Just to preserve the text of it (Yes, it was in a link on another thread, but I would like to assure it doesn’t just suddenly “disappear”…) I’ve not saved all the links in the original text. Maybe I’ll add them if I search through them all..
Original comment:
Gail Combs says:
Thanks guys.
That was pretty much my take on the situation, but I am not a security or IT type.
“Original post by Frank Huguenard, since removed from HuffPo.”
Here is the Huff and Puff Article:http://k1nsey6.com/2016/05/hillary-clinton-to-be-indicted-on-federal-racketeering-charges/
Hillary Clinton to be Indicted on Federal Racketeering Charges
K1nsey6 / 2 days ago
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is a United States Federal Law passed in 1970 that was designed to provide a tool for law enforcement agencies to fight organized crime. RICO allows prosecution and punishment for alleged racketeering activity that has been executed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise.
Activity considered to be racketeering may include bribery, counterfeiting, money laundering, embezzlement, illegal gambling, kidnapping, murder, drug trafficking, slavery, and a host of other nefarious business practices.
James Comey and The FBI will present a recommendation to Loretta Lynch, Attorney General of the Department of Justice, that includes a cogent argument that the Clinton Foundation is an ongoing criminal enterprise engaged in money laundering and soliciting bribes in exchange for political, policy and legislative favors to individuals, corporations and even governments both foreign and domestic.
James Comey
“The New York Times examined Bill Clinton’s relationship with a Canadian mining financier, Frank Giustra, who has donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and sits on its board. Clinton, the story suggests, helped Giustra’s company secure a lucrative uranium-mining deal in Kazakhstan and in return received “a flow of cash” to the Clinton Foundation, including previously undisclosed donations from the company’s chairman totaling $2.35 million.”
Bloomberg Politics
Initially, Comey had indicated that the investigation into Hillary’s home brewed email server was to be concluded by October of 2015. However, as more and more evidence in the case has come to light, this initial date kept being pushed back as the criminal investigation has expanded well beyond violating State Department regulations to include questions about espionage, perjury and influence peddling.
Here’s what we do know. Tens of millions of dollars donated to the Clinton Foundation was funneled to the organization through a Canadian shell company which has made tracing the donors nearly impossible. Less than 10% of donations to the Foundation has actually been released to charitable organizations and $2M that has been traced back to long time Bill Clinton friend Julie McMahon (aka The Energizer). When the official investigation into Hillary’s email server began, she instructed her IT professional to delete over 30,000 emails and cloud backups of her emails older than 30 days at both Platte River Networks and Datto, Inc. The FBI has subsequently recovered the majority, if not all, of Hillary’s deleted emails and are putting together a strong case against her for attempting to cover up her illegal and illicit activities.
A conviction under RICO comes when the Department of Justice proves that the defendant has engaged in two or more examples of racketeering and that the defendant maintained an interest in, participated in or invested in a criminal enterprise affecting interstate or foreign commerce. There is ample evidence already in the public record that the Clinton Foundation qualifies as a criminal enterprise and there’s no doubt that the FBI is privy to significantly more evidence than has already been made public.
Under RICO, the sections most relevant in this case will be section 1503 (obstruction of justice), section 1510 (obstruction of criminal investigations) and section 1511 (obstruction of State or local law enforcement). As in the case with Richard Nixon after the Watergate Break-in, it’s the cover-up of a crime that will be the Clintons’ downfall. Furthermore, under provisions of title 18, United States Code: Section 201, the Clinton Foundation can be held accountable for improprieties relating to bribery. The FBI will be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that through the Clinton Foundation, international entities were able to commit bribery in exchange for help in securing business deals, such as the uranium-mining deal in Kazakhstan.
It is a Federal Crime to negligently handle classified information under United States Code (USC) 18 section 1924. It is a Federal Class A Felony under USC 18 section 798. Hillary certified under oath to a federal judge that she had handed over to the state department all of her emails, which she clearly did not. In spite of her repeated statements to the effect that everything that she did with her home brewed email server as Secretary of State was above-board and approved by the State Department, the Inspector General Report vehemently refutes this claim. Hillary refused to be interview by the Inspector General’s office in their investigation, claiming that her upcoming FBI interview took precedent but it seems more likely that Hillary is more concerned about committing perjury or admitting to anything that can be used against her in a court of law.
“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary. At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”
Inspector General Report
Hillary Clinton is guilty of exposing classified documents to foreign governments by placing them illegally on her server, of sending and receiving classified documents and conspiring with her staff to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by avoiding the use of the State Department run servers. Some of the documents were so highly classified the the investigators on the case weren’t even able to examine the material themselves until they got their own clearances raised to the highest levels.
While there is an excellent cast to be made the Hillary committed treasonous actions, the strongest case the FBI has is charging both Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as the Clinton Foundation of Racketeering. There’s no wonder why it’s taken this long for the FBI to bring forward a recommendation. The rabbit hole is so deep on this one that it has taking dozens of investigators to determine the full extent of the crimes that have been committed. Perhaps the most interesting question here is whether or not the FBI’s investigation will be able to directly link The Clinton Foundation with The Hillary Victory Fund. If this happens, the DNC itself may be in jeopardy of accusations of either being an accomplice or of being complicit in racketeering.
Original post by Frank Huguenard, since removed from HuffPo.
Musings from the Chiefio 
Save you some digging, here are a few of the important links:
Links that shed light on the depth of the abuse of classified material, the Hillary’s email server scandle.
These are not just technical violations but issues that others have gone to prison for. Some of this information is so sensitive it has to be handled in special rooms secure from electronic monitoring (ie leave your phone outside the room). Some of this information divulged methods and sources including outing intelligence operatives which is a criminal offense of its own.
At the highest levels of classification they enforce a strict need to know, just having a top secret clearance is not enough, you have to have a demonstrated need to access the info before you are cleared for these compartmented programs.
The emails clearly demonstrate an ongoing, non-trivial pattern of out right disregard for security handling requirements over long periods of time. Recent indications appearing in the news today even suggest that the staff in Hillary’s office may have shared passwords and as has already been disclosed in her emails intentionally stripped classified markings off of documents and passed them by non-secure means.
https://20committee.com/2016/03/07/the-xx-committee-hillary-emailgate-reader/
https://20committee.com/2016/05/26/game-over-emailgate-just-crippled-the-clinton-express/
These are not just errors but clear and obvious intentional disregard for the harm such errors could do to the interests of the U.S. and could have easily cost lives.
Judicial Watch released the deposition transcript.
http://nypost.com/2016/05/29/hillary-has-been-burying-emails-since-she-was-first-lady/
This looks too good to be true. The Clintons have gotten away with selling state secrets, government favors as well as murder. As near as I can tell Bill was originally an honorable man but Hillary has always played “ME WIN” at any cost to others.
Interesting, politicians seem to be invulnerable until their entire house of cards collapse. This one seems to be getting wobbly at the edges. This one has a very tangled weave and the tendrils of it are all over the world. Once it comes apart there will be many unforeseen consequences…pg
Yes it will be very interesting to see who gets sucked into this vortex of deceit in the end.
A image there will be a few surprises and some will blow the whistle on others to save their own skin.
Now where is my pop corn bowl?
Thank you again Larry and E.M.
The general run of the mill sites do not do the type of digging you guys do. Nor do they have the knowledge and insight.
The Climategate emails of late NOV 2009 may yet pull the curtain on this postmodern “Wizard of Oz!”
In exchange for control of national research funds, did National Academies of Sciences become a “scientific-technological-elite” that used false “consensus science” to help crooked politicians control and deceive the public worldwide, as Eisenhower warned might happen in this country in his farewell address to the nation on 17 JAN 1961?
One of the difficulties I think with her classified capers the media and the general public is they have very little practical understanding of how seriously high level clearances are taken by those who have them. Nor do they understand the extraordinary resources and effort other intelligence services will expend to get bits and pieces of that info. I have held clearances at the levels of some of her most classified items found in her emails. Programs which at the time the existence of which was itself classified and they were not even publicly acknowledged as being possible/existing.
In a TS (top secret) office if you have a person who is not cleared to the level of the materials routinely used in the space, they have to be escorted 100% of the time by someone who is cleared. That includes going to the bathroom. They are never left unattended or out of view by their escort.
They are signed in and out of the area. When you first take them into the area, you call out to announce “Uncleared” in a loud voice and everyone in the area is supposed to cover any classified materials they are working with while that uncleared person is in the space.
The printouts we produced for Generals briefing were manually stamped top and bottom of each page with both Top Secret and a secondary caveat code word. That caveat word was a separate level of compartmentalization. If you held a TS (Top Secret) clearance but were not cleared for that code word material, you were “uncleared” even though you held a TS clearance.
I have seen that caveat code word that we used in media (books and articles) a few times since I held my clearance (early 1970’s) But in spite of knowing it has been compromised, I have never uttered that word in an unclassified location in the intervening 45 odd years. I will not validate it as being the actual caveat we used. That in itself is classified, even if the code word has leaked into the public domain. Lack of confirmation is part of the process of care of classified materials.
When I transported that material as a Top Secret Courier, my driver never took the exact same route out and back twice in a row. He had multiple routes for the trip and some times would just wing it. He also carried a .45. If we had been in a traffic accident, I would not have left that material unattended to go to the hospital until I was relieved by military security.
When I was discharged from the service, I was given a final briefing telling me what I could and could not do as a result of holding that level of clearance. I was told that even though I was out of the service and no longer in contact with that classified material, I was not to over fly several countries.
This is the sort of material that she casually stuck in private emails or sent over fax machines with no markings (in direct violation of Federal Law) and passed over a system which was improperly secured for that level of material and un-audited by her IT security folks at the State Department.
If you accidentally put such material on an unclassified server, disk drive etc. you have to promptly report that fact to your security officer, and he has to approve a proper method of sterilizing that equipment or physically destroying the device. In the case of just Secret level materials that required not just deleting the material (computer file) but overwriting the file many times with random 1’s and 0’s to trash not only the original data but make it impossible to forensically restore the data through deep statistical analysis.
It is safe to assume that every single email she sent or received on that server is in the hands of several foreign intelligence services. No telling how many people have died because of what she did, but in Afghanistan it is said that they were constantly having leaks which compromised missions. Rumor has it that those leaks stopped when they quit informing the State Department of those high value missions until after they had been executed.
Literally hundreds and possibly thousands of people have put their own lives at risk to gather and process that information which she so casually handled. She is a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and should not be anywhere near government office let alone the Presidency.
It does not matter whether the Clintons get indicted or not. This on top of all the other Clinton scandals explains why Donald wants to run against Hillary. As they say in the military, Hillary provides a “Target Rich Environment”.
When Hillary accused Donald of short changing or cheating Vets out of the promised $6 million it backfired as it never was remotely credible that a billionaire would steal a few millions under the Main Stream Media’s spotlight. When Donald called a reporter a sleaze yesterday it was because that reporter knew the truth yet published a lie.
When Donald goes after Hillary for her many scandals it will sting because the Clintons have repeatedly used their government jobs to enrich themselves. In the beginning they were petty crooks skimming travel funds and stealing furniture from the WH. Today they steal hundreds of millions selling influence. Here are a few examples from memory……I look forward to Gail Combs telling me what I overlooked.
1. “Investments” in cattle futures (1978)
2. Travelgate.
3. Selling access to the White House and the Lincoln bedroom.
4. Stealing the White House furniture.
5. Selling “Influence” while Hillary was Secretary of State.
6. Giustra’s lucrative uranium-mining deal in Kazakhstan
7. Using the Clinton Foundation to solicit foreign donations.
8. Shaking down financial institutions for $21.6 million of “Speaking Fees” in two years.
This kind of stuff makes me want to puke and I suspect that a majority of Americans feel the same way. Expect Donald to win in a Reagan style landslide.
@Larry Ledwick
Hillary’s actions suggest that she personally knows there is no real danger that anyone in the Justice Department will ever attempt to prosecute her for violation of rules for handling “classified” information. Has Hillary overlooked something?
@Larry; your experience is in the military where they take security very seriously, “Lose Lips Sink Ships” The State Department is a leaky sieve, has been as long as I can remember. Sometimes they seem to be working for America’s enemies rather then striving to protect us. The foreign services of many Nations seen to have plants in our Department of State D.C. offices, some in high positions…pg
@Larry:
While I have never held a top secret clearance myself, I have worked with a lot of folks who did. (and dated the daughter of the director of a nuclear lab for a while… so was very aware of her shadow, whom we dubbed Clarence Clearance… Hi Clarence! Been a while!).. We often put notes to Clarence in electronic communications, but never got a reply 8-)
Some of the Lab Rat kids knew their Dad had a Ph.D. Physics, worked at the lab, and had two suitcases, summer & winter. They would come home, grab a suitcase, and be gone a couple of weeks. The season here did not always match the season of suitcase grabbed. That was ALL they knew…
The Cray engineers had interesting stories of maintenance at unnamed TLA sites. Strip, man trap doors, suit up, use only their tools, repeat strip and man trap on exit… Any dead disk NEVER leaves. It get rolled to a corner of the computer room and mothballed forever…
A friend worked at a top secret radar maker. We (E.E. friend) and I used to call him and say, in Russian “Hello, NAME, how are you? I’m doing well.” just to wake up Clarence Clearance… we knew they had auto language detect on the phones and hot call monitoring… With friends like us…. But our accent was horrid and we rapidly transitioned to California Dialect happy talk about lunch plans… He could not travel to certain friendly countries without escort due to kidnap probability for what he knew… Eventually the joke wore thin as we were sure we then had full dossiers and were part of the New Guy training :-)
Me? Mostly industrial security. I had access to all Enginerring email at Apple for 7.5 years. Think that was important? While the Mac was being developed? Yet somehow none of it ever leaked… I could have gone to prison for “export of a controlled munition” if I let the wrong Apple Employee have an account on the Cray… Yeah, not quite the same world, but I could see Top Secret from there… We handled all backups for all Engineering machines… think about it… zero leak, zero loss…
I am offended deeply by the utter lack of respect for “secret” shown by Hillary. She violated every ethic I hold most dear.
@ G Camel: the one that really gripes me is Bill arranged to sell the secrets of making quiet submarine propellers as well as the equipment to make them to the Chinese. Three times the Clintons were caught taking campaign funds from Chinese that were highly connected to the Chinese Government. Every time it was oops! somebody must have made a mistake, we will return the money. Just one of many such “errors”. It is only an error if you get caught…pg
IFF the “cloud backups” statement is correct, that there were cloud based backups that were deleted, then IMHO the FBI has a full copy and Guicifer is just for “penalty enhancement” to show she was hacked. Compare whatever fragment is in his archive with the recovered cloud backup from the vendor’s deep backups… any match proves the hack.
The I.T. guy was likely granted immunity in exchange for any encryption key on the cloud backup. It is essential that any major service provider will have 100% recoverability from a 100% data center loss. Both via a DR Site (Disaster Recovery duplicate facilities) and via a Towers Of Hanoi like permanent data archive facility. I’ve set up such programs. THE fundamental ethos is to assure you can always recover some version of the data, preferably the most recent 1/2 dozen, forever. “Tape is cheap” and “better saved than sorry” are common values…
I have no idea what was on most of the 2 TB of backups we did at Apple ( in the late 80s that was a lot) but we recovered and restored a lot of “deleted” stuff… anyone running a service expects a lot of those calls and has a tape budget to match… Our yearly and quarterly dumps were tagged for “never delete” archival… they may still be in the tape vault for all I know… though were I there we would have moved them to DVD by now.. BTW, I still have my personal backups from then for my own account…somewhere…
I sure hope they really did do backups to “the cloud” as that almost certainly means 100% are now in FBI hands. There is something delicious about computer noobs thinking they know how to game the system, yet having no clue what “people like me” really do, day in and day out, so their FUBAR deletes are recoverable…
p.g.
I used to work for the STC Submarine Systems Group that had a 29 acre factory in Greenwich (London, UK). We had a cable ship (S.S McKay) anchored in the Thames, towering above my office. Part of the site was occupied by our military submarine factory that I never entered because I lacked the necessary security clearance.
Bill Clinton was accused of leaking weapons technology (e.g. Neutron Bomb) to the Chinese but nothing came of it.
Here is some more coals for the fire from corrupt Australian Government associated with the Clinton Foundation http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2016/05/bad-news-on-the-horizon-for-the-clinton-foundation-and-those-in-australia-who-have-shovelled-money-i.html
Michael Smith is an independent journalist who often exposes such items. Sorry I do not have the HTML skills to make a good link. :)
Bill Clinton was also responsible for allowing export of missile guidance and other technology to the Chinese. The pattern of shady deals is almost too long to list.
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/1998/june98/psrjune98.html
Well here is an interesting twist!
Seems the law firm behind the class action law suit against Trump University have paid the Clinton’s
$675,000 in speaking fees over the years.
http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/exclusive-law-firm-behind-trump-university-lawsuit-gave-big-money-to-the-clintons/
As Gomer Pyle used to say “Surprise surprise!”
> While I have never held a top secret clearance myself, I have worked with a lot of folks who did
I used to work for a company that sold software/hardware to UK MOD.
I know of a situation where, to diagnose a software fault the developers asked for the mainframe crash memory dump from the error. They received the thick stack of fanfold and it had been censored by inking out (to the point of going through the paper) all the sensitive memory values. Thousands of them. The list looked more like a doily.
On another occasion I met a guy who worked on software related to missiles. That was all I ever knew, he wouldn’t even discuss the programming language he used, let alone its application, hardware or even the sorts of programming problems he had to solve. Most of our (short) conversation seemed to consist of me asking a question and him looking uncomfortable and saying “I can’t discuss that”.
Larry, did it ever occur to you that Lawyer-Client privilege means law firms are a great way to launder/hide where funds are actually coming from? That it maybe Soros or someone else who is actually footing the bills and not this law firm?
That this Lawyer-Client privilege also allows the rich to get around campaign finance laws limiting donations to $2,700?
Several eons ago in 2008 I looked at the contributions to several politicians and was struck by just how many lawyers and law firms donated. I swear it looked like 50% or more. In many cases the law firm and then each individual lawyer would donate. It was not possible to check how many wives, kids, cats and dogs did too. (Remember many law firms now are dual function law and lobbyists.)
In a quicky look I couldn’t find an example however the BBC did it for me.
Seems Hitlery found other ways to cheat on the individual cap on campaign funds.
Bernie and his supporters are throwing a hissy fit over this sleaze by Hitlery.
Side note on Lawyers and lobbyists. — Following the career of Ann Veneman.
The lawyer, Ann Veneman is interesting to follow as she drifts in and out of public office destroying lives across the world. She is a great illustration of the methods used to ram through the desires of the elite and how just one individual can be used over and over again.. (Bits and pieces of my research over the years.) Especially note her work for Patton, Boggs & Blow, a law firm in 1994.
………..
Member of the Council on Foreign Relations
Member of law firm of Patton, Boggs and Blow
Member of the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) and in 1986, she rose to deputy undersecretary for international affairs and commodity programs.
Was one of the early negotiators of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and from 1991 to 1993 served as deputy undersecretary (NAFTA wiped out 75% of Mexico’s farmers opening up the land to the international Ag Cartel and driving the wave of illegal immigration.)
She help negotiate the Uruguay round talks for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
She served on the board of directors of Calgene with it’s Monsanto link.
From wwwDOTorganicconsumers.org/old_articles/corp/veneman.php
Was California’s Secretary of Food and Agriculture, serving from 1995 to 1999.
27th United States Secretary of Agriculture under George Bush 2001 – 2005
And was finally rewarded with the position of the Executive Director of UNICEF from 2005 to 2010. (WIKI)
“Since beginning as UNICEF Executive Director on May 1, 2005, Veneman has made the Millennium Development Goals a priority” International Policy Council on Agriculture, food and Trade – Ann Veneman Biography (USDA bio)
SEE: From Carroll Quigley to the UN Millennium Summit: Thoughts on the New World Order
Funny how the reward for betraying the Main Street American is an unelected, untaxed position in the UN for the Trojan horses. In 2008 I could not understand WHY Organic Consumers Assoc and Food and Water Watch were in favor of this bill (Hr 875 later the Food Safety Modernization Act) until I did some digging: Maude Barlow a “no dog in this fight” Canadian, is a director of both. She has been handsomely rewarded for selling out the US consumer and farmer with an appointment as New Senior Advisor to the UN president on October 21, 2008.
………………..
Going back to Ann’s employers Patton, Boggs and Blow. They were among the first lobbyists.
Oldest version #1
Older version #2
The WTO wrote the Guide to Good Farming and The Guide to Good Agriculture, later codified into US law as the Food safety Modernization Act, that is now used to micro-manage independent US farmers and drive them out of business as they strangle in red tape.
The original link to the HuffingtonPost appears to have been this one:
A claimed archive of the HufingtonPost is here:
The wayback machine is returning a 404 eror.
EM, please post a link to your article:
Huff Post Pulled Article
over at:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/05/31/clinton-email-scandal-cheryl-mills-deposition-clinton-email-was-not-subject-to-foia-inquiry-full-pdf-transcript/
They try but do not have the level of expertise that you guys do.
I can not post since my IP address is still banned and I haven’t gotten a work around yet. (no laptop)
The only places I can post now is at sites I have been on for years.
Snicker… guffaw
Law firms — the modern equivalent of the hired gunslinger of the old west or the Ninja of the East.
Sarcasm follows:
Outraged! I am outraged, I say! The ONLY reason why you are on this fishing expedition against Hillary is that you are afraid of a strong independent woman! Harumph! Harump!”
End sarcasm:
Any bets on whether some SJWs have already tried that response?
One of my personal favorites in the long list of unexamined Clinton crimes is Bill’s blood fiasco when he was Arkansas governor. He authorized blood collections from the state prison system, that were then sold to blood recipients mostly in Canada. Thousands of people were exposed to HIV tainted blood as a result.
Nice summary of the probable facts and impact of the emailgate scandal, with several embedded links worth reading.
Jason, the more I read about the Clintons the more horrified I am.
That these people occupied the White House (and stole the furniture) WITH NO consequences for their multiple misdeeds AND the fact Hitlery is STILL getting ~40% of the popular vote, I find truly stunning.
Heck Rasmussen Reports shows 50% Say Clinton Should Keep Running Even If Indicted
What ever happened to the Rule of Law and an adult informed electorate?
Gail, that went out with the ‘progressive’ takeover of the Ds and Rs via Teddy & his cousin plus Woodrow Wilson.
You see, Billy got impeached for suborning perjury, but how many low-info folk know that. The Senate’s failure to convict is, in part, exactly why we have moved further down this road to serfdom. Even fewer know that Hildebeest was known bad from Watergate. The ‘press’, being part of the problem, helps those perceived as friends and hurts those perceived as enemies, or tries (the Donald is showing the low-infos something here). Another fun, but likely not well known fact is that Hoover and his administration did help bring the depression on by not doing what Harding and Coolidge did when the immediate post WWI recession hit, though the newly created FED (and the FED is the third or fourth Bank of the US, ie, a national and nationalized bank) did help bring that on. FDR doubled down on Hoover’s stuff, yet, Hoover was bad and FDR good. Yep, Newspeak/Doublethink at its finest and yes they’ve been at this in the US since the 1890s.
Hi Larry, my youngest son has been put through the security clearance process and I have experience with civilian NDAs (the processes are conceptually similar). If he were to do what the Hildebeest has done, well, I doubt that he’d get the same treatment.
Gail, if I am not mistaken, in cases of criminal activity, particularly on the part of a law firm, which is an officer of the court, is it not possible to breach lawyer-client confidentiality? I do think that such confidentiality can as is broken with respect to doctor-patient and clergy-parishioner confidentiality.
One more item on how Clinton and her staff seemed impervious to security rules, and how secure data may have been leaked to her insecure email server.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/1/inside-the-ring-hillary-clinton-aides-tried-to-use/
USA Today published this today:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/01/donald-trump-lawsuits-legal-battles/84995854/
Under the headline of “LITIGATOR IN CHIEF” it is an impressive piece of “Investigative Journalism” that shows how much effort the Main Stream Media is devoting to undermining Donald Trump while ignoring the criminality of the Clintons.
Like all the other efforts of the MSM to date it will backfire. Anyone who takes the trouble to read the feature to the end will be impressed by Trump’s success. Out of 1,300 lawsuits Trump lost 38 (2.9%) and settled 175 (13.5%). He won 450 (34.6%) while 500 (38.5%) were dismissed. Given his 85:15 record a fairer headline would be:
“WINNER IN CHIEF”.
Will anyone compare the statistics for lawsuits involving the Clintons? I seem to remember one that ended in Bill losing his licence to practice law. Something about “Lying Under Oath” that would have landed you or I in jail.
This is all the grounds needed for prosecution of Hillary C. if the FBI is allowed to proceed by the Justice Dept.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/06/02/hillary-clinton-exchanged-cia-officers-names-private-server/
Thanks guys,
It is amazing how corrupt our system of government has become.
Also the newest is the European Union is floating the idea of a government ID for using the Internet.
The EU wants you to log into YouTube using your state-issued ID card
As I have learned first hand, internet censorship is already alive and well. but the EU wants to go even further.
Of course the question then becomes what is “Hate Speech”?
Gatestone Institute tells us.
We already know that Tony Heller got banned and only outrage by his supporters got him re-instated. We know that any warning about the Muslims are labeled hate speech up to including a UK Member of Parliment reading Winston Churchill.
Looks like we will soon be living in an Orwell Nightmare.
Gail,
Hayek and Orwell warned us. So did Thomas Jefferson:
“………..the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure.”
Thomas Jefferson, Paris, November 13, 1787.
Soon you won’t be able to find the above quote on the Internet or Winston Churchill’s assessment of Islam. Here is just one quote that has been deemed hate speech:
“‘No stronger retrograde force exists in the world than Islam.”
The more governments try to censor the Internet the more need there will be for each and every one of us to use strong encryption. No doubt that too can be declared “Illegal” even though the enforcement of such laws will require Gulags and “Big Brother”.
This is why we must never let printed matter disappear or be taken away.
If everything is stored “in the cloud”, it becomes a simple matter (“got a minute, Winston?”) to rewrite it, eliminate it, or create it. Certainly that’s in the back of them minds of the “IT Companies” and the EC, who are a non-elected self-sustaining criminal crew of bureacrats and the European Parliament, who are elected placeholder puppets to give the proletariat the impression that they (er, we) actually have a voice in what’s going on.
The media control over here (Germany) is apalling. Göbbels would be proud, indeed, envious. And I think, he would even be ashamed.
Trump, the AfD, the UKIP, indeed anyone who questions the suicidal policy of unlimited “migration”
(culturecide?) are painted with the broad brush of “right-wing extremism”, indeed Nazism (who were anything but right-wing, but EC and EP don’t know or care about the difference).
Oddly enough, Nazism, leftism, and the Greens all go back a long way together.
How can we throw da bums out when they’re not even elected?
Jeff,
I feel for you. I spent a year in Germany in 1974 and found it a lovely country.
I really wish people would wake the F…K UP! before it is too late.
The elite HATE us, the free middle class and they HATE the Europe and the USA that spawned us.
Never forget that Ted Turner said he would like the population reduced to a 1/2 million.
That is enough people to prevent inbreeding and provide slave labor. Also notice the Genetic storage — Seed vaults and DNA grabs from not only plants but animals and people. The DNA taken from felons and those with minor offences like traffic violations. ometimes I feel like I am living in a Science Fiction Horror novel.
@Gail & G.C.:
Thus my interest in “peer to peer networks” and as P.G. put is “beer can” computers. The creation of dynamic mesh networks, and “the dark net”. The simple fact is that if ANY information flows, then ALL information can flow. Yes, the baud rate might be lower as it gets hidden in the stream.. but it will flow.
It is already happening, BTW. I’m “late to the party” in many ways. There are a load of P2P packages floating around and hoards of folks on them.
Per “hate speech”: That is why I have also condemned the whole idea as absurd. “Hate Crime” too. Show me the “love crime” opposite… It is just political theatre to criminalize some folks more than others.
BTW, I refuse to use Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook. I do use Youtube as they have generally been OK; but if that changes… another service will crop up. If the EU doesn’t like it, they can put up a Great Router Wall like China does.
I’m fairly sure the EU is not long for this Earth. Once tyranny is this far along, it rapidly heads into the drink. If it doesn’t, the Muslim slow invasion has them gone in about a decade anyway. How will it end? Too early to say. Could be the New European Caliphate, could be Charlemagne Redux, could be Westphalian Again, could even be regional wars of Peerage… Depends on how the demographics unwind, how the populace reacts, and how much avarice drives the “little Princes” to take on the “old Kings”… Or if The Russian Bear gets a bit-o-cold in 2026 and decides to snack on some tasty bits of vaguely Slavic countries… and then cleans up Syria in a ‘final solution’… they really like that port on the Med…
So, not living in the E.U. I really don’t worry about it that much. It will get worse before it gets better, but it won’t take all that long to collapse. The southern band is already in slow collapse (Cyprus is toast, Greece is on the burner asking for more money again, Spain and Italy warming up the fires…) and the north is busy committing self-democide and erasing the only cultures that are financing the place. Britain is avoiding the worst of it, standing half aside via the Pound and a bit of water… and might have the brains to exit the building while it is only smoking and not in full throated conflagration. We find out in a month.
When it gets weak enough, the USSR Redux will happen. Russia will absorb what it wants, likely up to Germany, a bit at a time. Various “countries” may well be petitioning to join as things get worse and Russia avoids that rot. I think it will have a southern tilt to it this time, though. The various Slavs of places like the Former Yugoslavia “needing protection”…
Why does that not bother me? Read European History. The place has been in a consistent state of flux and mush since the Roman Empire. (Actually, including the Roman Empire… their map changes a lot over their 1000 years…) Why ought now be any different? The anomaly has been the period of peace and relative stability following W.W.II. So that’s going to end. So what?
The Global Socialist Movement has decided that Nationalism is The Great Satan and is determined to stamp it out so that the International Workers Socialist Paradise can form. THAT is why any hint of national pride is labeled “right wing extremist” AND, IMHO, why they want a flood of muslims globally. To “break the gel” of national cultures. Doing nicely in Germany, Sweden, and France already… Hungary and Slavic countries not so much…
Do remember that the “Nation State” is a relatively new creation. Properly called the Westphalian State (for where it was conceived) is has NOT been a European feature for very long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty
Throughout most of European history things were either dominated by Royals (and biggest army wins) with many “vassal states” and satripies or by Empires (and biggest army wins). Rarely has their been a collection of “equal” nation states. The present EU is just pining for the old Holy Roman Empire and is working to slowly exterminate the Nation State (and with it, nationalism). It isn’t just me saying that…
So note that ‘everybody is doing it’ with reversion to “biggest army wins”…
So it goes.
Either the collective States of the world reclaim their Westphalian Sovereignty (by repudiating the NeoCons, the Globalist Socialists, and the Empire Wannabes; all of them) or this 400 year era ends and we return to the The Age Of Empires with “biggest army wins”.
Then again, I’m a bit “retro” and not very “modern”… though the wiki forgot to put the quotes around “modern”…
So it looks like my views are “paleo”… who knew? /sarc;
Sorry for the long digression, but I thought it important to point out it isn’t ME dreaming up some grand ‘conspiracy to destroy nations’. I’m just observing what the leaders of the world are saying as they set about destroying nations. The destruction of national identity, national sovereignty, and integrity is, by their own words, by design. Now you understand Obama and the immigration flap too.
I’m just looking at the history of such conglomerations and finding it ends up in Tyranny and Empire and “biggest army wins” and seeing how that looks on top of “modern” Europe…
So until I see some evidence that other folks, far more powerful than me, are taking the EU down a different course than the one “global leaders” have publicly stated, I can only assume they continue to work to destroy the Westphalian State and that this behaviour is by design.
IMHO this ends badly in tyrannical Empire, not in a happy Socialist Workers Paradise…
Chiefio,
For the big picture I find “The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age” by Davidson & Rees-Mogg illuminating.
They see cycles occuring at roughly 500 year intervals that are driven by the “Returns from Violence” and othjer powerful forces. If agression pays it will happen more. If the gains are outweighed by the costs of aggression there will be less violence. Thus the existence of nuclear weapons makes aggression less likely.
“BTW, I refuse to use Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook.” …Agreed.
Right now Hubby found out my IP address ban means he can not post to the local Linux Group. He is now working on the problem over the phone…. I am hearing a lot of Microsoft this and that (His computer is partitioned into Linux and Microsoft I think.) I once used his machine to post a comment on the web and the IP address was banned right after that…
AHHHhhh he just said, “that assumes I have a Microsoft OS and I don’t.” Seems the guy on the other end was not from the tech group but from a scammer from a third world country trying to sell a $300 ‘Fix’ and Hubby was having him on.
This is what happen to some poor schmuck with a microsoft system who was tweeking the tail of one of these SOBs by giving him a made up credit card number.
https://blog.malwarebytes.org/threat-analysis/2013/04/phone-scammers-call-the-wrong-guy-get-mad-and-trash-pc/
He actually did not lose anything since it was a ‘vitual machine’
Isn’t it nice to know these are the type of tech guys our former American companies are busy training?
I was aware through articles by Pascal Lamy, former WTO Director-General & EU bigwig, of the attacks on Westphalian Sovereignty and the love of Interdependence. To add the info on other side of the coin.
INTERDEPENDENCE
The current US foreign and economic policy is based on INTERDEPENDENCE.
Bill Clinton with his ratification of the World Trade Organization in 1996 and his ‘Reaching Out to China’
for campaign contributionsput in place World Interdependence. Both the IMF and WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said so.(For IMF see: Convergence, Interdependence, and Divergence, Finance & Development, September 2012, Vol. 49, No. 3 (wwwDOT)imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/09/dervis.htm)
For Pascal Lamy and Ian Goldin (University of Oxford )
Obviously with all this international economic interdependence, the shipping of US technology and jobs to other countries the reaching out of US leaders such as Bill and Hitlery Clinton, Obama and John Kerry, war is no longer a threat and the USA can ignore Russia’s maneuvers and China’s saber rattling in ‘a declining state of stability and security in the South China Sea’ and just keep their eyes trained on the real goal, Global Governance.
Unfortunately not everyone seems to be with the program or as Benjamin Carlson put it on January 30, 2014 00:20 “China is playing chicken with the US military in the South China Sea”
I do not think the Progressives assumptions about ‘Economic Interdependence’ are correct and that leaves the USA up a creek having given away all our paddles (along with our economic technology and military secrets) to the Chinese.
About the EU and Russia. This comment from a couple years ago.
Mac the Knife says: @ March 4, 2014 at 9:53 pm
I think the correct term is terminally stupid. They now have a paleo-nationalist in Russia called Putin. A China that hates all parts of the British Empire including us.
Lessons of history: China’s century of humiliation
The repercussions of British opportunism in China during the Opium Wars can be felt in geopolitics even today
And this quote in David Archibald’s article at American Thinker
And now they have uncontrolable heathens intent on conquest in the EU, BREXT, a China and Russia that hates their guts and a Donald Trump trumpeting “Make America Great Again”
“In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men
Gang aft agley,” — Robert Burns
Yes, I agree it looks like we are back to ” Empires (and biggest army wins).” With Russia and the Islam Caliphate squaring off, and China looking at all that nice land in the the USA and Canada.
For China it is relatively easy to take down the USA. All they have to do is point North Korea at the USA. Or more likely launch a weapon from North Korea since they would not want them to actually have the weapon.
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry pointed out just how vulnerable the USA actually is in 2014. He point blank told Congress:
“Natural EMP from a geomagnetic super-storm like the 1859 Carrington Event or the 1921 Railroad Storm, a nuclear EMP attack from terrorists or rogue states as practiced by North Korea during the nuclear crisis of 2013 are both existential threats that could kill 9 of 10 Americans through starvation, disease, and societal collapse.”
Wiping out the electrical grid (plus sensitive electronics) will KILL 90% of the US Population according to this report. (This is EXACTLY what the US government under Obummer and then Hitlery is planning to do only they are going to do it in slow motion over the next decade or so.).
This testimony was about H.R.3696 – National Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act of 2014
The bill was received in the Senate and Read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs after the bill was passed by the House on July 28, 2014. It was never passed by the Senate.
I do not know if anything similar got passed but I doubt it. After all “Climate Change” not the collapse of the USA is much more important.
The Caliphate is not going to accept non-muslim leaders especially female leaders like Hitlery and Merkel.
The Chinese are not going to accept non-chinese leaders especially the much hated Anglos.
The Russians are not going to accept Banksters/non-Russians as leaders after Cyprus and the Ukraine fiasco.
Why in heck do these Anglo/European Puppet Masters think the present situation is advantageous to them?
Are they hoping for a world wide annhilation with them emerging from their bunkers to rule over the survivors?
@Gail:
Per IP Address based bans:
The easy end around is to get a WiFi hotspot from Walmart for about $50 and use it sporadically. As it is often off, the IP Changes often. Similarly. a cheap used laptop (about $80) and visits to the library or Starbucks causes IP change too. Then, for about $10 / month you can get vpn service from far far away… Then you can also leave your home router turned off for a few days and it may get a new IP on boot as 24 hours is a common DHCP timeout interval. Just running on the hotspot one weekend a month with the house router off usually delivers frequent IP changes.
Per EMP:
I think there is a fair amount of Sellers Puff in the scare stories. Yes, it would be a mess, but lots of stuff would still work and “people like me” would have us rebuilt quickly. My no-electronics Diesel and Points carbureted wagon will run fine, my generator too, as will my tube radio and computers in cans…
There’s lots of mil gear that’s emp rated too.
Per the rest:
Maybe after I fix dinner for the spouse… SWMBO is home now… ;-)
EMP is so poorly understood by the general public that it is ripe for over stating the situation. The new book by Ted Kopple “Lights Out” covers a second vector for that same sort of situation, a coordinated cyber attack can also take down critical infrastructure and accomplish 70%-80% of the estimated consequences of EMP. So in fact we have three vectors for electronic collapse.
Solar storm — bad but not too bad, since there is warning and there are preventive actions
cyber attack on the control infrastructure — out of the blue, has never occurred before (except for trial runs in Ukraine) so hard to estimate its over all impact. Unlike EMP it would focus its effects on key nodes in the power infrastructure basically turning the country into a lot of small islands of surviving electrical generation capacity. It would not directly attack radio communication systems and computer systems (unless they were specifically targeted — ie not indiscriminate frying of solid state electronics)
EMP — out of the blue, could be catastrophic if well executed, new generation High output EMP weapons are claimed to be orders of magnitude more effective at generating an EMP pulse. (big unknown)
As E.M.Smith noted above, some who understand the threat and have anticipated the types of challenges it would present would probably get by one way or another, the unprepared, clueless city dwellers who have no technical skills and less understanding of even basic survival issues will be in a world of hurt. Major core city areas would be basically uninhabitable after about 3 days due to failure or water supply and no sewage sanitation issues in a high density population center.
Water would be king for short term survival, anyone who cannot access safe water within 3 days would have very low survival rates, and be driven to take extraordinary efforts to acquire water.
As an example after a typhoon in the Philippines survivors ended up digging up buried water pipes and breaking into them to get access to water.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/11/13/philippines-typhoon-survivors-desperate-for-food.html
It would also seriously impact things like delivery of imports to our harbors, and totally muck up farming, delivery of foods etc. It would likely have a delayed impact as those compounding issues interact with each other.
The technical side of the impact is fairly straight forward, and competent people could get by using 1890’s technology until things are put back together. The real question is can high density cities dependent on a logistic supply system based on just in time delivery cope as those issues get sorted out.
I use EMP and the cyber attack scenarios as my base line case to try to evaluate how well prepared I am and to identify areas I need to work on. It could happen tomorrow or it could happen decades from now but as a planning scenario it touches almost every vulnerability cities/governments face in disasters.
People with a can do attitude, a bit of handy man skills and a historical perspective on how their grand parents got by when everyone was riding horses will get through it. If government leadership make smart decisions there are work arounds for many problems it would present.
For example approximately 10% or our countries total power load is covered with emergency generation capabilities. Many large office buildings have emergency power. The bad news is most of that is only intended for intermittent use and 24 hours or so of continuous operation. If they could get fuel these would provide lots of private sector power islands which you could build out from.
Provide a couple hours a day of publicly available power for folks to recharge cell phones, or to pump water into public cistern etc
It could result in the sort of chaos we say in Katrina after the levies broke or the New York black out riots or everyone pulling together to get things glued back together.
If it goes completely SHTF it could be very bad, probably will vary widely by local region. Areas like Wyoming will probably hardly notice, they are used to riding out long blizzards and doing what needs to be done to get things fixed. Core cities with lots of clueless folks with no skills will be a major mess.
As above it won’t be as total as some predict but you can do an awful lot to make it into an adventure rather than a crisis at your personal level. Folks who have outdoors camping skills already have much of the equipment they would need to get by on primitive skills for a while. People who’s biggest worry is who the winner of the latest fad TV show is, will have a problem.
The EMP problem is the icing on the powder keg that is ready to blow up. (Closing coal and nuclear plants achieves the same thing, just more slowly.)
The big problem is the hatred and dispair generated in the black innercities by 7 years of Obummer and decades of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” Now add the flood of illegal immigrants expecting handouts. When the handouts stop, especially the handouts of the Dhimmi (Us) to their mulim ‘Masters’ you will have roving bands of thugs used to living in third world conditions. This lowers the survival of American citizens drastically. We just do not have the expertise of these people in living in these conditions.
If you compare two blackouts in NYC, 1965 with 1977, the first in good economic times and the second in bad economic times with the Community Agitators whiping up hate before hand in the second case; the amount of violence, deaths and damage was much greater when the hatred whipped up was combined with economic hard times. Therefore the thugs used the blackout as a licence to destroy. The 1977 conditions are mild compared to what we have today with the ‘the Ferguson Effect’ Mayors are telling the police to let them have ‘room to destroy’. Mayors in cities where Trump rallies are held are told to Stand Down and allow the thugs to literally beat up Americans directly in front of the cops.
This is the take of the Chicago Cops and they were ROYALLY PISSED! Questions About Last Night
(The thread goes on and on. It is an interesting inside look that may be worth capturing so it is not ‘Dsappeared)
Meanwhile in “Flyover Country” Obummer is quietly seeding Muslim refugees camps with the help of the Lutherans, Catholics and other local charities. The town officials, eager for the bribes do not tell people until it is a done deal. In some cases the towns are overwhelmed and turned into Sharia no go zones like in the EU.
Chris Christie, the New Jersey Governor said that his administration was given absolutely no notice of the resettlement. “We have refugees in New Jersey we don’t even know about.”
For example: Why is small town America being inundated with Muslim immigrants?
So far as I know 25 states are suing Obama over immigration issues.
HMMMmmm
My last comment went missing in action.
I have a copy if it doesn’t show up EM.
As pointed out earlier the “Returns of Violence” are negative today. If someone were to attack the USA using a nuclear EMP weapon it would cripple a swathe of our nation. However an EMP attack would not affect on our ICBMs based on land or sea. North Korea could do immense harm to the USA using an EMP weapon but our retaliation would return North Korea to the stone age. Kim Jong-un may be crazy but is he suicidal?
A very large EMP device could knock out a city but the whole US not a chance, that would take 100s of such devices. The electrical grid components are quite robust as well. They could be knocked off line for a while while the system is reinitialized as in any other blackout. Think any other local disaster. hurricanes, earthquakes, wild fires.etc. An annoyance, not the end of the world…pg
@Gail:
Found it. In “trash” which is strange as I didn’t put it there. Things are supposed to go to “moderation” if they hit the key word triggers or “spam” if they hit wordpress spam filters, and be manually moved to “trash” when I decide. I think I’m being hit with the same WTF that Anthony at WUWT was complaining about. He had some things being “auto trashed” due to a WordPress change of some sort. I’d not noticed any so ignored it… looks like I can’t ignore it now… Ah, reading it, likely the “F-word” in the quoted stuff did it.
Interesting, but not really germane to an EMP event IMHO. It may cause local pockets of Aw Shit, but they tend to stay local when they can’t move and have no light… Urban Jungle types tend not to have prep-kits and such…
@Larry:
Part of why I’m not so worried is just how many folks will have “just fine” kit to work with.
A few small examples:
How many folks have an RV? Many (most?) are metal skin and have pulse resistant wiring (i.e. short length high diameter). Many (most?) have secondary generators built in and with large fuel on board. Essentially, every RV park becomes a survivor island (perhaps with some small repair issues, like the TV in the rec hall).
How many folks have a swimming pool? They are all over the southern half of the nation. Lots of emergency water there. (Downtown Denver not so much…) Of the major urban core areas, how many are built on a river? (Most to all… in the 1700s to 1800s water and shipping via ship were very important and cities were founded on water supply). Take Chicago as an example, river runs through it and it fronts on a Great Lake. It may take 3 days for folks from the outer areas to get to the river bank or lake shore, but they can do it.
EMP mostly fries things with long wires. Short wires do not couple well to the pulse. Many (most?) cars and trucks and radios and planes and boats and…. will be just fine.
EMP is not magic and can’t flip breakers or plug things in. Lots of “old stuff” and “unplugged stuff” is not going to notice. How many people have a lot of “old stuff” in the garage? And what about all the stock in stores and warehouses? LOTS of inventory… No, not 100% of the in place equipment, but a lot and likely enough for ‘getting by’.
All over “quake country” there are folks with “quake kits”. Typically a good camping set and some water. I have 2 x 30 gallon barrels, for example. Depending on your “local disaster” other places have similar prepared folks and stuff. In rural areas, substantially every farm is a “prepared place”. (Often with lots of “old diesel” stuff around like that old tractor… and a 300 gallon tank of fuel…) While it might be a Royal Pita to have a million city dwellers trudging out to farm country, it would not be much worse than what is happening is Syria today (but I don’t think it would happen). Every farm and every prepared home becomes a surviving island.
Millions of folks, often as hobbies, know how to do things like make candles, can food, sew cloths, etc. etc. and have the kit to do it.
How many millions of folks have a propane BBQ on the patio? Charcoal? In the “Tailgate party kit”? I’d guess it is about 80%+ of the nation.
You can continue on in that way for a very long list of things and people and “hobby turned production”. At the end, the remaining OMG! stuff is a very short list.
1) MAJOR transformers. These are giant things with about 4 spares in the whole country. Large chunks of the nation will NOT be “grid connected” for a very long time. But how much do we really need The Grid? I’d assert folks can live OK with disjoint power systems. Production in factories will be worst hit, but most of that has gone to China…
2) SOME data centers. IMHO far fewer than expected. Disney had a lightning bolt hit the flag pole out front. It “flashed over” through the sand (what passes as soil in Florida ;-) into the main water pipe into the building, raising the entire ground plane to God Only Knows what volts. The result? Both UPS systems (on 2 separate mains feeds) fried. After an hour or 3 figuring this out, they were simply bypassed for the rest of the day. Substantially all the rest of the equipment was FINE. (modulo the usual “scram down didn’t come back” percentage). The point? Many data centers will have a “first fried” bit of gear at the power feed that goes FUNT! and the rest will be isolated. If a direct hit to the ground plane, to which ALL the equipment is connected, doesn’t kill it, a bit of EMP on the input lines is unlikely to do more…
3) SOME communications. That same “lightning protection” kit will save a lot of communications centers. Yes, telephone wires will fry what is on the end. BUT, today much communication goes via microwave (towers to cell phones and dish to dish) or glass optical fibre. Glass doesn’t do EMP. (And the electronic bits are mostly in those centers with the UPS at the enttry). Would it be a mess? You bet. But very rapidly a web of police radio, HAM (amateur) radio, military radio, etc. etc. would be running. ( I have a tube radio kit in my ‘deep kit’, but don’t expect to need it.) Various folks “with clue” will be setting up isolated cells for local calls via cell phone (at least in Silicon Valley where a lot of folks work on that kind of gear… on my “someday list” is to get a SDR kit for the Pi and see if I can make it a base station ;-) How much long haul fibre would survive and how much have fried amps? That’s an unknown. However, the actual fab for replacements is in Asia, not here, so easy to ship in replacements. One C5 would carry a huge fraction of the need.
4) SOME major motors. I could see, for example, the “lift pumps” on the California Aqueduct getting fried. That kind of “big wire grid connected and unique” motor is not going to be in inventory. But the motors in the local gas station pumps? I expect the lightning protection and “first thing blown” effects will protect most of them. (If not, some fraction will be isolated via switch at stations that are closed at the time of the pulse and those form the core of fuel delivery).
After that, I start to run out of “big things”.
Yes, a lot of misc small stuff is toast. Will it really “spoil my day” that my old Sony (pre HD) TV is dead? Or that my fridge is FUNT! Inconvenience, yes. Disaster, no. The fridge food gets cooked on the BBQ and they we shift to the canned and dried… just like in a Great Quake… And, frankly, I’d consider it a blessing that the cell phone didn’t work ;-)
Building Back:
This likely ought to be a full posting some day… For now, just a short note. After The Fall, I’d expect the “building back” to be along these rough lines.
a) First few days, folks find out what works, what doesn’t. Where the camping kit is in the garage, how much propane is in the BBQ, which car works, etc. Much like any other post-disaster. The Feds and State Governments likely pretty screwed up (like Katrina) and most recovery starting from local level “surviving pools”. A Small possibility that our overseas and underwater forces are busy nuking somebody… (Not going to look at a counter-counter-strike scenario here / now). Mostly folks learning how to live with 1800’s “services” again. “Car camping”, latrines, water wagons, etc.
b) In the second week, large numbers of survivor pools are running well. RV Parks especially, but also anywhere around the “edges” of the nation. EMP is not uniform, and unless hit with several, it is going to (most likely) be a donut. Hole in the middle, edge ring fine. Build back starts from the ring inward and pods outward. Emergency Teams starting to work from those areas into the rest. (There really ought not be too much for the Teams to do other than deliver food, fuel and water and fix systems. This isn’t like a quake or hurricane with massive destruction.) IF needed, foreign source (i.e. NATO and SEATO) mil gear can be set up at airports to get them operational for cargo flights in, visitors out. Airports become distribution hubs for food, fuel, water, materials. Repair teams bringing up water and sewage systems first (likely with portable generators).
c) Third week (likely the worst as local food supplies run out). IMHO “it depends”. Either we are “hard hit” and lots of trucks and cars are just toast (unlikely IMHO – short wires in metal boxes… but now with a lot of electronics… coin toss) so distribution is near zero; OR, most of the rolling stock is fine and we just need to get the refiners running again. By this time, ports ought to also be cleared. (I’m pretty sure major ships won’t notice, being a metal shell, but don’t know how many have gone to ‘electronic bridges’). Even if it is only “old tugs” that are working, they can have any dead ships towed to anchorage. “Ships at sea” will continue to deliver a lot of stuff that was already in transit. It will take a couple of months to have the cargo manifest swapped over to motors and transformers and fibre interfaces (oh my!)… Either the present rolling stock, or if needed, emergency military distribution (ours or allies) forms the convoys of shipping taking “essentials” to the center of the donut. Hauling some people out on the backhaul.
d) Month and longer. By now many of the islands are being connected. The donut is growing and the hole shrinking. Fuel being delivered to just about everyone who really needs it. Emergency rations for all, even if not what they really want for dinner. Banking ought to have come back up the first week ( as I suspect their systems are at least as hardened as Disney) along with “enough” communications. Many “mid sized” and larger motors, switches, etc. replaced and many places running, if not efficiently. (So local gas turbines running a local load, but not able to balance against a neighboring grid area). Water and sewage working in many (most?) areas too. Congress will be holding hearings blaming George Bush…
That’s roughly how I see it working out. Will there be riots in some areas? Sure. Is this different from any other year? No… Frankly, the folks in Nebraska are just not the kind to riot.
The Really Bad Scenario?
Not one EMP, but “a few”. Someone, unknown, sneaks a few of these “on orbit”. Now we don’t know who to counter strike… They set off 2, not one, centered on the coasts, not Nebraska. Now we don’t have a donut, we’ve lost the prime areas for shipping and recovery with the most population. About week 2, they set off another set… frying all the recovery gear… I think I know how to do this in a non-traceable way….
That one does, IMHO, end up in Mad Max land… and somebody likely gets nuked just to ‘preserve the balance’…
@Gail:
I’ve pondered that kind of thing from time to time.
IMHO it comes down to 3 things interacting badly.
1) Never underestimate the ability of intelligent people to fool themselves. The more educated, the more evidence that they can believe a dozen mutually exclusive things based on nothing. (especially outside of math, engineering and chemistry / physics. I’d say STEM except that the Science part is now junked due to the AGW fraud showing them just as dim as the Social “Sciences”… but children of The Elite don’t take STEM classes any way since “it isn’t what you know but who you know”…)
2) Rulers and The Elite live in an echo chamber of numpties. Essentially by definition, these folks are kept isolated from reality and “the hard facts of life”. Sons and Daughters of the Elite go to special schools together, always with guards, guardians, or similar, and are consistently told how special and smart they are. They are NOT allowed to do things like get drunk at the river and regret it, make a raft and float down the river at night (did that with a friend ;-) while in high school, or get an old junk motorcycle from a neighbor and rebuild it then ride it. (I made the mistake of telling my son, when he asked if he could have a motorcycle: “Yes, as long as you rebuild one that doesn’t work”. He went out and did it… with some help from me.)
3) Numpties can’t actually get much done, but learn early that destruction is easier than actual creation. This, coupled with their sense of superiority from #2 and their self deception from #1 gives you a person with a strong desire to show how competent they are, is certain of it, but can’t actually do anything. This is very frustrating. But they also know that “creative destruction” is a lot easier than actually making something (that they can’t do) so set about creatively destroying. Or not so creatively… being numpties…
You see, I don’t think it is about me, or you, or the nation, or anyone else you know. I think it is all about them. So do they…
IMHO we would be better served taking a random sample of farmers, truck drivers, cooks, mechanics and store owners and having them in all managerial positions in the government and all “diplomatic” roles (including the UN / EU / Ministers / etc.) They actually know how to do things and know how hard real creation is, so are not fond of destroying it to feel superior…
@P.G.:
A “big one” on orbit can take out about 100% of grid connected large transformers in the center of the USA ( if over Nebraska or so). That falls to about 10% as you reach the coastal areas and zero about North Washington State / South Florida. (Well, really, pretty much all of Florida outside the panhandle…)
The key bit is setting off a nuke in the ionosphere to make a nice pulse.
There’s a site with a nice map, but it put up a “popup” sign up thing so I’m just giving the URL for the map:
This is from an article claiming a “super EMP” device could take out the whole grid. Notice that even the “super EMP” has the coasts with 50% to 30% of “peak”. IMHO “in the real world” it will be even less. Then all those grounding and pulse protecting gizmos and metal cages and all attenuate it even more.
The kind you are talking about are the ones made of wires and using conventional explosives. Fun, but not like a nuke in the ionosphere… Basically a heavy current through a coil, then an explosive from one end propagating to the other blows it up and the magnetic force has to go somewhere, so becomes an EMP.
The limit is “line of sight”, so making one a lot more powerful isn’t as important as altitude. At ground level, they just can’t see over the horizon about 100 miles away. On orbit is a different thing.
I like this one, though:
http://gizmodo.com/5454295/this-emp-cannon-stops-cars-almost-instantly
why I have an old Mercedes without a computer in it…
I suspect it puts out a much stronger EMP “up close” than would be felt from a nuke “far away” in most of the country. That whole inverse square thing… which is why I think most cars keep running after an EMP event.
In any case, it takes nuclear capacity, heavy lift capacity, high altitude capacity (well above the 60 to 100 mile LEO) and lots of “other side of the world” control of the thing. Ground stations, timing, etc. Limited set of folks who can do that. Smaller set that hate us. Fewer still crazy enough to try it. At present the empty set (or it would have happened). Iran and N. Korea have the crazy bit, but lack the ability for now. Russia has the ability as does China, but neither of them that crazy. Most everyone else with the ability is not interested in it and likes us OK. IFF an EMP ever hit central USA, I’d expect to see Iran and N. Korea glowing in the dark 30 minutes later and “discussions” with Russia and China…
A great many unknowns for sure, many determined by local circumstances and unknowable variables.
In the inner cities the upper floors of buildings will have no water and very limited access due to loss of elevators. At about 250 ft elevation water head pressure exceeds main pressure. That means that without lift pumps and filled rooftop cisterns that most tall buildings have, even if you have full main pressures of about 100 psi, you will not be able to get useful water pressure above about the 8th or 10th floor. Carrying water from street level will become a major problem for everyone who lives in apartments higher than the 8th to 10th floors. You need between 2 and 4 liters of water a day per person to survive. In a 20 story apartment building with several hundred units that would require a human pack train of water carriers every day all day just to get water to the upper floors.
That means lots of people forced to relocate to tent cities near the street level sources of water. This works in the summer time, not so much in winter. In a couple months everything burnable in the city will have been scavenged for fuel for camp fires. All the trees in the parks will be cut down and buildings stripped of interior trim and other combustibles. (that is what happened in Holland when the Nazi’s cut off all supplies at the end of the war to starve the population.)
The problem of logistics is illustrated by these two efforts to supply just two small areas during and after WWII (now expand those demands to 100’s of millions — the supply infrastructure simply does not exist to make it happen in a disrupted system. In simple terms the carrying capacity will drop significantly for those not close to supply centers and the first 3 weeks to year will be very very difficult to handle)
The Berlin airlift
People broke up furniture and pulled off the wood work in their houses for fuel to keep warm and cook, trees in the street were slowly harvested for fire wood at night because it was illegal to do so.
The scenario you sketch out presumes that mass mob action does not occur in most areas. Likely true in many places but if the core city populace decides to move out to “greener pastures”, they would be like a plague of locusts for near by suburbs. At two to three weeks when the stresses of hunger make people angry, short tempered, desperate and easily set off, there will be trouble in large areas. Add summer heat waves, or winter cold to that scenario and you will see a major drop in carrying capacity.
One of the biggest problems we had when we developed crisis relocation plans were figuring out how to cope with the logistics required to keep large numbers of evacuees fed, hydrated and warm enough to survive cold weather. The Feds briefly discussed it in a 150 page report published in March 1979 for the Joint Committee on Defense Production Congress of the United States. Titled “Economic and Social Consequences of Nuclear Attacks on the United States”
The bottom line of this analysis, was that large scale disruption of normal society and its logistic base has far greater impacts than anticipated by most emergency planners, and inherent social pressures will force the evacuees to do things that counter the efforts of the government to get control of the situation. Even during the blitz, evacuated British citizens ignored the government efforts to evacuate large areas and moved back into the cities that they knew rather than stay in their evacuation areas. The pull of family will cause large numbers of people to try to move in ways the government cannot anticipate and support. Lots of secondary compounding issues that would make it nearly impossible to supply and support large metropolitan areas if the normal logistics train breaks down. Lots of supplies would be in route and serve as a rolling reserve or resources but it will be allocated by local circumstances not a coordinated system, so trucks of food and other key supplies will simply be commandeered and re-routed by locals regardless of what the government wants to do with those resources. In a hungry town a semi truck loaded with groceries for another town will not be allowed to make its delivery it will be diverted to some local use. Could be a local food bank for the general distribution of rations or it could be some local power broker selling it on the black market. Regardless the other town expecting delivery will be left twisting in the wind and will likewise commandeer other resources it gets control off to fill the void.
Areas near local harbor facilities, major rail heads and production areas will have some ability to supply their own needs, but locations a few hundred miles down the road from those sources will be left to their own devices to supply basic needs and that is likely not to be a smooth and efficient process. The combination of crime, misallocation, corruption and just good old fashioned incompetence will leave a lot of people desperate for key supplies.
At the same time there will be emergent activities spontaneously developed by the public which will try to counter some of these effects. (some guy with a box truck will set up a one truck food convoy to get supplies into the city). But at the same time others will set up emergent systems to exploit the situation (road blocks to commandeer passing supplies intended for other areas). Local street gangs will become the law of the land in large areas of the city, as the over whelmed police fire and government services try to cope with larger scale issues.
Like you, I am confident that the issue can be coped with if individuals take it upon themselves to make preparations. I however think a lot of the (well it will just be a big tail gate party) view is due to normalcy bias. Having wrestled with planning for similar situations I think a hard look at the logistics does not warrant that assumption for large areas of the country. It will take a year or slightly more to establish local supplies (victory gardens) etc. to fill the gaps and a lot of people will run out of supplies before that can happen.
It will be to some extent a problem that affects groups in different ways. Most lower income people blue collar folks go to the grocery store once a week to every two weeks. In Rural areas where travel distances are longer they might “make a food run” once a month or so. Those folks are used to managing their food pantry and stretching supplies until the next payday. They will cope fairly well at least for the short term. Lower and middle income white collar folks tend more to shop on a shorter cycle and live out of the freezer and microwave, do not do as much “cooking from scratch”, are less likely to be hunters or fishermen and their idea of roughing it is to cook some steaks on the BBQ grill or go to some resort area like the major national parks and live in a motel and eat in restaurants. They as a group will be less resilient, but can probably cope at least for the first 2-3 weeks, after that they will have empty cupboards and freezers, and find that the local lake in the green space does not have enough fish to feed the community and will be fished out in a week or two. Upper class white collar types who exclusively live out of the fridge/freezer and microwave and eat in restaurants or night spots 4 or more days a week on average will be the hardest hit. They as a group will be less adaptable, and competent in food management, and like the very bottom of the population income groups who live from one benefit check to the next (yes I know that they now use cards but those will not work with the system fried) will be in real trouble. The folks who have 2 days food in the cupboards either because the can’t afford to buy more, or they are used to ordering food off of menus will be very hungry puppies after day 10 or so.
Only time will tell, and I hope we do not have to find out the answer to this question because I don’t think we will like the answer.
Guys,
I understand where you are coming from but you make the unjustified assumption that our corrupted and infiltrated government actually wants to PRESERVE the USA as a nation and not destroy it.
Given the last 4 to 5 decades I disagree. The goal is the destruction of the USA and the philosophy underlying our US Constitution, the state exists to protect the rights of the individual. The goal is the installation of an unelected totalitarian global government similar to the EU with the philosophy, the individual exists to serve the state. Notice in BREXT The Movie the EU elected parliament is nothing but a feel good front with ZERO power. A hoax used to make the serfs think they are run democratically.
Pascal Lamy made it clear that the Elite have been working towards this goal since the 1930s. Actually the Elite have tried to destroy the USA since 1776. Karl Marx and his propaganda has just been the most successful method tried so far. My comment on the Karl Marx
Lamy in one article states:
In a second article Lamy is quite blunt in stating national sovereignty is passe.
WIKI says of Jean Monnet, he was ” a French political economist and diplomat. An influential supporter of European unity, he is considered as one of the founding fathers of the European Union. He was a European executive body, as President of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community, and thus he is known as the “Father of Europe”. Never elected to public office, Monnet worked behind the scenes of American and European governments as a well-connected pragmatic internationalist.” Monnet was also Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations.
In another article Lamy says:
I see some sort of crisis, blackouts of the electric system being the easiest to implement, in other to create a crisis and implement Diocletian’s Problem-Reaction-Solution. Duke Power for example controls much of the east coast power grid.
The President of Duke Power is a Green Energy freak.
Chairman’s Letter to Stakeholders
“….At Duke Energy, we have two aspirations that guide our planning and serve as a bridge to the future: (1) Modernize and decarbonize our generation fleet, and (2) Help make the communities we serve the most energy efficient in the world. …” (wwwDOT).duke-energy.com/investors/publications/annual/ar-2007/downloads/pdf/07Letter.pdf
Duke Energy extended a $10 million loan to Obama’s re-election convention committee that was then ‘forgiven’ and thereby got around campaign contribution laws. Duke is actually a young company founded in July 2, 2012 The boiler plate names Dr. W. Gill Wylie, James Buchanan Duke and William States Lee all born in the 1800s as ‘founders’ because of the Duke Power connection to the Catawba Power Company (1899) —- HMMmmmmm wonder who the real backers are?
I am not the only one seeing this.
Forward Observer
Samuel Culper is the Director of Forward Observer’s Open Source Intelligence service. He was an Army and contract Intelligence analyst with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He lives in Texas.
There is a lot more. This guy has studied the situation from the viewpoint of on the ground experience.
….And Obummer is seeding illegals from Mexico and refusegees from Syria throughout the country by the millions….
……
Completely O/T
Forward Observer – my ex-husband’s duty if he had gone to ‘Nam… Funny his Grandma was head of a state democratic party and his enlistment papers were ‘lost’ for several months so he missed deployment by ONE WEEK…
@Larry:
A more pessimistic view I see.
For now I’ll just note that roving bands of thugs were not seen in California quakes, despite extensive damage, and rare even in Katrina ( almost absent in Andrew).
Yes, folks used to ordering a burger & fries will have it worst. But do remember feed conversion ratio. Corn mush with beans isn’t fancy, but we will have a lot of it via not feeding it to critters world wide (we export a lot, and at 10:1 for cattle conversion ratio, that is a lot of corn mush. People won’t be happy, but they can be fed. One truck of corn feeds a lot of people. (My home town grew rice. Way more than they could eat in a century…).
BTW, doesn’t take a year to grow a garden. Radishes harvest in 25 days… biggest issue being water… outside rain fed areas.
In short, as you point out, urban core areas have it bad. The rest of us not so bad, though, IMHO. BTW, an armed neighborhood watch works well against looters. Experience reported from some gulf State post Andrew.
I’m also not worried about government having control thwarted. Emergent systems work better most of the time. Markets, for example, are emergent. Central Planning works far worse.
Gail:
I don’t miss that there are large forces wanting to destroy the USA, many of them running the government.
I just think that in a nation wide AwShit like an EMP attack, the bulk of we the people would not be dedicated to the destruction of the USA. We would just set about “fixing it” no matter what “they” want.
BTW, per that Metcalf comment:
I think it is just silly. The Metcalf station is just on the edge of San Jose / Silicon Valley, about 9 miles north of the start of the “South Bay” exurbs, in a band that is only “rural” as it is full of freeway with moderately undesirable land for building in large hills on each side. A bit south they are planting houses quite fast. To the point where even on Saturday at 2 to 3 PM the 101 freeway comes to a near halt near the station.
But also… Right across the freeway from the station is a shooting range. I’ve gone there several times. Did my DCM qualification there. THE most likely reason the station got shot at is some URBAN yahoos (since almost all the shooters at that range are from Silicon Valley) who went to the range thought it would be fun to take a pot shot. With (I’d estimate) about 30,000 shooter-days there per year, that there has only been one such event in the 4 decades I’ve been here surprises the heck out of me. IF it were near my old rural home town, the thing would be shot at at least once a year… (some crazy guys I grew up with… and stayed away from…) As you exit that range, the road takes you north, then turns you to face that station and it just looks like so much fun could be had…
So I’d figure that one for “stupid vandalism no self restraint” rather than “5th column”…
@Larry:
What I think my position comes down to in the smallest scale:
Either most of the cars, trucks et. al. still work, so we have a fleet of millions of vehicles to make an ersatz transport system and act as mobile power stations or: The vehicle feet is largely off line and those folks in the urban core areas can’t get to the suburbs and rural areas anyway so it doesn’t matter. THEY have a Very Bad Day, but the rest of us do fine without them. As they trickle out, we hand them a shovel and sack of corn and point them at a plot of dirt… with a water can in the middle…
Also note that folks are either in the “rain fed” ag areas and a catch pan gets water, or they are in the dry areas and most of them now have well water. ONE farm well driven by an old PTO Diesel Tractor can deliver more water than a city worth of folks can drink. (Bathing, washing cars and watering lawns not so much…) I think folks can figure that out. Especially when told.
So “farm as refugee camp” with water and grains even if hauled by a few tractors, or food and water trucked in from rural areas as most of the transport works..
The losers are the farm animals, that get promptly eaten so they don’t need the grains, and all the lawns, pets, parks, etc. etc. that are “nice to have” but not needed in a disaster.
The one time I think it could be very disastrous is if timed for dead of winter. Most harvested grains already sold and shipped, grain driers empty for the spring harvest. Folks not able to “walk out” nor can a few tractors “haul in” during a hard storm. Few folks prepared for a week without central heating. That’s why I don’t “do snow” and live in warm places ;-)
Not so much more pessimistic as it is a view point that specifically addresses what could go wrong. You can’t deal efficiently with problems you never really considered in the planning phase. Sometimes the biggest single issue is recognizing a risk exists. Residents who live below a dam that they don’t know exists won’t consider preparation for a dam breach and flash flooding — it is simply not even on the radar.
In military planning they teach commanders to plan for and prepare for two specific planning cases.
They plan for the MLCA (most likely course of action – of the enemy) and they plan for the
MDCA (most dangerous course of action – of the enemy), in planning for civil emergencies you have to do the same thing. You plan for the most likely outcome and try to mitigate and have a useful response to the worst case outcome (ie what if our other assumptions fail).
I have no doubt that in many communities your assumptions are valid and some variation of that will be the final outcome, but we also need to consider if normalcy bias assumptions might fail.
In the case of Katrina, Loma Prieta and other similar situations there was one standing assumption in place that might fail in a more extreme wide spread outage. That was the assumption of prompt outside aid and near term recovery. Although the victims of Hurricanes often get really upset with Federal, State and Local efforts and do often take matters into their own hands to get things done, if in a wide spread grid collapse (and possibly intentional destruction of other key facilities like oil refineries through cyber attacks), in some communities the population might reach a point where they feel totally on their own and enter an every man for himself state of mind. America has never seen wide spread starvation or break down like some other countries have in living memory. The 1700’s-1890’s technologies and knowledge to deal with those issues are lost to most citizens. How many folks do you think know how to build root cellars and keep produce over the winter? Most think canning with Mason jars is a quaint old fashioned skill that their grandmother might have done but they not only don’t know how to do it by don’t have the critical supplies.
It is the combined synergistic effects of multiple simultaneous breakdowns in support systems we take for granted that I worry about. If that happens, you then get into mob behavior situations where most anything is possible.
A friend of mine I used to work with many years ago, served in WWII infantry during the post surrender occupation of Germany. He mentioned how dangerous hungry crowds were and that they had to real credible threats of force to control them. (he mentioned something about you shoot a couple of them and the others decide to go somewhere else.)
There was a period of general mayhem in war torn europe following surrender but even in the areas controlled by the British, French, and Americans things went into total anarchy from time to time.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2119589/How-neighbours-turned-anarchy-erupted-Europe-aftermath-WWII.html
I wasn’t talking about the growing time of a garden, but rather the long term exhaustion of resources, populations weakened by a hard winter and semi starvation and the accumulated insults of the stress and exhaustion of survival. Late spring storms and other misadventures would hit famine stressed populations hard, especially in the northern interior areas where hard winters are the norm, and distance from resupply and recovery efforts make them at the bitter end of the food chain.
We don’t have the cultural survival knowledge to scrape by in starvation conditions by and large, although the prepper community is seeding the population with those who are trying to refresh those skills and memories. How many average people in the cities have any clue you can eat dandelions, cattail, plantain etc. or some of the other rough natural vegetation that the medieval Europeans depended on when famine came? How many of them have any clue how to set up useful latrines (out houses) to handle sewage if the water supply shuts down and the sewers clog up due to lack of flow?
People re-learn lessons about food borne diseases and sanitation the hard way. Diseases like cholera and typhus would return and gut the cities in days without modern medicine and sanitation.
The most dangerous time is in the early spring of the second year before significant crops can be harvested.
I often am
EMmmmmm wordpress is having issues
I am often amused at people that think that in a pinch they can grow enough food for themselves and their family members. Growing enough food for 4 people with hand labor is a very hard job and you need a lot of practice and preparation doing it in your area to be successful. Starting when you HAVE TO succeed is far too late. In the old days subsistance farmers tried to have a years supplies ahead. Even today Mormans are encouraged to have a years supply of emergency food on hand.
I would suggest befriending Mormans if you are concerned about surviving a real disaster time…pg
A major EMP event will occur be it natural or man made. The worst consequence will be damage to the “Grid” in general and the transformers designed to operate at 250 kV or above in particular.
Thus the “Grid” must be hardened or made irrelevant. IMHO we need to make the “Grid” irrelevant by building small modular nukes that can be delivered on a single truck. We should be able to build at least one per day. There are plenty of designs to choose from. GE, Rolls Royce and many others understand the technology. All they need is a government that will order NPPs instead of wasting public money on “Renewables” that increase the need for the “Grid”.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx
@Larry:
Being neither military nor civil defense, I prefer to plan for MPCA Mid Point Course of Action. Not to hot, not to cold. Then adjust as needed. Really, I’d like to prepare for the most horrid, but lack the $ Millions to buy a surplus missile base…
@P.G.:
Which is why I have a garden now.
BTW, I don’t expect it to provide full calories so much as supply variety, vitamins, and extend stored food enough to make it until resupply happens.
@All:
To the general point of folks not knowing some particulr thing, IMHO, that is one of the least problematic. Folks can learn fast.
Oh, and I grew up in a Mormon town, which probably explains alot 8-)
EM, Katrina shows how Government bureaucrats react to a crisis.
“…Despite their inability to cope with the resulting mayhem, several days after the storm passed New Orleans officials ordered the confiscation of lawfully-owned firearms from city residents….City authorities were selective with their order, discriminating against the most vulnerable….
A decade later, Wayne LaPierre’s words following Katrina are still as relevant as ever, “The lesson of New Orleans is that citizens must be able to rely on their own ability to survive. The answer once and for all to politicians who say Americans don’t need the Second Amendment, government will protect you, the answer forever more is New Orleans.””
(wwwDOT)nraila.org/articles/20150821/a-decade-later-remember-new-orleans-gun-confiscation-can-and-has-happened-in-america
Griffin cached the news articles (note his website now goes to this page all about spam…: http://www.freedom-force.org/freedomcontent.cfm?fuseaction=FEMA_Katrina )
Here is the wayback version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110926033634/http://www.freedom-force.org/freedomcontent.cfm?fuseaction=FEMA_Katrina
@Gail:
All of which (which I remember from watching the event closely at the time) is why I say folks will be dependent on themselves for a few weeks… Luckily, in a major EMP event, D.C. will be largely ineffective… Central Control depends most on the communications and electrical power that will be most damaged. Hard to call up the National Guard when you can’t call…
FEMA set out to protect the government and see that government functions? Well yes, that was the reason why FEMA was created. I though everyone knew that. :P
About disaster planning, well, I’ve done some of that. In a real disaster, the plan is the first thing to throw out because the disaster you face is almost never going to be the one written in the manual. :P
@CDQuarles:
The Plan is what you measure against to know how much and what to adapt, and throw away. It is the inventory in the freezer from which you make a meal, blended with the fresh ingredients at hand…
Can you tell I grew up in a restautant family of cooks? 8-)
FEMA is another unfortunate legacy of the Carter Administration. He tried to put all the disparate functions related to Civil Defense, aspects of continuity of government and national survival of the Department of Defense, Department of Health Education and Welfare and Department of Agriculture and Housing and Urban development (related issues for public health, housing and agricultural production of defense critical food and agricultural products etc.)
The agency was formed just before I joined Emergency Management, and it was pretty much a worst case cross breed. The old Civil Defense program had a relatively clear mission and limited authority to screw with other aspects of government. It in partnership with DOD was responsible for the immediate protective actions to survive a nuclear attack and recover critical infrastructure. Toward that end it enlisted the help of other agencies who had ownership of various components of that pie. (housing, health, agriculture etc.) As long as those agencies were separate they served a bit as checks and balances on each other. If DOD or Civil Defense made an excessive move that stepped on the authorities and responsibilities of the other agencies like housing or health and agriculture they had someone who would push back and call in question dubious decisions. Even back then there were authorities to seize critical supplies and commodities and ration them in time of national emergency, so those authorities are nothing new, dating back to WWI and WWII.
The real problem is that the various agencies had differing primary focus and views about the proper path to achieve the end goal of surviving a nuclear attack or massive flooding on the Mississippi. As a result they had fairly clear separation of responsibilities. If the Mississippi was flooding the Corp of Engineers was the lead agency for the flood fight aspect, health was the lead agency for disease control, etc.
Once they all got tossed in the same basket you had multiple bureaucracies all mixed in together and that resulted in in fighting and territorial disputes which paralyzed FEMA for years, it was still going on in the very early 1990’s when the wall came down and peace broke out. That was the death knell of the old Civil Defense community, and the other sub-agencies wasted no time pulling the teeth of the old Civil Defense aspects and gutting that mission. Things like the community shelter survey where they surveyed and certified various public building shelter spaces and tried to maintain adequate pre-positioned stocks of emergency water, medicines and all that were already in trouble by the late 1970’s and once the Soviet Union collapsed that whole infrastructure just evaporated.
Because of the politics involved with that many functions all mushed together into one big blob, bureaucracy just went nuts.
That said the folks in New Orleans and Louisiana completely dropped the ball proceduraly and failed to take several critical proactive steps which were required by both their plans and law to trigger outside support by Fema.
In short it was a huge cluster and everyone screwed the pooch on Katrina. A few well-intentioned people who had direct information on needs tried to meet them but the ran into a bureaucratic wall by stepping on toes and side stepping proper procedure. The bureaucrats for ego reasons could not loose control of resource management, and also for effective management of resources those agencies had lots of legitimate issues that made some of those spontaneous actions very counter productive.
For example:
For all the right reasons, lots of private groups and even governmental agencies, always want to run clothing drives for the disaster victims. That is literally one of the worst things you can do, (please do not ever donate clothing to a disaster drive-there will be copious amounts of that available locally) because you end up with truck loads of used clothing arriving unscheduled and unneeded in the disaster area just when you need to minimize unnecessary traffic so you can route essential resources, emergency workers like linemen, medical supplies, fuel, potable water, emergency generation etc.
The end result of those clothing drives is they fill up critical warehouse space with unneeded cloths, often not properly washed and sorted at the point of origin, so it sucks up volunteers at the disaster end doing useless work sorting cleaning or throwing out clothing and filling up warehouse space better used to store critical supplies like food rations, plastic to cover roofs, chain saws, repair kits for disaster recovery equipment etc. Much better to send money to local groups like church groups etc. Who can purchase locally exactly what is needed.
Example 2:
The other issue is a legal liability issue, It happens in every disaster, some well meaning folks pitch in to help and burn up a motor on their motor boat or break a transmission on their 4×4 and after the event sue everybody in sight to get reimbursed for their own mistakes. Some of those issues are fair wear and tear failures and most of the time the local government tries to cover as best they can, but some of it is just pure greed and fraud.
Here in Colorado we had 4×4 owners who responded to calls from local government (like I did during the blizzard of 82) who blew up their transmissions or broke other parts doing Dukes of Hazard class yahoo stunts, then tried to sue for the government to replace their blown transmission citing the general call over the media for volunteers as the justification. These are the same sort of jerks who will buy a brand new wide screen TV to watch the super bowl and then return it to the store 2 days later, or buy an expensive digital camera to go on vacation and return it when they get back.
Those sort of legal entanglements (especially wrongful death issues) is the reason bureaucracies hold volunteer efforts at arms length. (blame the lawyers)
Add to that all these emergency management agencies are deeply entangled in rules and regs that limit what they can do. For example when I worked for Colorado Office of Emergency Management I got certified with a wild land fire fighting red card to be able to assist with major fires. But I never could do anything because officially no fire agency would formally take me under their wing for both insurance and union rules issues.
My local fire chief did use me as a crew leader on two different fire responses because he knew me and trusted I would not do something stupid, when he was critically short of manpower during a burn on North Table Mountain right behind my home and in his fire district. (officially it never happened)
In small town USA, the locals know who can be trusted to pitch in a do it honorably if they break something or not to do stupid stuff and get themselves or others killed trying to help. They also know which guy to keep on a short leash because he is a goof ball, red neck fool.
Out of state or even out of county coordinators have no clue about that and simply cannot risk dealing with those long term legal nightmares. Add to that the pure simple over zealous law enforcement in Louisiana which did things which were clearly illegal, because — locally they are god and just did what they wanted, were in a notoriously corrupt political system, simply had no clue of the limits to their emergency authorities ( No Sheriff, you can’t drag people kicking and screaming out their homes just because you think it is dangerous for them to stay there).
Bottom line lots of blame to go around for dumb stunts in Government response to emergencies, just plain stupid government at the local level, gun shy junior manager types and King of the walk administrators, but there are a lot of good folks working in emergency response at all levels, and they should not all be tarred and feathered without consideration of the complexities of the situation.
So don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.
@Gail Combs,
That litany of FEMA failure in response to Katrina resulted from poor leadership. Michael Brown was made FEMA director as part of the spoils system. To the victors go the spoils. Plum jobs are awarded to members of the elites regardless of ability or competence.
Michael Brown could have served through both Bush presidencies but without anyone being aware of his incompetence. It was just his horrible luck to have a real emergency on his watch. FEMA stands for Federal EMERGENCY Management Administration.
We don’t notice the incompetence of government departments until people die. For example nobody noticed Rod Paige’s failure to do anything useful as Secretary of Education just like all the other leaders of the Department of Education since Terrell Bell. Here is a picture of me shaking hands with a worse than useless Educrat. What was I thinking……..it makes me feel bad that I was prepared to “Go Along to Get Along”.
With a little luck the next president won’t be owned by elites such as bankers and the “Donor Class”. Let’s hope that will make it possible to eliminate departments of the government that do actual harm (e.g. EPA, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture etc, etc). Let’s hope that the leaders of the departments that survive (e.g.Department of Defence, Department of Justice, FEMA, etc, etc) will be chosen for their ability rather than their political connections.
It was more endemic than poor leadership, you still had little fiefdoms from the former agencies who were blended together to form the agency. FEMA even back in the 1990’s spent a good deal of its time with political in fighting and maneuvering. As a result only the successful political animals survived and thrived, driving many like myself out of the emergency management community. The last good thing that FEMA did was to set up the Urban Search and Rescue teams after Hurricane Andrew, Loma Prieta and the lessons learned from the Mexican earthquake that brought down scores of buildings in Mexico cities. For the first time they realized they were wholly unprepared for that sort of emergency.
USAR was an attempt to address the very failures that were showcased in Katrina, it created a core rescue capability for large disasters that threw dollars at the problem and systematically crushed out of the box local solutions. Local solutions were discouraged and everything had a standard and they tried to fit everything into little cubbyholes. It was much like and borrowed a lot from the Interagency Fire Response community for wild fires. Unfortunately it was trying to graft a solution that grew up over the better part of a century onto a newly formed multi cell rescue group managed at the local level by local municipal fire services and tried to glue it all together almost over night.
When I wrote the grant proposal for the Rocky Mountain Rescue team, I literally had multiple 3″ thick binders of requirements, and lists of gear. The objective was a nation wide uniform structure where they could send any one of the USAR teams interchangeably into those sorts of emergencies.
The California and the Fairfax County fire USAR teams became the first active teams and because of the political connections of Fairfax County and to a lesser extent California (the earthquake risk in Ca gave them clout and they were fairly well along on developing their on structure) They drove the agenda. If you didn’t do it their way, it was a threat to their structural model and you were not one of the “in groups”.
At the state level here in Colorado I was already trying to bring in existing experienced rescue skills from our mountain rescue and mine rescue teams, for major rescue emergencies and even got a little bit of traction with some industrial rescue folks, but we got smothered by the fire service, and their quasi governmental bureaucracy seasoned with fire service union requirements, (the fire service like the United Auto Workers is very dominated by their unions and very my way or the highway) they ended up running the show by pushing aside or diminishing any other approach. Fire services are almost as bureaucratically hide bound as the military and Federal Government types, so instead of solving problems they pushed to meet prescribed standards that they had just pulled out of the air. Well actually Fairfax County Fire and California Fire authority pulled out of the air. They were looking for $10,000 solutions for $100 dollar problems.
The same sort of bureaucratic tug of wars were embedded through out FEMA as historically mostly independent organizations were suddenly all stuffed into one box. That pushed decision authority up hill rather than down to the tactical field level, and everything ground to a stop as every decision had to wait for some one’s approval, at a higher level instead of some local authority who had an intimate understanding of conditions on the ground tasking response actions, and getting things done, needs were constantly bucked up hill for approval.
The merger into Home Land Security after it was formed surely only made that worse when it was created only 3 years prior to Katrina. It became such a big multi-missioned monster that I am not sure any one could (or can) manage it effectively now, but weak management guaranteed it would manage to snatch disaster from the jaws of defeat, by propositioning assets that no one would approve activating until it was too late to act.
The problem was not at the Presidential level, it was endemic to the organization. A strong president and a take command leader could have improved things substantially by giving clear guide lines about what was expected and they could have been on the phone when the first news broke about the problems in New Orleans demanding solutions instead of it taking days of bad press to move people off center.
That said New Orleans was a problem waiting to happen. It was/is one of the most corrupt political environments in the country. Professional emergency managers have known since Hurricane Carla (September 3, 1961) and Hurricane Camile (August 17 1969) that New Orleans was a time bomb, fort catastrophic damage in a major hurricane. When you live in a basin below sea level it is not a surprise if it floods when the levees break.
In the 1980’s we used New Orleans as an example of a predictable disaster which only the date was unknown. Everybody involved in Emergency Management knew New Orleans was a huge problem, anybody who says otherwise (ie it was a surprise) is either a fool, incompetent, or totally clueless about emergency management. This is why the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans share a lot of blame for the out come, they literally did everything they could to screw up the response. Failure to make timely declarations, failure to use resources effectively (buses never used to move people who had no transportation), failure to follow their own emergency plans, a run away police force that went rogue and did things it had no legal authority to do — the list is almost endless.
Every major agency involved screwed up big time it was not just FEMA, although they got almost all the blame, the local mismanagement was spectacular in its own right.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4860776
Big organizations are inherently ineffecient, and we have reached the point were organizations who were lean mean and well trained (when we thought Gov’t was good) back in the Truman and Eisenhower days, is now at all levels bloated with fools who are good at bureaucracy but terrible at function.
I personally don’t see any clean easy path to fixing the problem short of clearing the table and starting over. Much of this bureaucracy is too broken to fix, like Lincoln and his Generals in the Civil War much of government is totally dysfunctional and the only cure is start issuing pink slips until the fools are replaced by the competent, but the politics will not let that house cleaning happen. In fact it is strongly disposed to make it worse by chasing every bright twinkly object that flutters by rather than focusing on clearly defined missions and results.
Here’s another one where they use the Clinton foundation to launder the cash.
http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton-foundation-donors-got-weapons-deals-hillary-clintons-state-department-1934187
@Larry Ledwick,
“I personally don’t see any clean easy path to fixing the problem short of clearing the table and starting over. Much of this bureaucracy is too broken to fix…..”
There you have it. It has been said (often) that some institutions are “Too Big to Fail” but usually that means “We Don’t Know How to Fix Them”. The solution is to let them fail or better still close them down.
The New Zealand government realized that the Department of Education was beyond any hope of reform so it was abolished in legislation known as “Tomorrow’s Schools” (1989). So what happened to the NZ schools without the firm hand of the Department of Education to guide them?
Today the NZ schools are arguably the best in the English speaking world.
Larry, gallopingcamel,
Thanks for the discussion.
And I totally agree. The larger the bureacracy and the more layers, the more tangled and hidebound and prone to SNAFUs. Add in the politics, Affirmative Action and you have a major disaster.
This also goes for large companies. It is one of the reasons they love socialism/regulations. On a level playing field they can not compete unless they have the money and clout to play dirty. Here in NC I know of two feed stores driven out of business by a chain coming in spending a couple years drastically undercutting the prices to below cost until the competition folded. Then the prices skyrocketed to well above that charged by the independents.