Full text as always for my FRiends, from a humblegunner-approved blogger. Many links embedded in the text at the source, and pictures.
Posted on 11/07/2013 1:08:51 PM PST by backwoods-engineer
An essay comparing the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 73 years ago today, to the near future collapse of the American civil society, from a blogger with the FR Seal of Approval.
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I. TACOMA NARROWS
73 years ago today, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State collapsed. The way in which it collapsed was brought on by a positive-feedback situation, where the destructive force was only bounded by the structural integrity of the bridge itself.
There are some serious lessons in this collapse for the future of American society.
First, let's get a basic understanding of why the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsed.
Tacoma Narrows Bridge begins to twist in the wind The wind that fateful day was blowing strong, gusting to 42 mph, at roughly right angles to the bridge's span. The bridge began to life, then flutter, then twist, and as more of the bridge's structure faced the wind, capturing more energy from the wind, the the motions of the bridge got larger with each bounce, which caused the bridge to capture more energy from the wind, which caused the motions to grow larger, and so on and so forth, until the bridge could no longer resist the motion, and it broke.
From Wikipedia:
Dynamic Aeroelastic Flutter is a self-feeding and potentially destructive vibration where aerodynamic forces on an object couple with a structure's natural mode of vibration to produce rapid periodic motion. ... a positive feedback occurs between the structure's natural vibration and the aerodynamic forces. That is, the vibrational movement of the object increases an aerodynamic load, which in turn drives the object to move further. If the energy input by the aerodynamic excitation in a cycle is larger than that dissipated by the damping in the system, the amplitude of vibration will increase, resulting in self-exciting oscillation.
Once the amplitude of the oscillations becomes large enough, the structural integrity of the bridge fails, resulting in what we see at right.
II. LESSONS FOR AMERICAN SOCIETY
Let's take the Tacoma Narrows collapse as a metaphor. What are the destructive forces pushing against American society today? What mechanisms cause these destructive forces to grow and build on themselves? And at what point does the structural integrity of American society fail, and an economic, political, and/or societal collapse occur?
The howling winds buffeting American society today come from many sources, but join to form a gale force aimed at near right-angles to our society's span.
I will only focus on a few destructive forces here: the increasing dependence on government and systems of support; the loss of liberty and the increasing police state; the continual devaluation of money via government and big-bank debt; and the intentional attacks on morality and traditional societal norms.
THE WINDS AND THEIR EFFECTS
Destructive Force: Dependence
When I was a kid, my grandmother canned the vegetables from her garden. In my dad's childhood in rural West Virginia, everybody did. Everybody had chickens, and many had a hog or two, rooting in the woods, that would help get them through the winter if things got tight. Folks were self-reliant.
Not anymore. One in five West Virginians have an EBT food stamp card. The country as a whole is so dependent on government that half of Americans live in a household that receives some kind of government benefit. America has 65 million low-information voters who don't pay taxes, but keep voting to keep the free stuff train 'a rollin'.
America is dependent. Not just on government, but on fragile systems of support than can easily be disrupted by natural disasters, like weather, or man-made disasters, like civil unrest and terrorism. Interdependent, "just-in-time" delivery and inventory systems ensure that no store has more than 3 days of food. And water? Pumped by electricity, just like sewage. A lot of people in my native West Virginia that used to be on wells, springs, and rain-catch cisterns are on county water and sewer now. Water that is pumped by electricity.
Food and supplies come to the stores on trucks, whose diesel fuel is refined, pumped, and metered by electrically-controlled and powered equipment.
All of it depends on the power grid. Thank God it's not fully centralized; states like Texas can stand on their own, and some other states like Tennessee, Alabama, and Washington have enough hydropower to stand alone, to a certain degree. But computerized controls connected to the Internet mean that these grids are fragile, and subject to computer-based attacks. It used to be that the utility industries had their own supervistory, control, and data acquisition (SCADA) networks. Not anymore. They're on the Internet, subject to the Chinese Army's cyberattackers and who knows who else.
In the midst of all this dependency, as a wild card, there are all these drills that turn into real tragedies. Oklahoma City, in '95. 9/11/01. The Boston Marathon bomber. And coming up, a week from today, NERC's GridEx, where the drill is the power grid going down, all over the East Coast. Two weeks after a documentary on NatGeo about an "American Blackout". How convenient.
When the power goes out nationwide, there is not a systemic way to get it back. Ever.
100 million+ would die in the first year.
And despite a large movement of "survivalism" and "preppers", of which Ol' Backwoods counts himself a part, it is not enough. Every day, more people get an EBT. Half of the voting population of the United States takes a government handout of one kind or another. de Toqueville's warning applies, but we have ignored it, and now, the Free Crap Army is busy voting itself more and more benefits. On our election returns maps, whole counties are turning the color of dependence, blue, which really should be Communist Red.
The dependence is growing, and is feeding itself, a destructive force bounded only by resources and the remaining strength of American society.
Destructive Force: The Police State
There is, it seems, an intentional push by the police to get people to react. The police-military-industrial complex seems to want a civil war. The Feds are paying for local police forces to have equipment and training in tactics that no oath-keeping officer should be using against Americans. And you know: if they have the gear and tactics, they WILL use them. To justify the budget, a police chief will send a SWAT team to take out a petty thief. And do it over and over again.
These "all cops to the scene" response to crimes seem directed toward getting people to believe that the Secret Police are everywhere and know everything, and will beat you down if you resist. In Boston, a whole city was locked down for ONE teenage 'terrorist'. But it is a sham, a Potemkin village. If 200 'youths' caused the Austin TX police to "swarm" on the location of the Haunted House riot, and the police could not respond anywhere else, what if a major crime or terrorist event occurred in the rest of the city? Chaos, that's what.
The police may put up a show of totalitarian force, but they cannot react fast enough. As Matt Bracken says, a flash-mob operates on a 4-minute form-act-disperse loop, and the police have a loop about ten times as long, on average. It's Col. John Boyd's OODA loop, and the mob is inside the police OODA loop. Only armed citizens can react fast enough, because they are already there.
Besides, as the Supreme Court has ruled half a dozen times, the police have no duty to protect you, the individual. They only have a duty to reduce crime generally. And their increasing use of Gestapo tactics does not help.
The armed citizen is the only bright spot in this police-state scenario we Americans find ourselves in. All 50 states have some way for the citizen to carry a gun; in some, it's virtually impossible to get a permit (New Jersey, New York), and in others (Arizona, Alaska, Vermont, Montana), no permit is required at all. The rest are mostly shall-issue. But everywhere you look, the armed citizen is blamed by the media and politicians every single time there is a mass shooting. And 9 times out of 10, those happen in so-called 'gun-free zones.' There's guns, all right, just not in the right hands.
And then, there are the "the people are the enemy" and "submit to me, I am a cop" attitudes.
Example: the lunacy in New Mexico. Anal rape of one Mr. Ecker by the police. They found a judge who ordered this done! Only one doctor stood up and said, "No, I will not participate." But Leviathan cannot be stopped. The cops found a hospital that would search this man's rectum, though he had demonstrably done NOTHING wrong. And these cops have done it before to another man.
The 'war on drugs' has been the single most important factor in causing the police to act like tyrants instead of their original mission: protect and defend the constitution against its enemies, and keeping the peace. Police now can use the possession of any kind of controlled substance as an excuse to do almost anything now.
Police know they will NOT lose a paycheck if they gun somebody down 4 seconds after contact, or taser a woman for not showing the cop her boobs. And the dirty cops blackmail the dirtier cops, with mutual guilty knowledge, and the so-called "thin blue line" protecting the thug cops.
What about the trained submissiveness exercises for the kiddos? They all teach the same lesson: kiss the boot of tyranny, or die. Kids frog-marched out of class by the police for the tiniest infractions, for biting a Pop-Tart 'in the shape of a gun' and the like. Kids in schoolyards, 'proned out' by the cops, yelling at them to get down, with barking drug dogs baring their teeth.
Cops used to swear an oath to the Constitution, to a set of ideals. These Feds and these rogue cops don't care about that anymore. There isn't a moral set of brakes anymore. They WILL go full Gestapo. It has already happened.
The police state is growing, and is feeding on itself, a destructive force bounded only by the remaining moral strength of American society. Destructive Force: Debt Every year, Federal, state, and local governments spend more than they did the year before, far in excess of the inflation rate. Government is the only sector where "zero-based budgeting" does not exist; more, more, more is just the way it's done.
Every year, more debt is piled on, and the Federal Reserve buys trillions of dollars in bad paper, stocks and bonds, to keep the bubble inflated. Banks make loans at ever-higher fractional reserve leverages, ensuring they could not possibly give out as much cash as they have deposits. Credit-default swaps (CDS's), collateralized-debt obligations (CDO's), and other obscure financial beasts pile debt higher and higher.
There is now more debt in America than there is money in the world. It cannot possibly be paid back.
And soon, the United States Treasury will spend quarter of annual tax returns on interest alone.
What if interest rates go up to a mere 5%? Chaos. Complete loss of faith in the dollar.
The debt mountain is growing, and groans under its own weight. How long before it gives way?
COLLAPSE
In our bridge metaphor, American society is swaying, twisting, and bucking, and every time it catches more wind, the amplitude of the oscillations increase.
Where is the breaking point?
I wish I knew.
But we, as individuals, families, and communities, had better be preparing for it. Because it's going to happen whether we like it, or not.
Full text as always for my FRiends, from a humblegunner-approved blogger. Many links embedded in the text at the source, and pictures.
You would have isolated areas with power. Some power plants have black start capability. In other words, they don’t need grid power to start up.
Ping everyone
You are mentioned.
Yeah, I noted that. Hydropower, in particular, has black-start capability. But do you agree that re-constituting a full-black grid would take years? And that in that time, millions would die?
“When the power goes out nationwide, there is not a systemic way to get it back. Ever.”
That’s really an absolutely inane statement. it is fully equivalent to “the oceans are rising and will be 35 feet higher in 11 years”.
Yes, we are highly dependent upon an aging grid. But the same author who decries all this pathetic dependency (and don’t get me wrong, I agree with the general theme) must thus be advocating for all manner of INdependence and completely discounts the notion that out of the 50% of people who are NOT leeches, there are probably 5,000 NON-SYSTEMATIC ways to restore the power grid and/or parts of it.
Global politics have ALWAYS worked on a pendulous continuum. As long as the politics remain moderate, the pendulum swings slowly to the left and right, keep a moderate pace and time. As soon as the pendulum swings far to the right or far to the left, the resulting “equal and opposite reaction” means a shift in geopolitical winds in the opposite extreme.
The problem with this is that as things become harder to control, people believe those peddling promises of stability, and the end result is anything but. Obama is a PERFECT example of this. 8 years of Bush and Republican rule sent people in droves to the polls to vote out who they saw as a threat: Republicans. In reality, the idiocy of the American populace saw the policies of Congress and the Senate, both in the hands on leftists, causing headaches for a Republican president, whom they blamed for the problems.
Americans only see party affiliation. They don’t care who’s in Congress or the Senate, because the President is an “everyone” representative, even though he’s anything but that. If the President is Republican and the country is reeling, they’ll vote in a Democrat. The opposite is true. The true issue, as I see it, is that with the Democrats stuffing the ballot boxes, illegals becoming a voting force for Democrats, and blacks consistently voting for Democrats, at some point it will be impossible to combat their agenda, and Republicanism, the actual idea that we are a Constitutional Republic, dies. Regardless of the pendulum effect, we either become a communist dictatorship or a right-wing fascist police state. Neither is desirable, but one or the other is on our eventual path.
Thanks, Laz. I was going to ping the illustrious Mr. Bracken.
Love the guy.
Besides, that isn't the point of the article. The point is, there is more than one destructive force acting on American civil society. I contend that a collapse is inevitable.
Yes. I hope to God only as an intermediate step. But history is unkind in that regard.
Preppers’ PING!!
Thanks for the preppers ping.
5.56mm
I am so screwed.
There’s a Great Storm coming everyone is feeling it and its one of the reason everyone is on edge. Deep down the alarm bells are ring the nerves on on edge and the mind is unsettled.
Its your choice you can prep or you can stand around on a bridge waiting for FEMA to bring you a bottle of water, a MRE, a warm blanket and a kiss for your boo-boo and maybe you can even get your picture as you stand there on the national news.
Any one with half a brain can look around and see for themselves what is happening right before their eyes.
So listen to what the bible says: A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it. NIV Proverbs 22:3
One of the things Selco covers in this article is the fact that many will not accept that a breakdown is occurring even as they watch it happening before their eyes. Why don’t they realize it? It’s caused by a condition called ‘Normalcy Bias’ a mental state people enter when facing a disaster.
It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.
A good article on ‘Normalcy Bias’ is on our own ChocChipCookies Blog The Survival Mom:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2010/12/29/normalcy-bias/
You either prepare and stand on your own beholden to no one or you become dependent on others to provide your basic needs and become their ‘serf’. Me I don’t want to be beholden to anyone for providing what is needed for me and mine. I certainly don’t want to have to kiss some ‘gubberment’ third class bureaucratic to try and coax some help from them, I don’t want some ‘jack booted’ thug herding me in line and telling me where to stand, sit, eat or sleep. And last but not least I don’t want to be shut up in with a bunch of ‘zombies’ and have to worry about not only trying to get basic necessities but having to fight to keep what I manage to get.
http://tomeaker.com/kart/Preparedness1j.pdf NOTE! THIS IS A FREE DOWNLOAD. I DO NOT MAKE ONE CENT OFF MY PREPAREDNESS MANUAL!
For those of you who haven’t started already it’s time to prepare almost past time maybe. You needed to be stocking up on food guns, ammo, basic household supplies like soap, papergoods, cleaning supplies, good sturdy clothes including extra socks, underwear and extra shoes and boots, cash (I myself have been putting up change for the past few years both for the metal content and the fact that using change to make what purchases you can will move you down the the list of possible marks during shtf), tools, things you buy everyday start buying two and put one up.
As the LDS say “When the emergency is upon us the time for preparedness has past.”
Again I like to recomend FReeper’s ChocoChipCookie Blog The Survival Mom (Please Blog Police let this one slide!) Where you can get lots of useful information like:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2011/11/20/8-morale-boosters-for-any-worst-case-scenario/
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2010/02/02/survival-priorities-the-rule-of-three/
And More
Also there is Ferfal’s Blog a survivor of Argentina’s first collapse:
And there is Selco’s Blog a Bosnian War survivor at:
There is also this documentry:
Sarajevo: A Street Under Siege
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kuCAOlQSEA
“There is no greater disaster than to underestimate danger. Underestimation can be fatal.”
Mark
I'm thinking THIS one will devolve into a right wing communist fascist police-state dictatorship.
With drones.
Laz,
You would have a better chance if you updated your BOB, but you insist on keeping that old Air Force issue one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPwW7RaPO_g
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