Posted on 09/14/2014 7:15:44 AM PDT by blam
BILLIONAIRE HEDGE FUND MANAGER: Of All The Things That Are Likely, Nothing Is Scarier Than An Electromagnetic Pulse
Myles Udland
July 30, 2014
Plasmasphere - Wikimedia Commons
Hedge fund managers often like to opine on various topics that are largely unrelated to investing.
In his latest lengthy quarterly letter to clients, Paul Singer of Elliott Management spent some time discussing a phenomenon that caught our attention and the attention of many others.
It's the danger posed by an electromagnetic pulse.
Singer writes that an electromagnetic pulse is the "risk that stands way above the rest in terms of the scope of potential damage adjusted for the likelihood of occurrence."
According to Singer, threats that are more manageable than an electromagnetic pulse include nuclear war and asteroids.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Supposedly the EMP pulse has the potential to strike all computerized and electrical devices, plugged in or not, unless they are sheilded or protected by something like a Faraday Cage.
An EMP can travel through the air and impact stand-alone devices like auto computers, cell phones and radios. Or it can enter a conductor, like grid power cables and wires, and travel through them to strike devices plugged in, like TV sets, home computers, etc.
Pertinent quote:
The current vulnerability of our critical infrastructures can both invite and reward attack if not corrected. Correction is feasible and well within the Nation's means and resources to accomplish.That language ("reward attack") is alien to ANY documentation on terror or military doctrine. I've never heard or read it before used in this reference. I'm curious of others' thoughts on that. From my perspective, it seems almost intentionally ambiguous. However, if the intent of the twice-copied/repeated passage in the document was "attack reward", I concur with the phrasing. One of the authors must be a tech/IT geek.
Regardless, this tidbit:
Nuclear plants produce roughly 20% of the Nation’s generation and have many redundant fail-safe systems that tend to remove them from service whenever any system upset is sensed. Their safe shut down should be assured, but they will be unavailable until near the end of restoration.is now totally moot (Fukushima) and I redirect back to my comment on what happens when those affected nuclear plants cannot be shut down safely due to loss of control...
("...tend to remove them from service...")
...RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT
The US government is preoccupied fighting racial imbalance in small town police departments and preventing global warming from flooding our coast lines in the year 2525.
Yes, in a government facility in New Mexico. Scientists worked there to determine how to harden military assets so they would continue to work.
My significant other is an earth scientist and geologist and said what I already knew to be true. Once he determined where this coronal mass would be closest on earth and the strength of it, he said if the strength was greater and would hit farther south toward us (north Texas) (it will actually be farther north toward Canada), all we had to do was unplug everything from the wall as only connected items would be fried.
If it was greater and hit farther south as in south of Canada or central part of the country, it is true the entire grid would go down and anything connected to the grid would be fried. That would be the 1800s lifestyle coming back.
OK, thanks for the info.
Would it be feasible to take his old bike too? As backup to getting home just in case?
"An Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack on the United States, whether man made or naturally occurring, could result in the deaths of nine out of ten Americans through starvation, disease and the collapse of modern society, warned Dr. Vincent Peter Pry, a member of the congressional EMP Commission and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security.
“A natural EMP catastrophe or nuclear EMP attack could blackout the national electric grid for months or years and collapse all the other critical infrastructures -- communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water -- necessary to sustain modern society and the lives of 310 million Americans,” Pry this week told the House Committee on Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies."
"Active from 2001 to 2009, the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack (EMP Commission) was initially established by the U.S. House Armed Services Committee under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2001. Sponsored by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), the EMP Commission served as a cornerstone of right-wing advocacy on national defense policy. Advocates seeking to spread alarm about the purported threat of EMP attacks, which would involve the detonation of nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere to generate a pulse that would knock out electronics-based infrastructure, have repeatedly used the findings of this commission to advocate increased funding for costly weapons programs such as missile defense and push alarmist notions that "rogue states" like Iran and North Korea pose an existential threat to the United States."
As I said in the previous post, water will be a significant problem. Perhaps not for YOU personally, but for most anyone else.
Water is 300+ft here.
You can’t just dig one of those 300+ft wells and not have modern equipment. Or piping of some sort. And you’re not going to go through one of the rock layers here without modern equipment anyways.
Many suburbs and HOA’s forbid rainwater cisterns. And getting those after some sort of event won’t be easy.
And the rivers, streams, lakes and ponds will be that ‘iffy’ water unless you boil it.
And then there’s the disposal of waste issue for people on a public sewage system...most of those have pumps at some point.
But the most important part is the people. How many suburbanites in the blue suburbs would say ‘Hey, if we dig a hole 30ft deep we’ll hit potable water! Let’s start!’. Especially the EBT cardholders. Once they burn down the cities, short time to recovery becomes long time to recovery.
That looks great.
Wouldn’t work here at all...maybe in Florida and places where the water table is really close to the surface...
4-Billion would fix our grid nationally.
Senator Cruz was right. Bomb them back to the stone age.
(Then again for some, maybe not ;)
Yes. A very large number of people from engineers to laborers are now designing a very low cost, DIY rotary water well drilling rig that will mount on a low cost, DIY tractor.
Those and many other machines are in development and already have a license requiring the designs to be free for anyone to build or manufacture and sell from now on (oh...engineers, laborers, technicians and legal support to give the effort some sticking power, too). The change is coming and the enhanced security of distribution and localization of production with it (i.e., not so centralized).
Yeah, and he usually does take it, I don’t think the range on a dirt bike is over 20 miles. He would have to carry extra gasoline with him to make it home..what a target!! Yikes, I think I better just remain calm and as another poster wrote, give him to God :)
I agree, that an EMP is a worst case scenario.
Everything else is managable or resolved fairly quick.
More importantly, the scope, dimensions of geography and total census of those affected under EMP far outweigh tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes.
Those events only affect a small area when contrasted with the the North American Grid.
Wish I secretly owned a nuclear power plant that could be put into use in an emergency but, all the means of delivering volts and wattage would be fried from the demarcation of my property.
How would you feel knowing your fridge and freezer are toast and there is no possibility of getting electricity to them for 3 months to a year or more?
Maybe not watching tv, listening to the radio or posting to Free Republic for just as long.
Access to money or digits to pay certain bills? Gone-O-La, because your place of employment or the government checks can no longer be automatically deposited.
But, there’s still paper checks, right?
Sure, when they can ramp up the ability to write those and even then, how do they place an order for those checks? No electricity = no modern means of communications.
But, presuming they can write checks where will they be cashed?
No bank has the ability to deposit a check, much less peer across their network to see if they even have money.
But now, it gets worse than that; assuming “you” get cash in your hand, I can promise you the guy behind you won’t.
Why? Ain’t enough greenbacks in the till for everyone in town.
70%+ of our money supply is digital and it’s gonna byte everyone in the (_!_).
In a currently $17 trillion dollar economy there are only $1.5 trillion real and physical dollars in existence....world wide.
So no ability to move bits and bytes pretty affects everyone.
Yes, in the movie "Ocean's Eleven" (the remake).
I'm in a city, my home on a hillside with a slope that goes down in my back yard. The other street behind my home is at lower elevation. An old timer in the neighborhood told me water used to flow at the bottom as a creek from upper hills, the city laid drainage pipe and covered it over. If the tap water stops flowing, I'm drilling into that drainage pipe. I suspect a lot of creeks run underground beneath many neighborhoods in many hilly cities and towns.
What about CLIMATE CHANGE!!!!!??????
Everybody knows that's the most imminent danger!
Just ask any idiot liberal. (as if there's any other kind...)
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