09:52 – Barbara called yesterday to let me know she was enjoying herself. When she called, Colin and I were smoking cigars, drinking bourbon, and watching the fight on TV. Later on, we headed to a strip bar for a boys’ night out.
Well, not really. Instead, we watched more episodes of Doomsday Preppers. The obvious goal of the series’ producers is to convince viewers that these people are crazy and stupid and, by extension, that anyone who believes in being prepared for emergencies is crazy and stupid. And there’s no doubt that many of their subjects are obsessed about dangers that are very unlikely to occur.
But many of them are concerned about potentially catastrophic events that have a much higher probability of occurring, for example an EMP event that takes down the entire power grid and transportation system. The man-made EMP event that many of them fear just isn’t going to happen, for both political and technical reasons. But a natural EMP event, a replay of the 1859 Carrington Event, is not only possible but inevitable. And, as Wikipedia says, “Studies have shown that a solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would likely cause widespread problems for modern civilization. There is an estimated 12% chance of a similar event occurring between 2012 and 2022.” I think that estimate is pessimistic. Such events occur, unpredictably but on average, every 400 to 500 years. That means that in any given decade, the probability of such an event is only 2% to 2.5%.
Similarly, another of their subjects, a San Diego physician, is preparing for a world-wide influenza pandemic. Historically, lethal pandemics occur on average about once a century. The last one was the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed 50 to 100 million worldwide, or 3% to 5% of the planet’s population. If a similar epidemic hit today, the death toll would be much, much higher, probably a billion people or more. In 1918, we didn’t have jet airplanes moving people around the world constantly, so transmission was limited. Nowadays, there are no such constraints on transmission. Essentially the entire population of the planet could be exposed to a lethal virus within literally a few days. We could have 50 to 100 million dead just within the US. On the other hand, the US and other first-world countries have much more capable public health systems than existed in 1918, which ameliorates the danger to some extent.
So, back-of-the-envelope, let’s guesstimate that the chance of such an epidemic occurring in the next decade is only 2% rather than 10%. That’s pretty comforting. A decade is a long time, and there’s only a 2% chance of each of these things happening during that time. The problem is, probabilities multiply. Looking at ten such potentially catastrophic problems, each with only a 2% chance of occurring within the next decade, we can calculate the probability that none of those will occur as 0.98^10 = 0.817. All of a sudden, things don’t look so rosy. An 18.3% chance of something terrible happening in the next decade is enough to scare most people. And if you look at 100 things each of which has only a 0.1% probability–one chance in thousand–of occurring each year, the probability that none of these things will happen over the coming decade is less than 37%.
My own SWAG is that the likelihood of something really, really bad happening during the next decade is perhaps 10%. My guess is that it will be a zombie apocalypse, so that’s what I’m preparing for. That way, I’ll also be prepared if something else happens instead. Okay, the truth is that I don’t believe zombies exist, so they’re just a placeholder for an unknown threat. What I really think is more likely to occur is civil unrest leading to a complete breakdown of the social structure in urban areas. That’s why I want to relocate to a small town in a farming area. I have an immense skill-set. I’ve spent the last 40 years accumulating useful skills and knowledge, but I don’t know how to farm, nor am I physically capable of doing so. So I’d like to live somewhere surrounded by people who do.
When was the last nation wide or world wide catastrophic event that occurred?
Does the Great Depression count? That seems to me to be the most likely type of catastrophic event in the near term.
Executing an EMP over the USA requires a very heavy lifter and is very, very, very difficult to execute. Creating a new variant of the Flu in somebody’s garage seems somewhat probably given the new tools that are supposedly coming out. But is somebody stupid / evil enough to do that?
Depends on how you define “catastrophic” and whether you’re talking about the US only.
Most Japanese, for example, would probably classify the ironically-named Fukishima event in 2011 to be catastrophic, and I suspect a lot of Africans would classify the current on-going Ebola epidemic as catastrophic. Both certainly were/are catastrophic for the people affected. The simple fact is that smaller, localized catastrophes happen every day somewhere in the world, and that larger-scale catastrophes (like, say, Katrina) are pretty common. Very bad things can occur anywhere on no notice, but most people assume that “it can’t happen here” despite the fact that they’ve been proven wrong again and again.
Unlike the people on that series, I’m not obsessed with prepping. I don’t think about it all day long every day. In fact, weeks pass without me thinking about it at all. I don’t spend huge amounts of money on preparations. But I am more than willing to spend some time and money on it. Also, I look at money spent on supplies and gear as a simple reallocation of assets. The question is whether I’d rather have hard assets that don’t depreciate or the current value of those assets as electronic figures in our bank balance.
Agreed that when TSHTF and one reaches TEOTWAWKI, it’s likely to be one’s personal world rather than the worldwide world. It may be an injury, a job loss, illness or accident, a transport breakdown, weather disaster, fire or flood, or a lawyer-imposed disaster (divorce, police, fraud for or against). However, if you’ve done an adequate job of preparing you and yours against the zombies, you should be adequately prepared for most everything.
If you do it right, then you’re likely to get a LOT of benefit from your preparations every few years, just by making life easier, even if you could have done without them during a particular exigency. Heck, even just the fact that you’re turning over your stocks in normal day-to-day life (as you should – anything else is financial idiocy), using older and cheaper stuff and waiting until it’s on special or in season to restock, is putting you financially far ahead.
Bombs Away! in Syria. Chickenhawk Obummer is in the WH bunker behind his new double fence. That’ll keep him safe. Since it’s wrought iron, it’ll protect him from ghosts, also.
I wonder how much the ordnance cost in Syria? Oh well, just tax some more.
To me, Katrina was a local disaster. New Orleans is 150 miles away from us and the only affects that we had were 200,000 refugees. Not many people for a city of six million at the time.
I am thinking of something that affects the USA in whole and thus affects the world. Something like a total financial failure of the federal government. Like October of 2008, except taken to the next step where the money system totally failed.
If you have ever seen “Twelve Monkeys”, that is another good example of what I am talking about. An ecoterrorist group comes up with a super flu? and spreads it via airports.
Here’s a great clip of our Fearless Military Leader Obummer saluting his Marines with a coffee cup. The guy is really the weakest leader of the US *ever*.
And a great quote from *respected* journalist Wolf Blitzer, when asked what’s different about this war than other (read Bush) wars:
“This one feels more modest.” lol I think that sums about the press feelings about OdoucheNozzles war.
We’re not going to have a monetary catastrophe. There’s simply no way for that to happen because (unlike eurozone nations) the US controls its own currency and, just as important, the US$ is a fiat currency. The Fed can simply create as much money as it wants to. China can’t do a thing to hurt us monetarily. I was going to say that all we owe them is paper, but it’s actually even easier than that. All we owe them is electrons. And, should the US government be in a really nasty mood, we can default selectively, basically not paying off Chinese-held debt while continuing to pay off debt from people we like.
The danger of a monetary collapse exists only the currency is (supposed to be) backed by hard assets, such as gold or silver. In effect, when the dollar was backed by gold and silver, the US government was in the same situation that eurozone countries are now. They controlled the currency only in the sense that they could counterfeit it by issuing more dollars than they actually had gold and silver to back.
What will happen is that the US government will continue to inflate the currency, as they have been doing for decades. As the issuer, they get the primary advantage of inflating the currency because at any given moment they’re buying goods or services that are priced on the uninflated value of those dollars, while what they’re actually paying is inflated dollars. Yeah, over the course of decades, the actual value of a dollar decreases by an order or two of magnitude. But that’s a gradual change. It’s not like you wake up one morning to find your dollars are worthless. Instead, lenders (including anyone holding dollar balances) watch the value of their holding diminish gradually. Could we see hyper-inflation? Sure, it could happen. But I don’t see it happening any time in our lifetimes. Of course, it depends on your timescale. A very elderly person now can remember when gold was $20/ounce and has now seen it at 100 times that price. To that person, inflation is more obvious than it is to us younger people. Of course, I remember when you could buy a new VW for $1,995 and gasoline sold for $0.12/gallon.
As to the man-made viral pandemic, it’s not just science fiction, but bad science fiction, at least insofar as garage biotech and terrorists are concerned. Just like EMP, you should be a lot more concerned about natural pandemics than man-made ones.
Solar storms aren’t really “EMP events”; they have the EM part, but not the P (pulse). They are slow things, and damage to the grid can easily be averted by (1) noticing that transformers are overheating (or just that there’s a large DC current where there shouldn’t be any DC), and (2) turning them off. The timescale is suitable for human intervention, but in case those guys are asleep at the switches, there are also automated protection circuits in place; the hypothesized damage due to nuclear attack is because of those protection circuits getting fried by the pulse and leaving the transformers vulnerable to the overheating. It’s not even certain that they would get fried, but in any case that scenario doesn’t apply to solar storms.
With lots of the grid turned off, of course there would be blackouts, but it’s not the really feared scenario of “we have N hundred huge transformers burned out, and the normal lead time for ordering a new one is a year”. (Local electrical distribution transformers aren’t at risk here; you need a large-scale loop in the grid, tens or hundreds of miles in diameter, to pick up enough magnetic flux to damage things.)
It’s not like you wake up one morning to find your dollars are worthless.
We almost got there in 2008. The Fed stopped it this time:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/view/
“On Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, the astonished leadership of the U.S. Congress was told in a private session by the chairman of the Federal Reserve that the American economy was in grave danger of a complete meltdown within a matter of days. “There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left,” says Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.).”
“Paulson pushed Lehman’s CEO Dick Fuld to find a buyer for his ailing company. But no company would buy Lehman unless the government offered a deal similar to the one Bear Stearns had received. Paulson refused, and Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy.”
“FRONTLINE then chronicles the disaster that followed. Within 24 hours, the stock market crashed, and credit markets around the world froze. “We’re no longer talking about mortgages,” says economist Gertler. “We’re talking about car loans, loans to small businesses, commercial paper borrowing by large banks. This is like a disease spreading.””
The next thing that was going to happen was the credit card and ATM networks were going to be shutdown. The Fed stopped that from happening. This time. Don’t know if they can stop it the next time.
I have agreed to the cell phone tower on my rural commercial property with Verizon. The agreement is $950/month starting with construction, a two percent increase per year and a $3,000 signing bonus.
Now they are going to do right of entry agreement, soil testing, surveying, etc. For some reason, they want to verify that I own the property.
And some of the dancers were real dogs, weren’t they?
Are you sure about that? Just look at the public school system. It trying to eat the children’s brains.
re the White House fence jumper, here is the best comment I’ve seen.
Yes, Solar “EMP” lacks the E1 and E2 components, but the E3, which might lasts tens to hundreds of seconds, contains so much energy relative to a puny little nuke-induced EMP that induced current flows might well be adequate to melt transmission lines and towers, not to mention welding transformers, etc. No, a Solar EMP isn’t going to damage the iPhone in your pocket or auto electronics or indeed nearly any electronics, but its effect on the transmission grid could be catastrophic, and not just on the long lines.
It doesn’t matter how much energy is floating around, if it doesn’t couple into your system. Even with the biggest solar event, we’re still just talking about fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. It’s a pretty puny field to begin with, and since on a global scale it isn’t changing its overall strength but rather just its shape, the local fluctuations are going to be pretty modest: maybe ten or twenty percent of its strength, tops. They also aren’t particularly fast. Which is why you need a loop measured in miles to see much of a problem. And it has to be a loop; it’s the change in flux going through the loop which produces the current. If you just have a long wire, with no loop, the flux changes won’t couple into it.
Now the electrical grid does have loops, and huge ones — that’s why they call it “the grid”, not “the tree” — but these aren’t present at the local level, where the architecture is of the tree type: power comes from one source, and flows out through wires and transformers to the houses. So you can relax about the transformer on the pole outside your house: it’s just not going to see this stuff. And the big hardware in the grid, which makes up those miles-long loops, is well protected. Rather than damage itself, it trips a circuit breaker and disconnects. That’s how we get cascading blackouts like the 2003 Northeast blackout: equipment protecting itself and shutting down. The grid also has people in control rooms actively monitoring it (or at least pretending to). I’m sure they goof off plenty, but they’d have to be real klutzes to goof off when a major solar weather event is predicted. And as mentioned, even if they did, automatic protections will still kick in.
The grid also has people in control rooms actively monitoring it (or at least pretending to)
I may need to tell you a story about a steam boiler (100,000 hp) melting down during the MASH final episode in Dallas. There was a TV in the control room (very forbidden) …
The next thing that was going to happen was the credit card and ATM networks were going to be shutdown. The Fed stopped that from happening.
This is why TARP was needed. Not that it was perfect, but it was needed to restore counterparty confidence in the financial world. Without it, the entire credit and money transfer network would have shut down. I’ve mentioned this here before – Megan McArdle (libertarian blogger, now at Bloomberg) wrote about it at the time. Seems like her sources were the same as Frontline’s.
Ordnance costs? Hey, they claim to have killed 150 isis members, who cares what it cost? A few million here and there – OK, hundreds of millions – it’s pocket change.
I was pleased to see interviews with two analysts, both of whom pointed out that bombing without boots on the ground is pretty useless, and that the boots need to be attached to Arabs from countries in the region.
May we live in interesting times…
Yah, good luck with that. I may previously have expressed my opinion of the courage, sensibility, intelligence, self-control, and discipline of Arabs. But that opinion is based on personal experience rather than high-minded principles which state we’re all just the same, so that means I’m a racist, so that means my opinion may safely be discounted by all
rightleft-minded people.I think it has a lot less to do with Arab ethnicity than islam.
The form of Islam, perhaps. I’ve dealt with muslims of other nationalities who were not as calamitously inept. It’s possible that the Arab soldiers and civilian support were acting dumb for our benefit, but I can’t really believe that — they’re as focused on “face” as any mainland Chinese, and their inability to, say, deliver water or get a truck running did not make them look good.
There’s also a good chance that some of the problem is caused by inbreeding, which I guess is more cultural than ethnic but which can feed back to the ethnic makeup. I’m not sure of the extent, but I know a not-inconsiderable fraction of ordinary Joes in Arab lands are the product of cousin marriages, and it’s been going on for generations.
a not-inconsiderable fraction of ordinary Joes in Arab lands are the product of cousin marriages, and it’s been going on for generations
Biologically speaking, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Livestock breeders do a LOT of intensive inbreeding, coupled with intensive selection, and it results in some damned fine livestock. What it depends on critically is getting the selection parameters right, and making sure you don’t miss any of the important ones.
That’s a big problem for us right there with Islam and Middle-Eastern culture. They are inbreeding and have been for many centuries – about one-and-a-half millennia under Islam, and several more before that. Under the influence of a civilising Jewish culture (it wasn’t always like that, and we’ve got records in the Bible which let you see the civilising results of selection for … well, civilised behaviour) things had been steadily improving. There were other cultures which were doing the same sort of thing there at the same time. After Islam came on the scene, all that was tossed in the trash. Much like Western civilisation in the last two generations, civilised behaviour was discounted, civilised morés were denigrated, and civilisation started to shred and disperse like fog in sunshine.
That isn’t to say Islam destroyed culture. What it did was to destroy the previous culture, and let something new emerge. What arose was a culture, but it wasn’t civilised. And that is where we run into the problems with breeding. It was a savage culture, it bred effective savages, and it still does.
Of men, Islam required and rewarded warriors; so the men who bred were successful warriors. To an extent, they needed to be intelligent, and to be able to think logically. However, not all the axioms they adopted had to be factual. In fact, they didn’t really need too much in the way of mental stability. A killing rage, the ability to hold a simmering grudge for many years or even generations, suspicion, the ability to use, misuse and disregard empathy whenever desired – these were all factors which often were no disadvantage, and sometimes were positively advantageous.
Of women, Islam required, and rewarded, successful mothers. In that culture, surrounded by those types of men, that meant women who would accept, live through, and enable their children to live through and adapt to, everything that was done by those men. Women who were quiet, uncomplaining, quite possibly schizophrenic and clinically depressed, and unreasonably loyal and accepting in the face of incredible oppression and maltreatment.
So – for fourteen hundred years, Islam has been breeding adherents who are moderately intelligent; paranoid, schizophrenic, mentally unbalanced, subject to unpredictable and occasionally uncontrollable rages, strong and flexible (both physically and mentally), and able to project whatever traits they perceive as advantageous at the moment – anything from charming to terrifying, wise to buffoonish, and many more – skins to be convincingly donned and shed, lives to be lived and then discarded at a moment’s notice.
That’s what we’re faced with. That is what Islam has been being breeding for in its adherents. God help us. Their Allah, if he ever was their god, has abandoned them. If he was a demon, then he most evidently is still right there with them. Whether you believe in gods and demons or not, the “People of the Word” will act as if such are real and in charge. So must we if we are to have any chance to survive. In fact, we must revert to the uncivilised behaviour of the original early Old Testament Jews, for that is what we’re faced with. That, and it’s being done by savages bred to it. God help us, we must deliberately do unto them, and do it fuster and moster, because they are now better adapted to savagery than are we.
Well, I don’t know about you guys, but my Viking/Scots heritage makes me pretty damned savage when the situation warrants it.
I am of mostly English DNA and heritage and we are very well-known, infamous, actually, for our perfidy and dogged persistence under whatever calamities. Until recently, anyway. We also turned most of the world’s countries the same color on the old maps and globes for a while, but then we apparently lost our nerve and our balls, well, our leadership did, anyway. So we have what we have. I suspect the better qualities of the old British bulldog will someday come to the fore, in yon Perfidious Albion itself, and throughout its former colonies. And our leaders can go straight to hellfire.
I note that Mr. SteveF’s avatar at the Daily Pundit is the Anonymous mask thing, redolent of Roman Catholic martyr Guy Fawkes; I used that same avatar for quite a while on FaceCrack but have since gone to old Father Merrin contemplating Pazuzu in the Iraqi desert, for the once a month now I bother to log in there.
I’m mostly convinced that England (or Great Britain, or the British Empire) squandered most of their good male DNA in the first half of the 20th century. The White Feather campaign explicitly worked to shame young men into enlisting, meaning the cowards and scumbags (and cripples and simpletons) mostly didn’t go, whereas the brave and honorable did. And the stupid English generals managed to get a lot of them killed in von Falkenhayn’s Verdun meat grinder and elsewhere. About 2% of the UK population was combat deaths in WWI, but of course that was almost exclusively men in their late teens through late 20s. I haven’t dug up demographics, but it’s probably most of the best 10-20% of the male breeding stock. UK casualties in WWII were lower, but added insult to injury.
Britain developed a fearsome world-wide reputation with a tiny, professional military, and held it for centuries. They threw this away a century ago, destroyed the manhood of the nation, and are now an international laughingstock. If that isn’t a shining testament to aristocracy, “Rule by the Best”, I don’t know what is.
Agreed.
From Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly:”
“IV
These fought in any case,
And some believing, pro domo, in any case ..
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later…
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria, non dulce et non decor..
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
There died a myriad,
and of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.”
OFD wrote:
“…Roman Catholic martyr Guy Fawkes…”
You mean the guy who “betrayed” his fellow conspirators then committed suicide to avoid his lawful punishment. That Guy Fawkes?
From Wikipedia:
“Immediately before his execution on 31 January, Fawkes jumped from the scaffold where he was to be hanged and broke his neck, thus avoiding the agony of the mutilation that followed.”
Most people sing like canaries when subjected to the interrogation techniques used by secret police torturers and will say anything at all, mostly useless as truth. Faced with what was coming on that scaffold, I hope I’d have the presence of mind and physical ability to jump off and break my neck, too. Between that and being burned at the stake, I’d much rather snap my neck.
I’d have to check, but I don’t believe Fawkes was/is included in the Church’s list of the forty or so English martyrs….nope, not in any of the lists. Probably because he used violence to achieve whatever goals, which gets kinda tricky when one examines the record of certain European cardinals who deliberately sent priests to England knowing they’d be eventually captured and martyred.
So I retract my “Catholic martyr” designation accordingly.
“…which gets kinda tricky when one examines the record of certain European cardinals who deliberately sent priests to England knowing they’d be eventually captured and martyred.”
They didn’t know, it was just a fairly good bet they’d be caught. I’ve read some interesting articles on “priest holes” used to hide Jesuit priests and other miscreants trying to turn the established order on its head. Quite interesting.
I suppose I shouldn’t mention the Borgias, pope, cardinal, and whatever, who occasionally forgot their vows of celibacy, etc.
Mention them all you like; I do. It’s a human institution and like all such, full of human error, frailty, sin and brokenness. I expect the Church will someday be revisiting the celibacy thing for its clergy at the current rate and ratio of clergy-to-parish stats. Maybe on the Orthodox model, who knows.
“… and other miscreants trying to turn the established order on its head.”
Those “miscreants” were attempting to return to the original established order, which was turned on its head by an evil monarch and his minions, egged on by felonious heretics on the Continent.
Dave, you used to be an Anglican so you know that the RC Church has been making stuff up for over a millennia. Luther, Calvin and the like weren’t perfect but they were just trying to root out the worst of the Catholic additions.
You say tomato and I say tuh-mah-toe.
When you get a couple of hours, read Thomas Woods’s very informative book on the history of the Church’s accomplishments, without which there would be no Western civilization:
http://www.amazon.com/Catholic-Church-Built-Western-Civilization/dp/1596983280/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411911604&sr=1-1&keywords=how+the+catholic+church+built+western+civilization
Actually, the RCC delayed western civilization by perhaps a thousand years. Without the RCC doing its best to suppress thinking, we might have landed on the moon in 969 rather than 1969. The RCC claims that it preserved knowledge through the Dark Ages, but in fact the RCC was in very large part responsible for the Dark Ages.
I would vehemently disagree about whether the Church ever ‘suppressed thinking’ and in fact would argue the polar opposite throughout that period; if not for the Church, the Dark Ages would have been the Much Darker Ages, and in any case, most contemporary historians dismiss such nomenclature as worthless and not in the least factual. Like they’ve dismissed the Renaissance in favor of “Early Modern,” for example. It sometimes seems that many people have bought the false histories and mythologies that were promulgated in this country, especially, since the 18th- and 19th-Centuries and simply accept the many bromides, such as “The Catholic Church suppressed thinking” and “The Catholic Church is the Scarlet Whore of Rome,” etc. originally hawked by uber-Protestant fanatics.
If I were catching myself simply repeating stuff I’d heard as a kid growing up outside the Church or what I was taught as fact in high school and college classes, I’d probably make an attempt to look at what the other side has had to say about it all; the Woods book is a good start and a real eye-opener. I’ve certainly had to pay attention to the arguments of atheists, professional and otherwise, over the years, and have not advocated their wholesale suppression and slaughter just yet. Methodists, maybe, but not atheists.
Dave, I’m afraid our host is right, but I think without the RCC it would have taken us to 1050 to get to the moon: 969 seems a tad optimistic. I think the Arabs preserved a lot of the old Greek learning, in Europe it was lost and only reintroduced from copies in Arabic.
I’ll see if a local library has the book you recommended.
Well, I won’t argue 1050 versus 969, although I thought I was being generous even with 969.
When you think about it, science really started in about 1500, after which it took only 469 years to land on the moon. And during much of that 469 years, the RCC was still doing its best to suppress science, including imprisoning and executing scientists.
And, when you think about it, most of science came out of countries that weren’t under the RCC whip, notably Britain and northern Europe. To this day, countries dominated by the RCC produce relatively few scientists and relatively little science. The damage to science in RCC-dominated societies wasn’t as great as the damage in islam-dominated societies, but the effects were certainly similar.