• A well-executed cyberattack could knock out the electrical grid and shut off power to a huge swath of the country, or compromise vital government or financial data and leave us unsure what is real.I wonder if they've got a plan for dealing with our most frightening, powerful cyberattacker in waiting: the sun. Here's the sequence from the Werner Herzog movie "Lo and Behold" that can scare the hell out you:
• The sheer number of internet-connected devices, from cars to pacemakers, means the risks are growing by the day.
The big picture: Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said this week that the U.S. is in "crisis mode," comparing the danger of a massive attack to a Category 5 hurricane looming on the horizon. Intelligence chiefs from the last three administrations agree, and told Axios there is no graver threat to the United States....
August 4, 2018
"When we asked America’s foremost intelligence experts what keeps them up at night, one response came up over and over again: the risk of a crippling cyberattack."
Writes Mike Allen at Axios:
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154 comments:
I don't think people are so stupid that they can't adapt. If that were true, we'd all be dead by now.
It would be astonishingly disruptive without the internet. The survivors might come to find they like life better without it. I would miss this blog and the interesting commenters. Maybe Althouse and Meade can make a plan to do an old-fashioned newsletter just in case.
I'm pretty sure those fopdoodles won't make it.
RAD hardening of critical infrastructure has been part of industrial design for a long time. That's not to say a massive solar flare won't do a great deal of damage to the Internet, our personal electronics, and even the power grid. But yeah, they got a plan for dealing with it. We even developed plans for dealing with it on long space voyages that pass through and beyond the Van Allen belts.
Look to cosmology for the answer the political question “why would you ever need a high capacity assault weapon?”
A Carrington Event would be the ultimate EMP/Cyberattack. Imagine LA, New York, Tokyo with no water, power, sewer, air conditioning, and no way to leave. A significant fraction of the human race would be dead quickly enough that they would have no time to adapt.
The Man in the Hole wins!!!
Maybe Althouse and Meade can make a plan to do an old-fashioned newsletter just in case.
I'll look for the Semaphore signals from that side of the Regent Neighborhood.
It's good to know we'll all be dead from 3-D printed guns long before the cyberattack. It's not like we can drive away, either. Thieves have stolen our cars by hijacking the keys. If only we lived in a simpler time when we could look forward to death from Smallpox.
Blue states hardest hit.
One nice thing about being older is being able to remember 20 years ago.
You have to assume that billions of people are too stupid to do their jobs without computers. I could do my job. How about you? Are you really so stupid that you can't work around it?
"I wonder if they've got a plan"
Like California has a plan to develop high-speed rail?
Anyway, even if "they" have "a plan," it is not a plan of which anyone is aware. Therefore, when a true catastrophe happens, everyone will panic, making any plan moot.
Nonsense. I have a coffee-cup sized transceiver and a solar panel. Shortwave reception will improve without all the powerline noise.
Lots of corn and soybean fields around me. Become a gleaner.
"Lawrence Krauss hardest hit"
"After the accusations [about what? Take a guess], Krauss himself was removed from several positions, including his association with the Center for Inquiry, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the American Humanist Association. Krauss also resigned from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group that sets the “Doomsday Clock.”
Now Krauss has also been removed from the Origins Project at Arizona State University (ASU), an important project that he headed."
Assume that engineers are smart and would get basic services running again in two weeks. Food is still being grown, trucks and trains still work.
The thing with EMP/cyberattack is that physical things still work. In WW2, most combatant countries were physically bombed and services were blown to pieces. Most of the time, the disruption was temporary. The most lasting disruption was people killed by bombs and being made homeless. There was no mass famine until the end of the war when Germany was physically occupied by allied armies.
EMP doesn't do that.
I'm sure there are technically solutions for this. Sort of like backing up hard drives on a grand scale.
Smart public policy would require everyone to have a few month's supply of food and water. Solar panels should enable most home dwellers to live off the grid at a survival level.
Krauss #MeToo'd, replaced by STEM women you've never heard of.
Hey I have a scythe, too.
A man can cut an acre a day.
My scything hat is loosely connected to the internet, by way of a baby monitor.
Smart public policy would require everyone to have a few month's supply of food and water. Solar panels should enable most home dwellers to live off the grid at a survival level.
I expect that most such events would fry solar panels.
In the 1970s, I had a supply if freeze fried food stored. Maybe it's time to set up another supply.
Tucson would be problematic without A/C. 107 predicted this weekend. We'll just submerge in the pool.
Fortunately, my guns are all analog.
"I don't think people are so stupid that they can't adapt. If that were true, we'd all be dead by now."
It's not that people are stupid, but that our interconnected systems--if brought down--would create catastrophe: planes couldn't fly; banks wouldn't have records of our deposits and we would have no access to money; food would spoil and markets would quickly be emptied of provisions; if the power grid were down, we'd be without power; hospitals would have great difficulty attending to the needs of their patients; and much more that hasn't occurred to me at the moment.
"Adaptation" to new conditions is a slow and long-term process, not something that would occur swiftly. In the long meantime, we'd be in chaos.
I have a lot of my pre-1992 work work backed up on 1600bpi computer tape.
I also have some 800bpi bcd tapes from even earlier containing nobody remembers what.
RC-
But that's happened before. It happens all the time in the modern world. We call it war, failed states, etc. There aren't mass die-offs. It sucks, but it isn't the end of the world.
Oh and many many boxes of punched cards in the basement.
On the bright side, we will no longer have to worry about Climate Change.
This sounds similar to the dire predictions for Y2K.
Althouse should buy herself a copy of "One Second After" via her Amazon portal. It is a novel that starts after en EMP attack has destroyed most of America's electronic equipment including the hardware that operates the internet.
This video focuses on the internet for some reason. The internet would be just one of the tools of modern man that is rendered useless by a YUGE solar flare or an EMP.
"You have to assume that billions of people are too stupid to do their jobs without computers. I could do my job. How about you? Are you really so stupid that you can't work around it?"
In the ensuing chaos, do you really think you would still have your job? They're not just talking about our not being able to use computers: this could bring about wholesale collapse of the entire interconnected systems that keep modern society functioning. (This is assuming a worst-case scenario, of course, and not some localized or contained collapse.)
The people who would best cope would be those who live largely outside these systems, people who grow or hunt their own food already as a part of their regular lives.
I don't understand EMP. How does it affect small systems, in particular. It doesn't seem like loops would intercept enough magnetic field to matter.
There's some confusion of energetic particle and magnetic field damage, I think, that prevents any popular account from making sense.
Rrhardin: Keep telling us how prepared you are and you will get a lot of us as visitors come knocking if and when this ever occurs.
Operating your computer near a transformer runs all sorts of changing magnetic fields through it, and has no effect that I'm aware of.
"But that's happened before. It happens all the time in the modern world. We call it war, failed states, etc. There aren't mass die-offs. It sucks, but it isn't the end of the world."
Even when the entire human race expires it won't be the end of the world. It will continue without as it did for almost the whole of its existence. As for war and failed states, there are not "mass die-offs," but there are mass deaths...and enforced homelessness, privation, hunger and starvation, illness, violence, etc. It's easy to be sanguine about it because we haven't experienced it in our country.
rhhardin said...
Lots of corn and soybean fields around me. Become a gleaner.
8/4/18, 10:34 AM
Oh, you mean a crop thief. No wonder you don't care about money.
So, a priori, I'd say the Carrington danger is to power systems that have huge loops wired in, by way of knocking out transformers that are hard to replace, particularly without electricity.
Energetic particles frying chips is another matter, from a nuclear explosion I'd guess, but the sun ought not to do that, what with atmosphere and our own magnetic field to discourage the charged particles.
"On the bright side, we will no longer have to worry about Climate Change."
Only because the more immediate hazards would be of greater moment; the processes behind climate charge would not suddenly stop. (I know you're being snarky, btw.)
Cookie:
If there were basically no carbon emissions from America, I'd think the climate change kooks would be happy since we were causing it right? And the actual alleged climate change would be halted too?
Hey, I went to the same school as the DACA judge.
Class Notes
1964
The honorable John D. Bates, a U.S. District judge, was highlighted in a Washing Post article on April 24 for his ruling that the government must continue the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program and reopen it to new applicants. He called the government's decision to end the program "virtually unexplained" and, therefore, "unlawful," but stayed his ruling for 90 days to give the Department of Homeland Security a chance to provide more solid reasoning for ending the program.
Today Trump's time is up: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/us/federal-judge-daca.html
Electric infrastructure can survive a cyberattack.
Just my impression.
It will cause problems, but its not a given that such an attack will get through, as most of the true operational systems are isolated, nor that it would similarly affect a diverse range of control systems.
The system used to work quite well in a non-digital manner and there are manual procedures and capabilities still in place. It would be a mess but it is recoverable. There are manual switches and valves and emergency radio systems to coordinate them.
No doubt many other systems, especially commercial ones, are not so well armored. It will be a state of emergency and perhaps there will be a period of state-managed rationing, but it is survivable.
the processes behind climate charge would not suddenly stop. (I know you're being snarky, btw.)
Yes, we will hope the sun and the earth's orbit would not change much.
Good observation, Cookie.
”But that's happened before. It happens all the time in the modern world. We call it war,”
Not to the entire planet at once. Not even remotely close.
”trucks and trains still work.”
No, they don’t. Their electronics are fried. How do the power companies fix the grid if they don’t have the parts nor the vehicles to transport them?
"compromise vital government or financial data and leave us unsure what is real".
Are we sure, now, of what is real?
The system used to work quite well in a non-digital manner and there are manual procedures and capabilities still in place. It would be a mess but it is recoverable.
Yes, I think such a catastrophe, man made or natural, would return us to a more analog world for a time.
Why are technical people so often leftist ? I think many, like coders, are more like artists than small business people.
Small business teaches practical economics. That's why I expect most doctors in the future to be leftists. They are all on salary and have no experience that would teach economics.
rhhardin said...
Lots of corn and soybean fields around me. Become a gleaner.
8/4/18, 10:34 AM
Bad Lieutenant responds:
Oh, you mean a crop thief. No wonder you don't care about money.
Gleaners are not thieves. As I understand it, they take what is left behind after the harvesting is done.
There are whole categories of people that build, run and maintain these systems.
Their upper management generally is not clued in to the details, but these people are in fact prepared to make their stuff work. Especially in an emergency. They are also extremely good at self-organization.
Its not apparent to a dedicated city-dweller, because these very critical people tend to be in the outer suburbs or the countryside. In fact, they are "deplorables", pretty much to a man, in my experience. If one were to study who has a finger on the switches of our lives, it would be quite clear how much everyone depends on, and trusts, a rather small and overlooked tribe.
Put EMP attack and giant solar flare down as reasons 5021 and 5022 of why WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!
At least the Chick Littles can't blame solar flares on mankind.
Even when the entire human race expires it won't be the end of the world. It will continue without as it did for almost the whole of its existence.
I know you won't but you should read Tom Clancy's "Rainbow Six," which is not his best but follows your theme.
Michael Crichton had a less apocalyptic theme in "State of Fear"
There are technical people and there are technical people, there are coders and coders. People working on social media apps in San Francisco are not the same as those working on Siemens PLCs.
Horses will be a prized form of transportation again.
Gee, you mean those of us afflicted with toxic masculinity might be back in vogue? hardest hit, leftist women and men.
In fact, they are "deplorables", pretty much to a man, in my experience. If one were to study who has a finger on the switches of our lives,
I have two sons. One is a fireman/engineer. He owns a million dollar house in Orange County and is conservative.
One is a trial lawyer in the Bay Area and disdains Orange County. He is a Gavin Newsom fan.
He does not own a house and is now thinking about moving to OC because the schools in the Bay Area are so awful.
Hmmm
Assume that engineers are smart and would get basic services running again in two weeks. Food is still being grown, trucks and trains still work.
Let’s say the mullahs detonate a nuclear device a hundred miles above Houston from a freighter in the Gulf. The mullahs could probably accomplish this with their present level of nuclear technology. No elaborate launching or guidance systems, which is the complicated part of an ICBM system, would be needed – they could simply tilt the rocket toward the Texas interior using a primitive line of sight.
Everyone in Houston would die immediately. All technology in a 3-state area would cease. Police protection would be gone; the individuals that make up the police force would be fighting to survive just like everyone else.
Crops? They would rot in the fields. All consumable food would be gone within 2 or 3 days without a trucking system to restock grocery shelves. Warehouses would be overrun by starving masses. Foot travel would be the only way to move about. Potable water would be rare, so many of the affected would gather around rivers and streams. It would be chaos and the chaos would last a LOT longer than 2 weeks.
The effect on the USA economy would be disastrous. Millions would starve, die of thirst or get sick from untreated water sources. Hospitals would be rendered useless.
Your only real hope of survival would be if you were near the edge of the affected area and could walk out of it – IF you could survive that long.
Even with a relatively minor catastrophe (compared to an EMP attack) like a hurricane it sometimes takes week or even months to restore normalcy.
The EMP danger is VERY real.
How about Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Moscow, St. Petersburg, London, Paris, etc. and so forth?
The biggest threat is calling out CNN and making poor Jim Acosta cry.
People are remarkably adaptable. Especially the very handy, hands on problem solving sort.
Systems can be created or re-created remarkably rapidly.
The US has tremendous "fat" in the system (literally, in some cases).
By which I mean duplicated sources of water and food, and stocks of these, and manufacturing capacity.
As for transformers and many other infrastructure equipment, a lot of the problem with these things and the rest built around them is they are over-sophisticated, designed to chase marginal improvements in efficiency. Crude replacements are much more easily made.
"Let’s say the mullahs detonate a nuclear device a hundred miles above Houston from a freighter in the Gulf. The mullahs could probably accomplish this with their present level of nuclear technology."
Based on what information?
I'd guess they are not anywhere near capable of accomplishing this.
I do agree with your description of the kinds of devastation that would occur if our systems were brought down...even without a nuke.
Amusing exercise, if you have a voltmeter. Set it to the lowest scale AC, and stick the probes in the ground as far apart as you can get them easily. You ought to get a half volt or so. Free electricity!
"Gleaners are not thieves. As I understand it, they take what is left behind after the harvesting is done."
Does this mean I can go into a supermarket just before closing time and simply take whatever hasn't already been bought that day? Great!
The Internet of Things is idiotic. I bought a new oven a couple of years ago and it has wifi capability so the owner can turn it on to preheat when they leave from work. I never set it up on my home network because that's moronic. Put a potentially easily hackable computer that I know nothing about on my network and open a gate into my network from the internet that someone else might be able to exploit to save a few minutes occasionally? In cyber security parlance this is called "increasing your attack surface" and you should only do that for very good reasons.
Raytheon, in a things to do with your CK-722 transistor project books, had a radio-station powered radio.
It basically used a crystal set to take the nonsignal part of the signal from a local broadcast station and used that power to run a transistor radio tuned to another station.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners
gleaners
" Hospitals would be rendered useless. "
Hospitals would have to go back to diagnosing appendicitis with physical exam. I was in Boston in 1965 when all the electricity in the northeast shut down. Life went on but I would not want to be an ICU patient. The Mass General had been convinced buy some techie idiot to shut down their emergency generator and rely on the grid that failed. We still managed.
It would be bad but there is a certain level of hysteria around, too.
You would likely die if you live in a city or a suburb of a major city (population 250k+). Driving your way out would be nearly impossible- you would have to walk out. You might survive in a small town that could cooperate to provide a collective defense against outsiders. Being nearly completely isolated in the mountains where you could survive hunting and gathering might be best, but it isn't any sure thing- you then have to provide your only defense yourself and could quite quickly find yourself outnumbered by just two strangers.
America’s foremost intelligence experts
Foxes or hedgehogs?
Does this mean I can go into a supermarket just before closing time and simply take whatever hasn't already been bought that day? Great!
Cookie is a city boy who thinks food grows in the supermarket.
BTW, the aftermath is a whole SF sub-genre.
There are some improbable things where you're just going to die.
One of the big fears driving catastrophic health insurance is that you get really really really sick but don't die.
Just cover that yourself by adding it to the you're going to die column, and do the rest out of your health insurance account.
Blogger Ron Winkleheimer said...
The Internet of Things is idiotic.
A few years ago I had a refrigerator that had a mother board failure. I didn't even know the things had mother boards.
A thousand dollars fixed that and then it failed again a month later. Both failures resulted in frozen food rotting since we were not living here full time. The house could be smelled a block away.
At least the warranty paid for the second one.
Read Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD for one imaginary outcome of a collapse of our society due to loss of the power grid and all interconnecting systems that keep society functioning. (In the book, the nature of the catastrophe is never made known--good on McCarthy for leaving that unsaid, as the ambiguity is so intriguing.)
I have a lot of old DVDs to watch when the power goes out.
Read Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD for one imaginary outcome of a collapse of our society due to loss of the power grid and all interconnecting systems that keep society functioning.
They also made a movie based on the book, a really, really, really depressing movie.
EMP would’ve bad enough. The North Koreans mounted a relatively unsophisticated attack on Sony corporation over yet another tasteless Seth Rogen movie that shut down their voice mail, reduced roughly half of their computers to junk, and shut down their entire electronic banking. A more sophisticated attack could wipe out everyone’s bank accounts, close down our financial systems, open valves on pipelines and in refineries and many chemical plants to pollute huge areas of land, shut dorm all phone service, and that's for starters. I deliberately avoid buying appliances that are remote controllable.
It doesn't help, that government clerks are destroying the foundation.
You know what happens when the foundation fails? Well, it isn't pretty, let me tell you that.
Here's something for the non-technical minded. The Internet is made up of routers. These powerful machines route billions of bits a minute this way and that.
You fuck the routers, you fuck the country.
Guess who's fucking the routers? You guessed it: The NSA, the FBI, All Military Branches.
It's so bad now, that even the military secure network is "unsafe at any speed".
Cisco wrote the specification for a “lawful intercept” backdoor for routers.
Here's a recent article from Tom's Hardware
Five New Backdoors In Five Months
This year has brought five undocumented backdoors in Cisco’s routers so far, and it isn't over yet. In March, a hardcoded account with the username “cisco” was revealed. The backdoor would have allowed attackers to access over 8.5 million Cisco routers and switches remotely.
That same month, another hardcoded password was found for Cisco's Prime Collaboration Provisioning (PCP) software, which is used for remote installation of Cisco’s video and voice products.
Later this May, Cisco found another undocumented backdoor account in Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture (DNA) Center, used by enterprises for the provisioning of devices across a network.
In June, yet another backdoor account was found in Cisco’s Cisco’s Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), a software tool for Wide Area Network (WAN) traffic optimization.
The most recent backdoor was found in the Cisco Policy Suite, a software suite for ISPs and large companies that can manage a network’s bandwidth policies.
The backdoor gives an attacker root access to the network and there are no mitigations against it, other than patching the software with Cisco’s update.
Whether or not the backdoor accounts were created in error, Cisco will need to put an end to them before this lack of care for security starts to affect its business.
Film at 11...
Even if 99.9% of the human population died off there would still be 8 million to perpetuate the species. That must be more than any other large mammalian carnivore or omnivore species. Although maybe some species would explode off the abundance of human and domestic animal carcasses.
@Etienne
The scary thing is that not creating backdoor accounts is cyber security 101. People studying for a CompTIA Security+ certification learn that. Yet here is Cisco, a major networking vendor who has existed for longer than the internet, creating multiple back doors.
If 99.9% of the human population died off, would birth control products still be available.
What, Ms. Althouse? "The Sun" is a Russian operative? Ay, caramba!! Trump has suntan, too!!
Clearly a confirmation of the Russian Collusion. ARREST HIM!!
Ken Thompson created a backdoor account in UNIX by hacking the C compiler. Furthermore, infinitely close inspection of the source code of the C compiler does not reveal it. The C compiler is written in C.
The same could be done in microcode, and nothing in the microcode source would reveal it.
Enter the Chinese.
Other problems with a mass cyberattack on the electric power system-
This has never been done before. Most military tactics and weapons, those that work, evolve. They are tried in small wars, or in a small scale in large ones. None of that has happened.
They must be testable. Therefore a testing system must be created sufficiently similar to the targets, which in this case are diverse and full of local eccentricities.
A mass attack therefore would rely on an untested, unproven weapon. And, considering the sophistication of the target, its going to be difficult to avoid revealing the attacker. This is the worst thing possible, a failed attack, a Pearl Harbor where the bombs are all duds.
Unix was a research project. It was the realm of long haired Berkeley types. Slowly it crept out of the colleges and into capitalist hands, and thus telephone switching has never been the same.
But it was easy to front-door telephone switching, only a pervert would play around with the back door. Perverts don't care that the front door is where you put your tools. That's why they call them perverts.
"The front door is an inny, the back door is an outy." - Penthouse Letters
A parallel analog system would be a useful backup for critical infrastructure.
I wish my daughter had not sold the 1993 pickup I gave her.
I'm proud to say we have sponsored many Syrian and Iraqi immigrants that are interested in our project, and working in their new adopted country.
How reassuring.
Only thing that worries me is electrical failure knocking out our groundwater pump.
How long can you keep water in plastic jugs?
"How long can you keep water in plastic jugs?"
Until you've drunk it all!
"Even if 99.9% of the human population died off there would still be 8 million to perpetuate the species."
Thank god! That means we in Manhattan will be spared, as we're essential to humanity's future.
Blogger wild chicken said...
Only thing that worries me is electrical failure knocking out our groundwater pump.
My grandparents did just fine with a mechanical well pump and even windmills might get popular again.
15 years to do something, make plans to bury the grid and nothing.
"How long can you keep water in plastic jugs?"
Let them drink wine.
Thank god! That means we in Manhattan will be spared, as we're essential to humanity's future.
Wouldn't bet against this being an earnest Cookie statement. It's definitely consensus sentiment amongst his neighbors.
My rule of thumb on the farm, was if the water wasn't fresh (such as stored water) then we always added bleach or iodine to it.
It's not the plastic, it's the contaminants that get into the jug, and everything about contaminants is exponential.
In the military we always added iodine tablets to our plastic water bowsers (those things that you sling around your neck that hold a gallon).
When we were in Egypt (desert NE of Luxor) we went to the Nile river every day with three bowsers on trailers. To these we added a couple of teaspoons of bleach. No one got sick in the month we were there.
As a new Lieutenant I always got the crap details... I had the new bowsers brought in by C-141 because the Egyptian army ones were all rusty. We left them there for the Egyptians after we left.
Project X from space.
Classical reference to Atlas Shrugged
Drs. Stadler and Ferris warn nation and demand more power.
Even if some automated sysyem kept supplying food, water and energy to NYC's survivors, they would die out anyway due to failure to breed.
Nuclear weapons still a deterrent?
NYC's survivors, they would die out anyway due to failure to breed.
They would probably kill each other before then.
The thugs would thrive,
W Virginians show the way
1632 series by Eric Flint et Al.
Michael K--I expect that most such events would fry solar panels.
Not likely, the interaction of the solar wind with the upper atmosphere creates magnetic fields that might induce current in electrical power cables and transformers. The induction effect can also drive excessive currents in sensitive electronic devices. You'd never see the flare (CME) visually unless you were observing the Sun with a narrowband filter (though Carrington did observe a white light flare). Solar panels on Earth wouldn't be affected.
Deplorables = Europe in 1600's
"The thugs would thrive."
As they would everywhere.
Don said...Nuclear weapons still a deterrent?
It's iffy. The US had a B-52 flying around with a live nuke and they didn't even know it.
"There are safeguards built-in" - disclaimer sticker.
All nuclear power plants have their high pressure core shield made in Japan. It's the only place with a large enough forge. Even France uses them.
Course, they aren't guaranteed against all Tsunami's.
I agree that the bigger threat is excessive solar activity. That would take the planet back, in terms of usable technology, 200 years instantly. The problem with allocating resources to address that threat is that it doesn't happen every day, like hacking does. We might get hit by a giant solar flare big enough to fry most of our electronic and electrical systems tomorrow or in 200 years. It's like the earthquake threat in California. (But with higher odds of death and destruction if it happens.) And also, why does everything need to be hooked up to the internet? Crucial systems, like power plants, should never be hooked up to allow outside control. If that means that some people can't access the system remotely and have to actually go to the power plant to get some work done...well, boo hoo. Remember how, in Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons were able to incapacitate the entire Colonial defenses...except for the Battlestar Galactica. That was because Adama refused to have the Battlestar Galactica hooked into any external networks.
https://en.battlestarwikiclone.org/wiki/Cylon_computer_virus
”15 years to do something, make plans to bury the grid and nothing.”
I said at the time that if Obama had to have his stimulus, do something useful with it like hardening the power grid. Instead, we pissed it all away.
”And also, why does everything need to be hooked up to the internet? Crucial systems, like power plants, should never be hooked up to allow outside control.”
There ought to be a law. Literally.
Only thing that worries me is electrical failure knocking out our groundwater pump.
A failure of the electric grid would be catastrophic! People don't realize how much we depend on electricity.
We (personally) could pump water from our well, intermittently into a storage tank that we have for drinking..... for a while, using our generator and the storage of gasoline we always have on hand. Every vehicle on the property is kept at full or almost full fuel tanks. (That would be 5 trucks and two diesel vehicles) Eventually, the gasoline supplies would run out. We could easily convert to a hand pump if we had to since our particular well isn't all that deep. Others who have 300 ft wells, not so much. Fortunately we have access to horses, wagons/pickup bed wagons, barrels and a fine water source within a mile. If you live near a river, stream or have a spring on your land, you are lucky.
Barring a permanent interruption of the power supply, people can survive for a while. In the cities it would be chaos, destruction, and death. In the rural areas, where we live, we could get by for several years or more, with the exception of potable water being a rather big deal.
Some commenters on this blog laughed when I described our "preparedness", thinking it was some sort of paranoia about the end of the world. But, living in the country, far from the supply sources, and dealing with frequent power outages as well as being "snowed" in often, it is just prudent to keep a supply of food, goods, tools, ammo and other items to be able to survive for some time.
Plus a nice benefit in the winter or if I don't feel like going to the store. Just pop on out to the pump house and grab something for dinner.
People in the cities rarely have more than a few days of food at hand and no other supplies either. Those are the people who will be the first in attrition because they live from day to day.
John Lynch...almost everything today has electronics in it and would be fried in a severe EMP or a CME. No communications and no working vehicles (aircraft, ships, trains, trucks, cars and hoverboards.) = no food, no water, no spare parts, no fuel, no electricity, no internet, no Althouse blog, ect, ect. You can still go to work, but it would be pointless since you also wouldn't get paid.
I’m proud to say we have sponsored many Syrian and Iraqi immigrants that are interested in our project, and working in their new adopted country.
No Russians or Chinese?
That is some first class trolling though.
I have a rowboat and a fishing pole.
the processes behind climate charge would not suddenly stop.
The processes behind climate change never stop. They haven't for 4.6 billion years.
What would stop are leftist politicians screaming about a non-threat as a way of extorting more money.
Some commenters on this blog laughed when I described our "preparedness", thinking it was some sort of paranoia
Richard Russell, who wrote "Dow Theory Letters" until he died, has a son living in Oregon farming for just that reason.
My wife's older son is living in Oregon and has a pretty good subsistence situation with a 50 acre compound with several houses. He has a freezer full of salmon and chickens they raised. The freezer has a generator attached. We thought about moving up there when we fled California but my wife's health can't take the climate. She does better in Tucson.
a freezer full of salmon and chickens they raised. The freezer has a generator attached
Two freezers, generators. Freezers with beef, lamb, chicken, pork, as well as other foods. Plus...if we have an outage in the winter...mother nature can be our freezer. Orchard full of fruit trees. Friends who raise chickens, goats, cattle, hogs, rabbits. A river below our house for vegetable gardening. Plus geese, wild fowl, deer and other game abound. The trout streams in our area are legendary and there are ponds with bass and crappie.
It wouldn't be fun, but it is livable.
While my RV components run on solar, I do need to pump gas occasionally if I want to go anywhere and I'm on the road now.
so much for the "science makes you happy" thread!
a freezer full of salmon and chickens they raised. The freezer has a generator attached
Two freezers, generators.
The chickens they raised are the size of turkeys. Some neighbors do the slaughter and freezing.
They are in the wine country and the brother-in-law builds winery equipment. Someone died and his heirs gave him several pallets of wine cases. Probably 100 cases. We would have taken some but we were flying.
He's the guy who rebuilds 1933 Ford Model As. He has six or seven. I asked him if he was selling any. Nope. He just collects them
He has about $600,00 worth of 1933 Model A Fords.
None have college degrees.
Why worry about mitigating this kind of threat? It's more fun to insult each other on twitter all day long.
The EMP and solar flare threat isn't new. The Carrington effect was noted in 1859 when there was no modern electrical grid and dependent technologies. It was enough to affect telegraphs. EMP effects were noted in early 1960's atmospheric nuclear bomb tests. In the 80's there were novels depicting the affects of an EMP attack. If our infrastructure is that vulnerable then we ought to be executing all public officials past and present for their dereliction of duty. In the meantime for what its worth, put all household appliances on surge protectors and if available by your utility, a surge on the electric meter. I have had power surges fry the motherboard of my refrigerator ( as ridiculous as the concept of a motherboard on a fridge is) and these protections have so far kept this from happening again.
They are in the wine country
Hmmmm? I wonder if they are in the same area where my husband's family used to own a big ranch and where some of the family still resides. Wineries everywhere now. Wouldn't that be a small world.
Generators are no good because there's no gas, not to mention inverter technology if circuits being fried is a question.
Gas, even if you hoard it, goes stale. Add Stabil for a few extra years. Except adding Stabil to stuff that hasn't had it added tends to dislodge gunk that lodges in the engine somewhere and fouls it.
The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!
OMG.
Fortunately, we're 10 years behind the curve on the internet/electronic devices. My wife grew up without electricity till she was 10, and I get bored with the endless "improvements" in Computers/Technology, etc.
I leave all that stuff to my daughter, who has all the latest I-pads and gizmos.
Just have Nobel Prize-winning obama tell them all to "knock it off", or else they'll cross his latest "red line".
When we asked America’s foremost intelligence experts what keeps them up at night, one response came up over and over again: the neighbor's dogs.
a freezer full of salmon and chickens they raised. The freezer has a generator attached
One has to be prepared to fight to keep all this once the balloon goes up. We discussed this during the great Fallout Shelter fad of the 1960's.
If 99.9% of the human population died off, would birth control products still be available
THEY BETTER BE! AND FREE!
As an aside, to be better prepared my FWB has a supply of manual sex toys that don't need batteries. Her: "Do you like sex toys? Me: "Well, YEAH!" Her: Good, cause I'm not in the mood."
Generators are no good because there's no gas
Yup. No gas.
Eat the frozen food first. Dry, smoke or dehydrate the other things that can be preserved that way. Like Forest Gump...except with jerky. Beef jerky, goat jerky, venison jerky. You're gonna need a lot of salt. Sulphur is good too. That's how we preserved apricots and and other types of fruit in the olden days. (when I was a kid). Smoke the stoned and cut fruit on thin stacked pallets in a tent with sulphur smoke/fumes and then sun dry for days.
I don't worry about survival. I'm not into survival. I'm in my 60's. All I worry about is not getting my blood on my wife's sofa.
Now she's into survival, but women are always unreasonable. Hell, dry ice can kill them, and they are worried to death about having clean underwear and red lipstick.
Let them drink wine
Yeah but how to cook the rice and beans?
I know mechanical pumps work but j don't have one.
Don’t worry, Trump’s buddy Putin would never mess with our energy grid...as long as Trump does what he’s supposed to do.
All these comments lead me to think that preppers are the most logical people alive today. Except that a gang with guns will be able to get as many supplies as are available.
Except that a gang with guns will be able to get as many supplies as are available.
Not without casualties.
Q. "What keeps you awake at night?"
A. "Nothing. I keep other people awake at night."
- J. Mattis, Secretary of Defense
Except that a gang with guns will be able to get as many supplies as are available.
The bedpan commando and energy expert weighs.
in.
Except that a gang with guns will be able to get as many supplies as are available.
Apart from that, there's the old Lifeboat Dilemma, unless your stash is so well hidden that the starving hordes will never find it. The frozen salmon doesn't go well with the stench of rotting corpses.
Remember we all have one last ditch survival tactic: dying.
added to my queue, thanks!
Remember we all have one last ditch survival tactic: dying.
It's on my bucket list.
”Don’t worry, Trump’s buddy Putin would never mess with our energy grid...as long as Trump does what he’s supposed to do.”
More worrisome is Obama’s buddy Khamenei.
When the cyber apocalypse comes, who will last longer - the fat people or the skinny people?
Country Boys Can Survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cQNkIrg-Tk
When the cyber apocalypse comes, who will last longer - the fat people or the skinny people?
Who has more meat on them, and would be easier to catch ?
Yes! Not enough people know about the risk of a large solar flare!
It kind of blows the cover on the global warming hysteria. Large solar flares have happened in the near past (the Carrington Event, 1861). They will happen again. A similar event today would result in the deaths of millions, at least, and set civilization back a half century. It can't be stopped, but it can be mitigated. The costs of mitigation are small compared to the costs of mitigating global warming.
But these measures do not require you to reorder the world's economy and create a super-economy of carbon credits managed by bureaucrats and banks. So the "reality-based" community doesn't give a shit. The only problems they are interested in solving are those problems whose solutions give their social class more power over the lives of others.
Obama believed that Russian attacks on the Ukrainian power grid in 2015 and 2016 were dress rehearsals for an election day eve attack on the United States! I guess the Russians were going to hack everything in sight and install a Manchurian candidate.
Kind of nutty if you ask me. The distributed, redundant nature of the electrical system would limit disruptions and our voting machines are, more or less, hacker proof. So why all the hysteria?
“All these comments lead me to think that preppers are the most logical people alive today. Except that a gang with guns will be able to get as many supplies as are available”
Except that being well armed goes along with being a prepper in many cases. Or, at least the people I know stockpiling food and the like, are also stockpiling firearms, and esp ammunition. Plus reloading equipment. The Issue isn’t guns, but ammo, because modern firearms, for the most part, last almost forever. Think of it this way - I have a Glock 17 that I have run maybe 10k (10!4) rounds through, with nary a problem. Multiply that by the >300m (3x10!8) firearms in the country, and you have the capacity to shoot maybe 3x10!12 rounds with the existing stock of guns. Current ammunition sales are around 12 billion (1.2x10!10) rounds a year, which works out to enough firearms to shoot more than 200 years of ammunition production. Hence the reloading equipment and supplies.
The other part of this is that the more rural you are, overall, the better you will be setup to survive, and the more you will likely be able to band together with well armed neighbors to fight off those gangs with guns. We spend half the year right by a gasoline dump, hydro dam, and major rail line. The big thing that would be missing from our diet would be vegetables. Plenty of varying types of meat to trade off, ranging from beef through bison, elk, moose, and those pesky pre-venisons, that would be the first to go. Plenty of feed to keep this going idefinitely. But the important point is that everyone is armed, and is going to work with their neighbors, instead of against them. You just aren’t going to shoot someone you see in church but are far more likely to shoot someone you don’t recognize aiming at that person. My guess is that in a county of maybe 15k, there are at least 5k hunting rifles, with at least that many experienced hunters, many with a military background. Which probably means that that gang with guns had better be a regiment or more in size to have a chance. No - they are going into the more congested, more densely settled, parts of the country where everyone doesn’t know everyone, and everyone doesn’t have at least one gun in the household. And what I think that will ultimately mean is that the rural part of the country will likely survive better than the rest, esp since they control the food supply, and most inner city residents won’t survive at all, since they are the most dependent upon the rural food supply, and tend to be least well armed (and are least likely, unless Mormon, to have any serious quantity of food stockpiled).
pre-venisons == children? That's terrible!
On the other hand, when the hammer hits the nail, it's just meat.
Just meat.
Ann Althouse said...
"Remember we all have one last ditch survival tactic: dying."
That's not survival. That's capitulation.
Bruce Hayden, you forget another type of meat: human.
The Mass General had been convinced buy some techie idiot to shut down their emergency generator and rely on the grid that failed. We still managed.
Managed? Without power for at least several weeks, perhaps several months? An EMP attack would make the emergency generator useless, you know. Besides, the mobs would probably make it impossible for the hospitals even with working generators.
I'd guess they are not anywhere near capable of accomplishing this.
Cookie, with all due respect I believe you are wrong. Here’s a recent assessment. One of the headings:
What nuclear capabilities did
Iran have before the deal?
“… before the deal …” refers to before the Obama agreement with Iran.
… Iran had the technical capability to become a nuclear-weapons state, experts say.
While Iran has repeatedly asserted that its nuclear activities are for peaceful use only, it had amassed a stockpile of uranium that further refining could have turned into fuel for nuclear bombs.
By some reckonings, Iran needed only a few months to make the required bomb fuel. It would have needed considerably more time to make a reliable warhead for a missile to deliver such a weapon.
The “experts” referred to are undoubtedly the CIA and other American intelligence agencies. The problem here is that the track record of these “experts” is abysmal. They have consistently underestimated nuclear capabilities, beginning with the Soviet Union and extending through the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. They have been wrong and surprised in EVERY instance.
So forgive me for assuming they are underestimating Iran’s capabilities. Why ruin a perfect record?
I suspect the mullahs have a bomb capable of detonation. The rockets themselves are not very complicated. The hard part is the launching and guidance systems technology. Without the need for those a low-tech rocket launch from an unassuming ship in the Gulf would be relatively easy.
Hmm... I didn't know cosmologists were experts on society collapsing.
The doomsaying reminds me of the survival articles which talk about making fire. The try to use sticks, etc. as if lighters and matches have somehow managed to vanish. Some seem to equate a technology loss as an episode of Naked and Afraid.
Blogger Robert Cook said...
“Bruce Hayden, you forget another type of meat: human.”
Maybe cannibalizm might work short term, but it is probably not a viable long term solution. We discovered that Mad Cow disease was most likely the result of cows being fed their brethren, to supplement their feed. Don’t quite understand the dynamics, but appears to be caused by prions, that are apparently misfolded proteins. And guess what? Societies that engaged in human cannibalizm seem to have experienced similar problems.
"Maybe cannibalizm might work short term, but it is probably not a viable long term solution. We discovered that Mad Cow disease was most likely the result of cows being fed their brethren, to supplement their feed. Don’t quite understand the dynamics, but appears to be caused by prions, that are apparently misfolded proteins. And guess what? Societies that engaged in human cannibalizm seem to have experienced similar problems."
A global human society reduced to cannibalism as a means to survival will not be too concerned about misfolded proteins or prions. It would be a society probably already in its terminal stages, with or without "Mad Human Disease."
"Assume that engineers are smart and would get basic services running again in two weeks."
Except, getting a utility's electric generator back up requires ... electricity. Which is usually available from other generators that are still on the grid. But, what happens if/when they are all down?
And practically everything is dependant on availability of electricity (and to a considerable extent, the internet). Presumably we could eat canned or fresh foods if the frozen foods were all spoiled, but could retailers establish a payment system when all their POS terminals are down, in a world where very few of us still carry any substantial amount of currency?
Perhaps it's time to ask, does everything really need to be connected to the internet and, if not, is the convenience of that connectivity worth the inevitable risks that come with it?
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