Posted on 08/26/2013 6:20:36 AM PDT by Travis McGee
One of my goals with this piece was to keep it pretty short, and the cause of the blackout is intentionally left ambiguous. My understanding is that so much of the world now runs on networked data, that a major cyber attack could leave our infrastructure unable to respond to the correct commands. Trains derail, water treatment plants run incorrectly, etc. Anything that causes the EBT system to collapse can lead very rapidly to massive urban riots following store looting.
The urban centers that will be the focus of these massive riots are also critical distribution nodes, so the food shortages will not be contained to the cities. In that scenario, violence spikes to unprecedented levels and the police and military are overwhelmed. Many will desert, including critical infrastructure workers who also have families living in dangerous conditions.
Once the infrastructure is untended, due to urban riots plus deserting infrastructure workers, the food and fuel distribution machinery will stop entirely. Some of the lost infrastructure will seal the deal, so to speak, such as the communication satellites that will lose their ground links in a few weeks, and become unrecoverable in many cases. It becomes a reinforcing cascade of disasters, both on the human and machine sides. It all works perfectly, when it’s working. But if the machine stops, even for a week, it may all be FUBAR once the cities explode, and they will.
My point is you cannot look at one system in isolation and say, “Well, if that element broke, here is the solution.” Take the nuke plants as an example. All of those cooling ponds full of hot rods require electricity to run the water pumps. What happens when the workers depart to protect their families, and don’t return? How long can our 100 nuke plants remain safe in a grid-down situation, after the workers start slipping away?
Another flawed “one element” view would be to say, well, X thousand trucks can restock X thousand looted supermarkets in X days. Wrong, and you can by now list the reasons why it won’t happen according to plan. Lack of security, out-of-fuel trucks stranded everywhere and looted, drivers who took off on foot, city highways that are much too dangerous for resupply trucks while the remaining LE and military is overwhelmed, etc.
Well, FWIW, I got it off my chest and into words.
I just wish the cultural wreckers on the other side would read it. I’d love to get their reaction.
Excellent expression on what happened to our civilization.
There is so much said on the topic and you picked the meat of the matter .... like you always do. Thanks for sharing your writting with us, Matt.
God bless you and keep you in His heart and surrounded by His angels no matter what happens in earth.
Thanks, Sara, what else can we do? I wish Alas would get picked up by the liberal blogosphere, that’s my goal. The last part, the “why” part, is meant to provoke the left into responding, to advance the discussion.
That makes sense. The hardware and system failures are as much if not more the RESULT of the EBT/Economic riots, as the reverse situation.(The cyber attack could be one initial trigger but would not have to be the only scenario to cause this cascading effect.)
In my mind, that raises the statistical odds of all this happening to a much higher level, than if we were just saying, this all might happen due to an EMP. That is probably a fairly low likelihood, but an economic disaster that causes riots, that causes people to leave their posts in various infrastructures, that causes further collapse, etc, etc is much more likely. Thanks for that explanation.
And I agree that putting it in a short story form will be more effective for getting the word out.
Even the economic disasaster might not necessarily lead to this societal collapse, if our society was still moral, self controlled and united. We got through the depression without turning into something like Nazi Germany because the soul of our country was still turned to God.
Not anymore, that’s why the outlook is so grim.
Point by point I was saying, “Exactly.”
You got it. Especially the last part. The America of the 1930s that got through the Great Depression without tearing itself apart no longer exists. Now kids murder for fun on full stomachs. Imagine when they are starving.
The one thing which concerns me more than anything is my Grandchildren. My Daughter and Son-in-Law are pretty much your typical American upper middle class family.
They are basically conservative but they simply don’t think the country is rotting and they are not making preparations for anything other than their future financial security.
Their maternal Grandfather lives with them and is partly responsible for their comfortable life. His upbringing was your typical hardscrabble farm existence. He was a kid during the dust bowl and depression, went into the Army at 18, fought til the end and went to college on the GI bill.
They are his only heirs and they will be wealthy, actually already are to an extent. Unfortunately all that can disappear except maybe their real property.
I don’t see them very often tho we exchange emails about daily. I just don’t seem to be able to get through to them.
I spent most of 40 years in the SF Bay Area, surrounded by that lot.
It wouldn't get through to them. Even if you document everything you say with verifiable sourcing from outlets that they trust, they have an armor of facile rationalization that allows then to dismiss anything short of getting a shot to the chops of hard, cold reality.
I had an outright commie friend there for many years- Soviet propaganda posters up in the wall of his bedroom- who insisted that there was no such thing as objective reality. There's 'your reality' and 'my reality' and they are equally illusory. People like that need to live it before it gets through to them. They believe what they want to believe. As long as the wheels keep turning, they can get away with that.
Yeah, he's still a friend. He doesn't proselytize. He's a great cook, an ancient history nut, and gets back up after I knock his bullcrap down, no hard feelings. Oddly enough- he's pro-2A, and for the right reasons.Yeah, I have weird friends- he's not the weirdest.
Bottom line- it's like teaching pigs to whistle. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Just do it. ONE tomato plant to start. Or ONE zuke plant. Or ONE pepper plant.
Do it or the little old ladies will pester you.
“is our communications network really that vulnerable to being taken down nationwide?”
Infrastructure only works insofar as there is excess capacity on a regular basis. If critical demand exceeds supply, access prices reach “gouging” levels until supply catches up...which is a problem if the shortage is pervasive and resonates with other shortages.
Some months ago, I read info. from the trucking industry itself and they said if the internet doesn't work to transfer money, no truck will leave the loading dock. Forget lack of gasoline or anything else, the money has to change hands before a truck leaves and no truck leaves if the money can't be transferred by a click.
So, you can reevaluate the food delivery or medicine delivery or ANY truck delivery scenario - it will stop sooner than you have thought.
My mantra has long been since 1998 when I began to prepare, “When trucks stop, it's over.”
It’s that normalcy bias. Most well-to-do German Jews just couldn’t imagine Germany getting worse, year by year. Until it did, and it was too late to flee.
I just think it would be worthwhile to get their reactions in order to instigate discussion that might reach some of the reachable in the middle. There is no curing old commies like your friend. In the USSR, some went to the firing squad shouting “Long Live Communism!” etc.
And the trucks on the road need to gas up about every other day, if they are going to get anywhere. Once the truck stops are empty/looted, it’s over. The govt will try to order trucks to move and diesel to flow, but it won’t work.
Posted to my FB page!
More than one party has to want to meet in the middle ground.
Marcella, regarding bread, chapatties can be made just with flour, a bit of salt and water. Also a little teeny bit of yeast can make raised bread if it is risen longer. We should make a bread thread, I’ve made so many kinds and do regularly, including various kinds of flat bread.
There are going to be plenty of bones in the middle ground.
“Once the truck stops are empty/looted, it’s over.”
When I need to solve a problem, I go to what started the problem for me, then decide how to fix it.
In 1998, I got up one morning, got a pad and pen and said no trucks had been in this area for six months - how do I live in this house without power because it would be gone and I couldn’t buy any food because there wouldn’t be any to buy and the water wouldn’t come out of the faucet any more. I went in the bathroom and developed a way to have running water and wrote down “store toilet paper”. I went through the whole day that way to try to overcome the problems so I could live with some bit of comfort after the basics were covered.
I’m still doing that so that’s 15 years of preparing for the ultimate problem of no trucks. I get through hurricanes easily and any other reason power goes out so the preps have been there when I need them. If the power goes off and stays off for a year or more, I don’t want to see that happen to my friends, my relatives, and everyone living in this country.
Their reaction, even if they won’t admit it, would probably be “Yeah, that’s pretty-much what we’ve got in mind”.
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