Republicans Spread The Alarm
But not about global warming. They're now alarmed about an Electro-Magnetic Pulse, aka EMP.
“We face not only the threats from terrorism but also the threat of new kinds of dangers,” Huckabee said, “from a cyberwar that could shut down major financial markets, to threats from an electromagnetic pulse from an exploded device that could fry the entire electrical grid and take this country back to the Stone Age in a matter of minutes.”
The Heritage Foundation has published alarming papers claiming that “all past calamities of the modern era would pale in comparison to the catastrophe caused by a successful high-altitude EMP strike,”
Newt Gingrich campaigned on the EMP threat during the 2012 Republican primary, and Ted Cruz warned last year that an EMP strike by the Iranians could leave “tens of millions of Americans” dead. There’s even a congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Caucus that, according to its founder, Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., works to safeguard against “the single greatest asymmetric capability that could fall into the hands of America’s enemies.”
My irony meter has just exploded. If nothing is done, we have the very real future of mega-droughts, mass starvation, rising sea levels inundating coastline cities, increasing temperatures rendering vast areas of the planet uninhabitable, and Republicans look away and pretend they didn't hear that.
But some very remote threat which scientists regard as happening with vanishing probability, a side effect of a nuclear explosion which to affect the U.S. would require the ability to carry this device 200 miles into space, something only the U.S. and maybe Russia would be able to accomplish, seizes the imagination of Republicans and suddenly we're all in great danger of the markets, internet, our TV's and mobile phones, becoming useless.
I'm at a loss to explain this, people incapable of understanding a real impending catastrophe affecting the entire planet, all continents, every nation, while at the same time passionately believing in something so remote and improbable.
“We face not only the threats from terrorism but also the threat of new kinds of dangers,” Huckabee said, “from a cyberwar that could shut down major financial markets, to threats from an electromagnetic pulse from an exploded device that could fry the entire electrical grid and take this country back to the Stone Age in a matter of minutes.”
The Heritage Foundation has published alarming papers claiming that “all past calamities of the modern era would pale in comparison to the catastrophe caused by a successful high-altitude EMP strike,”
Newt Gingrich campaigned on the EMP threat during the 2012 Republican primary, and Ted Cruz warned last year that an EMP strike by the Iranians could leave “tens of millions of Americans” dead. There’s even a congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Caucus that, according to its founder, Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., works to safeguard against “the single greatest asymmetric capability that could fall into the hands of America’s enemies.”
My irony meter has just exploded. If nothing is done, we have the very real future of mega-droughts, mass starvation, rising sea levels inundating coastline cities, increasing temperatures rendering vast areas of the planet uninhabitable, and Republicans look away and pretend they didn't hear that.
But some very remote threat which scientists regard as happening with vanishing probability, a side effect of a nuclear explosion which to affect the U.S. would require the ability to carry this device 200 miles into space, something only the U.S. and maybe Russia would be able to accomplish, seizes the imagination of Republicans and suddenly we're all in great danger of the markets, internet, our TV's and mobile phones, becoming useless.
I'm at a loss to explain this, people incapable of understanding a real impending catastrophe affecting the entire planet, all continents, every nation, while at the same time passionately believing in something so remote and improbable.
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