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09:19 EDT
And what I find most remarkable is that even BuzzFeed is so enthusiastic about this. And I attribute that to Mr. Trump's 'The Art of the Deal' genius.
Why?
Because he's got just everyone on board with this, and each for their own reasons, but all you'll hear about is the 'attack' aspect of this order.
Curiously, and, as we've seen to hillarious effect, it turns out that there are no hawks like the Democrats. Who knew? Everything is Russia's fault, and we must prepare for attack by Russia. At this point, I wouldn't be the least surprised to hear Sting reword his famous song to vilify the US for not opposing Russia more forcefully.
Having grown up military, as I've said so many times before, I was raised in a strongly pro-military, pro-national defense enviroment. "Oh, woe is us! If only Congress knew what we know, those misers would loosen the purse strings, and give us everything on our wish-list." (Little did I know then just what the C_A had been doing, and to whom they had shifted their loyalties.) (You do know who the C_A is, right? They're that famous three-letter agency, lacking intelligence.)
Now, mind you, there was actually something to this. I'm pretty sure the B52s are still being flown today. They had been designed about the time I was born. They were old when I was in the Air Force. There was a time they were even dropping out of the sky for what was, at the time, mysterious reasons. (OOPS! I actually had to remove this pithy little observation. It might actually still be classified.) Although, to be fair, many nations, most notably Russia, NEVER retire an airframe. It's like joining the mob: The only retirement plan is when they 'retire' you. These other countries will fly an airplane until it finally crashes. So, the Russians are also still flying their antique Bear bomber, among others.
But there's another aspect to all this. Technically, it, too, is an 'attack' in my book, but most others would see this as just nature doing what nature has done before. And, I think, what we're really worried about here (but not saying openly) is not so much Russia, or even China, but a repeat of what 'nature just did' in 1859, just nine months before the outbreak of the Civil War: The Carrington Event.
The Carrington Event was one of those 'shot across the bow' kinds of things we so often find throughout history. Take, for example, the Roman siege of Judeah. Just as it got going, it got called off because Caesar died, and the general in charge of the attack was a candidate to become the next Caesar. So the whole affair was put on hold while he went back to Rome to claim the throne. Or the wreath. Or the robes. Whatever. Anyway, this offered the Jews YEARS of time to smell the smoke, and get the heck out of Dodge. And some did. The rest died. Look at the Carrington Event that way. The only electrical technology we really had at that time was the telegraph. The solar outburst literally blew that entire network up. Miles of wires (which make fantastic antennae for receiving electrical fields, and turning them back into current) melted. I'm not talking about sparks, like you may have seen on wires lately. I mean, the wires glowed red hot, and melted. Telegraph offices exploded, and not always from the hydrogen gas from their lead-acid batteries. There were lightning-like flashes that struck operators down. Surviving stations disconnected their batteries, and found that there was still so much residual energy in the system that it continued to operate without battery power.
And all that was over fairly heave-guage wire, using fairly high-voltage batteries. Everything today, every car, truck, gas pump, traffic light, phone, pacemaker, even our refrigerators (thanks to this absolutely insane Internet of Things) (IoT), is actually run by sensitive, delicate, low-voltage logic circuits, operating on 5 volts, or less, over pathways measured not in American Wire Guage, but in nanometers. Less than the width of a human hair. If you've ever worked with such things, you know all about how sensitive they are, and just what measures you have to take to protect them. Blow just one computer in your car, and the whole could just stop working altogether. And just something as simple as that spark you feel when touching a door-knob in winter can spell doom to almost any computer.
Another eruption like the one in 1859 could literally put us back into the stone age in mere weeks.
As has been noted before, practically none of us could recover the technology behind so much as a number 2 pencil, let alone all the thousands of tools and gadgets that form the basis of our modern way of life.
I mean, even Hollywood has, on occasion, been clear-headed enough to consider what might happen if ...
So, yeah. I'm pretty enthusiastic about this executive order, too, just not for the reasons everyone else seems to have.
I just hope our counter-measures will be enough, because I'm expecting something even bigger than the Carrington Event.
This is where I take one of those hard turns I'm so famous for, so fasten your seatbelts. If that doomsday scenario rocked your world, you might want to sit down for this.
Maybe I've mentioned here before, that it was here at our own Purdue University where it was first observed that solar activity affects ... are you ready for this? ... the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes, which had been, up until about a decade ago, believed to be unfailingly constant, giving us the basis for every type of radiometric dating extant.
And this fact alone just blows all kinds of ships right out of the water.
It's long been known that cosmic ray bombardment can, and does, create isotopes of oxygen, beryllium, and ... CARBON ... in our atmosphere in real-time. All the time. This means that the proportion of C12 to C14 was NOT fixed at some point in time millions of years ago, allowing us to measure the remaining quantities of one against the other to arrive at the date a given organism ceased aspirating. In fact, that proportion was never fixed at all.
This little burr under the saddle of the radio-carbon dating crowd is one of the reasons for the still continuing global dendrochronology project. It's hoped that these tree rings, ice and sediment layers, can create a map of just how much, and where (?! Oh, yes, it's not the same everywhere, further complicating the task), and WHEN, the proportions of various isotopes of various elements have changed over time. You probably never even heard that the dates in school science textbooks were updated about 35 years ago. The dates have been getting updated since then, too, but so much and so frequently that everyone has now pretty much adopted a 'wait-n-see' tactic before going on record with any solid dates for anything, because they know it will all change again, because the project is still under way, and because they keep stumbling over new problems.
The times, they keep a changin'!
Now, add to this the revelation that the very decay rates of those ad hoc isotopes is itself variable, and you've got sheer mayhem in the scientific community. But you've probably never heard a peep about any of this. Of course, they'll never let you know that. Imagine if word got out that all the tales they've been telling us were all based on bad science, on assumptions, on wishful thinking. They're not only trying to play it cool, hoping no one really notices this; they're trying to keep their jobs, keep us funding their 'science'. Remember, these are the guys who keep trying to shout down all the 'pseudo-scientists' with the 'empirical science' argument. "We", so the argument goes, "don't traffic in imagination or superstition (Quantum Mechanics notwithstanding). We measure things, and report that." Well, except that this was never true to begin with. What all science has always done is deal in what we call theoretical science. In other words, they measure what they can, and then they form a hypothesis based on those observations. It's fine in theory, but, in practice, it's worked out quite differently, as their continued adherence to the long-since solidly debunked 'dirty snowball' theory of comets shows. And that's not all. Since literally everything peddled by Scientific American et al is really theory, and those theories are increasingly falling prey to these false assumptions, one would not at all be out of line in claiming that all of science is not only on shaky footing, but losing that footing, and heading over the cliff.
Yes, it really is all that bad.
In other words, the religious faith that many of these have so long derided turns out to be in no way any less credible than their so-called science.
Ready for the coup de grace?
Notice the almost off-handed mention of timing and location: The solar flare was being announced in advance of the actual flare ... on the far side of the earth.
Understood or not, the military, never ones to let the whys get in the way of the wherefores, is already using this effect to predict when they need to switch their satellites to protection mode, which could save us already overburdened tax-payers a tidy bundle.
Moreover, this goes back to my own claims about the fallacy behind particle-wave duality, the double-slit experiment, quantum entanglement, quantum tunneling, and even the now infamous Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, namely that all of these are misunderstandings of the apparent data caused by the fundamental misconception that matter (including 'photons') is intrinsic in nature.
Now what do I mean by that?
More and more, just as with the ever-growing evidence that the sun is not internally, but externally powered (an idea which, interestingly enough, meshes well with our own Pearl of Great Price's facsimile 2, figure 5), it is becoming apparent that even the particles of the universe we assume to be a given ... they just exist, and always have (which is why the Big Bang is so necessary to this school of thought) ... can not be taken for granted. But, what has somehow been forgotten by all is that the very grandfather of quantum mechanics, the late, great Max Planck, said himself that, "All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together." Adding, furthermore that, "We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter."
Maybe that's why more people aren't familiar with that particular quote.
12:14 EDT
But I've got to go now. I planned a rather ambitious 50-mile bike ride for today, on a trail I've never ridden before, the Fall Creek Trail, and I'm late. I need to finish tying and soldering my poor, overtaxed spokes, adjust the shifters, inflate the tires, pack my bags ... First ride of the season, you know.
Where did I put my hat?
So, gotta go!