The Mother of All Threads: Global War on Terror Year 16

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Pener Kropoopkin: Jan 30, 2013

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/opinion/yemen-war-unconstitutional.html

Ro Khanna, Marc Pocan, and Walter Jones are calling for an end to America's involvement in the illegal war on Yemen.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-yemen-fp-57231dc0-adcf-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb-20171010-story.html

quote:

In a matter of days, the deadly cholera epidemic in Yemen will set a world record.

The outbreak is entirely man-made. Two-and-a-half years of civil war have decimated Yemen's water sanitation system and its hospitals. Without access to clean water, doctors or medical supplies, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have contracted cholera, which spreads through fecal bacteria in water.

Aid organizations blame both sides in the conflict, which pits a Saudi-led coalition armed by the United States against Houthi rebels supported by Iran.

At last count on Oct. 2, Yemen had 777, 229 suspected cases of cholera, with the death toll at 2,134 people, according to the World Health Organization. Soon, Yemen will surpass Haiti, which has documented about 815,000 cholera cases. In Haiti, however, the outbreak began in 2010, and has taken seven years to reach that figure. In Yemen, it has taken only about six months to reach those alarmingly high numbers.

# ? Oct 11, 2017 01:53

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 11:45

Peel: Dec 3, 2007

https://twitter.com/JohnAllenGay/status/918615917826801665

can't wait for 'your allies, on whom your position depends, have explicitly stated they will align with your enemies against you if you do this' to have as much effect on the death cult as a brisk gust of neutrinos

# ? Oct 13, 2017 01:10

Fallen Hamprince: Nov 12, 2016

Peel posted:

https://twitter.com/JohnAllenGay/status/918615917826801665

can't wait for 'your allies, on whom your position depends, have explicitly stated they will align with your enemies against you if you do this' to have as much effect on the death cult as a brisk gust of neutrinos

sterile neutrinos

# ? Oct 13, 2017 01:16

Yossarian-22: Oct 26, 2014

Peel posted:

https://twitter.com/JohnAllenGay/status/918615917826801665

can't wait for 'your allies, on whom your position depends, have explicitly stated they will align with your enemies against you if you do this' to have as much effect on the death cult as a brisk gust of neutrinos

thankfully the u.s. doesn't do invasions that turn the whole world against them and cause political self immolation as well as wanton death/destruction

# ? Oct 13, 2017 02:13

Pener Kropoopkin: Jan 30, 2013

The United States is a greater threat to the stability of global capitalism than Communist China

# ? Oct 13, 2017 02:16

ScrubLeague: Feb 11, 2007; Nap Ghost

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

The United States is a greater threat to the stability of global capitalism than Communist China

also works if you substitute literally anything for "global capitalism" and literally anything for "Communist China" and at literally any time since the start of the 20th century.

# ? Oct 13, 2017 02:19

Plutonis: Mar 25, 2011

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

The United States is a greater threat to the stability of global capitalism than Communist China

Seems like Trump really is the Leftist cnaditate

# ? Oct 13, 2017 02:23

Pener Kropoopkin: Jan 30, 2013

https://twitter.com/scotty9k/status/918704303757340672

:thunk:

# ? Oct 13, 2017 06:06

FourLeaf: Dec 2, 2011

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

https://twitter.com/scotty9k/status/918704303757340672

u gotta be kiddin me

# ? Oct 13, 2017 06:09

Autism Sneaks: Nov 21, 2016

if every smartphone and TV in the continental US stopped working indefinitely there would be a bloodbath of bored fat Americans thrown into the mundanity of material existence without increasing hyper-distraction turning on one another, checks out

# ? Oct 13, 2017 06:41

Pener Kropoopkin: Jan 30, 2013

There isn't even any certainty that an EMP from a nuclear detonation would actually knock out cellular networks or even your phone.

Popular Mechanics just issued a response lmao

http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a25883/north-korea-cant-kill-ninety-percent-of-americans/

quote:

Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control scholar, wrote in Foreign Policy in 2013, "(the) EMP Commission exposed 37 cars and 18 trucks to EMP effects in a laboratory environment. While EMP advocates claim the results of an EMP attack would be "planes falling from the sky, cars stalling on the roadways, electrical networks failing, food rotting," the actual results were much more modest. Of the 55 vehicles exposed to EMP, six at the highest levels of exposure needed to be restarted. A few more showed "nuisance" damage to electronics, such as blinking dashboard displays."

Back to The Hill article, which claims an EMP attack by North Korea would kill "9 of 10 Americans by starvation and societal collapse." The first clue that something is amiss with this claim is that, if you trace the link provided in the article, it cites the words of Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, who describes a novel he had read called One Second After. Bartlett says:

"I read a prepublication copy of a book called One Second After. I hope it does get published; I think the American people need to read it. It was the story of a ballistic missile EMP attack on our country. The weapon was launched from a ship off our shore, and then the ship was sunk so that there were no fingerprints. The weapon was launched about 300 miles high over Nebraska, and it shut down our infrastructure countrywide. The story runs for a year. It is set in the hills of North Carolina. At the end of the year, 90 percent of our population is dead; there are 25,000 people only still alive in New York City. The communities in the hills of North Carolina are more lucky: only 80 percent of their population is dead at the end of a year."

Bartlett was so spooked by this novel that after he left Congress he moved into the woods and became a survivalist, where he spends his days "cutting logs, tending gardens and painting walls." And just to be clear, the claim that North Korea could kill 90 percent of the American people was directly pulled from a science fiction novel.

There are even more problems with this claim. Nobody knows how large of a nuclear weapon it would take to destroy the U.S. electrical grid. Five megatons? Five hundred megatons? A gigaton? North Korea would only have one shot at this, because any such attack would result in a U.S. retaliatory nuclear strike that would leave everything from the DMZ to the Chinese border one smoking, radioactive crater. America's nuclear arsenal and command and control is hardened against EMP and would survive to dish out a ruthless counterstrike. That in and of itself would deter the North Korean leadership from committing what would amount to societal suicide just to watch Americans eat grass before they ultimately starve.

Furthermore, North Korea does not have thermonuclear weapons. It claims to have tested a thermonuclear device last year but the device was not large enough to actually have been so. North Korea wants nuclear weapons and indeed may some day have them, but that is generally seen as being somewhere down the road. Even then, it would have to develop a rocket capable of delivering an extremely large warhead.

Warning against the threat of North Korean nuclear weapons is a public service. Warning that North Korea could kill 90 percent of the American people with EMP is not. It's even a good idea to warn, broadly, against the threat of EMP: in 1859, a solar storm sent a pulse of energy hurting toward Earth, sending electrical surges through those electrical systems in use at the time, telegraph networks. Telegraph operators received shocks from their equipment and telegraph pylons threw sparks. If it occurred today, the so-called "Carrington Event" could indeed have serious consequences for satellites, electrical grids, and electronic devices worldwide. Tying such a real problem to a fantasy involving North Korea does a disservice to the larger issue.