I learned as a kid on the farm in NC that it isn’t wise to mess with a rooster, especially when he’s bigger than you, and really especially if he’s defending one of his hens.
Anybody got an i.d. on the intruder? Kinda looks like a Cooper’s to me but I’m no way certain. Heck, I don’t even know where Sunset Farm is.
That wasn’t Foghorn Leghorn in action and it wasn’t the Chicken Hawk either.
Musk is offering to buy Twitter outright for 43 billion. Say what you will about that guy, but he certainly puts his money where is mouth is. He seems pretty serious about pulling some bodies from the burning wreckage that is free and unsupressed speech on that platform.
Growing up on a farm, I never considered roosters chivalrous . . .
According to Fox Business this morning, Musk may not have enough cash to close this deal, and may have trouble getting financing.
Twitter reported 2021 results of $5.08B in revenue and operating loss of $493m which includes a one time litigation related charge of $766m. With results like that you can be sure Musk will struggle to get financing for a nearly 10x revenue stock offer. I wish him well though.
Way off topic. Snowing again in Eastern Washington’s Columbia Basin.
No one expects The Abdominal Snowman.
Prior to this announcement Tucker Carlson suggested Musk could ask we, the unwashed masses, to buy Twitter shares and agree to grant him our vote as a proxy.
The latter part of that could certainly work, but I don’t see how the first part does. If it’s not done surreptitiously (and how do you get millions of individuals to act in concert on something surreptitiously?), the activity itself would immediately drive up the price. Not only that, it would almost certainly create at least one opposing party or group doing the same thing but vowing to vote in opposition to Musk. Which would also drive up the price.
I doubt Musk can engineer a 100% takeover. He might be able to engineer a majority take over. However, even with his current, 9+% stake he can have tremendous impact on the company’s policies and future. A percentage of current shareholders would likely vote with him, or support any policies he suggests. It may not be a majority, but it’s likely a majority don’t have a strong view either way, so someone like Musk stating strong policies and plans for change could hold sway.
Regardless, it will be fun to watch.
Translation dum dum dum another one bites the dust.
I doubt Musk can engineer a 100% takeover. He might be able to engineer a majority take over. However, even with his current, 9+% stake he can have tremendous impact on the company’s policies and future. A percentage of current shareholders would likely vote with him, or support any policies he suggests. It may not be a majority, but it’s likely a majority don’t have a strong view either way, so someone like Musk stating strong policies and plans for change could hold sway.
Yeah, I mean he only needs 50% to be able to fire all the idiots and replace them with people who actually give a crap about free speech. And as you say, he may not even need that. How many Twitter shareholders would be fully on board with his changes versus those that would oppose him or are happy with the stauts quo? If he could increase his ownership to the point that he could override the opposers, who knows?
If this is true, then nuclear war is not nearly as destructive as the public thinks. The obvious implication is that MAD is much less of a deterrent than the public thinks.
While it’s great that nuclear war doesn’t end civilization (though is really really bad), it also (in my opinion) makes the probability of a nuclear exchange higher. But it seems that there’s only two countries with enough nuclear weapons to have any plausible reason to start one: the US and Russia.
tl; dr version: There’s only about 4,000 nuclear weapons ready to go, about 3,000 split between the US and Russia. No one seems to be targeting to maximize civilian deaths, and most nuclear weapons are more modestly sized than they could be. The effects of fallout are grossly overstated in popular media and nuclear winter is not a real thing.
After watching the chicken / hawk fight video, its clear that at least some chickens are not chicken.
No matter what Musk does he still is going to have a company that swipes data from users and sells it to advertisers. Surveillance capitalism.
What else can he do with Twitter? ….that will yield him some profit?
Regarding nukes and their usefulness, the usual suspects objected to modernization of small nuclear weapons, refinement of selective yeild because it would make the more precise and less indiscriminate, and therefore more likely to be used (against Iran or the Norks for example). Can’t have that it would be better for Iran to nuke up anfor the Norks to continue. …. Leftist logic.
There’s yet another attempt at a professional spring football league starting this Saturday. Confusingly, this one is called the “United States Football League (USFL)” despite having no direct relation to the old USFL from the 1980s other than owning the trademarks. The ruleset is similar to the last interation (2020) of the XFL with stuff like 3 point conversions.
Frederick, why would we use 20% of our deployed warheads to target 170 silos that will probably be empty by the time the warheads arrive and how does he know what the Russian target list is? Also not mentioned is EMP.
The Feds will declare Twitter a monopoly after Musk gets majority control.
…and the rooster’s final comment, thrown over his shoulder as he marched back into the hen-house; “Get out and STAY out!!”
Alas, my rooster, Larry-Bird died of old age about a year ago. He was actually pretty useless, as something got into the yard a couple of months before and mauled three of the hens to death, and him without a scratch on him.
We’ll hold off replacing the hens until I have the back yard fence replaced, and I don’t really want another rooster because those guys are noisy, and at the most inconvenient times, like 4:30 AM.
Chases Eagles:
EMP, no clean water, no sanitation, targeting hydroelectric/flood control reservoirs, targeting nuclear weapons production/waste facilities, collateral damage much?
A well placed nuke could generate an electro-magnetic-pulse that shuts off the power for months.
Our electrical grid and computer systems are vulnerable to both nuclear explosions and coronal mass ejections. The hardening of the electrical grid is the only kind of infrastructure improvement that I’m 100% behind.
Put all your vulnerable electronics in your homemade Faraday Cage…
@Chases Eagles:Frederick, why would we use 20% of our deployed warheads to target 170 silos that will probably be empty by the time the warheads arrive
Not if we went first. Just sayin’. A nuclear war might only be a few minutes’ notice, and it’s not like you would have time to change the targeting, so I think that’s quite logical that a %-age of them would be targeted to silos in case we had that need to strike first.
You seem to be assuming the US would never strike first, but that wasn’t the plan in the Cold War. Only China and India have pledged “no first use” but I’m not sure what a pledge is worth.
and how does he know what the Russian target list is
He doesn’t, neither does he know the US list, he’s working from what little is publicly known.
Also not mentioned is EMP.
No it isn’t, probably because EMP doesn’t go over the horizon (relative to the weapon) and most of the weapons are not going to be detonated high. If a good %-age of the weapons used were specifically optimized for EMP (as opposed to destroying targets) were used there might be something to worry about, but like nuclear winter this is an are where it’s hard to trust anything in the popular media.
Ultimately, with only 1500–ish weapons to use, that’s not a very large number of targets and setting some up for EMP means giving up other targets. Our popular ideas about nuclear war were formed when there were ten times as many.
Got a little reward coming to him in the hen house….
Frederick,
I was (am?) a big, Carl Sagan fan and no expert on nuclear physics, but even as a teen, when I read his predictions of disaster and nuclear winter it seemed like he was over estimating by orders of magnitude.
The author at the link you posted likely makes valid, scientific/mathematical/climactic points, but his or her statement here is also almost certainly correct (emphasis mine):
The basic conclusion of all of this is simple. Nuclear war is definitely not an existential threat to humanity, much less to all life on the planet. Most people even in major urban areas would survive the initial attack, along with a surprising amount of infrastructure. This isn’t to minimize the effects, as it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas, but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up.
We humans have suffered and/or caused a rogues’ gallery of catastrophes over the millennia. A “humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history” is no small thing. It’s impossible to predict or even imagine what civilization would look like on the other side of such an event.
All things considered, the near simultaneous detonation of all available nuclear warheads seems wise to avoid.
@om:collateral damage much?
“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed” lol.
But I don’t know who you think was saying nuclear war wouldn’t be very very bad. Obviously there would be huge and massive collateral damage wouldn’t there?
Certainly wasn’t me you were criticizing, as anyone can see from what I posted (the part where I used the words “really really bad” if you’re having trouble). Maybe you’re posting in another discussion at the same time.
In other words, the political fallout from the disruption and chaos of a large scale, nuclear war is guaranteed to be immense, regardless of the actual, physical destruction and fallout, which will also be significant.
@Rufus T Firefly:it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself,
No doubt. But this is pretty far from the “nothing left but cockroaches” in the popular culture. Unfortunately we can achieve the result you describe without bothering with nukes, and have in human history. Maybe not as quick without nukes though.
nuclear war is guaranteed to be immense,
Pretty sure no one is saying it isn’t.
Regarding EMPs,
It’s one of those cool theories that is observably real and tends to get scientific minded folks creatively imagining all sorts of interesting scenarios (throwing humanity into the pre-1700s is a very intriguing thought experiment), but, like nuclear winter, my guess is predictions far outpace reality.
Not an EMP, but lightning has struck three homes I’ve lived in. All three times the impact on electronics was very non-systematic, non-systemic, unpredictable and random. Circuit boards on some home circuit lines were fried while others on the same circuit were untouched. Some light bulbs exploded, others did not. Some outlets and switches were destroyed, others on the same line were not…
I doubt an all encompassing EMP that completely knocks out a sizable city is currently in any nation’s quiver, let alone pulses from nuclear warheads launched at targets with non-EMP goals.
Frederick,
I think we agree on both counts. I’ve always felt the “nothing left but cockroaches” scare was way overstated. Human hubris tends to overestimate our capabilities. Compared to an average, 5’9″, 160 pound man the Earth is a big place and can shake a lot of things off rather quickly. I doubt we could do anything as winter-inducing as the eruption of a single, major volcano, even if we launched all our nuclear weapons with climate cooling as a goal.
On the other side of the coin is the frailty of human society. We saw all too clearly last year that the botched arrest of one man can lead to the collapse of the rule of law in more than a dozen, major U.S. cities. The chaos created by nuclear bombs going off in our cities would reduce many of us to craven cro-magnons in short order, which could be more beneficial to a foreign power than an EMP or nuclear winter.
“if this is true.”
You didn’t notice Frederick, that I was addressing Chases Eagles? Must have been collateral ego damage.
Rooster was fighting off a much smaller chicken hawk. Wonder what an equal size bird of prey fight would be like.
Musk offering to take over Twitter is very interesting. Too bad some big owners oppose it – seems like they want a higher price. Somehow I doubt that Musk would have too much trouble getting financing, but it might be a problem.
I sure hope we don’t get more real data about small scale nuclear war – nor total war. I don’t think Putin is that crazy – but he does seem a bit crazy now.
@om:You didn’t notice Frederick, that I was addressing Chases Eagles?
You addressed him, but nothing he actually said. You just gave a laundry list of bad things that would happen that he didn’t mention.
It’s a mystery to me who or what you thought you were being responsive to with that kind of answer, and so I invited you to clear it up, that’s all. I just know it wasn’t me.
Laundry list, including consequences likely to result from targeting significant national infrastructure. As opposed to “if this is true.”
Otay.
Rufus T. Firefly,
I have been hit by LEMP while driving. A lightning bolt hit a transformer that I was driving by and it killed my car. Started right back up though.
Re: Carl Sagan / nuclear winter
Rufus:
Sagan was a real scientist and good popular science communicator. However, he wasn’t sufficiently careful about reaching the conclusions he wanted to reach.
The nuclear winter model neglected, for instance, the rotation of the earth, which would have dispersed the dust in the air blocking sunlight, thus reducing nuclear winter to nuclear autumn at worst.
Sagan also joined an effort to take down fringe scholar, Velikovsky, who theorized that Venus had been a loose planet which came close to the Earth and caused destruction on the scale recorded in the Bible and myths. I’m no fan of Velikovsky, but Sagan’s math which demonstrated the long odds of such a close planetary call failed to include the force of gravity.
Then there’s his antagonism towards those who have seen UFOs. The only possibilities Sagan allows is that the viewers are mistaken, lying or hallucinating.
@om:As opposed to “if this is true.”
So you were responding to my comment, which used those words “if this is true”, despite having addressed someone else?
Please clarify, because I don’t want to put words in your mouth that you didn’t say.
“If this is true” linked to an article that said “This isn’t to minimize the effects, as it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas”, and so all the things you listed were assumed in the thing you said “as opposed to” about.
Scout’s honor: did you bother to read it before you posted?
You’ve built an entire thread on a dubious? citation. Chases Eagles brought up EMP and I added a few other obvious things that didn’t seem to be in the citation. And now you’ve spent quite a bit propping up the citation IMO.
On Scout’s honor, how invested are you in it?
@om:I added a few other obvious things that didn’t seem to be in the citation
The article has a list of targeted infrastructure… I notice you won’t answer the question if you read it before posting.
On Scout’s honor, how invested are you in it
A) you don’t answer my questions and b) you question my motives for even bringing it up. It doesn’t look to me like you intend to engage in good faith.
I linked to it because I read it and thought it was interesting and we’ve all been talking about nuclear war lately. That’s the extent of my “investment”. Not everyone likes or is interested in the same things, that’s fine.
I went back and forth with you about what you were trying to say because I did not wish to unfairly assume you weren’t in good faith. If you wanted a good faith discussion, that would be fine, and if you don’t that’s fine too. You do you, man.
Frederick:
I read the citation before posting but didn’t comment immediately, I commented to Chases Eagles, but I already said that. Do do you read what people write? Chases Eagles rebutted your targeting ICBM silos ploy, and brought up EMP.
Now I have noticed that you seem to think that I am obligated to answer your questions. You aren’t my professor, my employer, or parent, and this isn’t for extra credit.
Is this power thing that expects or demands a response and if not given is thus an attribution of motive?
That hen still may have died, if that hawk got her bad. A few years ago I chased some kind of cat that had a chicken in its mouth. The cat tried to go thru a wire fence with the chicken but gave up as I was closing in on them, dropped the chicken and ran off. The chicken lived for a few hours, then died.
This, by the way, is one good reason for having a lid on your chicken coop, and it’s easy enough to do, you just create a minor “roof structure” and then cover it with chicken wire. You also want to extend the chicken wire below the ground at least a couple feet, to stop thieving varmints from burrowing under it.
P.S., this is a side point, but, interestingly, chickens, as birds, lack the quality of processing capsaicin. Mammals generally have it. So, if you retain a container of chicken feed, it is a good idea to mix in red pepper. You may be surprised at how much of your feed is feeding rats, not chickens. The chickens won’t give a damn, but the rats will learn to leave it alone.
BGawwwwKKK!
😛
}}}} Way off topic. Snowing again in Eastern Washington’s Columbia Basin.
Global Warming!
}}} Put all your vulnerable electronics in your homemade Faraday Cage…
Yawrate: I want to see you fit a Honda generator into an ammo can 😛
Just kidding. I agree with the point, you might want to have some electronics inside one, no argument.
But a phone inside one is probably of limited usage, given that anything would take out the cell phone network, and even the landline system.
The real question is how actually vulnerable it is. They would not, after all, be overly forthright about how much they’ve hardened basic elements of it, after all — enough that they could get it back to functional usage in short order if needed.
Face it, bad actors are not the only things which can send out large EMPs in this universe.
But having a lot of paper books on recovery are not a bad idea, nor a couple DVD versions of Encyclopedias and a computer able to read them inside one, along with your generator system being built inside one as well.
P.S., one thing I encountered as an idea is to get a very old copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, ca. 1900-1920, if you can. There’s a lot of stuff in there that newer ones have elided (correctly) as “irrelevant”, but which, after a true collapse, would be markedly invaluable.
}}} I doubt an all encompassing EMP that completely knocks out a sizable city is currently in any nation’s quiver, let alone pulses from nuclear warheads launched at targets with non-EMP goals.
Rufus, as a lifelong computer guy, I have exactly one lightning story:
I was working as “The support guy” at a small firm ca. 2001, about 30 employees at the time. The back of the building had a classic “aluminum storefront” type setup with lots of windows. I was standing there, talking with one of the workers whose office it was, as a lightning strike struck a pine tree out back, probably 50′ away from me… about 30′ away from the closest part of the building. About the only obvious result was some limbs falling off the pine tree (the tree itself later died and was cut down). And there was no other clear effect. BUT — the computer in the office closest (the 30′ point) stopped working within a day, and the one in the office I was standing in became pretty wonky, and was replaced in short order. That is/was it. No other computer in the building was recognizably affected, even some in the same building the floor above the office in question (I know this because that is where my own working facility was at).
Both the computers in question were comparatively old, and planned for replacement already — both users were better off with new laptops, anyway.
But it was interesting, nonetheless.
}}} I’m no fan of Velikovsky, but Sagan’s math which demonstrated the long odds of such a close planetary call failed to include the force of gravity.
Well, this may be true, but, given that Velikovsky’s theories don’t seem to grasp things like statistically extreme improbabilities, this would be a minor failure by comparison.
All by itself: for Venus to shift in its orbit by the extreme suggested and THEN end up in the LEAST eccentric orbit in the solar system (ok, exclude Triton… Venus is #2, but #1 in the planets) is about as close to a “no fucking way” in all of science.
And just for shits and giggles, in very close to the orbit needed to justify Bode’s Law, which may be just a coincidence, but… we only have one solar system to really examine so far, so it may be innate in solar system formation… It seems nontrivial that the adjusted form (developed ca. 1900) also works for the moon systems of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. It may be a stupid-ass coinkidink, but that it works for both solar systems and moon systems suggests it may be relevant to planetary and lunar formation.
Just these two things, all by themselves, mark Velikovsky’s theories as so absurdly preposterous you’d need a hell of a lot of proof just to make them worthy of even being seriously considered. I will leave both the proofs and the skeptical testing thereof to people with far more time on their hands to waste than I have. People who take them seriously as-they-are are basically so ignorant of both math and science as to be unworthy of being taken seriously.
Sagan was not particularly rigorous when relating to his pop-sci efforts, but they are masterpieces of ineluctable proof when compared to something like Velikovsky.
😉
}}} Is this power thing that expects or demands a response and if not given is thus an attribution of motive?
Om, you have engaged on it. If you then choose to not re-engage when someone questions or comments on aspects of what you’ve said, it is not inappropriate to question your capacity for answering the subsequent challenges.
No, you are not obligated to defend your positions, but, having expressed them, when they are challenged, there is a reasonable good-faith expectation of a response to those challenges.
You may ignore the challenges, but this calls into question your assertions at that point, given that you choose not to defend them. And adding a question to your motivations does not unreasonably follow.
There are far too many liberal trolls out there who will state things that are actually false, and then act all surprised and offended when someone challenges those statements.
This does not necessarily apply to you, please realize. But neither is it improper to question such in light of it.
By an example, in a facebook thread, local to my own area, there was commentary about the state of local roads. Given that we also have a number of distribution warehouses in the immediate vicinity being spoken of, I noted the roads were worsened by continual usage of trucks, well above “typical” for any given stretch of roadway.
Some jackwad blatantly stated that “trucks did little more damage to roads than cars” as a counterargument.
I responded with a link to an article which openly asserted (it was an official paper on such, not a random internet piece) that trucks did, on average, six times the equivalent road damage per mile than a car did.
Oddly enough, the lying/stupid jackwad never responded.
I’ve personally seen all too many trolls who deny, directly, assertions made, which anyone with ANY knowledge knows are factually true, with the intention of merely naysaying — or trying to “win” an argument with lies — just because they think they won’t be opposed.
*I*, personally, am offended by the existence of such (and again: not claiming this includes you) assholes, and will generally take the time to destroy their misinformation with reasoning and evidence. Because otherwise, the 10+ lurkers for every commenter will possibly be taken in by their lies.
@ OBH > “Because otherwise, the 10+ lurkers for every commenter will possibly be taken in by their lies.”
IIRC, back when Montage and Manju were the Resident Trolls, this is the reason Neo gave whenever a commenter would ask why she took often copious amounts of time and effort to refute their assertions.
Which she did quite thoroughly and eloquently, I would add.
Curiously, both the M-trolls disappeared after November 2020.
@ OBH > “one thing I encountered as an idea is to get a very old copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, ca. 1900-1920, if you can”
I have the 1911 edition, $5 at a library sale for the full set.
Also have an old OED, although missing its original magnifying glass, and a 1918 Webster’s.
Also the Foxfire series, and a couple of others of the genre.
Plus, there is this coincidentally relevant post from the Federalist – not generally known as a hotbed of prepper-dom.
In a game of nuclear poker do we want Biden or Blinken playing our hand? Can Biden even find the table? Would he hold his cards with the backs facing our opponent or with the fronts facing him?
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I learned as a kid on the farm in NC that it isn’t wise to mess with a rooster, especially when he’s bigger than you, and really especially if he’s defending one of his hens.
Anybody got an i.d. on the intruder? Kinda looks like a Cooper’s to me but I’m no way certain. Heck, I don’t even know where Sunset Farm is.
That wasn’t Foghorn Leghorn in action and it wasn’t the Chicken Hawk either.
Musk is offering to buy Twitter outright for 43 billion. Say what you will about that guy, but he certainly puts his money where is mouth is. He seems pretty serious about pulling some bodies from the burning wreckage that is free and unsupressed speech on that platform.
Growing up on a farm, I never considered roosters chivalrous . . .
According to Fox Business this morning, Musk may not have enough cash to close this deal, and may have trouble getting financing.
Twitter reported 2021 results of $5.08B in revenue and operating loss of $493m which includes a one time litigation related charge of $766m. With results like that you can be sure Musk will struggle to get financing for a nearly 10x revenue stock offer. I wish him well though.
The Saudi Prince who owns 5.2% of Twitter rejected Musks offer. But I have no idea if he controls enough to completely tank the offer outright or not.
Way off topic. Snowing again in Eastern Washington’s Columbia Basin.
No one expects The Abdominal Snowman.
Prior to this announcement Tucker Carlson suggested Musk could ask we, the unwashed masses, to buy Twitter shares and agree to grant him our vote as a proxy.
The latter part of that could certainly work, but I don’t see how the first part does. If it’s not done surreptitiously (and how do you get millions of individuals to act in concert on something surreptitiously?), the activity itself would immediately drive up the price. Not only that, it would almost certainly create at least one opposing party or group doing the same thing but vowing to vote in opposition to Musk. Which would also drive up the price.
I doubt Musk can engineer a 100% takeover. He might be able to engineer a majority take over. However, even with his current, 9+% stake he can have tremendous impact on the company’s policies and future. A percentage of current shareholders would likely vote with him, or support any policies he suggests. It may not be a majority, but it’s likely a majority don’t have a strong view either way, so someone like Musk stating strong policies and plans for change could hold sway.
Regardless, it will be fun to watch.
Translation dum dum dum another one bites the dust.
Yeah, I mean he only needs 50% to be able to fire all the idiots and replace them with people who actually give a crap about free speech. And as you say, he may not even need that. How many Twitter shareholders would be fully on board with his changes versus those that would oppose him or are happy with the stauts quo? If he could increase his ownership to the point that he could override the opposers, who knows?
If this is true, then nuclear war is not nearly as destructive as the public thinks. The obvious implication is that MAD is much less of a deterrent than the public thinks.
While it’s great that nuclear war doesn’t end civilization (though is really really bad), it also (in my opinion) makes the probability of a nuclear exchange higher. But it seems that there’s only two countries with enough nuclear weapons to have any plausible reason to start one: the US and Russia.
tl; dr version: There’s only about 4,000 nuclear weapons ready to go, about 3,000 split between the US and Russia. No one seems to be targeting to maximize civilian deaths, and most nuclear weapons are more modestly sized than they could be. The effects of fallout are grossly overstated in popular media and nuclear winter is not a real thing.
After watching the chicken / hawk fight video, its clear that at least some chickens are not chicken.
No matter what Musk does he still is going to have a company that swipes data from users and sells it to advertisers. Surveillance capitalism.
What else can he do with Twitter? ….that will yield him some profit?
Regarding nukes and their usefulness, the usual suspects objected to modernization of small nuclear weapons, refinement of selective yeild because it would make the more precise and less indiscriminate, and therefore more likely to be used (against Iran or the Norks for example). Can’t have that it would be better for Iran to nuke up anfor the Norks to continue. …. Leftist logic.
There’s yet another attempt at a professional spring football league starting this Saturday. Confusingly, this one is called the “United States Football League (USFL)” despite having no direct relation to the old USFL from the 1980s other than owning the trademarks. The ruleset is similar to the last interation (2020) of the XFL with stuff like 3 point conversions.
Frederick, why would we use 20% of our deployed warheads to target 170 silos that will probably be empty by the time the warheads arrive and how does he know what the Russian target list is? Also not mentioned is EMP.
The Feds will declare Twitter a monopoly after Musk gets majority control.
…and the rooster’s final comment, thrown over his shoulder as he marched back into the hen-house; “Get out and STAY out!!”
Alas, my rooster, Larry-Bird died of old age about a year ago. He was actually pretty useless, as something got into the yard a couple of months before and mauled three of the hens to death, and him without a scratch on him.
We’ll hold off replacing the hens until I have the back yard fence replaced, and I don’t really want another rooster because those guys are noisy, and at the most inconvenient times, like 4:30 AM.
Chases Eagles:
EMP, no clean water, no sanitation, targeting hydroelectric/flood control reservoirs, targeting nuclear weapons production/waste facilities, collateral damage much?
A well placed nuke could generate an electro-magnetic-pulse that shuts off the power for months.
Our electrical grid and computer systems are vulnerable to both nuclear explosions and coronal mass ejections. The hardening of the electrical grid is the only kind of infrastructure improvement that I’m 100% behind.
Put all your vulnerable electronics in your homemade Faraday Cage…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiNQbWZFe-E
@Chases Eagles:Frederick, why would we use 20% of our deployed warheads to target 170 silos that will probably be empty by the time the warheads arrive
Not if we went first. Just sayin’. A nuclear war might only be a few minutes’ notice, and it’s not like you would have time to change the targeting, so I think that’s quite logical that a %-age of them would be targeted to silos in case we had that need to strike first.
You seem to be assuming the US would never strike first, but that wasn’t the plan in the Cold War. Only China and India have pledged “no first use” but I’m not sure what a pledge is worth.
and how does he know what the Russian target list is
He doesn’t, neither does he know the US list, he’s working from what little is publicly known.
Also not mentioned is EMP.
No it isn’t, probably because EMP doesn’t go over the horizon (relative to the weapon) and most of the weapons are not going to be detonated high. If a good %-age of the weapons used were specifically optimized for EMP (as opposed to destroying targets) were used there might be something to worry about, but like nuclear winter this is an are where it’s hard to trust anything in the popular media.
Ultimately, with only 1500–ish weapons to use, that’s not a very large number of targets and setting some up for EMP means giving up other targets. Our popular ideas about nuclear war were formed when there were ten times as many.
Got a little reward coming to him in the hen house….
Frederick,
I was (am?) a big, Carl Sagan fan and no expert on nuclear physics, but even as a teen, when I read his predictions of disaster and nuclear winter it seemed like he was over estimating by orders of magnitude.
The author at the link you posted likely makes valid, scientific/mathematical/climactic points, but his or her statement here is also almost certainly correct (emphasis mine):
We humans have suffered and/or caused a rogues’ gallery of catastrophes over the millennia. A “humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history” is no small thing. It’s impossible to predict or even imagine what civilization would look like on the other side of such an event.
All things considered, the near simultaneous detonation of all available nuclear warheads seems wise to avoid.
@om:collateral damage much?
“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed” lol.
But I don’t know who you think was saying nuclear war wouldn’t be very very bad. Obviously there would be huge and massive collateral damage wouldn’t there?
Certainly wasn’t me you were criticizing, as anyone can see from what I posted (the part where I used the words “really really bad” if you’re having trouble). Maybe you’re posting in another discussion at the same time.
In other words, the political fallout from the disruption and chaos of a large scale, nuclear war is guaranteed to be immense, regardless of the actual, physical destruction and fallout, which will also be significant.
@Rufus T Firefly:it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself,
No doubt. But this is pretty far from the “nothing left but cockroaches” in the popular culture. Unfortunately we can achieve the result you describe without bothering with nukes, and have in human history. Maybe not as quick without nukes though.
nuclear war is guaranteed to be immense,
Pretty sure no one is saying it isn’t.
Regarding EMPs,
It’s one of those cool theories that is observably real and tends to get scientific minded folks creatively imagining all sorts of interesting scenarios (throwing humanity into the pre-1700s is a very intriguing thought experiment), but, like nuclear winter, my guess is predictions far outpace reality.
Not an EMP, but lightning has struck three homes I’ve lived in. All three times the impact on electronics was very non-systematic, non-systemic, unpredictable and random. Circuit boards on some home circuit lines were fried while others on the same circuit were untouched. Some light bulbs exploded, others did not. Some outlets and switches were destroyed, others on the same line were not…
I doubt an all encompassing EMP that completely knocks out a sizable city is currently in any nation’s quiver, let alone pulses from nuclear warheads launched at targets with non-EMP goals.
Frederick,
I think we agree on both counts. I’ve always felt the “nothing left but cockroaches” scare was way overstated. Human hubris tends to overestimate our capabilities. Compared to an average, 5’9″, 160 pound man the Earth is a big place and can shake a lot of things off rather quickly. I doubt we could do anything as winter-inducing as the eruption of a single, major volcano, even if we launched all our nuclear weapons with climate cooling as a goal.
On the other side of the coin is the frailty of human society. We saw all too clearly last year that the botched arrest of one man can lead to the collapse of the rule of law in more than a dozen, major U.S. cities. The chaos created by nuclear bombs going off in our cities would reduce many of us to craven cro-magnons in short order, which could be more beneficial to a foreign power than an EMP or nuclear winter.
“if this is true.”
You didn’t notice Frederick, that I was addressing Chases Eagles? Must have been collateral ego damage.
Rooster was fighting off a much smaller chicken hawk. Wonder what an equal size bird of prey fight would be like.
Musk offering to take over Twitter is very interesting. Too bad some big owners oppose it – seems like they want a higher price. Somehow I doubt that Musk would have too much trouble getting financing, but it might be a problem.
I sure hope we don’t get more real data about small scale nuclear war – nor total war. I don’t think Putin is that crazy – but he does seem a bit crazy now.
@om:You didn’t notice Frederick, that I was addressing Chases Eagles?
You addressed him, but nothing he actually said. You just gave a laundry list of bad things that would happen that he didn’t mention.
It’s a mystery to me who or what you thought you were being responsive to with that kind of answer, and so I invited you to clear it up, that’s all. I just know it wasn’t me.
Laundry list, including consequences likely to result from targeting significant national infrastructure. As opposed to “if this is true.”
Otay.
Rufus T. Firefly,
I have been hit by LEMP while driving. A lightning bolt hit a transformer that I was driving by and it killed my car. Started right back up though.
Re: Carl Sagan / nuclear winter
Rufus:
Sagan was a real scientist and good popular science communicator. However, he wasn’t sufficiently careful about reaching the conclusions he wanted to reach.
The nuclear winter model neglected, for instance, the rotation of the earth, which would have dispersed the dust in the air blocking sunlight, thus reducing nuclear winter to nuclear autumn at worst.
Sagan also joined an effort to take down fringe scholar, Velikovsky, who theorized that Venus had been a loose planet which came close to the Earth and caused destruction on the scale recorded in the Bible and myths. I’m no fan of Velikovsky, but Sagan’s math which demonstrated the long odds of such a close planetary call failed to include the force of gravity.
Then there’s his antagonism towards those who have seen UFOs. The only possibilities Sagan allows is that the viewers are mistaken, lying or hallucinating.
@om:As opposed to “if this is true.”
So you were responding to my comment, which used those words “if this is true”, despite having addressed someone else?
Please clarify, because I don’t want to put words in your mouth that you didn’t say.
“If this is true” linked to an article that said “This isn’t to minimize the effects, as it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas”, and so all the things you listed were assumed in the thing you said “as opposed to” about.
Scout’s honor: did you bother to read it before you posted?
You’ve built an entire thread on a dubious? citation. Chases Eagles brought up EMP and I added a few other obvious things that didn’t seem to be in the citation. And now you’ve spent quite a bit propping up the citation IMO.
On Scout’s honor, how invested are you in it?
@om:I added a few other obvious things that didn’t seem to be in the citation
The article has a list of targeted infrastructure… I notice you won’t answer the question if you read it before posting.
On Scout’s honor, how invested are you in it
A) you don’t answer my questions and b) you question my motives for even bringing it up. It doesn’t look to me like you intend to engage in good faith.
I linked to it because I read it and thought it was interesting and we’ve all been talking about nuclear war lately. That’s the extent of my “investment”. Not everyone likes or is interested in the same things, that’s fine.
I went back and forth with you about what you were trying to say because I did not wish to unfairly assume you weren’t in good faith. If you wanted a good faith discussion, that would be fine, and if you don’t that’s fine too. You do you, man.
Frederick:
I read the citation before posting but didn’t comment immediately, I commented to Chases Eagles, but I already said that. Do do you read what people write? Chases Eagles rebutted your targeting ICBM silos ploy, and brought up EMP.
Now I have noticed that you seem to think that I am obligated to answer your questions. You aren’t my professor, my employer, or parent, and this isn’t for extra credit.
Is this power thing that expects or demands a response and if not given is thus an attribution of motive?
About those lightning strikes, EMPs, and other dangers.
https://notthebee.com/article/some-dude-captured-the-exact-moment-a-bolt-of-lightning-hit-his-bros-car
That hen still may have died, if that hawk got her bad. A few years ago I chased some kind of cat that had a chicken in its mouth. The cat tried to go thru a wire fence with the chicken but gave up as I was closing in on them, dropped the chicken and ran off. The chicken lived for a few hours, then died.
This, by the way, is one good reason for having a lid on your chicken coop, and it’s easy enough to do, you just create a minor “roof structure” and then cover it with chicken wire. You also want to extend the chicken wire below the ground at least a couple feet, to stop thieving varmints from burrowing under it.
P.S., this is a side point, but, interestingly, chickens, as birds, lack the quality of processing capsaicin. Mammals generally have it. So, if you retain a container of chicken feed, it is a good idea to mix in red pepper. You may be surprised at how much of your feed is feeding rats, not chickens. The chickens won’t give a damn, but the rats will learn to leave it alone.
BGawwwwKKK!
😛
}}}} Way off topic. Snowing again in Eastern Washington’s Columbia Basin.
Global Warming!
}}} Put all your vulnerable electronics in your homemade Faraday Cage…
Yawrate: I want to see you fit a Honda generator into an ammo can 😛
Just kidding. I agree with the point, you might want to have some electronics inside one, no argument.
But a phone inside one is probably of limited usage, given that anything would take out the cell phone network, and even the landline system.
The real question is how actually vulnerable it is. They would not, after all, be overly forthright about how much they’ve hardened basic elements of it, after all — enough that they could get it back to functional usage in short order if needed.
Face it, bad actors are not the only things which can send out large EMPs in this universe.
But having a lot of paper books on recovery are not a bad idea, nor a couple DVD versions of Encyclopedias and a computer able to read them inside one, along with your generator system being built inside one as well.
P.S., one thing I encountered as an idea is to get a very old copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, ca. 1900-1920, if you can. There’s a lot of stuff in there that newer ones have elided (correctly) as “irrelevant”, but which, after a true collapse, would be markedly invaluable.
}}} I doubt an all encompassing EMP that completely knocks out a sizable city is currently in any nation’s quiver, let alone pulses from nuclear warheads launched at targets with non-EMP goals.
Rufus, as a lifelong computer guy, I have exactly one lightning story:
I was working as “The support guy” at a small firm ca. 2001, about 30 employees at the time. The back of the building had a classic “aluminum storefront” type setup with lots of windows. I was standing there, talking with one of the workers whose office it was, as a lightning strike struck a pine tree out back, probably 50′ away from me… about 30′ away from the closest part of the building. About the only obvious result was some limbs falling off the pine tree (the tree itself later died and was cut down). And there was no other clear effect. BUT — the computer in the office closest (the 30′ point) stopped working within a day, and the one in the office I was standing in became pretty wonky, and was replaced in short order. That is/was it. No other computer in the building was recognizably affected, even some in the same building the floor above the office in question (I know this because that is where my own working facility was at).
Both the computers in question were comparatively old, and planned for replacement already — both users were better off with new laptops, anyway.
But it was interesting, nonetheless.
}}} I’m no fan of Velikovsky, but Sagan’s math which demonstrated the long odds of such a close planetary call failed to include the force of gravity.
Well, this may be true, but, given that Velikovsky’s theories don’t seem to grasp things like statistically extreme improbabilities, this would be a minor failure by comparison.
All by itself: for Venus to shift in its orbit by the extreme suggested and THEN end up in the LEAST eccentric orbit in the solar system (ok, exclude Triton… Venus is #2, but #1 in the planets) is about as close to a “no fucking way” in all of science.
And just for shits and giggles, in very close to the orbit needed to justify Bode’s Law, which may be just a coincidence, but… we only have one solar system to really examine so far, so it may be innate in solar system formation… It seems nontrivial that the adjusted form (developed ca. 1900) also works for the moon systems of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. It may be a stupid-ass coinkidink, but that it works for both solar systems and moon systems suggests it may be relevant to planetary and lunar formation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_eccentricity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titius%E2%80%93Bode_law
Just these two things, all by themselves, mark Velikovsky’s theories as so absurdly preposterous you’d need a hell of a lot of proof just to make them worthy of even being seriously considered. I will leave both the proofs and the skeptical testing thereof to people with far more time on their hands to waste than I have. People who take them seriously as-they-are are basically so ignorant of both math and science as to be unworthy of being taken seriously.
Sagan was not particularly rigorous when relating to his pop-sci efforts, but they are masterpieces of ineluctable proof when compared to something like Velikovsky.
😉
}}} Is this power thing that expects or demands a response and if not given is thus an attribution of motive?
Om, you have engaged on it. If you then choose to not re-engage when someone questions or comments on aspects of what you’ve said, it is not inappropriate to question your capacity for answering the subsequent challenges.
No, you are not obligated to defend your positions, but, having expressed them, when they are challenged, there is a reasonable good-faith expectation of a response to those challenges.
You may ignore the challenges, but this calls into question your assertions at that point, given that you choose not to defend them. And adding a question to your motivations does not unreasonably follow.
There are far too many liberal trolls out there who will state things that are actually false, and then act all surprised and offended when someone challenges those statements.
This does not necessarily apply to you, please realize. But neither is it improper to question such in light of it.
By an example, in a facebook thread, local to my own area, there was commentary about the state of local roads. Given that we also have a number of distribution warehouses in the immediate vicinity being spoken of, I noted the roads were worsened by continual usage of trucks, well above “typical” for any given stretch of roadway.
Some jackwad blatantly stated that “trucks did little more damage to roads than cars” as a counterargument.
I responded with a link to an article which openly asserted (it was an official paper on such, not a random internet piece) that trucks did, on average, six times the equivalent road damage per mile than a car did.
Oddly enough, the lying/stupid jackwad never responded.
I’ve personally seen all too many trolls who deny, directly, assertions made, which anyone with ANY knowledge knows are factually true, with the intention of merely naysaying — or trying to “win” an argument with lies — just because they think they won’t be opposed.
*I*, personally, am offended by the existence of such (and again: not claiming this includes you) assholes, and will generally take the time to destroy their misinformation with reasoning and evidence. Because otherwise, the 10+ lurkers for every commenter will possibly be taken in by their lies.
@ OBH > “Because otherwise, the 10+ lurkers for every commenter will possibly be taken in by their lies.”
IIRC, back when Montage and Manju were the Resident Trolls, this is the reason Neo gave whenever a commenter would ask why she took often copious amounts of time and effort to refute their assertions.
Which she did quite thoroughly and eloquently, I would add.
Curiously, both the M-trolls disappeared after November 2020.
@ OBH > “one thing I encountered as an idea is to get a very old copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, ca. 1900-1920, if you can”
I have the 1911 edition, $5 at a library sale for the full set.
Also have an old OED, although missing its original magnifying glass, and a 1918 Webster’s.
Also the Foxfire series, and a couple of others of the genre.
Plus, there is this coincidentally relevant post from the Federalist – not generally known as a hotbed of prepper-dom.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/13/heres-how-to-butcher-a-chicken-in-your-backyard-for-dinner/
Two new datapoints out today from “The Hill”–
https://thehill.com/policy/international/3269401-russia-sends-formal-letter-warning-us-to-stop-arming-ukraine-report/
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3269696-zelensky-says-world-should-prepare-for-russia-to-use-nuclear-weapons/
In a game of nuclear poker do we want Biden or Blinken playing our hand? Can Biden even find the table? Would he hold his cards with the backs facing our opponent or with the fronts facing him?