Thursday, March 31, 2022
The Worst Part of Biden’s New Budget? by Dan Mitchell
Since the economy suffers when tax rates go up and the burden of government spending increases, there obviously are plenty of awful features in President Biden’s newly released budget.
If I had to select a worst feature, though, I’d be tempted to pick the proposed spending hikes that Biden is seeking for some of Washington’s most-wasteful bureaucracies.
Here’s a chart from a story in today’s Washington Post (based on Table S-8 in the budget), which summarizes how much additional “discretionary spending” Biden is seeking.
Why am I upset about these proposed spending increases?
From a big-picture economic perspective, it’s bad fiscal policy to allow the burden of government spending to grow faster than the private sector.
And since Biden is projecting that real GDP will grown by 2.8 percent next year and inflation will be 2.1 percent during the same period (see Table S-9 of the budget), he obviously wants all these bureaucracies to enjoy big increases (unlike families, who are losing ground compared to inflation).
But I’m also irked from a targeted fiscal perspective. That’s because Biden wants giant spending increases for bureaucracies that should not even exist.
Here’s what I’ve written about some of them.
- Get rid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
- Shut down the Department of Agriculture.
- Eliminate the Department of Transportation.
- Abolish the Department of Education.
- Pull the plug on the Department of Energy.
- Phase out the Department of Veterans Affairs.
By the way, “worst feature” is not the same as most economically damaging feature.
There are two other parts of Biden’s budget that definitely will cause more harm.
- Many of the same tax increases he was pushing last year, plus Elizabeth Warren’s “billionaire’s tax” that will force people to pay tax on unrealized capital gains.
- Many of the redistribution programs he was pushing last year as part of his plan to expand the size and scope of entitlements and increase the burden of the welfare state.
These tax increases and entitlement expansions will do considerably more damage than the discretionary spending increases excerpted above.
But it’s still an outrage that Biden is shoveling more money at some of Washington’s most wasteful and counterproductive bureaucracies.
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
Corvallis Post #91, The American Legion, Department of Montana, Inc.: This year's Memorial Day Parade entry form is now...
Monday, March 28, 2022
Naming Names You see, there are real people behind all these disorders of our national life. Many more besides just the notorious Dr. Fauci… by James Howard Kunstler
One reason American movies are so bad these days is they have forgotten how to tell a story. Stuff just happens to characters. Cause, effect, and consequence no longer exist in the workshops of Hollywood. And one might sense that these imperatives are likewise missing from what used to be known as real life in the USA, with all its stories and narratives. Stuff just happens to the people in this country now. And then sometimes, stuff un-happens.
With the Russian operation in Ukraine alarming the populace, you might have forgotten the late Covid-19 epidemic that provoked so much public hysteria and government policy overreach. Stuff happened during those two-plus years of Covid-19, and, even with Ukraine blaring from the cable news channels, Covid-19 stuff is still happening. Vaccine mandates are still in force, in New York City, for instance — except for performers and ballplayers, who are exempted now, as announced this week by Mayor Eric Adams. If you detect any specious reasoning behind that diktat, at least you know who made it happen.
But so many other things just happened with Covid-19, rather serious things, and no one has had to answer for them, certainly not Dr. Anthony Fauci, who just days ago talked up another booster shot of his obviously defective mRNA “vaccines.” Dr. Fauci proposed that despite a raft of emerging statistics from the life insurance realm that indicate a shockingly high number of mysterious all-causes deaths for people in the prime of life. Several conditions appear to be killing them: 1) blood clotting in the capillaries of various organs, apparently caused by the “vaccine’s” main active ingredient, spike proteins; 2) heart inflammation (pericarditis and myocarditis); 3) a mystifying array of neurological afflictions; and 4) switched-off immune system toggles, including the cellular mechanism for preventing the growth of cancers.
This developing picture of a public health catastrophe, growing more robustly detailed by the week, has somehow not alerted the general public, not least because the entire public health officialdom does not want them to know about it. In fact, as averred to above, they are all still busy promoting the “vaccines” which are responsible. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the CDC, is rather well-known — though her duties appear limited to the public impersonation of a “concerned mom” — but whoever heard of Rebecca Bunnell, PhD, Director of the CDC’s Office of Science? Does Science play any part in the emerging disaster of sharply rising all-causes deaths? It would be good to know, don’t you think? Anyone heard from Daniel Jernigan, MD, Deputy CDC Director for Public Health Science and Surveillance (DDPHSS)? You’d think he would be out there surveilling things.
How about Brian C. Moyer, PhD, Director of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. He would be in charge, presumably, of the VAERS system, which tabulates adverse vaccine events. That system evidently under-reports adverse events by a shocking amount — some say only 1 percent are ever recorded. Why is that? Because it is a website that is so notoriously ill-designed and hard to use that the CDC pledged to fix it more than ten years ago and never got around to it. Why is that, Dr. Moyer? Has anyone asked him? I don’t think so.
There is the appalling and still on-going campaign to suppress Covid early treatment off-label drugs such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, fluvoxamine, et cetera, though the protocols have been proven highly effective in clinical practice as well as scores of internationally peer-reviewed studies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died because these drugs were maliciously outlawed. In many states, doctors can be punished with loss of medical licenses for using these safe and effective drugs, or even talking them up.
Who exactly in public health was responsible for this suppression? Who gave the orders for it? Or did it just happen? Was it Francis Collins, recently retired director of the National Institutes for Health (NIH)? He must have at least approved the policy. Stephen M. Hahn, MD, who was Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from Dec. 2019 to Jan. 2021, the heart of the Covid event time-line? Janet Woodcock, who was Acting Commissioner from Jan. 2021 to Feb. 2022 — and was previously the longtime chief of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research? Or the current chief of that outfit, one Patrizia Cavvazoni, MD? Or Jacqueline A. O’Shaughnessy, PhD, the FDA’s Acting Chief Scientist? Was outlawing early treatment in their purviews? Did they even know about it? How could they not?
Consider another killer on-the-scene: the drug remdesivir, a Dr. Fauci production, originally for Hepatitis-C, manufactured by Gilead Sciences. US public health has anointed remdesivir the standard-of-practice for patients severely ill with stage-two inflammatory Covid in the ICUs all over America. It is well-known that remdesivir destroys kidney function in as little as five days. This supposed anti-viral agent is being used after the high-viral-load stage-one phase of Covid is over. How many ICU patients have been killed by remdesivir?
Why not ask Judith A McMeekin, Pharma D, the FDA’s Associate Commissioner for Regulatory Affairs? Or Sam Posner, Acting Director for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases? Or Rima F. Khabbaz, MD, Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases? Or Debra Houry, MD, Acting Principal Deputy Director of the CDC and, since 2014, Director of the Center for Injury Prevention and Control? Or the CDC’s Chief Medical Officer, Mitchell Wolf, MD? Or Nathaniel Smith, MD, CDC’s Deputy Director of Public Health Service and Implementation? Or maybe Jay C. Butler, Deputy CDC Director for Infectious Diseases?
You see, there are real people in high places with exalted credentials who must in some way be responsible for the epic blunders committed during the Covid-19 saga. Or else they allowed these actions to happen on-purpose. Will any actual persons answer for any of this?
Oh, by the way, perhaps you noticed the ruckus over University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas (born William Thomas) recently winning the Women’s 500-yard freestyle race in the NCAA nationals. How did it happen that the six-foot-four Thomas, oddly still in possession of normal male genitalia, got permission to compete against, shall we say, natural-born women? You can ask Mark Emmert, the NCAA President, or Wendell E. Pritchett, President of the U. of Penn., or Alanna W Shanahan, Penn Director of Athletics, or Lauren C. Procopio, Assistant Director for Men’s/Women’s Swimming.
You see, there are real people behind all these disorders of our national life. Many more besides just the notorious Dr. Fauci… and many more work under all these directors of this-and-that. What have they done? Or did stuff just happen?
NATO and Russia — Whistling Past Each Other’s Graveyards by Tom Luongo
“What we have here, is a failure to communicate.”
-Cool Hand Luke
There are so many angles from which to view the war in Ukraine. I’ve tried my best to cover them to get a sense of why we are where we are… which is headed towards a much larger conflict.
Despite my deep cynicism, I am essentially an optimist. I tend to see opportunities for end games that result in humanity walking away from any kind of final solution. And sometimes that means having to look beyond the boundary conditions of the current conflict and see it in the grander context of what humanity is trying to achieve.
So remember, this is my bias. There’s a solution even if things look bleak because humanity has always recoiled from the worst of its excesses when personally confronted with them, at least for a few generations until the memories fade.
In WWII the nominal good guys, the Allies, defeated the nominal bad guys, the Axis, but mainly the Nazis. I’m not one to subscribe to that caricature of events. I know the issues are far deeper than that.
During war both sides’ propaganda becomes the height of reductionist. The other side is bad.
Putin, for his part, is calling Ukrainians both brothers of Russia and Nazis at the same time, overplaying the genocide of Russians in the Donbass. While in the US we’re just calling the Russians by names we would normally reserve for ants invading our kitchen.
This conflict between West and East is a civilizational one where each side uses words in very specific ways which creates the opportunity for this type of reductionist propaganda. Joaquin Flores in my podcast with him tried to elucidate this idea from the Russians’ perspective.
There he talked about what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov means by the word ‘neutral’ as it regards Ukraine. Neutral to Lavrov and Russia means part of the greater Russian Union State, making Ukraine a partner to Russia similar to Belarus and soon to be Kazakhstan.
The US and those angry ants at British Intelligence who craft the talking points for this war, define neutral like the Swiss: not aligned, a buffer state. And that mismatch in definition is used cynically to promote this idea by NATO and the West that the Russians are not fulfilling their international obligations and justify their helping Ukraine’s heroic defense of itself from a hostile invader.
And Russia is now a hostile invader. That much is true, certainly.
To promote the simplistic narrative is to ignore the last eight years in Ukraine as well as NATO’s advance across Europe over the last 30.
But this is where the unbridgeable gap between East and West lies.
The fault for this gap lies wholly with NATO and the West who have steadily advanced until they reached the Russian border at the Donbass. To discuss this in any other terms is pathetic and just an excuse to exercise one’s inherent racism and bloodlust against Russians.
That is what everyone putting a Ukrainian flag on their Twitter feed is doing whether they realize it or not.
You are not supporting the right to self-determination by a people acting freely here. Ukraine is a puppet state crucial to an aggressive war of conquest by the very people who brought you two years of privation and humiliation over COVID and now want to farm you as tax cattle while living in an unescapable Orwellian Panopticon.
Russia’s list of grievances are as long as any bill that passes through a Congressional committee these days. But the big ones have been the attempts on flipping Belarus and Kazakhstan. These two pivotal countries were victims of failed revolutions to overthrow the governments there and install NATO-controlled puppets, trying to replicate the ‘victory’ in Ukraine in 2014.
Not only did they fail miserably, if anything they furthered Russia’s aims to bring the former Soviet republics back into their orbit and end their flirtations with the West. The only one of these left, really, is Ukraine, the Baltics simply do not matter in any strategic sense.
To discuss this war in anything other than these terms is to purposefully miss the point. And our Neoconservatives in the State Dept. and the White House have absolutely prosecuted foreign policy in that way, showing a level of disingenuousness and willful obtuseness that frankly beggars description without resorting to swearing like a sailor.
That can only lead to the conclusion I have made multiple times. This war was chosen by the West. It was designed this way. All “attempts” at diplomacy by NATO, the UK, France and the US were simply nothing more than time-buying exercises to build up Ukraine’s strength to launch a blitz of the Donbass and sanction Russia for even responding.
Why? Well, frankly, to win and subjugate Russia to our oligarchic system of control, c.f. that Orwellian Panopticon I just mentioned. So, we purposefully use the term ‘Ukraine’ to mean something completely different than what the Russians mean by the name. Ukraine to the West is the pre-2014 border. That hasn’t been reality for eight years.
To the Russians Crimea is Russia, not Ukraine. The Donbass could have been negotiated down but that was refused by the West completely, rejecting the implementation of the Minsk Agreements.
Make no mistake, Minsk II was nothing more than another time-buying exercise by NATO and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel to get Nordstream 2 completed and allow NATO to build up the Ukrainian military to the point where it could credibly blitz the Donbass.
When Putin ordered a massive multi-front invasion he was simply pre-empting an attack that was coming.
The sanctions packages implemented since then were already prepared. They were happening no matter what move Putin made. There was no different outcome here, only the dates on which these events were going to take place.
NATO chose the place. Putin chose the time. Everything else is chatter and noise.
So where are we today?
Both sides believe just enough of their own propaganda as to dig in on their strategies.
Putin and Russia are methodically turning Ukraine into a meat grinder with a 1000 mile front the UAF cannot possibly keep supplied. The initial attack by Russia was designed to knock out logistics behind UAF lines and make it all but impossible for the cells of Ukrainian forces to support each other without ceding large amounts of territory, if they could even get out from under Russian fire control.
The US and NATO think they can now fight a proxy war turning Ukraine into Afghanistan in the 1980’s by sending in billions in weapons and doing everything short of sending in official troops to turn this into an official NATO v. Russia war.
The losses on both sides will be horrific and high. The chaos unleashed on Ukrainian civilians is terrible. The scenes in recently ‘liberated’ Mariupol are heart breaking.
Ukraine should have surrendered early on but Davos and NATO do not want that, because that would end their legal justification to send aid in and the dreams of bleeding Russia white through sanctions and outright theft of their foreign assets.
But the evolution of this war is proceeding exactly as I told you early on. Opening salvos have been fired, now the real war for the future of humanity begins at the legal and financial level.
Russia has made many smart moves in shoring up its financial position. It kept the gas flowing to Europe to leave the communications lines open there. But since the EU are not reliable actors Russia put them on the published ‘unfriendly list’ of countries that now are allowed to pay for their Russian exports in either rubles (announced by Putin earlier this week) or gold (announced yesterday).
The response to this move by the Twitterati today has been hilarious. It’s clear the talking point went out of PR central that Russia is ‘violating its contracts’ by demanding payment in something other than the contracted currency.
In a post-sanctions environment where the currency of the contract is useless to one party of the contract that contract is no longer valid. This is a basic contract of adhesion issue where one party has forced another into a subordinate position vis a vis the contract.
And when that’s the case, the contract as written is invalid. Period.
This lesson can be applied all across this conflict to see where NATO, the US and Europe have abrogated their responsibilities towards Russia over and over again — START, INF, Budapest, Minsk, etc. — and yet still feel they have the justification under international law to call Russia the aggressor and escalate the conflict.
It’s childish and irresponsible but it’s also so endemically Davos. When you’re the superior power you can enforce contract rules or break them and leave the other person twisting. Contracts only matter when people abide by them.
As everyone with some working gray matter has pointed out, Russia has the real power here because it produces what the world needs while the people pushing this war are doing so from an increasingly shaky foundation of paper assets.
So, contracts be damned, it’s gold or rubles for natural gas, unfriendly Europe.
It’s bitcoin or local currencies for everyone else.
Ukraine will be neutral. China will remain friendly. Words matter when a person wants them to matter.
And from where I’ve sat these past ten years the Russians have honored their words while the West has used them as weapons.
If we live in a world where agreements are simply a tactical extension of war then Russia tearing off the band-aid in Ukraine ended that illusion.
Both sides here aren’t listening to the other until one side is forced to, by facts on the ground or in the plumbing of the financial system. The end result will be a world with a new Iron Curtain. The sanctions will stay in place until there is a full political revolution on either side.
My bet is on that happening in the West since it is psychologically and culturally far weaker.
The West and NATO believe they can effect regime change in Russia by costing some oligarchs their yachts. The Russians feel they can grind out a victory on the ground in Ukraine while running out the clock on the petrodollar-and-paper-gold-inflated monetary system of the West.
Neither side has yet taken enough damage to back off from their positions. Biden stood up at NATO in Brussels and told the world food shortages are coming and we must endure them because Russia.
Davos is intentionally, through Biden, Blinken and NATO, trying to destroy the world economy so no one needs Russian energy while killing off millions more useless eaters.
The Russians responded with: We take gold or rubles for wheat and gas, just not useless euros or dollars. At the same time they finished cleaning the Azov battalion animals out of the important port city of Mariupol, key to the chip industry.
Then I read on Zerohedge that the Russians are so thoroughly tired of listening to lying US officials that they aren’t even taking calls on their ‘deconfliction hot lines’ between senior military staff. Only the low-level operators are talking.
But Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in a statement that the Russian officials “have so far declined to engage.”
…“We must avoid a scenario of NATO and Russia sleepwalking into war because senior leaders can’t pick up a phone and explain to each other what is happening,” he added.
The only ones sleepwalking into a NATO/Russia war will be the Neocons who still think some logistics failures around Kharkov and Kiev equal a Russian military weak enough to force into submission. Very soon, Davos will come to the realization they can’t win a war against a united Global South intent on de-dollarizing and repricing their trade in real gold, not their paper, and real barrels of oil.
Then they’ll want to talk.
At that point, unfortunately, the graveyards all across Ukraine, Russia and the West will be overflowing.
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W2LJ QRP - When you care to send the very least!: The bee in the bonnet of some American Hams
Preparing for Infrastructure Failures RESILIENT LIFE By Samantha Biggers
While the Ukraine invasion, energy crisis and COVID-19 drive most of our news today, the neglected upkeep of the our infrastructure combined with the ongoing international threats to it should factor into your efforts for greater resilience. And, it’s not just a U.S. problem because many countries throughout the world experience similar issues.
In this article, I will discuss the following threats, but I am also going to include a section on how you can prepare.
- Dams
- Ports
- Nuclear Plants
- Cyber Attacks
- The Grid
- Railroads
- Oil Refineries and Pipelines
- Roads and Bridges
Dams
The 1935 Works Progress Administration was responsible for a great deal of the bridges and roads we use today. Dams were another key part of the WPA projects and they are now 80 years old and starting to show major signs of deterioration.
Rebar rusts
Dams help generate power to feed the grid. In my area, the Tennesee Valley Authority (TVA) uses many power-generating dams. The largest example of this is the Lake Fontana dam. At 480 ft, this concrete dam is an awesome sight to see. Unfortunately, the dam was built in 1942 and completed in 1944. Although it is made of reinforced concrete, the steel rebar inside is getting old. As rebar rusts with moisture, all of the reinforcements in older dams will decay. Dams that are older have had even more years to deteriorate.
Earth dams are only meant to last for so long
Some big dams are made of nothing but rock and dirt. While earthen dams can work well for decades, it is typically advised that within 50 years, they should be reinforced.
The Fort Peck Dam near Glasgow, Montana measures 250 feet tall and an outstanding 21,026 feet long. That is a ridiculous size for an earthen dam. Completed in 1940, it holds back the 5th largest reservoir of water in the United States. The reservoir itself extends a whopping 134 miles. Can you imagine what would happen if there was a failure at any point of the 21,026 feet of this dam?
The Bottom Dam Line
If dams fail, not only will great portions of populated areas be flooded, but any ability to produce power could be wiped out for a long time, if not permanently. Losing the power generation capability of even just a few hydroelectric dams in any area would significantly affect the availability of electricity and the cost. Not taking care of our nation’s dams is a major threat to the grid.
How To Prepare
If you live downstream of a dam, you need to be ready to move. Having bug-out bags on hand for a rapid evacuation due to a leak or release of water is highly advisable. At the same time, if something major happens suddenly and you live close to a dam, you may not have enough time to escape. That is the scary part. That being said, you should familiarize yourself with the roads and topography of your area. Getting to higher ground as quickly as possible is the goal during a dam emergency.
I don’t like telling people that they should move, but concrete dams are safer than earthen dams, and if I lived close enough to a large earthen dam, I might consider moving further away. The lack of workers is another concern. Even if the government suddenly decides to make dams safer, I am not sure about their ability to get workers, especially with vaccine mandates in place.
Ports
If you read the news much, you know our ports have a lot of container ships waiting off the coast to be unloaded. This is just one of the major problems in the supply chain and transportation industry contributing to empty shelves and the unavailability of goods. Even if manufacturers could keep up with production, a problem is getting things where they are needed.
Foreign ports that shut down entirely for COVID-19 also contributes to this challenge. Not too long ago, a single case of COVID was rumored to have shut down a port in Schezwen, China.
Lack of employees combined with additional employee loss due to vaccine mandates has only worsened the problems at our ports.
At the time of writing, the busiest port in the U.S. is struggling to unload ships forcing more and more to wait offshore for long periods of time. There seems to be little being done to solve port congestion issues. The Biden administration telling ports to operate 24/7 during a labor shortage has proven ineffective.
How To Prepare
Until manufacturing actually returns to the U.S. in a significant way, we must deal with foreign-made products being in shorter supply and costing a lot more.
Some goods may not be available. This will lead consumers to make staples last longer.
Consumers can make a choice to cut out less important expenses from their budget, so they have more money to spend on foreign-produced goods. In some cases, the consumer may find that domestically-produced versions are now a better bargain, although in today’s environment that may not often be the case.
A lot of us have plenty of practice with supply disruptions over the last two years, but if things don’t improve, we may be in for a worsening situation. While you cannot stock up on everything, now is the time to consider what household and emergency supplies you might need on hand.
Questions I get asked a lot is how much food, water, and household supplies do I think people should have on hand? One year for most household goods is an appropriate goal to strive for, but I know it is unrealistic for a lot of people (especially when it comes to water). I generally advise people to start with a few months, and then add to that as budget and space allow. You can fit a lot of dehydrated food and canned goods in a closet with proper planning. Even those in apartments can have a year’s worth of food on hand if they buy freeze-dried or dehydrated foods and make use of every nook and cranny.
As long as electricity is available, extra small appliances might be worth purchasing. Coffee makers, microwaves, and other inexpensive appliances will increase in cost or not be available due to a combined lack of manufacturing and transportation issues.
Medical equipment and many medications are manufactured in China or India. If anyone in your home uses oxygen machines or other essential home medical equipment make sure it is in good condition and keep on hand extra masks or parts that tend to wear out. Also, consider extra battery packs should the grid go down. As for medications, keep as large of a supply on hand as you can. Renew your prescription as soon as you are allowed. Ask your doctor to write prescription for a 90-day supply if possible.
Nuclear Plants
In some cases, nuclear plants are 40 years old or more. Instead of improving or shutting them down, they are given a renewal certification and allowed to continue operation.
People talk a lot about the general impact of the grid going down, but they almost always leave out one of the more terrifying possibilities during a moderate to long-term power outage: the onsite waste storage.
Nuclear facilities store a lot of spent fuel rods and waste on-site because the U.S. never created a spot for mass waste storage. Remember Yucca Mountain? Well, that never happened, so nuclear power plants just rely on cooling ponds with pumps that keep cool water flowing into special pools that house spent nuclear fuel rods. These rods still have plenty of radioactivity, and are very hot. If the grid goes down and the reactors run out of backup diesel, the water will start to boil off and eventually expose the rods leading to a radiation discharge.
Now, consider the fact that there are 93 active nuclear reactors in America, some in areas with significant populations.
How to Prepare
You can significantly increase your chances of survival if you are in the fallout zone of a nuclear reactor. First, if you live within 50 miles of a reactor, you need to be prepared to leave your home quickly. This means having a go bag ready.
I also highly recommend having a CBRN gas mask for each member of your family. Infants and small pets need evacuation chambers. Sure, this equipment costs some money, but it is nothing compared to the damage or death that can occur during a nuclear accident if you don’t have it on hand. If you want further protection, then invest in a hazmat suit that will block nuclear particles. Mira Safety makes some excellent masks and suits. (For the sake of transparency, I write regularly for Ready To Go Survival, a site that is owned by Mira Safety. I owned their gas mask before I started writing for them. I do not make any commission from selling their products.) That being said, I would be glad to answer any questions regarding gas masks and nuclear preparedness since it is a subject that I know well.
A Geiger counter can help you measure radiation levels as you evacuate.
If you’re not in an evacuation zone, there are ways to protect your home from any radiation. Check out this article outlining Chris Martenson’s personal radiation protection, and this complementary article about radiation on Peak Prosperity.
Cyber Attacks
Cyber attacks are on the rise worldwide. Many types of business are often the target, but utilities and other portions of the infrastructure are key targets too. Many will remember the Colonial Pipeline hacking incident last summer. Hackers used ransomware on the pipeline’s control systems. What consumers were led to believe would be resolved in a few days took much longer, and ended only because Colonial paid the ransom.
Caving to the hacker’s demand will encourage some hackers to commit further cyber extortion crimes.
One should assume that computer systems managing nation’s infrastructure are cyber-attack targets.
How To Prepare
Consider what you would do during rolling blackouts, or moderate to long stretches with no electricity.
The best way to prepare for gasoline and fuel disruptions is to keep your gas tank at least ½ full, safely store extra gas in cans or a caddy at home, and pay attention to the news for signs of looming shortages ahead. For example, we know that if a major hurricane strikes the gulf, there is the potential for supply disruption in the near future.
The Grid
If hackers can shut down pipelines, they can shut down the grid (we’ve seen nation states do just that). Our electrical power grid is extremely vulnerable to ransomware attacks, but there are other threats. From my house, I can see parts of the main power lines that are rusted and corroded. These are lines that carry power to urban areas in my region. This is quite common throughout the nation.
I have been writing about preparedness for a very long time, and while a lot of my readers are worried about an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), I have always considered the lack of maintenance and security of power stations and lines to be a far bigger, and more likely, threat.
How to Prepare
Having some backup power at home is not as expensive or hard as it used to be. In an extended outage, generators running on fuels like gasoline, propane or diesel will have shorter production lifespan than a solar power station.
Investing in some solar backup is a good idea. Panels can be used to charge up power stations. Some power stations are large enough to offer whole-house backup. There are plenty of small affordable power stations that are ready to use after an initial charge. Jackery makes excellent power stations that are lightweight and come in a variety of sizes to meet your needs. Goal Zero is another reputable brand.
If you have a grid-tied solar power system for your home, then you need to know that no solar power will be available to you if the grid goes down unless you have a battery backup system and a switch to disconnect you from the utility service. Some people opt for the battery back up at installation, but most do not because of the extra out-of-pocket cost. Grid-tied systems are typically designed to reduce or eliminate your typical power bill, not be a backup for a grid down emergency.
Rolling blackouts can happen anywhere and anytime when the power grid is stretched thin. This happened in Texas just last year because of a once-in-a lifetime winter storm. You need to have enough food, water, and medication on hand to get through at least a few weeks. During winter, this means also having plenty of warm blankets and clothing and some way to have some backup heat.
It is also important to have a way to prepare and cook meals if you are without electricity. Small propane stoves are a good option. If you have a wood stove, then you can enjoy the peace of mind of having a way to stay warm and something you can cook a meal on.
Since it can take longer to cook and prepare meals without electricity, it is a good idea to have some foods on hand that require little or no preparation. Cans of soup or stew will heat up fast with very little fuel.
Wood-fired rocket stoves are a good option for emergency cooking outside.
Railroads
While you may think the loss of railroads will not affect you much, I bet you are wrong. They are another link in the supply chain moving freight worldwide for consumers and industrial use.
In American alone, railroads transport 61 tons of goods per American per year.
How To Prepare
When commodities don’t move as fast or as inexpensively as we are used to, we can expect prices to rise. This means more expensive power because we still get a considerable amount of power from coal-fired power plants. Bulk animal feeds are moved by rail, so any rise in cost or shipping delays can affect the food supply chain.
The most you can do to prepare for railroads not being maintained is try to conserve energy and try not to waste food. Be ready for some goods to take longer for companies to produce.
Oil Refineries and Pipelines
Over the last few years, there have been many oil refinery and pipeline shutdowns threatening fuel supplies for short periods of time. Hurricane Katrina shut down a significant portion of the nation’s refineries for weeks, adding pressure to fuel prices and availability.
President Biden revoked a key permit that was essential for finishing the Keystone XL pipeline. The 1,200-mile pipeline would have carried 830,000 barrels per day of oil sands from Alberta to Nebraska. Our use of Russian oil could be zero if that pipeline were operational
In January, Biden placed a moratorium on new fossil fuel leases and drilling on federal lands.
If political policies can disrupt fuel availability and cause prices to skyrocket, imagine what an attack would do.
How To Prepare
In my area, we are at the very end of the gas supply chain. Gas is delivered to basically everywhere else before it reaches the sparsely populated mountains of North Carolina. As a result, we do not let our truck get to less than half a tank. When supplies are reliable, we make sure our gas caddy is full, so we can keep running our Kawasaki Mule, chainsaws, weed eaters, etc.
It does not take a lot of fuel to keep our little farm running for months at a time. If you have a space where you can store a few gas cans safely, or if you have a spot that can hold a gas caddy, you can have a safety-net in case of a supply disruption. If you have a long commute, then you may not be able to store enough to get through a week especially with a larger vehicle.
During times of shortages or high prices, you should do whatever you can to reduce trips. Pick up what you need in town when commuting to and from work rather than going back out later. Avoid driving on your days off if possible.
Roads and Bridges
Ever notice the construction date on bridges? Well, for many, those dates are far in the past. Bridge failures are quite common.
Last year, it was reported that there was a huge crack in a main support beam of the I-40 bridge that spans the Mississippi River connecting Memphis, Tenn. to West Memphis, Ark. Shockingly the crack was first spotted and reported in 2016 by a kayaker. It took five years before the issue was addressed. The bridge was shut down for more than 11 weeks to make repairs. The I-40 bridge at Memphis has 41,000 cars on average pass over it daily. Imagine the traffic. Consider the carnage if that bridge had collapsed.
I used to live near the Skagit River in Washington State. A few years ago, a bridge collapsed. It was amazing more people were not injured, considering that the bridge is part of I-5. Some cars did go into the water. If the time of day had been different, the results would have been horrific.
Road maintenance is split between county, city, state, and federal agencies, which affects how fast and how well things get fixed. Some counties, cities, and states attempt to do a decent job, but road funds only go so far, and the labor shortages throughout so many industries make it harder to get jobs completed in a timely manner.
Those who live in lower-traffic areas or in small communities may find that they are last in line for repairs. When labor is hard to come by, and funds are tight, and only a few people are impacted, all too often, those that are out in more rural areas or on lower traffic roads get fixed last.
My husband and I don’t travel on interstates that much. The last few months of my pregnancy, we had to drive on the interstate more often, and we noticed things were not being maintained. While the pavement seemed alright at the time, the sides of I-40 in western North Carolina were overgrown with vegetation to the point that signs on the side of the roadway were obscured and difficult to read. It was clear the road crews were waiting longer between maintenance.
In the future, I expect that the pavement will be rougher, and there are going to be more potholes. Debris on roadways is not going to be cleared as quickly, thus posing hazards. Some roads that are paved may even go back to being mostly gravel or the gravel concrete blend that one used to see before asphalt became more commonplace.
How To Prepare
Bad roads can lead to breakdowns. Getting stuck on a road is never fun, but it can be a little easier if you pack a good car emergency kit and a get-home bag just in case you actually have to abandon your vehicle.
Those that drive more rugged vehicles may have it easier when road conditions deteriorate, but not entirely. No matter what you drive, you can expect tough road conditions to lead to more wear and tear in shorter amounts of time.
Finding alternative routes to get where you need to go and back is a smart idea. A route that may have taken longer in the past may actually be quicker if the roads of your main route are in rough shape.
Bridges not being maintained is something you really cannot do much to prepare for. If a bridge goes out, you will have to take a route that is likely to be a lot longer if you absolutely have to cross a waterway. If you can take care of business on your side of the bridge, it will be in your best interest.
Conclusion
At this point, there is simply no way for the infrastructure to be fixed before there are increasingly major failures. Even if an emphasis on launching repairs today, it would be a long time before things were up to par. The most the average person can do is be aware of the threats and prepare as much as they can by planning around them.
On a local level, a group of citizens may be able to spur action if they make a strong case to the right people. So, in addition to preparing your household for these challenges, consider contacting your local officials to let them know their voters want action.
Otherwise, what other ways are you preparing for infrastructure failures?