“All I Have Is Hunger” – Many Venezuelans Too Weak To Protest Despite Maduro Misery

 

While tens of thousands of angry Venezuelans turned out for the ‘mother of all protests’ yesterday, facing an increasingly hostile military/police state, the numbers could have been significantly larger but for the fact that legions of poor Venezuelans are simply too frail from starvation to protest.

Some say they are intimidated by armed pro-government militias who scour the slums for signs of dissent. Others say they are afraid to lose the few food handouts the cash-strapped government still provides.

“We wear our protest on the inside for the fear of losing our bag of food,” said San Félix resident Luisa Gutiérrez, a single mother of three.

Former CIA director warns North Korea could kill 90% of US

If you’ve been following Global Geopolitics for a while, you wouldn’t be shocked to hear about this one, as it has been warned about plenty of times already.

 

Former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency James Woolsey takes part in a panel discussion on Sharia law at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington February 12, 2011. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

 

(VERO BEACH, FLA) On Wednesday former CIA director James Woolsey and Dr. Peter Vincent Pry published an Op-Ed in The Hill warning that North Korea has the ability to kill 90 percent of Americans by detonating a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP) over the United States.

The deaths, the two national security experts wrote, would result from the starvation and societal collapse which follows an EMP knocking out the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructure for over a year.

Electromagnetic attack could claim 9 of 10 American lives

All one has to do is take out a mere nine substations and it’s lights out for America. As said in another article from 2012 in synch with today’s, up to 90% would perish as a result.

The culture of complacently sitting around and “hoping” things will magically fix themselves has taken the place of meaningful action — and, evidently, it takes possibility of hundreds of millions of Americans to perish in order to learn a lesson.

This makes America all the more ripe for picking by the Chinese, Russians and even the Iranians but isn’t prepared. It also seemingly doesn’t care.

 

An electromagnetic pulse attack can take down the nation’s electric power grid, plunge the country into darkness and claim 9 out of 10 American lives within a year.

That’s not a prediction coming from doomsdayers or a sci-fi film. It’s from Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, who served on several congressional commissions and on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, and was a CIA intelligence officer from 1985-1995.

An EMP, in short, is a burst of energy that can fry electronics, including computers. If the burst is powerful enough, like a small nuclear weapon exploded above the U.S., it could potentially shut down the nation’s power grid for months, even years.

Within a year after such an attack, 9 out of 10 Americans would die from disease, starvation and civil unrest, Pry said. There would be no food, no clean water, no transportation to bring food in, no cell phones, no computers, no medicine.

EMP and the Shield Act

So many years, so many warnings coupled with a growing number of threats — yet, America fails to prepare. This post is not to sound alarmist, but the basics of national security should be covered. Threats from America’s enemies are made on almost a daily basis… and perhaps one day they might follow through.

American and Soviet planners realized that an EMP effect could be used to win a nuclear war. As described by Dr. Pry above, EMP could be used to disrupt or destroy an enemy’s nuclear arsenal. Realizing this potential, the Soviet Union and the United States both developed super-EMP bombs. These weapons produce intense gamma radiation, enhancing the EMP effect so that hardened or protected weapon systems can still be damaged. After successful tests the Russians deployed an unknown number of EMP warheads. On its side, the United States failed to deploy its own version of the super-EMP weapon.

Since proliferation is the word of the day, American experts are now concerned that rogue states have acquired super-EMP technology. In fact, there is evidence that North Korea has developed and deployed its own version of the Russian super-EMP bomb. Russian military officials have privately warned the U.S. government that scientists from the Soviet super-EMP bomb project have been helping the North Koreans. Last Thursday I spoke with Dr. Pry, who said that North Korea may have tested a super-EMP weapon in May 2009. The “signature” of the North Korean test was consistent with a high-gamma output combined with relatively small blast output – of three kilotons.

Pry also described Iranian missile tests which appear to resemble high altitude practice strikes. It is well known that the Iranians and North Koreans have been collaborating. Both regimes consider the United States to be Enemy Number One. The propaganda of both regimes includes the promise that America will be destroyed. How this destruction is accomplished, we are not told. But simple observation of tests and preparations should provide us with a clue.

Even a localized EMP strike could take out the entire U.S. power grid because power stations are all interconnected, and damage would cascade through the system wiping out equipment that could not be replaced for at least 18 months. According to the “Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack,” an EMP attack “can damage or disrupt the infrastructure that supplies food to the population of the United States.” Supermarkets typically carry enough food to supply the local population for three days. Without electricity, Americans will starve. Less than two percent of Americans work on farms, according to the Commission report. “An attack that neutralized farming technology would depress U.S. food production.” The food distribution system is even more vulnerable.

The Commission report concludes: “Absolute deprivation of food, on average, will greatly diminish a person’s capacity for physical work within a few days. After 4 to 5 days without food, the average person will suffer from impaired judgment and have difficulty performing simple intellectual tasks. After 2 weeks without food, the average person will be virtually incapacitated. Death typically results after 1 or 2 months without food.”

In a continent-wide EMP attack, between one third and four-fifths of the population would die. As of today, the United States government has taken no action to prepare for this kind of attack, or harden vital systems essential for saving millions of lives. In 2010 Congress tried to pass the Grid Act (HR 5026). After being passed by the House, the Grid Act died in a Senate committee. Today we have a chance to pass another bill, called the “Secure High-Voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage Act” (the Shield Act). It acknowledges that American lives will be lost without electricity, so the grid must be protected. The cost of the Shield Act is minimal – pennies per month for the average electric bill. A better investment can hardly be imagined.

Full article: EMP and the Shield Act (JR Nyquist)