What I did then was to do a search on twitter for "@blogger," which resulted in seeing a torrent of tweets to Blogger. I was relieved to know that I was not the only person with the problem. I also saw that many of the tweets written to Blogger were beginning to get nasty. A few of the tweeters were threatening to start blogging at WordPress, another free blogging service. But the overall theme of the tweets was beginning to show panic. That was when I tweeted to Phil to let him know about the problem and the panic when technology fails.
The one scary thought I had through the turmoil, though, was the fact that technology can fail due to human error, or, insidiously, because of an intentional act of terror, or worse: the government pulling the plug. Just sayin'....
The reality of the 2003 Northeast Blackout was more mundane ... and perhaps more disturbing. The cascade failure of the power grid, which some parties tried to blame on Canada, underscored the relative fragility of the energy network on which we all depend so strongly. A single point of failure can, under the right conditions, become a catastrophic outage, plunging thousands and even millions of people into more than darkness. To lose power is not just to lose light, but to lose heating, cooling, communication and entertainment. In short, when technology fails, it fails us in every facet of our day-to-day lives. When we and our neighbors experience such a failure at the same time, panic, conflict and injury or death are not far behind.
The time to prepare is before technology fails. You depend on technology; we all do. How you cope with its failure is your choice ... and your responsibility.
By Phil Elmore
Posted: June 10, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern
© 2010
On June 7, blogger stopped working. The outage was longer than just a couple of hours. It was long enough, in fact, for people who depend on blogger to, well, blog, to start to freak out. At microblogging site Twitter, a rising note of alarm started to creep into posts that went like this: "Is anybody else having trouble getting blogger to work?" It got worse as the outage persisted, and people who have made updating their blogs part of their daily routines suddenly couldn't communicate with their readers.
As much as we might be tempted to dismiss bloggers as basement-dwelling loners engaged in the Internet equivalent of talking to themselves, it's a fact that a great many people get their news from and spend time communicating with a network of bloggers who use public and commercial blogging sites (rather than their own websites). It was one of them, John Kubicek, who first brought the blogger.com outage to my attention. John maintains a popular conservative blog in which he summarizes major news events and links to various conservative and libertarian columns.
"See the panic?" John wrote to me. "PANIC? Like the end of the world kind of thing? It can be more than just annoying when technology fails. Think fishing and shrimping in the Gulf. People who depend on technology are affected by failures sometimes for their livelihood, and it can be devastating."
I thought about that for a long time. Mr. Kubicek quite rightly points out that when a major piece of our technological world goes awry, it can affect us to the point of destroying our jobs and our lives. The oil leak [See video below] still raging in the Gulf is one of the best examples. Technology intended to prevent an accident of this kind completely failed, triggering week after week of finger pointing, excuses and failed attempts at solutions – all while the Obama administration refused to take the problem seriously.
In only too typical fashion, Obama is more concerned with covering his own posterior while mouthing vulgar, contrived comments calculated to make him look tough. The problem in this case, of course, is that pencil-necked bureaucrats known for their stilted public speaking voices and their nagging tendency to apologize for America at every conceivable turn can rarely affect a street-tough image that anyone finds believable.
Dukakis rode a tank, the expression on his face making him look slack-jawed and simple underneath his ridiculous helmet. John Kerry put a shotgun over his shoulder, as if we'd believe he's an avid hunter who wouldn't do his best to ban your guns. The mediocre-at-best George W. Bush wore a flight suit and landed on an aircraft carrier, ludicrously declaring accomplished a mission that grinds on killing our soldiers to this day. And now Barack Hussein Obama, the man whose masterful manipulation of modern media prompted us to dub him our technology dictator, has taken to the airwaves threatening to kick someone's behind, as if we'll believe he's a passionate fighter for truth and justice and not simply a brittle, defensive, incompetent tyrant.
Technology brought us imagery of these failures. Technology was used by these men in their attempts to spin their failures and their flaws into some false belief on the part of voters that such men could or should be trusted. As we've learned only too well watching the devastation in the Gulf, however, technology can collapse at any moment, leaving us to discover just how dependent we have become in relying on something that is fundamentally not reliable.
What's the longest you've ever gone without power? In 1998, a derecho (a violent straight-line wind storm) knocked out the power to my city. Over the next three days, my desperation grew as hour after grueling hour without power, without hot water, without the ability to cook the majority of food in the kitchen, without a freezer to preserve that food, without any form of entertainment that was not battery-powered AM radio, without any light at night that did not come from the flashlights I had sprinkled throughout the house, took its toll on my patience. I started calling home whenever I was not present, hoping against hope that the answering machine would pick up, indicating that power was restored. After three days of this, when I finally heard my own digital voice on the other end of the line, the message I left was incomprehensible. I was too busy blubbering with delight that this long weekend's sojourn into primitive living was finally over.
READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com
RELATED VIDEO:
June 8, 2010 High-Resolution Video of Oil Leak
Video provided by TheREALjohnny2k
Be sure to check out
johnny2k's Tea Party Gear!
johnny2k's Tea Party Gear!
Profits derived from your purchases
will help me to attend tea party rallies,
(especially the one in Las Vegas, on July 15-17)!
will help me to attend tea party rallies,
(especially the one in Las Vegas, on July 15-17)!
Posts
Longest I've gone without power was the 98' Icestorm in Quebec. Three weeks before the power was restored.
ReplyDeleteIt was a good thing it was winter. I just moved my deep freezer outside and shoveled snow into it.
To cook I just used the wood stove and the BBQ. It took longer to prepare things (spaghetti sauce, chili, etc) but it got done.
Main problem was gas. Since the gas pumps are all run by electricity the only way to get gas was to drop off the 20 gallon jug in the morning with a tag on it with name/number/address. At the end of the day, you pick it up and fill up your car because the only way the gas station would know how much gas you bought was by the size of the canister.
Heat was the wood stove and keeping the air flow tight. My chief problem was making sure that my wood didn't get stolen. I heard of one guy that had a cord of wood on the side of his house and people were just stopping by and taking it (stealing) while he was at work.
Because of that he, and people stealing wood, guaranteed that he was out of wood in around five days into the power outage.
I didn't have the same issue and all my wood is in a locked wood hutch in the garage.
In all the biggest issue during it was securing stuff. The gas I would pick up, make sure the propane for the BBQ was put away, the wood, putting a lock on the deep freezer out side.
Basic stuff really. Then again I was in the country side then (and now). I honestly have no clue to what was going on in the cities, the media black out was literal because most stations didn't have the proper scale of equipment to deal with the black out (takes a lot of juice to run a radio tower)
When the grid went out, I had no clue it happened because the family and I were out camping.
I suppose it depends on what you do with your time and sensibilities. I would promise you though, if power dropped off for two months I would expect a lot of people to die off pretty quickly. Even governments need power and oil to run properly. And both are desperately needed to keep food from spoiling and deliver food.
If the concept of peak oil has anything to say about the situation. I would guess a solid 40-50% population culling. Sad thing is they would probably waiting for government aid in some form while they starve to death or eat bad food they shouldn't be.