National Grid Quotes

Well, you missed out on some important protocol, Ella. You can't stand between a Texan and his power tools. We like them. Big ones that drain the national grid. We also like truck-stop breakfasts, large moving objects, Monday night football, and the missionary position. We don't drink light beer, drive Smart cars, or admit to knowing the names of more than about five or six colors. And we don't wax our chests, ever.

Apathy's just a front. People offer it when there's something stronger hiding underneath. You have to work harder to tap into it, but then your performance has even more power.

They all had darkened eyes, eyes that seemed to have a hunger behind them. Borne out of the private convulsions only secret passions can provoke.

There’s this misconception that artists should create their own mythologies, through how they live. Not true. They should create their own mythologies through their work. In whatever styles, textures and approaches they choose to use.

The principal concern of a nuclear reactor - particularly an RBMK reactor, because of its graphite moderator - is that cooling water continuously flows into the core. Without it there could be an explosion or meltdown. Even if the reactor is shut down, the fuel within will still be generating decay heat, which would damage the core without further cooling. Pumps driving the flow of water rely on electricity generated by the plant’s own turbines, but in the event of a blackout the electrical supply can be switched to the national grid. If that fails, diesel generators on site will automatically start up to power the water pumps, but these take about 50 seconds to gather enough energy to operate the massive pumps. There are six emergency tanks containing a combined 250 tons of pressurised water which can be injected into the core within 3.5 seconds, but an RBMK reactor needs around 37,000 tons of water per hour - 10 tons-per-second - so 250 tons does not cover the 50 second gap.92

What they found is that there’s simply no way for the states to do it without enhancing the power grid. The model also showed that regional and national approaches to transmission—rather than leaving each state to its own devices—would allow every state to meet the emission-reduction goals with 30 percent fewer renewables than they would need otherwise. In other words, we’ll save money by building renewables in the best locations, building a unified national grid, and shipping zero-emissions electrons wherever they’re needed.

Culture always tells you to look to illusions for answers. ‘Look at me’, it says, ‘I’ve worked it all out’. Celebrities grow too powerful because people mistake their colour for content. They allow them to create a hole at the heart of our culture, in which they then flourish.

In focusing on “cultural change” and “conflict between cultures,” these studies avoid fundamental questions about the formation of the United States and its implications for the present and future. This approach to history allows one to safely put aside present responsibility for continued harm done by that past and the questions of reparations, restitution, and reordering society.9 Multiculturalism became the cutting edge of post-civil-rights-movement US history revisionism. For this scheme to work—and affirm US historical progress—Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture. As territorially and treaty-based peoples in North America, they did not fit the grid of multiculturalism but were included by transforming them into an inchoate oppressed racial group, while colonized Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were dissolved into another such group, variously called “Hispanic” or “Latino.” The multicultural approach emphasized the “contributions” of individuals from oppressed groups to the country’s assumed greatness. Indigenous peoples were thus credited with corn, beans, buckskin, log cabins, parkas, maple syrup, canoes, hundreds of place names, Thanksgiving, and even the concepts of democracy and federalism. But this idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources. The fundamental unresolved issues of Indigenous lands, treaties, and sovereignty could not but scuttle the premises of multiculturalism.

The run-down test was originally scheduled for the afternoon of the 25th, but Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin was asked by Kiev’s national grid controller to delay it until after the evening peak electricity consumption period had ended.94 The afternoon staff had been briefed on the test and knew exactly what to do, but their shift ended and they went home. Evening staff took over, but then they too left, leaving the relatively inexperienced night crew - who had never conducted a test before - the responsibility of starting a test they were not prepared for and had not anticipated doing.

Often, during my stay in your country, such comparisons troubled me. In fact, they did more than trouble me: they made me resentful. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education. To be reminded of this vast disparity was, for me, to be ashamed.

Private sector networks in the United States, networks operated by civilian U.S. government agencies, and unclassified U.S. military and intelligence agency networks increasingly are experiencing cyber intrusions and attacks,” said a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report to Congress that was published the same month Conficker appeared. “. . . Networks connected to the Internet are vulnerable even if protected with hardware and software firewalls and other security mechanisms. The government, military, businesses and economic institutions, key infrastructure elements, and the population at large of the United States are completely dependent on the Internet. Internet-connected networks operate the national electric grid and distribution systems for fuel. Municipal water treatment and waste treatment facilities are controlled through such systems. Other critical networks include the air traffic control system, the system linking the nation’s financial institutions, and the payment systems for Social Security and other government assistance on which many individuals and the overall economy depend. A successful attack on these Internet-connected networks could paralyze the United States [emphasis added].

Implantation of this extremely dangerous ‘element’ (biochip) will be accomplished by injection into the human organism in order to slowly mutate its structure. Using some ‘imperative need’ as pretext, they will convince the nations to accept it, even by masquerading it into something different from what it will actually be. This will be the marking of the beast (injection, puncture, scratching or ‘engraving’ of the skin, incision etc.) as John calls it in the Apocalypse {Tr. n.: In the original Greek version the word χάραγμα [charagma] is used, which is more appropriately translated as ‘carving’, ‘incision’, etc.}. This will be the gravest trap for man, because, if he accepts it, he will be subjected to the (voluntary or involuntary) transmutation of his astro-aetheric bodies into an energy ‘net/grid’ which will irrevocably entrap his Soul in this world of devastation, stopping it from escaping to higher territories. Then, not even the knowledge of Truth (Epignosis) will be enough to set him free.

Multiculturalism became the cutting edge of post-civil-rights-movement US history revisionism. For this scheme to work—and affirm US historical progress—Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture. As territorially and treaty-based peoples in North America, they did not fit the grid of multiculturalism but were included by transforming them into an inchoate oppressed racial group, while colonized Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were dissolved into another such group, variously called “Hispanic” or “Latino.

In the Negev in Israel, Israeli authorities have refused to legally recognize 35 Palestinian Bedouin communities, making it impossible for their 90,000 or so residents to live lawfully in the communities they have lived in for decades. Instead, authorities have sought to concentrate Bedouin communities in larger recognized townships in order, as expressed in governmental plans and statements by officials, to maximize the land available for Jewish communities. Israeli law considers all buildings in these unrecognized villages to be illegal, and authorities have refused to connect most to the national electricity or water grids or to provide even basic infrastructure such as paved roads or sewage systems. The communities do not appear on official maps, most have no educational facilities, and residents live under constant threat of having their homes demolished. Israeli authorities demolished more than 10,000 Bedouin homes in the Negev between 2013 and 2019, according to government data. They razed one unrecognized village that challenged the expropriation of its lands, al-Araqib, 185 times.

Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife’s edge. We’re a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there’s a dial tone, and your front yard isn’t underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there’s no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating.

And all that connectivity makes us more vulnerable to malware and spyware,” I say. “We understand that. But I’m not so concerned, right at the moment, about whether Siri will tell me the weather in Buenos Aires or whether some foreign nation is spying on me through my toaster.” Augie moves about the room, as if lecturing on a large stage to an audience of thousands. “No, no—but I have digressed. More to the point, nearly every sophisticated form of automation, nearly every transaction in the modern world, relies on the Internet. Let me say it like this: we depend on the power grid for electricity, do we not?” “Of course.” “And without electricity? It would be chaos. Why?” He looks at each of us, awaiting an answer. “Because there’s no substitute for electricity,” I say. “Not really.” He points at me. “Correct. Because we are so reliant on something that has no substitute.” “And the same is now true of the Internet,” says Noya, as much to herself as to anyone else.

The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.

There was something strangely compelling about a Japanese guy with lamb-chop sideburns and a voice so shrill you could be forgiven for thinking his testicles were wired to the national grid.

If Columbus had an advisory committee, he would probably still be at the dock.” Arthur J. Goldberg, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, 1962–1965, United States Secretary of Labor, United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Section 21, Lot S-35, Grid M-20.5, Arlington National Cemetery.

Sometimes just to see what was happening, my father would drive to the airport. Newark Airport was the first major airport serving the greater New York area. It was opened for traffic on October 1, 1928, on 68 acres of reclaimed marshland next to the Passaic River. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey later took it over from the Army Air Corps in 1948 and started a major improvement program. Driving by and seeing activity from the road, we drove to where Eastern Airlines had a shiny new DC-3 on display, and as luck would have it, it was open to the public. It was an exciting moment when I boarded this aircraft and discovered that it was first constructed in 1934, the same year I was born. An example of modern technology, it was the first modern airliner and the forerunner of commercial aviation. It would still be years before I would learn to fly an airplane, but for now, things could not get much better. On our way back to Jersey City, we drove over the Pulaski Skyway, one of the first elevated highways in the country. The United States was trying to crawl out of the worst depression ever and government projects, backed by stimulus money, were everywhere. The Tennessee Valley Authority was building dams to run hydroelectric generators in the South, and big projects like Boulder Dam were being built out West along the Colorado River. The nation’s electrical grid was expanding by leaps and bounds and highway construction projects with new bridges were being built. The United States was growing once again, and I was there to see it!

We need the implementation of the Smart Waterways Grid across India to harness 1,500 BCM of floodwater and connect the rivers and catchment areas as a single plane. The grid will receive 1,500 BCM of floodwater and act as a water grid so that water can be released to any deficient place and replenished during flood. It would act as a 15,000 kilometres-long national reservoir. It would be able to provide drinking water to 600 million people, irrigation to 150 million acres of land, and generate 60,000 MW of power. Due to ground water recharge, it would also save 4,000 MW of power. Each state can implement this mission with an outlay of approximately 50,000 crores with annual budgetary support, central government assistance, public-private consortia and with support from the World Bank in a BOOT (Build, Operate, Own and Transfer) based PPP model and this can be realized within 2020. Apart from this, an Integrated Water Resource Management system is also required to revive water bodies and tanks and build farm ponds and checkdams across India as well as increase irrigation infrastructure and groundwater potential, thereby enhancing the safe drinking water resources of the nation.

I’d like to be known just as a good worker in the vineyard who held his own and contributed generally to the advancement of the law.” Harry Blackmun, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, 1970–1994, author of the Roe v. Wade decision. Section 5, Lot 40-4, Map Grid V/W-36, Arlington National Cemetery.

I remain steady in my belief that well-written literary fiction doesn’t have to be high-brow; it has to embrace ideas about destiny in a storyline that holds the readers’ attention. From his classic presentation at the 200th anniversary writers’ conference of North American Review, the nation’s oldest literary magazine, where he poked fun at his own early novels for their obscurity, implying clarity in the digital age equals salvation. Then he toyed with the digital age itself: Some nut will find a way to blow up the electric grid. All these electronic gadgets that rely on electricity will go dark. The batteries will run down. We’re talking Cormac McCarthy darkness, black on black . . . except for one distant flicker of light. It’s on a beach probably Australia. Survivors will make their way through the dark and find the light from a single candle. Next to the candle will be a lad with a note book scribbling away with the last pencil on earth. He’s writing about what happened. He hopes someone will read what he writes. That’s what writers do. They hope.

pivoted the results on our Criminal Records Bureau and National Insurance database mirrors to get the place of work for everyone who’s on the books, and the pre-processor is turning that into grid reference data so we can plot them on a map or query for areas where the rate of that’s funny . . .

There are three power grids that generate and distribute electricity throughout the United States, and taking down all or any part of a grid would scatter millions of Americans in a desperate search for light, while those unable to travel would tumble back into something approximating the mid-nineteenth century.

Virtually all of our civilian critical infrastructure—including telecommunications, water, sanitation, transportation, and healthcare—depends on the electric grid. The grid is extremely vulnerable to disruption by a cyber- or other attack. Our adversaries already have the capability to carry out such an attack. The consequences of a large-scale attack on the U.S. grid would be catastrophic for our national security and economy.” It went on to say: “Under current conditions, timely reconstitution of the grid following a carefully targeted attack if particular equipment is destroyed would be impossible; and according to government experts, would result in widespread outages for at least months to two years or more, depending on the nature of the attack.

In its 2008 report the EMP commission recommended that measures taken by the Defense Department to protect crucial military installations, including the installation of surge arrestors and Faraday cages, could usefully be applied to civilian infrastructure also. The commission estimated that protecting the national electric grid against an EMP attack would cost about $2 billion. Such estimates are easily made in the abstract, but reality is another matter. No action was taken on the commission’s recommendations for protecting the electric power grid.

The grid is extremely vulnerable to disruption by a cyber- or other attack. Our adversaries already have the capability to carry out such an attack. The consequences of a large-scale attack on the U.S. grid would be catastrophic for our national security and economy.” It

Not only would he and his ranch hands survive a cyberattack on the electric power grid that serves Wyoming, they would barely notice it. I

Because the system’s maintenance and protection reside in so many different hands, though, and because its complexity has made each player more dependent on computerized control systems, the grid is also more vulnerable than it used to be.

James Woolsey argued that protection of the national electric grid against an EMP attack is possible, that it is not prohibitively expensive, and that necessary congressional action is long overdue.

No action was taken on the commission’s recommendations for protecting the electric power grid. Two

This tension has resulted, in the electric power industry, in a high-stakes duel between corporations and government regulators, the consequences of which are cybersecurity regulations so patchwork and inadequate as to be one of the chief sources of the grid’s vulnerability. The

Russia, China, and Iran, among others, continue on an almost daily basis to demonstrate a range of cyber capabilities in espionage, denial-of-service attacks, and the planting of digital time bombs, capable of inflicting widespread damage on a U.S. power grid or other piece of critical infrastructure.

The Manhattan Project employed two hundred thousand people. It had eighty offices and dozens of production plants spread out all over the country, including a sixty-thousand-acre facility in rural Tennessee that pulled more power off the nation’s electrical grid than New York City did on any given night. And no one knew the Manhattan Project was there. That is how powerful a black operation can be.

What had saved Ukraine is precisely what made the United States the most vulnerable nation on earth. Ukraine wasn’t fully automated. In the race to plug everything into the internet, the country was far behind. The tsunami known as the Internet of Things, which had consumed Americans for the better part of the past decade, had still not washed up in Ukraine. The nation’s nuclear stations, hospitals, chemical plants, oil refineries, gas and oil pipelines, factories, farms, cities, cars, traffic lights, homes, thermostats, lightbulbs, refrigerators, stoves, baby monitors, pacemakers, and insulin pumps were not yet “web-enabled.” In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.

Schmidt also echoed the assumption that China and Russia, encumbered by a network of interlocking interests with the United States, would likely be constrained from launching a full-scale cyberattack on an American power grid. Could they do it? Yes. Would they? Only in the context of an expanding crisis.

Wars are fought in the shadows. The weapons are subversion and misdirection. Propaganda and misinformation. Hacking social media accounts. Infiltrating national power grids.

Many nations were critical of how their governments were handling things in these difficult times. Perhaps we could have tempered that dissatisfaction with the understanding that this was a poisoned chalice for any government, with no good options, only less bad options.

Whether or not you share Lakeman’s conception of the evils of the urban grid, he does identify that great irony of the American city: a nation that celebrates freedom and weaves liberty into its national myth rarely gives regular people the chance to shape their own communities. Municipal governments, often with the counsel and assistance of land developers, lay down community plans complete with restrictive zoning long before residents arrive on the scene. Residents have no say about what their streets and parks and gathering places will look like. And once they move in, it is illegal for them to tinker with the shape of the public places they share, or, as I have illustrated, to use their homes for anything beyond the dictates of strict zoning bylaws.

There have been, as of this writing, only four secretaries of homeland security. Each of them has conceded the likelihood of a catastrophic cyberattack affecting the power grid; none has developed a plan designed to deal with the aftermath. I

US intelligence officials believe that the Chinese military has mapped out infrastructure control networks so that if the two nations ever went to war, the Chinese could hit American targets such as electrical grids or gas pipelines without having to launch a missile or send a fleet of bombers.

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Thirty-Fifth President of the United States of America, former senator and representative from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Section 45, Grid U-35, Arlington National Cemetery.

To get what you want, stop doing what isn’t working.” Earl Warren, Thirtieth Governor of the State of California, Fourteenth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Section 21, Lot S-32, Grid M-20.5, Arlington National Cemetery.

People are very quick to ridicule others for showing fear. But we rarely know the secret springboards behind human action. The man who shows great fear today may be tomorrow’s hero. Who are we to judge?” Audie Murphy, most decorated soldier of World War II, Congressional Medal of Honor winner. Section 46, Lot 366-11, Grid O/P-22.5, Arlington National Cemetery.

At Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, and at several other centers around the world, there are special rooms where people rarely tread. Nothing much seems to be happening in these rooms, there's no visible motion, and the only sound is the gently whir of fans that keep the temperature steady and the humidity low. In these rooms, roughly 10^30 protons and neutrons are at work. They have been organized into hundreds of computers, harnessed to work in parallel. The team races at teraflop rates, which means 10^12- a million million-FLoating point OPerations per second. We let them labor for months-10^7 seconds. At the end , they've done what a single proton does every 10^-24 second, which is figure out how to orchestrate quark and gluon fields in the best possible way so that they keep the Grid satisfied and make a stable equilibrium.

On a June afternoon in 1791, George Washington, Andrew Ellicott, and Peter Charles L’Enfant rode east from Georgetown “to take,” so Washington recorded in his diary, “a more perfect view of the ground” of the new federal city. From David Burnes’s fields they surveyed the prospect of the Potomac River, and then, continuing east across the Tiber Creek, they climbed to the crest of Jenkins Hill. With the confluence of the Eastern Branch and the Potomac, the cities of Alexandria and Georgetown, and the hills of Maryland and Virginia spread majestically before them, the time had come, the president wrote, “to decide finally on the spots on which to place the public buildings.” From their vantage point on Jenkins Hill, L’Enfant presented his vision of a city worthy of the new republic. He began by siting the two principal buildings: the “Congress House,” as he called it, would command Jenkins Hill, “a pedestal waiting for a superstructure”; the “President’s Palace,” L’Enfant’s name for today’s White House, would rise about a mile away on the land partially belonging to David Burnes. A star of avenues each named for a state would radiate from the center of each house. Pennsylvania Avenue—the name would honor the state’s importance in the nation’s creation—would connect the two buildings. It would be “a direct and large avenue,” 180 feet wide and lined with a double row of trees. These radiating avenues would intersect at circles and squares, to be named for heroes, and they would overlay a grid of streets similar to that of Philadelphia.

People like you are the reason this album needed to be written in the first place. When you’ve got your salary, and your cosy little ivory tower, you’re dead happy to spout off about artistic integrity and us getting there together. But the minute you’re asked to back your promises up with some strength of character, you come apart. You say you love good music, but you can’t listen to it that carefully if you treat people like this.

Sam marvelled at how easily people walked off the street and into these decadent dioramas. It was spooky how easily people’s inner landscapes were expressed in enclosed booths and glittering bars. Their private nightmares slid into the moulded furniture as if it had been designed for them.

I do wonder if the modern world creates these desperations for you. It makes you crave products you don’t want. It places its imperatives in front of religion, faith. It employs certain people for its cause. Celebrities, singers, musicians. When you conclude that the material world is disappointing you look to these figures for answers, as they sit just beyond the array. You hunt these figures down, like they are wise men. If they vanish from your life you imbue them as symbols with even greater potency. But really it is what you project onto them that’s interesting.

Doubts over security of the power grid cover a broad range, from that cautious “nothing is impossible” to the full-throated warning of “not if, but when.

None of these people has suggested that there is anything simple about sabotaging a grid; they say only that the capability exists, an opinion shared by specialists who have no financial interest in the field. When I asked Janet Napolitano, who is now president of the University of California, what she thinks the chances are that a nation-state or independent actor could knock out one of our power grids, she replied, “Very high—80 percent, 90 percent. You know, very, very high.

There are, as previously noted, more than three thousand electric power companies in the United States. Many of the smaller electric companies lack the resources and often the motivation to provide their operations with the best cybersecurity. Computer access to any one of them can provide access along the network to the SCADA and EMS systems that calibrate supply and demand for the grid as a whole.

What about independent actors using cyberattacks to knock out one of our power grids? Are we at that point yet? “Simple answer,” said Schmidt, “yes.

He is convinced that China and Russia have already penetrated the U.S. power grid, both for purposes of reconnaissance and, very likely, in order to plant cyber weapons that could be activated at some time in the future.

In successive State of the Union addresses President Obama has warned of the danger of cyberattacks on our infrastructure. Government is adapting to the “new normal” of daily hacking, and cyber specialists such as Richard Clarke and George Cotter, who held senior government posts, have explained that the Russians and the Chinese are almost certainly inside the grid, mapping its vulnerabilities. Keith Alexander and Howard Schmidt warn that independent actors will soon have the capability to damage the grid, if they don’t have it already. If nothing else, the United States demonstrated with Stuxnet what a carefully planned cyberattack can do to the most securely defended equipment. Still, senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security, including the current secretary, treat the likelihood of a crippling attack on one of the nation’s power grids as nothing more than a speculative threat, and an unlikely one at that.

With adversaries’ malware in the National Grid, the nation has little or no chance of withstanding a major cyberattack on the North American electrical system. Incredibly weak cybersecurity standards with a wide-open communications and network fabric virtually guarantees success to major nation-states and competent hacktivists. This [electric power] industry is simply unrealistic in believing in the resiliency of this Grid subject to a sophisticated attack. When such an attack occurs, make no mistake, there will be major loss of life and serious crippling of National Security capabilities. [Emphasis added.]

The media net was designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security, so that people could use it to transfer money. That's one reason the nation-states collapsed—as soon as the media grid was up and running, financial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments, and the tax collection systems got fubared.

As the scientific forester may dream of a perfectly legible forest planted with same-aged, single-species, uniform trees growing in straight lines in a rectangular flat space cleared of all underbrush and poachers,85 so the exacting state official may aspire to a perfectly legible population with registered, unique names and addresses keyed to grid settlements; who pursue single, identifiable occupations; and all of whose transactions are documented according to the designated formula and in the official language. This caricature of society as a military parade ground is overdrawn, but the grain of truth that it embodies may help us understand the grandiose plans we will examine later.86 The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a “civilizing mission.” The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.

Russia was not waiting for rapprochement with the United States. They could see that Trump’s chaotic White House was creating numerous financial opportunities worldwide, and they were going to scoop them up. On December 5, 2018, the Middle East and North Africa representative for the Russian state atomic energy company Rosatom went to Riyadh to meet with MBS. Its representative, Alexander Voronkov, said Russia would supply Generation 3+ VVER-1220 reactors for the kingdom, which he said were the most advanced ones Russia offered.26 It’s worth noting here that in 1994 Russia built the first nuclear reactor in Iran, also a VVER model. The reactors in Bushehr nuclear station were to be the same VVER-1220 as those Russia promised to Saudi Arabia.27 Even more interesting, Russian arms exporter Rosobornexport, a sanctioned arms company, sold S-300 air defense systems to Iran to protect Iran’s reactors, and one could imagine this could be part of the package to Saudi Arabia as well.28 The Russians were brilliantly offering regional parity and stability to both Iran and Saudi Arabia if the reactors were bought. It came with a tacit guarantee neither side could attack the other since they would have the same air defense system. On January 22, 2019, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) delivered a report on what Saudi Arabia needed to do to stay within international norms if it pursued a nuclear power program. Mikhail Chudakov, a former head of Russian nuclear programs and IAEA deputy director, delivered the report that gave the kingdom the green light to move forward.29 The following day, the kingdom received offers from five nations for construction of the project: the United States, Russia, France, South Korea, and China.30 The Saudis originally wanted sixteen reactors but have scaled that back to two as part of a larger effort to diversify its energy grid.31 The “tilt” seems to be toward the Russians, with the Russian IAEA official paving the way and the Rosatom folks working over the royal family. Like their arms sales, the Russians promised a fairly cheap but stable deal that comes with massive long-term costs. But it was Team Trump that started this game, trying to cheat, abuse ethics, and lie its way into potentially gaining billions of Arab sheikdom money under the guise of a major foreign policy initiative. In the end, they got played by Russia, who knew corruption at a master-class level. Trump was a piker. And Russia ate America’s lunch… again.

It took only a generation after the end of the Depression for Americans to become consummately modern individuals, until as a nation we had lost working knowledge of a coal brazier, a kerosene lamp, a latrine, an ice box, a well, a mangler, or anything else more complicated than a switch, a button, an outlet, a socket, a tap, or a flusher. And yet, it was the case that almost no one had any idea how the replacement technology (a coal-burning power plant for a brazier, or sewer treatment plant for an outhouse, or water purification plant for a well) worked. By the mid-1970s, who, driving down the highway, could tell the difference between an oil refinery and a coal-burning power plant? A sewage treatment plant and a water purification plant (or, for that matter, a fish hatchery)? Realistically, who needed to be able to distinguish among these classes of support? Nobody, except the professionals charged with maintaining them. As long as the switches, buttons, outlets, sockets, taps, and flushers worked, the benefit of all the rest having become distant undertakings running along long wires and through long pipes was they at they were no longer our immediate concern.

the United States shares the concern of some in Asia that the BRI could be a Trojan horse for China-led regional development, military expansion, and Beijing-controlled institutions’.132 And, it should be stressed, for the control of critical infrastructure. After 40 per cent of the Philippines’ national electricity network was sold to the giant state-owned State Grid Corporation of China, the head of the national transmission corporation conceded that the Philippines’ entire power supply could be shut down by the flick of a switch in Nanjing, the location of the monitoring and control system.133 State Grid also owns a large share of the electricity networks in the Australian states of Victoria and South Australia.134 Its bid for the New South Wales grid was rejected on national security grounds.

Smalley’s vision was that electricity should become the ubiquitous fuel of the twenty-first century, based on a decentralized, local energy storage model where everyone on the grid would have a personal storage appliance that could ensure delivery of uninterrupted power. This distributed system would be supplemented by rewiring the electric grid with superconductors that could enable cross-continent and even worldwide electrical transmission, taking advantage of time zones, climate variations, and large-scale sources of power such as nuclear energy. Smalley was ahead of his time.

Equally salient now is the need for the United States and its allies to double down to ensure that malevolent actors such as Iran and Russia cannot successfully launch a cyberattack on electric grids, petrochemical complexes, and financial services. It could be argued there is an overstated sense that, given the availability of alternative energy, the security of oil supply chains no longer matters. The reality is that there are more than 1.2 billion oil-burning vehicles on the road globally, compared to just five million electric vehicles. Thus, the idea that the world economy no longer needs to worry about a cutoff of oil supplies is questionable. But the fact that large energy-consuming governments know what they could do if oil were less available is a big change from the 1970s, when there was heightened fear of a lasting economic dislocation.

Everywhere we went, Deb and I saw the imprint of the great national undertakings of the past. An astonishing amount of the public architecture of twenty-first-century America was laid down in a few Depression years in the 1930s, bu the millions of people employed by the Works Progress Administration. The small airports we landed at were the result of midcentury defense-and-transportation bulding projects, as were the interstates we flew above. The libraries we found almost everywhere were the result of both public and private investment. The grid-pattern fields of the farmland Midwest had been laid out by the rules of settlement from the earliest days of the republic. The practices that made them the most productive farmland in the world were crucially spurred by land grant universities and agricultural-research schools. The wildlands and ecosystems that have escaped development did so because of their protection as national parks or monuments.

De Beers set up a purchasing office in Monrovia in 1954 where they bought diamonds, with the intent of keeping as much of the diamond trade under its control as possible. However by 1956, while I was still in Monrovia, there were approximately 75,000 illegal miners, who were smuggling these valuable stones on a vast scale. At that time I was offered the opportunity to get involved in this bonanza, which I fortunately did not do since some of my friends who did, went missing never to be seen again. At that time I was the Captain of a Farrell Line’s coastal ship and made additional pocket money running booze into the Liberian interior. In those days when someone disappeared or fell off of the grid, as we would say, the chance that they would be found again was exceedingly slim. In 1984 the De Beers Group (SLST) from South Africa, sold its remaining shares, under duress, to the Precious Metals Mining Company controlled by Lebanese National, Jamil Sahid Mohamed Khalil, was a questionable local businessman, as well as a diamonds and commodities trader. He became known throughout the world’s diamond industry as a wheeler-dealer and a politician, influential in Sierra Leone, where the majority of the blood diamonds came from. In 1999, when South African mercenaries invaded Sierra Leone’s capital city Freetown, Jamil attempted to flee from this West African country but was stopped prior to leaving his home. During this altercation, one of Jamil’s sons was shot to death right in front of him. The following year, Jamil died of a stroke after having successfully made his way to Lebanon.

most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Thirty-Fifth President of the United States of America, former senator and representative from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Section 45, Grid U-35, Arlington National Cemetery.

wall against his back, then frowned as he heard a creaking sound coming from somewhere close by. He was about to investigate, when the house was plunged into darkness once again. * * * Ryan swung his car through the gates and was forced to reduce his speed along the narrow driveway, for which Phillips was eternally grateful. They followed the road over the little stone bridge next to the Archimedes screw and heard the water bubbling furiously through its crushing blades as they passed. They rounded a bend and the house materialised through the trees, its windows flaming brightly against the inky blue-black sky. “It doesn’t look real, does it?” Phillips said, his eyes trained on the perfect backdrop. “It’s not going to disappear before your eyes,” Ryan muttered. Then, in a moment of extreme irony, that is exactly what happened. The two men looked on in shock as the house seemed to disappear, its walls blending with the colour of the night sky and the trees surrounding it. CHAPTER 30 “What the hell?” Martin Henderson swore beneath his breath as the lights went out. He stepped away from the wall to begin feeling his way towards the doorway but the house was pitch black and he could barely see his own hand in front of his face. The circuit had blown again, he thought, which was hardly surprising when a couple of old crackpots insisted on living like Victorian throwbacks rather than relying on the National Grid like the rest of the known world. The sooner he could get away from here, the better. His fingers brushed against the architrave on the doorway and he began to retrace his steps using the wall as a guide, no longer concerned about keeping his meeting at nine o’clock. He only hoped the other person was having as much trouble as he was, finding their way through the maze of rooms in the old house. When his fingers touched nothing but air, he realised he’d reached the turning to lead him back into the small hallway outside the bedrooms and the morning room, and the lift shaft was somewhere over his left shoulder. Blind without any light source, Henderson’s other senses were heightened considerably. He shivered as he stepped in front of the doors to the lift shaft, feeling an icy breath of wind brush against his cheeks. His brain was slow to compute the fact and he did not realise the implication until it was too late. The doors were open. The figure stepped out in front of him, barely making a creak against the floorboards but it was enough to alert him to the presence of another. “For The Valiant,” they whispered. Two firm hands came up to thrust against his chest and

My suggestion is the necessity of a national policy to provide grid independent solar panel houses to these dwellings which can be extended to other 140 million houses gradually. Also the street lights can be provided on community based solar panels in villages, towns and cities. This will bring to India a vibrant solar panel industry right from innovative development, efficiency enhancement, production, distribution, marketing and maintenance of trouble free solar energy system as a business. This integrated business solution will bring down the cost of solar power generation and also distribution loss. The action of creating solar paneled houses and street lights will release nearly 50,000 to 60,000 MW of power for use by various sectors of the economy propelling national growth. It will also be useful for providing low cost electricity to other developing nations in the world.

significant power outages are climbing year by year, from 15 in 2001 to 78 in 2007 to 307 in 2011. America has the highest number of outage minutes of any developed nation—coming in at about six hours per year, not including blackouts caused by extreme weather or other “acts of God,” of which there were 679 between 2003 and 2012. Compare this with Korea at 16 outage minutes a year, Italy at 51 minutes, Germany at 15, and Japan at 11. Not

The vast majority of major, collaborative infrastructure projects around the world have been guided by government policy and funded by public resources: sanitation systems, road systems, railway networks, public health systems, national power grids, the postal service. These are not the spontaneous outcomes of market forces, much less of abstract growth. Projects like these require public investment. Once we realise this, it becomes clear that we can fund the transition quite easily by directing existing public resources from, say, fossil fuel subsidies (which presently stand at $5.2 trillion, 6.5% of global GDP) and military expenditure ($1.8 trillion) into solar panels, batteries and wind turbines.

Trump’s first budget eliminated ARPA-E altogether. It also eliminated the spectacularly successful $70 billion loan program. It cut funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of six thousand of their people. It eliminated all research on climate change. It halved the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster.

First, they could create a system of “open access” in which any power generator could use anyone else’s transmission system on a first-come, first-served basis to deliver power from a generator to a state-regulated distribution system. Second, the FERC started allowing some generators to make wholesale sales—sales only to other utilities, not actual end users—at deregulated rates. Once federal regulators enacted these key preconditions, advocates of deregulation could approach individual states. State legislatures could then vote to allow competition among deregulated retailers of power, or “retail choice,” as it became known. About half the states did just this, almost all in regions where retail rates were well above the national average.

the federal government is failing utterly to take some kind of action to protect our nation from the existential threat to our nation’s security. We currently are spending a trillion dollars on so-called “green energy” but we see nothing being spent to protect the grid from the threat of an EMP attack. The previous administration was at least moving in that direction, acknowledging the threat as real and starting to act. The current administration abandoned those efforts. It is nothing short of criminal to do so.

In Texas, the top wind energy–generating state in the nation, wind supplies 23 percent of the grid’s power.