80 Billion Dollar US Intelligence Budget and the Defense of Civilization

From: http://theblotch.com/wordpress/?p=934

80 Billion Dollar US Intelligence Budget and the Defense of Civilization
by SPLOTCH
So it seems that 80 billion dollars per year are being spent on the Intelligence Industrial Complex in the United States – 80 billion dollars: $80,000,000,000. But what are they doing, exactly? what are they watching and what are they trying to guard against? Stinking, unwashed, underfed cave dwellers in Afghanistan? A clerical, Sharia-based, and thus eminently or even overly orderly government in Iran? A few nuts with fizzle bombs and explosives in their underwear? And this costs 80 billion dollars?

In the meantime, the whole electrical, electronic, digitally base infrastructure of modern civilization – the entire economy, the food supply, the money supply, pretty much everything which makes modern civilization what it is, is completely unprotected if the sun makes one untoward burp in our direction. Scientists call this a CME or coronal mass ejection, which in addition to other exotic waves and particles could send an EMP or electric magnetic pulse our way.

What could a massive EMP do? If this EMP creates its own magnetic field oriented with the earth’s own magnetic field, it could knock out every power grid on the planet. What would that mean? No communication. No one would have any idea whether anyone else was affected. Computers, cell phones, and land lines useless, as if they never existed. Modern vehicles based on electronics (anything built within the last decade or so) would cease to operate. The long and complicated chain of trucks which brings food to the hundreds of millions every day in North America would stop dead. Grocery stores would be cleaned out in a day. Furnaces would not work in the north. Those with fireplaces would soon be tearing boards off their neighbors’ houses to keep warm. The others would simply freeze. After that, it’s every man and woman for themselves. Whoever has the most guns and the most bullets will eat and keep warm, the others will perish. A Mad Max world with no end in sight for maybe a century if ever.

There is presently no protection for this. The power grids are not dampened or shielded. There are not enough spare transformers around to light one small city. Nothing has been done, nothing is being done. And yet 80 billion dollars a year are being spent to insure that a radical doesn’t blow up your local convenience store or bring down a plane. Plane crashes are bad, but how about the end of civilization, the death of billions, and a benighted essentially medieval world dominated by the strong and the ruthless for decades or centuries?

This is a very remote possibility though, right? Actually, scientists say such an event is inevitable within 10 to 100 years – or as early as tomorrow for that matter. Inevitable means it will happen, it’s only a matter of when. Will we be prepared when it does? Not if it happens right now, we won’t.

Add to this the very real risk from large asteroid strikes, also inevitable in the course of the next few centuries or again as early as next week, and also potentially as damaging as the CME or even more so for a really big one, and it adds up to – we’re spending $80 billion on what?

A bill has presently been introduced in Congress but has not yet passed. It is called H.R.5587 and seeks to establish a United States Commission on Planetary Defense. The bill calls for the establishment of a 2 million dollar budget to help track NEOs or near earth objects (civilization-killing asteroids, in other words). 2 million dollars to help ward off the extinction of the human race, 80 billion dollars to track a few savages with AK-47s – does that sound reasonable? Lets compare those two numbers: $2,000,000 vs $80,000,000,000. Crazy.