Blackout Wars


Book Description

Blackout Wars is about the historically unprecedented threat to our electronic civilization from its dependence on the electric power grid. Most Americans have experienced temporary blackouts, and regard them as merely an inconvenience. Some Americans have experienced more protracted local and regional blackouts, as in the aftermaths of Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, and may be better able to imagine the consequences of a nationwide blackout lasting months or years, that plunges the entire United States into the dark. In such a nightmare blackout, the entire population of the United States could be at risk. There would be no food. No water. Communications, transportation, industry, business and finance--all of the critical infrastructures that support modern civilization and the lives of the American people would be paralyzed by collapse of the electric power grid. Millions could die. How could a catastrophic blackout happen? Threats to the electric power grid are posed by cyber attack, sabotage, a geomagnetic super-storm, and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon. Blackout Wars warns that terrorists and rogue states are developing a revolutionary new military strategy that could exploit all of these threats in combination, including exploiting the opportunity of severe weather or a geo-storm, to collapse the national electric grid and all the critical infrastructures. It would be the fall of American civilization. For the first time in history, the most dysfunctional societies, like North Korea that cannot even feed its own people, or even non-state actors like terrorists, could destroy the most successful societies on Earth--by means of a Blackout War. Attacking the electric grid enables an adversary to strike at the technological and societal Achilles Heel of U.S. military and economic power. Blackout Wars likens this new Revolution in Military Affairs to Nazi Germany's Blitzkrieg strategy, secretly developed and tested in low-profile experiments during the 1930s, sprung upon the Allies in 1939-1941 in a series of surprise attacks that nearly enabled the Third Reich to win World War II. Just as the West was asleep to the threat from the Blitzkrieg, so today U.S. and Western elites are blind to the looming threat from a Blackout War. Fortunately, where the Federal government is failing to protect the national electric grid, State governments have legal authority and the technical capability to protect their electric grids within their State boundaries, and so spare their citizens from the worst consequences of a protracted blackout. Maine, Virginia, Arizona, Florida, Oklahoma Texas, Colorado and other States have initiatives underway to protect their grids and their peoples from the existential threat that is nuclear EMP attack, and from other hazards that could cause a catastrophic blackout. Ominously, this necessary trend toward decentralization of a vital national security responsibility from the Federal government to State governments is eerily reminiscent of the late Roman Empire. When Rome could no longer defend its cities from the barbarians, the cities built walls to defend themselves. Now that Washington cannot or will not defend the United States from nuclear EMP attack, some States are "building walls" to protect their electric grids and peoples from the new barbarians. Blackout Wars is the story of these heroic efforts by individual legislators and citizens to be "Horatio on the Bridge" defending their States and peoples against perhaps the greatest threat that has ever challenged civilization. Most of all, Blackout Wars is a handbook on why and how the States must meet this challenge, and a clarion call to the States to defend themselves.




Blackout Warfare


Book Description

"Blackout Warfare" is the term used in this report to describe a revolutionary new way of warfare planned by Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran that is still little understood in the United States, but poses an imminent and existential threat to Western Civilization. These potential adversaries plan to use cyber-attacks, sabotage, and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons in combination to blackout national electric grids to achieve quick and decisive victory. Blackout Warfare that paralyzes the U.S. electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures--communications, transportation, natural gas and petroleum, business and industry, food and water infrastructures, and the military--could kill most Americans. The EMP Commission estimates up to 90% of the U.S. population could die from a nationwide blackout lasting one year. The military would be paralyzed by a nationwide blackout, as CONUS military bases depend for 99% of their electricity upon the civilian electric grid. For the first time in the West, this report fights back against looming catastrophe by thinking about and planning for Blackout Warfare the way our potential adversaries do.




Blackout


Book Description

The most universal civilian privation in World War II Britain, the blackout possessed many symbolic meanings. Among its complicated implications for filmmakers was a stigmatization of film spectacle--including the display of "Hollywood women," whose extravagant appearance connoted at best unpatriotic wastefulness and at worst collaboration with the enemy. Exploring the wartime breakdown of conventional gender roles on the screen and in the audience, Antonia Lant demonstrates that many British films of the period signaled their national cinematic identity by diverging from the notion of the Hollywood star, the mainstay of commercial American motion pictures, replacing her with a deglamourized, mobilized heroine. Nevertheless, the war machine demanded that British films continue to celebrate stable and reassuring gender roles. Contradictions abounded, both within film narratives and between narrative and "real life." Analyzing films of all the major wartime studios, the author scrutinizes the efforts of realist and melodramatic texts to confront women's wartime experiences, including conscription. By combining study of contemporary posters, advertisements, propaganda notices, and cartoons with consideration of recent feminist theoretical work on the cinema, spectatorship, and history, she has produced the first book to examine the relationships among gender, cinema, and nationality as they are affected by the stresses of war. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Blackout of Sporting Events on TV.


Book Description




Small Wars, Big Data


Book Description

How a new understanding of warfare can help the military fight today's conflicts more effectively. The way wars are fought has changed starkly over the past sixty years. International military campaigns used to play out between large armies at central fronts. Today's conflicts find major powers facing rebel insurgencies that deploy elusive methods, from improvised explosives to terrorist attacks. Small Wars, Big Data presents a transformative understanding of these contemporary confrontations and how they should be fought. The authors show that a revolution in the study of conflict--enabled by vast data, rich qualitative evidence, and modern methods--yields new insights into terrorism, civil wars, and foreign interventions. Modern warfare is not about struggles over territory but over people; civilians--and the information they might choose to provide--can turn the tide at critical junctures. The authors draw practical lessons from the past two decades of conflict in locations ranging from Latin America and the Middle East to Central and Southeast Asia. Building an information-centric understanding of insurgencies, the authors examine the relationships between rebels, the government, and civilians. This approach serves as a springboard for exploring other aspects of modern conflict, including the suppression of rebel activity, the role of mobile communications networks, the links between aid and violence, and why conventional military methods might provide short-term success but undermine lasting peace. Ultimately the authors show how the stronger side can almost always win the villages, but why that does not guarantee winning the war. Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population.




The Blackout in Britain and Germany, 1939–1945


Book Description

This book is the first major study of the blackout in the Second World War. Developing a comparative history of this system of civil defense in Britain and Germany, it begins by exploring how the blackout was planned for in both countries, and how the threat of aerial bombing framed its development. It then examines how well the blackout was adhered to, paying particular regard to the tension between its military value and the difficulties it caused civilians. The book then moves on to discuss how the blackout undermined the perception of security on the home front, especially for women. The final chapter examines the impact of the blackout on industry and transport. Arguing that the blackout formed an integral part in mobilising and legitimating British and German wartime discourses of community, fairness and morality, the book explores its profound impact on both countries.




Final Blackout


Book Description

Published for the first time in 1940 in "Astounding" magazine, "Final Blackout" "is set in a world ravaged by 30 years of war. . . [and] chronicles the rise, in England, of the charismatic leader, strategist and statesman known only as the Lieutenant" ("Publishers Weekly"). "Hubbard spins a masterful tale of suspense and nonstop action."--Harold Robbins




The Blackout


Book Description

In a small town located in northern Spain, electricity has mysteriously stopped working. Batteries, cellphones, vehicles, and even all types of machines don't work anymore. The government sends several agents to investigate the murder of the owner of one of the bars in town, the rape of a girl, and the suicide of the local priest. Apparently, all those deaths are related to the blackout.




Britney Spears's Blackout


Book Description

Britney Spears barely survived 2007. She divorced her husband, lost custody of her kids, went to rehab, shaved her head and assaulted a paparazzo. In the midst of her public breakdown, she managed to record an album, Blackout. Critics thought it spelled the end for Britney Spears' career. But Blackout turned out to be one of the most influential albums of the aughts. It not only brought glitchy digital noise and dubstep into the Top 40, but also transformed Britney into a new kind of pop star, one who shrugged off mainstream ubiquity for the devotion of smaller groups of fans who worshipped her idiosyncratic sound. This book returns to the grimy clubs and paparazzi hangouts of LA in the 2000s as well as the blogs and forums of the early internet to show how Blackout was a crucial hinge between twentieth and twenty-first-century pop.




Advertising


Book Description

3000. That's the number of marketing messages the average American confronts on a daily basis from TV commercials, magazine and newspaper print ads, radio commercials, pop-up ads on gaming apps, pre-roll ads on YouTube videos, and native advertising on mobile news apps. These commercial messages are so pervasive that we cannot help but be affected by perpetual come-ons to keeping buying. Over the last decade, advertising has become more devious, more digital, and more deceptive, with an increasing number of ads designed to appear to the untrained eye to be editorial content. It's easy to see why. As we have become smarter at avoiding ads, advertisers have become smarter about disguising them. Mara Einstein exposes how our shopping, political, and even dating preferences are unwittingly formed by brand images and the mythologies embedded in them. Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know(R) helps us combat the effects of manipulative advertising and enables the reader to understand how marketing industries work in the digital age, particularly in their uses and abuses of "Big Data.' Most importantly, it awakens us to advertising's subtle and not-so-subtle impact on our lives--both as individuals and as a global society. What ideas and information are being communicated to us--and to what end?