livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
The advent of COVID-19 and the subsequent nation-wide lockdown amounts to a wake-up call of historical proportions. It has alerted us to the possibility of “black swans” swimming into our lives, or in the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his bestselling The Black Swan, our susceptibility to “the role of the exceptional event leading to the degradation of predictability.”
A “black swan” is characterized by three attributes: “it is a rarity,” “it causes an extreme impact,” and we come to understand it only “after the fact.” The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 was such a “black swan” -- a malign event we did not expect and plan for. At the same time, most beneficial discoveries and technologies did not come from design, planning or predictable outcomes but were rare events with positive implications; for example, Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin. But what most concerns us is the negative “black swan,” with its destructive radius owing much of its malignity to the “built-in defect of conventional wisdom.”
The Wuhan lab was only one of many, no doubt with equally careless or fallible security protocols and poor equipment that could lead to a new pandemic, for which we would need to be prepared. China’s institutional structure across the board is defective and unequal to the challenge of ensuring safe and productive results. The ideal solution would be to quarantine China, to cast it out of “the family of nations,” forbidding all travel to and from. Since that cannot be done in the real world, we have no choice but to limit our contacts with China so far as such a measure is feasible, to reduce our dependency on Chinese imports and cheap labor, and to remain in a state of readiness for future epidemics.
There is another Black Swan on the horizon which needs to be acknowledged and, so to speak, rendered Gray. The name of this swan is EMP, or Electro-Magnetic Pulse (aka HEMP, or High Altitude EMP). The fear, uncertainty and hardship of COVID times that we are undergoing will dissipate, but it should prepare us for other “exceptional events” that would be far worse than what we are currently experiencing -- and by orders of magnitude. Wearing masks, self-isolating and hunting for toilet paper are as nothing compared to the devastation an EMP attack would unleash. Such an attack is not beyond the realm of possibility when we consider the existence of major state actors like China and Russia, who have developed EMP arsenals, and highly capable rogue state actors, such as North Korea and Iran.
www.americanthinker.com
A “black swan” is characterized by three attributes: “it is a rarity,” “it causes an extreme impact,” and we come to understand it only “after the fact.” The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 was such a “black swan” -- a malign event we did not expect and plan for. At the same time, most beneficial discoveries and technologies did not come from design, planning or predictable outcomes but were rare events with positive implications; for example, Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin. But what most concerns us is the negative “black swan,” with its destructive radius owing much of its malignity to the “built-in defect of conventional wisdom.”
The Wuhan lab was only one of many, no doubt with equally careless or fallible security protocols and poor equipment that could lead to a new pandemic, for which we would need to be prepared. China’s institutional structure across the board is defective and unequal to the challenge of ensuring safe and productive results. The ideal solution would be to quarantine China, to cast it out of “the family of nations,” forbidding all travel to and from. Since that cannot be done in the real world, we have no choice but to limit our contacts with China so far as such a measure is feasible, to reduce our dependency on Chinese imports and cheap labor, and to remain in a state of readiness for future epidemics.
There is another Black Swan on the horizon which needs to be acknowledged and, so to speak, rendered Gray. The name of this swan is EMP, or Electro-Magnetic Pulse (aka HEMP, or High Altitude EMP). The fear, uncertainty and hardship of COVID times that we are undergoing will dissipate, but it should prepare us for other “exceptional events” that would be far worse than what we are currently experiencing -- and by orders of magnitude. Wearing masks, self-isolating and hunting for toilet paper are as nothing compared to the devastation an EMP attack would unleash. Such an attack is not beyond the realm of possibility when we consider the existence of major state actors like China and Russia, who have developed EMP arsenals, and highly capable rogue state actors, such as North Korea and Iran.
Swans of a Different Color
The advent of COVID-19 and the subsequent nation-wide lockdown amounts to a wake-up call of historical proportions. It has alerted us to the possibility of “black swans” swimming into our lives, or in the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in...
