I am currently studying the Bible book of Isaiah in a Bible Study Fellowship class. Isaiah has a lot of end times prophecy in it. I am also watching Dr. David Jeremiah's sermon series called "The Coming Economic Armageddon" in which he speaks at length about end times through the prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation.
Then, a bit ago, I read an article "Report warns Obama about 'new' Dark Ages" by Bob Unruh. The article talks about a report titled "EMP Attacks – What the U.S. Must Do Now". The article starts out with the following:
"Two national-security experts have issued a report through the Heritage Foundation that warns Obama administration officials to start working now to prevent – and mitigate the damage from – an electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States because of the potential for "unimaginable devastation."
"Not even a global humanitarian effort would be enough to keep hundreds of millions of Americans from death by starvation, exposure, or lack of medicine. Nor would the catastrophe stop at U.S. borders. Most of Canada would be devastated, too, as its infrastructure is integrated with the U.S. power grid. Much of the world's intellectual brain power (half of it is in the United States) would be lost as well. Earth would most likely recede into the 'new' Dark Ages," states the report by James J. Carafano, the deputy director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies and director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, and Richard Weitz, senior fellow and director of the Center for Politial-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute.
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""An EMP strike can easily obliterate America's electrical, telecommunications, transportation, financial, food, and water infrastructures, rendering the United States helpless to coordinate actions and deliver services essential for daily life," says the report."
The report goes on to say there are several countries with the capability to pull off an attack of this kind. It could be accomplished from a ship off our coast firing a short- or medium-range missile to lift a nuclear warhead over the U.S.
But, setting aside the idea of an enemy attack for a minute, there is also the possibility of a similar event occurring in relation to a massive geomagnetic storm caused by sun flares. Some scientists believe because we will reach solar maximum (the period of greatest solar activity in the solar cycle of the sun) within the next 2 years, the possibility of disrupting solar flares could also be a serious problem. According to the article the last 'great' geomagnetic storm, called the Carrington Event, occurred in 1859. We've come a long way, baby! But, it might bite us in the butt if we have another 'great' geomagnetic storm in the near future given our amazingly large dependence on electricity.
The article mentions blackouts in 1977 and 2003. The one in 1977 was cause by two lightening strikes (the equivalent of a minuscule fraction of an EMP). Both were devastating to the areas they hit. I remember a blackout in 1965 or thereabouts. I know it was in November because my mother was standing on a stool reaching into a kitchen cabinet to get down candles for my birthday cake!
So, what does this mean to us? I don't have a clue. But, it seems to me quite interesting in light of some of the things described in the Bible. Is it related? Again, I don't have a clue. It's just something to think about.
I do have to say, I've had a concern about our reliance on electricity, cell phones, computers, etc. for quite a few years. The more we rely on technology, the bigger the butt-kicking we might take if technology is halted in its tracks.
Remember all the hoopla over Y2K? I do! I was still working back then and I was a software engineer with IBM working on their premiere mainframe operating system. Y2K was a really big thing for 'old' software. Back in the dark ages of the 1960's and 1970's (not the devastating dark ages discussed in the report) the people who wrote the code that ran the operating systems never anticipated their code would still be running 30 or 40 years later. They had to be concerned about fitting large amounts of data into small places. So, years were coded as 2 digits rather than 4. When it became apparent that we needed to ferret out all the places in the whole operating system code and "fix" the way the year was portrayed/stored, we realized that was a big deal. Bunches of people worked on that for over 2 years. IBM was pretty confident they found all the spots that needed to be "fixed" but, in programming, you just never know what you might have missed. So, all of us were sitting around (sober) on New Year's Eve waiting for the phone to ring. Fortunately, my phone never rang so I watched the ball drop and some of the following festivities and then went to bed. As far as I know, there were no catastrophic errors that weren't found before hand and the few that were found were in non-critical applications. This was true at least at IBM Poughkeepsie, NY.
But, I have to say, I was not sure enough that all places were "fixed." So, I took out a bunch of money (a small bunch, that is) to have on hand in case ATMs were out of commission. Fortunately, all went pretty smoothly. Phew!
Think about it a minute -- if there can be this much hullabaloo over fixing a date, how much worse do you think it would be if we were hit by an EMP attack? I think the farthest thing from our minds would be whether or not the ATMs work.
Am I paranoid? No, I'm not. I have faith in Almighty God who was and is and always will be. These things just fascinate me.
Blessings,
Mary
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