"Back to my first question. Houston - do you still have a problem? You have been knocked so far off the front page by now, I can't even find any information about you in the classifieds."
Hello Houston? Do you still have a problem? You were a big news item not that long ago. In fact, you were the first in the string of four tropical events this season. Remember that storm called Harvey? 30 inches of rain from a very slow moving hurricane? I remember reading thousands of homes in Houston were damaged or destroyed with over 100,000 cars having the same fate. The recovery from this historic storm was going to be the big news story for weeks if not months. Well, it was not.
This whirlwind of a news cycle actually started for me during the eclipse on August 21st. Yes, that true. A bit over a month and a half ago. While in Nebraska viewing the event, my wife and I were parked next to a young couple from just outside of Houston. Little did they know, or did we know that Houston was going to be ground zero for the first tropical storm in a bit under a week. Now that it is over, we seem to have forgotten that Harvey did tens of billions of dollars of damage to Houston and killed over 80 people.
But hold on. Just as relief was pouring into Texas, along comes a monster storm in the Caribbean called Irma. This Cat 5 storm started chewing up islands in the Caribbean on September 6th and then hit Florida on September 10th as a strong Cat 4. From right after the start of the month (September) until when Irma finally devolved into a tropical storm, Irma became the news cycle. And Harvey? Who was Harvey anyway?
Because Irma affected just about the entire state of Florida, this was going to be the news for weeks if not months. But then came Maria. Another monster storm who not only knocked the socks off of Puerto Rico, but also knocked Irma right off the front page. On September 20th, a scant ten days after Irma made landfall in Florida, Maria all but destroyed Puerto Rico. The devastation was so complete to this small island, and the restoration was going to be so immense, this was going to be the lead story for the following weeks and months.
But then came Las Vegas.
On October 1, the new story with stole the headlines was the mass shooting in Las Vegas. And on October 9th, that is pretty much where we are right now. In my life, I can never remember so much historic news happening in such a short period of time. Maybe Alvin Toffler was right. We can become over saturated with news and information, that we can reach the point of becoming almost numb.
Back to my first question. Houston - do you still have a problem? You have been knocked so far off the front page by now, I can't even find any information about you in the classifieds. As for me? I am just hoping that for the rest of October nothing more earthshaking is going to happen. We all need to digest what has happened during the past month and a half. If you are feeling overwhelmed, don't feel lonely. Many of the rest of us are also.
South Korea is ready to deploy graphite bombs - also known as "blackout bombs" - that will paralyse North Korea's electrical power plants in the event of war breaking out on the peninsula.
ReplyDeleteBlackout bombs were first used by the United States in Iraq in the 1990 Gulf War and work by releasing a cloud of extremely fine, chemically treated carbon filaments over electrical components. The filaments are so fine that they act like a cloud, but cause short circuits in electrical equipment.
Graphite bombs worked well against targets in Iraq, knocking out around 85 percent of the electrical supply across the country. NATO used similar weapons against targets in Serbia in May 1999, damaging around 70 percent of the country's electrical supply.
Analysts believe the weapons would work well against targets in North Korea, which are likely to be obsolete and not insulated.