A friend recently mentioned his brother, who falls into the "conspiracies under every rock" taxonomical classification, asking "questions" regarding recent attacks on power plants in four states.
Thanks for putting this together. On another forum (you know the one) I'm routinely the "conspiracy debunker" on the Covid shots. I didn't get an mRNA vaccine - I had Covid before the shots were available - and I don't support mandates and I believe the evidence indicates the shots don't work, certainly not boosters. And yet I have to defend "the shots" against all kinds of conspiracy induced "conclusions" which have yet to be scientifically proved. I perform this service not because I'm a self-sacrificing saint, but because I don't want my "group" looking like idiots who leap to conclusions. The latest craze is the "suddenly died" conspiracy. People "suddenly die" all the time - it's an unfortunate fact of life in a world with billions of people. People have "suddenly died" for generations. But because we're looking for that twitch of grass right now on anything we can link to Covid vaccines, we "see" a pattern every time a young person "suddenly dies". Of course, the headline that announce a sudden death gets far more attention than the coroner report a month later that says the victim had a congenital heart defect - one in a million. In a nation with 340 million people...you'll see hundreds of these cases. But alas, it doesn't stop the conspiracizing....
The COVID conspiracies are a product of the government's lying to us "for our own good." Combine that with social media's "helping hand" in suppressing anything that went against the government's narrative, and you've got all the ingredients for the conspiracists to gin up their own nonsense.
I'm in a "middle ground" on the vaccines. I do remain of the belief that they mitigate (or did, for the early variants) risk of death - and if we recall, they were originally advertised that way. 90-95% effective at preventing infection, near-100% effective in mitigating risk of death.
Those numbers still allowed for a 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 chance of getting the bug. That's not how traditional vaccines work, so calling them the "V" word opened up another channel for the motivated to cry fraud.
And, indeed, the "sudden death" bit is absolutely pattern-seeking behavior. Before that it was other alleged side effects.
Not that there isn't any chance of either pattern, it behooves me to say. With stuff like this - a rapidly evolving virus, "young" science, and no long-term data, possibilities are myriad. But, we're back to Hitchens' Razor and correlation is not causation.
The fringes get the loudspeakers, unfortunately, and it is indeed the case that guilt-by-association is on many minds when it comes to this stuff.
Hi Peter, I think you're on the right track here. But I have a minor quibble with your terminology. To me a power plant is a generation facility, where power is created and then transmitted out. It seems like the facilities that were targeted in these instances were substations, whose function is to simply transmit power. These can be transmission stations (high voltage in, high voltage out) or distribution stations (high voltage in, low voltage out). There was a mention of a hydro plant, but from what I gathered that was gunshots heard in the area. In my state gunshots near a station (particularly a transmission station which are in more remote locations) are pretty commonplace during hunting season. I know it always makes me nervous when I hear them.
Which brings me to a point of irony. I design substations for a living, and my company has many ongoing security projects to help protect the stations, and ultimately the grid. A lot of these are cybersecurity projects of which I am not involved. The others are physical security, which mostly comprise of station yard lights, cameras, and ballistic walls. The ironic part of this is that we are only installing the walls around part of the control house, which houses all the control panels (brains of the station) and batteries ( for backup power). The walls are only to protect the batteries, which are not visible from outside of the house. If someone wanted to take out the batteries they would have to know where they were located, i.e. have knowledge of their exact location inside of the house as a former employee or contractor. These walls cost tens of thousands of dollars each.
What I find humorous as I design these security enhancements, is that a person completely outside of a station with a rifle and scope can do far more damage to the grid by simply shooting at the transformers (full of oil) or breakers (full of SF6) in the station. These are huge pieces of equipment and easy targets of opportunity. But bigger brains than mine have decided that it is of more importance to protect unseen batteries that only a select few would even know were there. The engineers in my department just laugh and say, well it all pays the same.
As a side note, the company that fabricates the ballistic walls for us is a bunch of good old boys who like to shoot guns. And as their customer they invite us to come to their shop and test their ballistic walls out, which includes shooting .50 caliber rounds at them. So we've got that going for us.
You are, of course, correct in noting "station" rather than "plant." As it was only the trigger to the article, I didn't pay it much heed.
As for the .50 cals - they're banned in my state, no matter that I've never heard of one being used in a crime here. The classic "why do you need that" statist's argument.
Thanks for putting this together. On another forum (you know the one) I'm routinely the "conspiracy debunker" on the Covid shots. I didn't get an mRNA vaccine - I had Covid before the shots were available - and I don't support mandates and I believe the evidence indicates the shots don't work, certainly not boosters. And yet I have to defend "the shots" against all kinds of conspiracy induced "conclusions" which have yet to be scientifically proved. I perform this service not because I'm a self-sacrificing saint, but because I don't want my "group" looking like idiots who leap to conclusions. The latest craze is the "suddenly died" conspiracy. People "suddenly die" all the time - it's an unfortunate fact of life in a world with billions of people. People have "suddenly died" for generations. But because we're looking for that twitch of grass right now on anything we can link to Covid vaccines, we "see" a pattern every time a young person "suddenly dies". Of course, the headline that announce a sudden death gets far more attention than the coroner report a month later that says the victim had a congenital heart defect - one in a million. In a nation with 340 million people...you'll see hundreds of these cases. But alas, it doesn't stop the conspiracizing....
The COVID conspiracies are a product of the government's lying to us "for our own good." Combine that with social media's "helping hand" in suppressing anything that went against the government's narrative, and you've got all the ingredients for the conspiracists to gin up their own nonsense.
I'm in a "middle ground" on the vaccines. I do remain of the belief that they mitigate (or did, for the early variants) risk of death - and if we recall, they were originally advertised that way. 90-95% effective at preventing infection, near-100% effective in mitigating risk of death.
Those numbers still allowed for a 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 chance of getting the bug. That's not how traditional vaccines work, so calling them the "V" word opened up another channel for the motivated to cry fraud.
And, indeed, the "sudden death" bit is absolutely pattern-seeking behavior. Before that it was other alleged side effects.
Not that there isn't any chance of either pattern, it behooves me to say. With stuff like this - a rapidly evolving virus, "young" science, and no long-term data, possibilities are myriad. But, we're back to Hitchens' Razor and correlation is not causation.
The fringes get the loudspeakers, unfortunately, and it is indeed the case that guilt-by-association is on many minds when it comes to this stuff.
Hi Peter, I think you're on the right track here. But I have a minor quibble with your terminology. To me a power plant is a generation facility, where power is created and then transmitted out. It seems like the facilities that were targeted in these instances were substations, whose function is to simply transmit power. These can be transmission stations (high voltage in, high voltage out) or distribution stations (high voltage in, low voltage out). There was a mention of a hydro plant, but from what I gathered that was gunshots heard in the area. In my state gunshots near a station (particularly a transmission station which are in more remote locations) are pretty commonplace during hunting season. I know it always makes me nervous when I hear them.
Which brings me to a point of irony. I design substations for a living, and my company has many ongoing security projects to help protect the stations, and ultimately the grid. A lot of these are cybersecurity projects of which I am not involved. The others are physical security, which mostly comprise of station yard lights, cameras, and ballistic walls. The ironic part of this is that we are only installing the walls around part of the control house, which houses all the control panels (brains of the station) and batteries ( for backup power). The walls are only to protect the batteries, which are not visible from outside of the house. If someone wanted to take out the batteries they would have to know where they were located, i.e. have knowledge of their exact location inside of the house as a former employee or contractor. These walls cost tens of thousands of dollars each.
What I find humorous as I design these security enhancements, is that a person completely outside of a station with a rifle and scope can do far more damage to the grid by simply shooting at the transformers (full of oil) or breakers (full of SF6) in the station. These are huge pieces of equipment and easy targets of opportunity. But bigger brains than mine have decided that it is of more importance to protect unseen batteries that only a select few would even know were there. The engineers in my department just laugh and say, well it all pays the same.
As a side note, the company that fabricates the ballistic walls for us is a bunch of good old boys who like to shoot guns. And as their customer they invite us to come to their shop and test their ballistic walls out, which includes shooting .50 caliber rounds at them. So we've got that going for us.
You are, of course, correct in noting "station" rather than "plant." As it was only the trigger to the article, I didn't pay it much heed.
As for the .50 cals - they're banned in my state, no matter that I've never heard of one being used in a crime here. The classic "why do you need that" statist's argument.
Very informative, thanks for sharing