The most basic, minimal function of government is protection. Governments are supposed to protect the citizens from one another and from foreigners. Criminals are supposed to be punished, borders secured, terrorists kept out, and hostile foreign states deterred from attacking us. The present US government has troops stationed in countries all over the world, and continues to be bogged down in an eternal, undeclared (and, hence, unconstitutional) war in Afghanistan. Our citizens’ lives are increasingly micro-managed by innumerable laws and by tens of thousands of regulations (supposedly based on those laws) crafted by unelected bureaucrats. Yet our borders are left wide open; the courts routinely release vicious criminals to prey on us; and we have been left vulnerable to terrorists, to nuclear attack, to hackers, and to EMP (electromagnetic pulse).

Not only are our borders inadequately guarded, but Border Patrol officers (remember Ramos and Compean?) have been railroaded into prison for doing their duty. Legal immigration continues at high levels; visas are granted to techies to take jobs from American engineers; and illegals are bused all over the country at our expense and given all sorts of benefits. They commit much of our crime; some are terrorists; and they bring in a host of diseases. We pay an ever-higher price for importing all those Democrat voters.

We spend trillion on wars that never end and on keeping troops in nations like Germany that can easily defend themselves, so there is not enough money left to fund an adequate ABM (anti-ballistic missile) defense. True, the technical problems are serious, but we have at least developed the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, which can destroy ICBMs with kinetic warheads, although it is only deployed in very limited numbers at a few sites in Alaska. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) looked into lasers, space “battle stations,” orbiting mirrors (to reflect ground based laser beams), and “brilliant pebbles,” orbiting kinetic kill satellites that could hit enemy ICBMs in their upper boost stage, when they are vulnerable and before they deploy their MIRVs (Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles) and decoys. None of these ideas are currently being developed, although the Boeing Airborne Laser system is still being tested.

EMP, or electromagnetic pulse, is a huge burst of magnetic energy that can be produced by major solar flares or coronal mass ejections or by nuclear bombs detonated in low Earth orbit, referred to as “HEMP,” or high altitude electromagnetic pulse. There are also non-nuclear EMP weapons (of limited power and range), using capacitors, microwaves, and explosively pumped flux compression generators. EMP can create induced currents in our power lines, destroying computer systems, electrical appliances, and the vital transformers that could take many years to replace. Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the Homeland Security EMP task force, estimates that up to ninety percent of our population could be killed by an EMP event. Remember that vulnerability has been engineered into all our systems, whether by accident or design, and for it to be accidental would require an almost subhuman level of intelligence on the part of those who designed the systems. Not only would an EMP take away our electricity, the internet, and most of our communications systems; it would also paralyze the banking system, and cut off water supplies and sewage removal. Hardening our system against EMP would cost only a fraction of the trillions we spend on foreign wars and occupations, but our King Hussein refuses to invest in it. The implications of this are truly mind-boggling.

And all our systems are also incredibly vulnerable to hackers; you would think the potential for such attacks would have been obvious and that it would have been a simple matter to construct our control systems so that they would be invulnerable, but I guess that would have been too logical. The recent major hack attack, almost certainly by China, should have been a wakeup call, but there is no evidence that even now our glorious rulers are doing anything to counter the threat. Remember that the systems that are vulnerable to EMP are also fairly vulnerable to hackers, who could disrupt our communications and banking systems and interfere with water and sewer systems, nuclear power plants, and the systems (SCADAs, or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems) that control oil and gas pipelines, and even some industrial facilities. Retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer thinks that the Chinese may already have implanted “Trojan horse” software in these systems.

And China has become as wealthy and as technologically advanced as it is in part because of our insane trade policies and our allowing the Chinese to infringe on US patents. Remember Bill Clinton’s laundered campaign contributions from the Chinese, and his dealings with the sleazy Charley Tre and James Riady of the Lippo Group, an Indonesian banking firm that worked closely with the Chinese. We have empowered our potential enemies, and appear to be doing the same thing with Iran.

Meanwhile, King Hussein has released tens of thousands of illegal alien felons here in the US to prey on us, an act that would have brought swift impeachment to any “Republican” President, and he is now planning to release thousands more criminals. Despite the attacks on Ft. Hood, the D.C. Navy Yard, and on military recruiters, Hussein and Army Chief of Staff Raymond Odierno oppose arming the recruiters or soldiers on bases here in the US. It was Clinton who originally decreed that all soldiers save MPs had to be disarmed. And other attacks have scarcely been reported; little attention was given to the shots someone fired at transformers in a power substation in California not long ago. A friend of mine here in Sacramento actually saw bomb-making equipment in an apartment being investigated by the BATF; this was not reported.

Due to our increasing economic and social problems, we have no “slack” in our economy or in our broader society, and it wouldn’t take much to send us back into the Dark Ages. Perhaps it is no longer a question of if, but when.