Power substations vandalized in Washington state
lite.cnn.com
lite.cnn.com
https://www.grid.news/story/technology/2022/12/06/the-north-...
> There were 70 reports of emergency electric incidents and disturbances caused by suspected physical attacks, sabotage or vandalism from January to August 2022, Grid’s analysis of the most recently available data from the Department of Energy found. That figure represents a 75 percent increase from 40 such reports in all of 2015, the first year for which comparable data is available.
That being said, this isn't new, it just wasn't reported on as much as before.
And we're not going to have drones operating 24/7 over every single substation in America, there are way, way too many of them.
Tech based solutions probably look like cameras, alarms systems and better physical security.
Just find extremist people in the US and finance them. It is a standard thing in war. The reason the Bolsheviks won was because they were supported by the german government, as they were in war against Russia.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11217187/from-his-home-in-russia-c...
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/25/586099619/the-russia-investig...
The motive (and timing - it's winter) is the same as in attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure - degrade quality of life for civilians in hopes of creating chaos & unrest
This sure looks like domestic terrorism, hard to believe this is ordinary vandalism. These stations are everywhere so easy targets.
Agreed 100% and framing it as vandalism feels like a disservice from the reporting.
> I would expect they have cameras, maybe they don't have good coverage.
It's also hard for cameras to cover every threatening angle. Any goon with a drone or a rifle can cause some from of damage to a power station, after all.
The difference between vandalism and domestic terrorism, in this case, is intent. Since the reporters don't know the intent, calling it domestic terrorism would be speculation, which we need less of in reporting. Sticking to the facts is important.
Not a disservice. It's complicity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/01/january...
An AR-15 has a 600 yard range. It's also easy enough to cover the area with cameras, but the beltway snipers shot from within the trunk of a car -- making a rolling sniper's nest.
Really? The entire range all the way around the facility, with resolution capable of identifying perpetrators? That feels like a stretch.
Why on earth would you sabotage the electrical grid to disrupt LGBT events? Why don’t they have a thread for Americas numerous foreign enemies? Is that not a possibility?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/vandalism-...
> A resident who had promoted the protest wrote on Facebook: “The power is out in Moore County and I know why.”
> The woman, who says she works at a group called Moore County Citizens for Freedom, later said she had been visited by law enforcement officers.
> “I told them that God works in mysterious ways and is responsible for the outage,” the woman wrote.
> “I used the opportunity to tell them about the immoral drag show and the blasphemies screamed by its supporters.
> “I told them God is chastising Moore County, thanked them for coming, and wished them a good night.”
It seems far more likely that an attack mirroring another attack that happened a month ago is probably being done by the same group of people.
> Authorities in Moore County ... have not linked the coordinated attack to a drag queen performance
The quote you gave is from someone who promoted a protest. She was claiming that God destroyed the substation. It's not impossible that this means one of her group actually did it, but it's not the same. It's more like some religious figure in 2001 saying that 9/11 happened because of God's wrath against gays or something.
It is readily falsifiable (the police talked of her like a day after the shooting and decided she is just a crank spouting off on Facebook…the end), it has absolutely no merit, zero.
It was repeated/suggested/amplified WAY early with zero evidence by notable LGBTQ twitter personalities because it fit a narrative in THEIR head. Then it became THE narrative…
And now despite absolutely no connection whatsoever you see it weeks later in adjacent news stories and even here on HN.
As fascinating as it is terrible.
The ones that like to critique a certain someone for fomenting hate seem to be fomenting quite a lot of it themselves lately. I'm not convinced there is as much racial divide as I'm told by the news. Nor as mich divide in regards to gender.
Sorry, long response. I'm just really frustrated at being so consistently lied to by "official sources".
[arrest report needed]
That doesn't mean she or anybody religious did it? Please reread what you posted.
Someone probably thought the gays had too much power.
ba-dum.
ba-dum.
These people are not bright.
Destroying a substation could also be perceived as furthering independence and increasing societies resilience to a soon failing government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline
Most of the violence encouraged, is against pipeline infrastructure, which one has to admit is already causing a ecological mass-genocide. So our all consuming society model is the radical dangerous faction in this view and the shortsighted majority the attacking group.
It is a theme in some forums, and its hard to argue against it, without sounding like a techno-messiah madmen, who over promised over the last 30-40 years. Fusion is not here, the free market caused more problems then it did solve, the elites who applaud themselves for creativity, are compared to previous generations impotent, responsibility shy and attempting to run away from the mess.
Its also a convenient scape goat to have, if one privatized public services into monopolies, which now fail to perform. I ve heard the lgbt+ also set the Reichstag ablaze.
What on earth would a 'foreign enemy' have to gain from a local electrical grid attack in the US, Mr McCarthy? Against the risk of getting discovered and thus sanctioned/invaded/whatever, disrupting a town's electricity supply for a few days doesn't make any sense, even for Putin's Russia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
As a domestic terrorist tactic I think it's pretty old.
We don’t know who did this. Any assumptions about how one group is being treated relative to another is projection.
But I think for some people there is a workaround. Where I live we are on Natural Gas. Years ago, the furnace there was rather old and needed to be replaced due to a leak. But that furnace would work fine without electricity, it had what I think was called a magneto. So with power outages, we at least has heat.
The State made these furnaces illegal to install, so now, the new one would stop working with power outages. Why can't people with oil/gas be allowed to install furnaces without the need for electricity. In many places it is too tight to install a generator.
And for ignition since they don’t use/waste a pilot light.
Without electricity, how would the furnace communicate with the thermostat, and how would the blower fan motor operate? Convection goes up, but not necessarily out, and without a blower fan there's risk of the furnace overheating.
To me, radiators are the best heating system, too bad they have been out of favor for decades.
But I think it's pretty easy to understand why it's unpopular. First, AC is popular in the US, so a system that can reuse the same ducts is a lot less expensive than something entirely separate. Secondly, it's a lot simpler and cheaper to service. If your hydronic heating system freezes or develops an airlock or springs a leak, you might be looking at five-figure repair costs.
In the old furnace, every so often you would have to add water, depending on how cold it is outside.
The house was build over 110 years ago, so electricity was not too common back then. I probably think the source of heat back then was a coal furnace.
I'm curious, why? I've never lived somewhere with radiators, so I perhaps don't know what I'm missing.
Judging by the tone on the ground in WA right now it’s more likely to ignite rock throwing at lifted trucks.
I think the first time most Americans heard much or cared about terrorism was 9/11. The word has -very- strong emotional attachment - hatred, fear, anger, sadness, etc. In the interest of not causing nationwide panic, I can understand why they're just calling it vandalism.
Others may say we -should- be panicking, and I can't necessarily disagree, only explaining one possible reason media is hesitant to use that word.
"In the past two decades, fewer than half of all terrorist attacks have been either claimed by their perpetrators or convincingly attributed by governments to specific terrorist groups."
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/02/01/why-do-t... (http://archive.today/mL4OE)
--also the definition of terroism has been applied with a broader brush over the recent years [perhaps 10 years?]
What's your source for this? Events classified as "terrorist incidents" per year in the U.S. regularly exceeded 100 in the 1970s, but haven't exceeded 65 in 10 years ending 2017.¹
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States
Not at all. During my lifetime, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Unabomber's arrest were all prominent enough for me to remember when they happened. I still remember hearing my grandmother express concern about the Michigan Militia when she saw a belligerent guy wearing camo pants.
> all prominent enough for me to remember when they happened
I listed pre-9/11 examples of terrorism that I remember happening.
Terrorism isn't a consistent ideological position. People don't openly advocate for what they self describe as terrorist states, terrorist literature and philosophy, terrorist thinkers and political party. There's no terrorist bookstore, but here in SF I can go down to Haight St and find an anarchist bookstore ...
On the other hand I think terrorist is an appropriate description for a Timothy McVeigh or a Kaczynski. I would say those are more violent than most 19th-20th century political anarchists.
Though anarchism was pretty much dead by the end of WWII, I think now they're just called Republicans.
Jan 6ths got the T word thrown around.
Perhaps it can be viewed as a word used to selectively threats to the powerful or their narrative.
Until we know who did it, and why, we can speculate and assume, but you can't know for sure.
For example they might just like causing trouble, that's bad obviously, but it's not terrorism.
[0] https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/fbi-dhs-domestic-terrori...
If i was homer simpson and caused a nuclear incident due to negligence, it's still not terrorism.
Correct.
> What if the scale changes from 14,00 to someone taking down key pieces of the power grid
Still not terrorism.
> I’d want the authority in charge to absolutely treat this or any attack on infrastructure as terrorism.
Sure, but only until they determine what it really is.
Terrorism is hard to define exactly, but some required elements are that it be an attack on civilians (an attack on military or police is never terrorism). And it must have a goal of some kind, they must want to change something, by making people scared of another attack.
If you attack people because you hate them, that's not terrorism unless your goal is to change some law or reality (for example make them scared to leave their homes). If you just attack out of hatred it's bad, but it's not terrorism.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspi...
Three Men Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Provide Material Support to a Plot to Attack Power Grids in the United States
Domestic Terrorism Plot was in Furtherance of White Supremacist Ideology
Sure are an awful lot of coincidences. Guess we’ll never know.
We know that people who espouse terrorism not only fantasize but produce instructional materials on this sort of thing, so we should admit admit it as a possibility and try to estimate the probability of it being a factor here.
Making-demand (AKA hostage-taking) terrorism was mostly a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in the form of flight hijackings, and was usually carried out by state-affiliated terrorists, who had an objective to negotiate for prisoner releases.
The violence/fear-as-the-objective type of terrorism has been the predominant since the Oklahoma City bombing onwards to the Salafist terrorism of the last few decades and through to the current spate of white-supremacist motivated terror attacks (i.e. Buffalo). There was quite a bit of this sort of terrorism going on in the US prior to the Civil Rights movement, too, but we didn't have the word "terrorism" to apply to things like lynchings.
Claiming responsibility is not useful for domestic terrorists as they can then be easily captured compared to those who reside in hostile states. Also, claiming responsibility also has the effect of reducing panic and confusion, which is the opposite of what these groups want to accomplish. Timothy McVeigh didn't claim responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombings. He was tracked down (despite his use of aliases to rent the truck) by FBI agents:
https://www.fbi.gov/news/podcasts/inside-the-fbi-oklahoma-ci...
I wish more people learned from history.
Punch the Fascists? Well, the Left tried that in Weimar Germany, and it ended with the Fascists in charge.
Have a Socialist Revolution? You end up with Lenin and Stalin, or Mao and Deng, or, for extra points, the Khmer Rouge, a regime so insane even their fellow Socialists in Vietnam invaded them to end their brutality; even if you insist none of those people were True, Honest Socialists, that's part of the point, isn't it? They're the people Socialist Revolution ended up putting into power.
What is to be done? Maybe, just maybe, not something which puts the most violent out in front.
Oh but we will. Those things always exist.
You have to engage with politics and the power structures.
You have to think and do hard work in building coalitions and power bases.
Gangs don't win power, they just get used by those who do.
Look up the SA and the Strasserists.
I shouldn't expect too much from people who refuse to see the larger issue and instead get lost in the weeds.
> Accelerationism is the most inherently violent and dangerous ideology circulating in the global white supremacist extremist movement.
This for example is not untrue, but it omits the basics necessary to understand the broader context.
Accelerationism is a practical strategy able to be incorporated into any ideology. While right-wing accelerationism seeks to foment civil breakdown that results in a white ethno state, left wing accelerationism seeks to let the breaks off if capitalism in the hope that it will self implode and the resulting devestattion can be harnessed to bring about a communist utopia.
Between and around these lie myriad other accelerationist tendencies each with its own version of what will happen after the status quo self-annihilates. My point is that leaving out all of this is a huge omission and we haven't even gotten to Nick Land and the CCRU yet!