| Message-ID: <20230523142546.GA357720@telecomdigest.us>
Date: 23 May 2023 10:25:46 -0400
From: "Bill Horne" <digest-replies@telecomdigest.net>
Subject: Re: Congress moves to preserve AM radio in cars
On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 05:31:07AM +0000, Fred Atkinson wrote:
>> From: submissions@telecom-digest.org on behalf of John Levine
>> <johnl@iecc.com>
>
>> It appears that Garrett Wollman <wollman@bimajority.org> said:
>>> And guess what? Your phone gets the same emergency alerts as the radio
>>> stations do. That excuse simply doesn't hold water any more.
>
>> I'm guessing you don't spend a lot of time driving around out in the
>> boondocks.
>
>> As soon as you get off main roads in a hilly area, cell signals are
>> hit and miss. Here in not particularly rural upstate NY I can show
>> you places on state highways where there's no cell signal at all. I
>> expect western Mass is the same way.
>
> The problem is that if our Internet goes down, we won't get those alerts.
>
> The entire AM band is not going down all at once.
The entire AM band is not going down at all: in 1971(1), the Emergency
Alert System was accidentally triggered when a U.S. Government
employee ran a paper tape to send a teletype message which should have
been a routine weekly test, but turned out to be an emergency alert.
The tape which was used was right next to the one which was supposed
to be sent; the employee picked up the wrong tape. The Pentagon
expected there to be widespread panic, immediate mass stampedes toward
"Fallout Shelters," and that all but "Conelrad" AM stations would
cease operation.
None of it happened. The few people whom heard the alert shrugged
their shoulders, kissed their loved ones goodbye, and settled down in
their living rooms to await their deaths - or decided that it was a
mistake, and went about their business. By and large, no one showed up
at any "Fallout Shelter:" in the first place, very few citizens knew
where they were or what they were intended to be used for, and in the
second, they were almost all aware of the impossibility of surviving a
nuclear war, and just decided that they'd be dead in a few minutes and
should enjoy the time they had left.
As for the "Conelrad" system, it didn't work. Radio station managers
demanded that their employees stay on the air and keep running the
oh-so-profitable ads for soap that they'd been running before the
alert was sent out. The whole episode was quickly dismissed and
explained away by the new and improved generation of blow-dried
airheads that has taken over from the real reporters of the World War
II era, and the populace was reassured that nothing was wrong and they
could go back to buying soap and being obedient.
It was a repeat of the "Duck and Cover" drills my generation of
youngsters was forced to undergo during our grade-school years, until
a few exceptional young students (including Joan Baez) told their
teachers that they didn't want to play the government's game and
didn't want to pretend that ducking or covering would make any
difference.
In other words, the whole edifice of the "Civil Defense" network and
its alerting system crashed of its own weight, in the face of bluntly
stated evidene from oh-so-onery free thinkers that it was all
psychological warfare, following a military map left over from the
days when "right thinking" Americans were expected to do what they
were told without question.
The current version of the emergency alert system has been redesigned
to carry warnings of tornado, floods, missing children, and (of
course) immenent nuclear destruction. That was a clever move, since it
both provided some actual benefits to a jaded public, and convinced
that same public to actually pay attention to the alerts in the first
place. Until, that is, 2018: in Hawaii, a government employee
accidentally tripped a warning of an impending missile attack, and
caused yet another generation of blow-dried airheads to swing into
action and snap to attention and explain it all away again.
Bill Horne, who believes in Ghod and Senator Dodd and keeping old Castro down
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Emergency_Message
Copyright © 2023 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.
|
| Message-ID: <20230523123930.GA357369@telecomdigest.us>
Date: 23 May 2023 08:39:30 -0400
From: "Bill Horne" <digest-replies@telecomdigest.net>
Subject: Re: Congress moves to preserve AM radio in cars
On Sun, May 21, 2023 at 04:45:00PM -0400, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that Garrett Wollman <wollman@bimajority.org> said:
>> And guess what? Your phone gets the same emergency alerts as the radio
>> stations do. That excuse simply doesn't hold water any more.
>
> I'm guessing you don't spend a lot of time driving around out in the
boondocks.
>
> As soon as you get off main roads in a hilly area, cell signals are
> hit and miss. Here in not particularly rural upstate NY I can show you
> places on state highways where there's no cell signal at all. I expect
> western Mass is the same way.
s/in a hilly area/south of the Mason-Dixon Line/
s/not particulasrly rural upsate NY/the hills of western North Carolina/
s/expect/know/
Bill "We're not at the end of the world, but we can hear the waterfall" Horne
|
