Operations Director for the EMP Task Force Glenn Rhoades is an expert in grassroots social activism and advocates for grid resiliency. In the first half, he pointed out there is a range of man-made dangers that threaten America's infrastructure, including electric substation attacks, cyber-attacks, and electromagnetic attacks (EMP), which can destroy most equipment that is electrical in nature. This last possibility represents a wide-area outage that could last months and be created by the explosion of a nuclear device in the upper atmosphere. Rhoades cited concerns over objects like the Chinese balloon that crossed over US airspace. A balloon of that size (about 200 ft in diameter) is capable of carrying a large payload like multiple nuclear warheads, he said, adding that had it done so, it could have caused a major portion of the Western grid to fail if it exploded over Wyoming or Montana.
Solar storms also have a potentially serious impact on the power grid, and there is a 12% chance of a significant solar event occurring every decade, he warned. Regarding America's focus on renewable energy programs, he doesn't understand how they can be deployed without considering the need to harden them. Rather than America producing more weapons, "the narrative has got to be that we can deter attacks on our nation if we're resilient," he remarked. For more, check out a free EMP Task Force PDF report, Grid Down: Death of a Nation, compiled by Jonathan Hollerman.
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Author Dena Merriam is the founder of a women-led interfaith organization (GPIW). In the latter half, she shared her profound journey of discovering her past lives and visiting the locations where her former incarnations lived, such as Tibet. By realizing that this is not your first time around, you lose your fear of death and know you're part of an ongoing experience of life after life, she commented. Merriam recounted how her grandson, then four years old, started sharing memories of being in Tibet and killed in an invasion. He knew the chants and the names of the deities. This triggered Merriam's memory of her own past life in Tibet-- an incarnation that had a great impact on her current existence, and was focused on a search for higher truth.
While in Tibet, she became involved with a spiritual leader, who ended up controlling and taking advantage of her, and she sought to discover through her past lives why she allowed this to happen. Merriam learned that in a previous incarnation, this man was a son she'd given birth to and then abandoned, and he had taken revenge upon her in the current life. This helped her to resolve and bring closure to the situation. "Relationships follow us from one life to another," and may be particularly consequential around unresolved issues, she explained. Rather than using hypnotherapy to recall past lives, her memories come naturally, often in meditation and introspection, as well as in clues revealed in dreams. Merriam has also peered 200 years ahead, and while there are some disruptions due to climate, she sees a brighter future for humanity.
News segment guests: John M. Curtis, Catherine Austin Fitts