On This Day Pre-Y2K
Confused by any of the jargon you see below? Check the Y2K Glossary!
January 25, 1999 Permalink
Here is an economist who also understands programming. In a detailed, long report on his personal investigation of the natural gas industry, he says he has become very pessimistic. He doesn’t think the industry will get compliant.
Then he tells us that other industries are just fine -- those that he has not studied in any depth.
In short, where he made a detailed investigation, he found a disaster waiting to happen. Where he didn’t do the same level of research, he is confident that everything important will be OK.
“You don’t need to worry about the banks, insurance companies, stock markets and other financial institutions. With all their money they are fixing their problems. The government, even given Congressman Horn’s failing grade quarterly report, will probably get by with Social Security Unemployment Insurance and most anything else that is critical. (Although not without many glitches). Big Business certainly has the talent and resources to fix its own. The rest may muddle through.”
He has got one thing clear: government spokesmen paint a happy-face picture. If they didn’t, they would be gone.
And this: he relied on a Deep Throat character -- an informant who refused to be identifiued.
No one who tells bad news will survive the lawyers. He says that the lawyers’ verbiage conceals rather than reveals. Surprise, surprise.
This is a pretty good research job, marred only by his near desperation not to be classified as an end-of-the-line fanatic, which his report indicates is coming.
He worries about nuclear war. He can’t see why y2k is so high on the doom-sayers’ list. What about terrorism? As one of the original promoters of the Strategic Defense Initiative (before Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech), and as the co-author of a book on the topic of civil defense, here is my answer: y2k can be dated precisely. The domino effect, if it hits the power grid and takes it down, will produce the same level of devastation as a nuclear war would. So, I worry more about y2k than nuclear war. But if y2k weren’t around, I would worry about terrorism, which I have been writing about for years. Anyone who wants to understand why should read the book by my friend Joe Douglass, America the Vulnerable. I interviewed him over a decade ago for FireStorm Chats. It’s a lot worse now than it was then.
—Gary North, garynorth.com, 01/25/99
