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General Norman Schwarzkopf, the US Army General who masterminded and led the rescue of Kuwait in 1991 from the occupying Iraqi military died on Dec 27 at the age of 78.
"Stormin' Norman" as he was known to the troops and the media was a hard charging, no nonsense guy who was in the right place at the right time to pull together a coalition force of troops from various nations and pull off a huge victory, obliterating much of Saddam Husein's forces in a "one hundred hours" campaign and chasing the rest back across the Iraq border.
We can only speculate how history might have been changed for the better if that coalition force had been allowed by the various western governments to follow the Iraqi forces into Iraq and finish the job.
General Schwarzkopf wrote his autobiography after the Iraq war, titled, "It Doesn't take a Hero." It is well worth the read.
RIP General Norman Schwarzkopf
A lot has been said the past couple of years about the Mayan Calendar coming to an end on December 21, 2012 and other coinciding events such as the alignment of the earth with the center of the galaxy. It reminds me of the last time that predictions were made about the collapse of civilization:
The event on December 31st, 1999 when the century changed from 1900 to 2000--commonly known as Y2K.
The prediction was that computers worldwide had not been programed to recognize the date change, and therefore dates on computerized documents would show "January 1st, 1900" instead of "January 1st, 2000." Imagine what that would do to computerized calculations, for example in banks, calculating interest on accounts, or in government facilities with scientific calculations involving date and distance, for example. As a computer programmer at the time, I (like most programmers worldwide) spent quite a lot of my time leading up to Y2K ensuring that computer programs were updated to allow for the new century.
Even so, like many people worldwide, I doubted that every line of code in the world would be changed correctly and in time, and so I made some preparations for outages in the national electric grid and other
utilities caused by computer failures, that could affect the supply of electrical power, water, electronic communication, and therefore may result in rioting, delays in food deliveries, lack of emergency services, etc.
Fortunately, on 12/31/1999 nothing much happened. But it did cause me to think about how to survive potentially dangerous incidents that are not as exotic as a worldwide collapse of technology, but are more likely: House fires, terrorist attacks, flu pandemics, hurricanes, earthquakes ... the world has experienced all of these on a fairly frequent basis.
One good thing about the whole Mayan calendar brouhaha is that it causes many people to ask themselves for the first time, "What if?"
What if I was without power, communications, food and water for 48 hours or longer? What if the police knocked at my door and told me I had five minutes to evacuate my home? Do I know what my options are to Shelter in Place (SIP) and ride out an emergency, or to evacuate to avoid one?
Let's use this Mayan calendar discussion as an opportunity to evaluate where we are, what the most likely threats to our well-being are, and what and who we have around us to be able to shelter in place or evacuate if we are ever faced with a more mundane, but more likely event that threatens our well-being.
See you on December 22nd!
