Yellowstone Supereruption

Let's call it Area One. It's the 600-mile radius around the Yellowstone Caldera. Bill McGuire, professor of geohazards at University College London, considers a 600-mile radius to be deadly space during even a minimal supereruption. "Within a thousand kilometers, virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows, and the sheer explosive force of the eruption."

Some geologists now define 'supereruption' to mean at least 240 cubic miles of ejected material, which is identical to Yellowstone's last supereruption -- Yellowstone 3, aka, Lava Creek -- and about 960 times the quarter-cubic-mile of material ejected by St. Helens in 1980.

A quick and dirty calculation of counties included in Area One's 600-mile radius shows a current population of 19.8 million (estimates by the federal Census Bureau dated 01 July 2005). Unprepared, the vast majority of those will likely be dead or dying in the first days of a Yellowstone supereruption.

By recent scientific calculations using seismic data, the volume of Yellowstone's 80 x 40 x 8 km magma chamber is about 20,000 to 25,000 cubic km -- about 4800 to 6000 cubic miles. If Yellowstone 4 blows out just a quarter of its magma, the 1200 cubic miles spewed will be the largest known supereruption. Yellowstone 1, aka Huckleberry Ridge, about 2 million years ago, was 600 cubic miles of ejecta. Sumatra's Toba, about 74,000 years ago, was 720 cubic miles of ejecta. 1200 cubic miles of ejecta would be 4800 times St. Helens' 1980 blast. And it could happen tomorrow.

The actual size and date of the next Yellowstone supereruption is beside the point. The point is that our politicians have intentionally kept ordinary people unprepared. They want us to shop till we drop. Zero preparation is the point. Unprepared, a Yellowstone supereruption tomorrow, or twenty years from now, will be the nonfeasant murder of tens of millions of ordinary Americans -- by politicians of both parties, done in the corruption kickbacks and greed that fuel the superrichs' obscenely excessive profits.

------------------------------------

Zero preparedness threatens everyone living within 600 miles of Yellowstone. However, that specified radius -- from an interview of several geologists for a February 2000 BBC program -- has apparently been branded "alarmist" by Monkeybrain's regime. The map showing the 600-mile-radius -- what I'm calling 'Area One' -- is credited to the US Geological Survey on the Discovery Channel's site, but no longer appears on the USGS site. What does appear on the USGS site is a lot of no-worries pap stacked wide and deep.

The USGS no-worries pap is clearly social engineering designed to maintain government and the global economy for the benefit of the superrich. No fair spending the public money for public civil defense. Public money is for corporate welfare and the superrich.

Civil defense, once a robust arm of civil society but eviscerated for decades by the bought and paid for majority of superrich-representing politicians, is now FEMA's job. FEMA is where Monkeybrain's fascist goosesteppers are doing a heck of a good job securing their wardrobes and careers -- and not saying or doing anything to offend the Business Roundtable, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, or the unconstitutional, privately-owned, and treasonous Federal Reserve.

Despite the BBC programs on supervolcanoes that aired February 2000 and April 2005 -- and the executive summary presented to the FEMA hierarchy by the BBC and the program's scientists after the 2005 program -- FEMA still does not publish any preparedness guidelines for a supereruption.

You can search FEMA far and wide. No mention of radioactive volcanic ash fall appears. Their advice of what to do during a volcanic eruption is infantile, relative to a supereruption from which (1) evacuation might very well be impossible, and (2) roof-crushing radioactive ash might fall in heavily acidic rain for weeks, as far away as Dallas and Chicago. Needless to say, the states' disaster planning amounts to the same no-worries bureaucratic shuffle around short-term emergencies.

Despite FEMA's blind eye, the Yellowstone supereruption will not go away if we ignore it long enough. It is going to happen.

We have three supervolcano caldera in the western US. All of them are due to past-due. The Yellowstone Caldera, the Long Valley Caldera (SE of Yosemite in California), and the Valles Caldera (just west of Los Alamos, NM). Although the Valles Caldera is not as restless as the other two (which are currently making about 3,000 earthquakes per year), they are all capable of equaling Yellowstone 3 (240 cubic miles of ejecta). Continent-covering ash fall would be a killer component of any of their supereruptions. If just one goes off, the unprepared US and the whole world is in deep doo-doo.

Sumatra's Lake Toba supereruption, 74,000 years ago, caused a volcanic winter that probably lasted about six years. The evidence appears in ice cores taken from Greenland. The following thousand-year cold snap took the planet into the Ice Age that ended only 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. One supereruption. 64,000-year hangover.

Another downside. Many imminent scientists are considering scenarios in which multiple natural disasters of cataclysmic proportion are triggered in chain reactions -- by a space rock or space-rock storm, or one of the events themselves. A Yellowstone supereruption, a Long Valley supereruption, the San Andreas lock-up NW of Los Angeles cutting loose, the Cascadia Subduction Zone lock-up cutting loose on the NW coast, and lahars (hot volcanic mudflows) from Mt. Rainier devastating the southern Puget Sound area (into Tacoma) without much warning and without signs of a conventional eruption stand out as one glaring possibility of multiples.

Such chain reactions seem very reasonable. A storm of space rocks 1 km to 1.5 km in diameter (the dinosaur killer at Chicxulub is estimated at about 10 km in diameter) could blow out craters deep enough to explosively open either or both Yellowstone and Long Valley calderas to the atmosphere, easily leading to the chain reaction.

However, multiples are beyond the scope I've set here. Planning for a Yellowstone supereruption seems a good starting point for multiples preparedness. If we know what to do with the Yellowstone Area One, we'll know what to do with a Long Valley Area One.

Unprepared, we face communications failure, health care overload and breakdown; food and water contamination and scarcity; livestock death; food processing plants breakdown; mass starvation; residential cave-ins from ash load; masses of desperate homeless refugees; long-term loss of road and air transport to ash-fall effects; loss of prescription meds distribution; loss of petro-fuel processing and distribution -- just to name some of the problems.

Unprepared, the death toll inside Yellowstone Area One will be 10 to 20 million. We should expect the short term death toll outside Area One to be more tens of millions.

Of course, the corporations and superrich are preparing their fascist global economy to endure with only minimal loss of profits. Production facilities and jobs are already safely and profitably scattered off-shore. The global marketplace has been diversified away from America and into many populous off-shore areas. Monkeybrain's North American Union will spread the American national economy north and south of the borders. The NAU will also finally eliminate the people's rights and liberties under the American Constitution -- always a disruptor of billionaire profits.

Point is, the superrich are not banking on Yellowstone 4 being thousands of years from now, or, alternatively, being such a tiny little insignificant eruption that it can't possibly disturb their profits. They're clearly banking on desertion of America to keep their profits as stable as possible after Yellowstone 4 guts about two-thirds of the continental US. They are elite corruption-machine profit-makers, not natural-disaster half-way houses for the benefit of the rabble.

Middle East war profiteering should give the superrich and their Swiss bank accounts the boost needed for them to make it through the tough times ahead.

Still glad you allowed you rights and liberties to be taken by fascist government so that they can make Nazi-like aggressive war forever, and so that you and your family can be safe?

Still glad about all the time you've spent rebuilding the Democratic Party so that it can grab power from the Republinazis, without bringing any of the treasonous constitutional criminals to justice? So that fascist government can continue its pro-superrich policy of zero preparation -- to kill you and your family?

Still glad you've cocooned yourself away from populist remedies that are outside the box of predator-controlled party politics? (See the "Unity America" action plan in Open Letter To Susan and add nationally organized jury nullification.) Citizen preparation for Yellowstone 4 has the power to bridge and break the social, financial, and psychological cocooning that has paralyzed effective American citizen action for the past three decades. Connect with others. Prepare or die. Liberty or death.

Preparation is the only way to save people and prevent national collapse.

Earthquakes in a caldera, many scientists agree, mean that increasing pressure is breaking brittle rocks around and over the magma chamber, as the magma moves closer to the surface. Heat rises. There have been thousands of Yellowstone earthquakes in the past decade. USGS recorded 113 earthquakes there in the month of February 2007. No worries, of course, say the pap-masters. This is just normal.

Despite the pap-loaded party line from Monkeybrain's goosesteppers and superrich-controled ivory-tower types -- who have explanations for everything except zero preparation -- some prominent scientists continually say that Yellowstone 4 could happen tomorrow.

The fascist regime's main argument for the supereruption still being hundreds or thousands of years off in the future is as childishly vacuous, and as non sequitur, as they come.

All of this restless volcanic activity at Yellowstone, the vacuous argument goes, has been happening for about ten thousand years. Yellowstone is a restless caldera. Uplift and subsidence. New hydrothermal activity from crustal water heated by the magma below. It's all old news. It's all just normal. Therefore, nothing will happen in the foreseeable future.

As if heat does not rise. As if magma does not rise to the surface. As if magma just loiters around in some underground honeycomb condo for ten thousand years.

As if ten thousand years of the Yellowstone magma rising to the surface is no precursor to a supereruption.

As if not being able to stop it means that preparation is futile.

As if preparing for it is something that nobody could have imagined.

Very similar to the Monkeybrain goosesteppers' claim that nobody could have imagined airliners as bombs for the 9/11 attacks. Very similar to the Monkeybrain goosesteppers' claim that nobody could have imagined the breakdown of levies at New Orleans. Are we clear? Monkeybrain's goosesteppers have no imagination and lie their asses off about everything.

As if preparation for the supereruption would not tap off the public and private spending that benefits corporate welfare, the superrich, and the central banking war profiteers most of all.

Cooking for the next supereruption has not been going on for 10,000 years. It has been going on for about 640,000 years. The source is a relentless "mantle plume" hot spot, continually feeding new magma upward.

When the cooking breaks through to the surface -- by earthquake, cap rock melted away until it's too thin and weak to hold the pressure from below, space rock impact, al Qeada suitcase nuc, or whatever -- about 1200 cubic miles of molten, explosive rhyolite could blow up in our faces.

For the past fourteen years at least -- since NASA infrared scanning discovered the true extent of the Yellowstone Caldera in 1993 (doff of cap to Lawrence Joseph in his excellent 2007 book, Apocalypse 2012) -- any responsible government representing all the people would have been prepping citizens to survive the coming supereruption.

Stockpiling safe and renewable sources of food, water, and medicines; building disaster-proof communications; defining self-sustaining communities, and building underground shelters for them that are under survivable above-ground structures (the Swiss style, in poured and reinforced concrete, with blast doors at least 8 feet thick); and providing incentives for relocation out of Area One's 600-mile radius would be just the tip of the preparation iceberg.

But, noooooo. We've got to have an unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous invasion of Iraq. We've got to have aggressive, internationally criminal warfare in the Middle East forever, so that the global billionaires can war-profiteer off the backs of dead and maimed US soldiers. We've got to bankrupt the US for war-profiteering so that low-income social programs can be tossed into the Reagan-Bush voodoo-economics toilet. No fair spending public money for the public. That money belongs to the billionaires.

Outside Area One's 600-mile blast-kill area -- the first ring of doom (with apologies to L. Joseph in A-2012) -- ash fall will be the second ring of doom. Well, if it's not overmatched by the radiation ring of doom. Radioactive minerals, such as uranium U-235, are a natural part of the Yellowstone's mantle plume heat. They're not likely to step aside so that the supereruption can go on without them.

We should expect 6-foot radioactive ash depths 1000 miles downwind from Yellowstone 4. An eruption at Bruno Jarbridge, in SW Idaho, about 10 million years ago -- fueled by the same hot spot that is now under Yellowstone -- buried hundreds of pre-historic animals in 6 feet of ash at present-day Orchard, Nebraska. Orchard is about 1000 miles away from the volcanic source.

(Relocation of the hot spot is no puzzle. The North American Plate moves southwest. The hot spot stays put. The 16- to 17-million-year geologic record of the hot spot's caldera and eruptions shows new caldera forming from southwest to northeast.)

According to the USGS site, a cubic meter of wet ash, stacked on top of another cubic meter of wet ash, could weigh up to 8,800 pounds -- over 4 tons. Deadly weight, for 6 feet of depth. Because it is electrically conductive glass, volcanic ash causes thunderstorms. Volcanic ash almost always falls in a rain. Figure on most of it being wet-weight.

Just the pyroclastic flows near Yellowstone 4 will be capable of killing thousands, tens of thousands, or millions. We've all seen images of the open-mouthed gasps frozen into the Roman corpses at Pompeii, buried in 20 feet of pumice and ash carried by a pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius, August 79 CE.

As with St. Helens, the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius was just a volcanic hiccup relative to the American supervolcanoes.

The no-worries-pap predictions are for Yellowstone 4's pyroclastic flows to take out a 100 km -- 60-mile -- radius. St. Helens' pyroclastic flows took out a 28-km -- 17.4-mile -- radius. It seems pretty dumb to say that a caldera producing 1000 to 4800 times St. Helens' ejecta will collapse into its own giant, miles-deep hole and blow out pyroclastic flows of less than 4 times those of St. Helens.

Seems prudent to me to expect much larger pyroclastic flows at the end of a Yellowstone supereruption. But then, Area One will be pretty much dead already.

Still, a 60-mile radius is 11,304 square miles (area = pi times radius squared). Pick it up to a 100-mile radius and you've got 31,400 square miles. Either is unimaginable to the kid who once cut corn out of half-mile bean rows for weekend work.

Then there's the volcanic winter. It'll last some years or decades, depending on how big the supereruption is and how long it lasts. The planet, scientists say, will be completely encircled with volcanic clouds within two weeks after a supereruption. All ecosystems will be adversely affected. The Asian monsoons will be disrupted, adding the loss of that world's breadbasket to the loss of the US breadbasket.

The staggering list of killer effects goes on and on. Zero preparation sucks.

-------------------------

See especially:

BBC, Supervolcanoes, first aired 03 February 2000, transcript, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/
supervolcanoes_script.shtml

BBC, Supervolcano: The Truth About Yellowstone Part 1, first aired 14 April 2005, transcript, at http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1343737.htm

BBC, Supervolcano: The Truth About Yellowstone Part 2, first aired 21 April 2005, transcript, at http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1350403.htm

----------------------------

Modified Wed 04 Apr 2007, at 3:45 p.m.

© 2007 by Stephen Neitzke

Supervolcano Politics

A monster freak of nature, 40,000 years past due on its 600,000-year cycle, is about to bury the continental US. There's no negotiating with this monster. When it happens, it will destroy the US as we know it -- unless we somehow manage to get prepared for it.

"Of course, there's a fourth ring of doom -- zero preparedness. Katrina times a hundred million. It's the whole point here. We must hold our elites responsible for knowing that Yellowstone 4 is inevitable. Makes no difference whether it happens next week, three years from now, or twenty years from now. Zero preparation means a death toll in the tens of millions before any significant counter-measures can be taken. And, in an informed choice, zero preparation is exactly what Monkeybrain's government has chosen."

--------------------------------

I've been on a rambling sabbatical. From Christmas Week to the Ides of March, it was free-range politics -- politics without borders. It was about where we've been, what the hell are we doing, newly-discovered ambushes, and where to from here?

The sabbatical soft-centered on Lawrence Joseph's Gaia-oriented 2007 book, Apocalypse 2012. As entertaining a writer as Joseph is, I could learn to hate that book. From first reading, it's been like an evil ghoul in the night, most days.

One of the book's ghoulish faces is my dread that the hi-jacking of our government and the killing of our Constitution was done because the superrich class-race elites had the book's natural disaster information back when. Yellowstone's supervolcano would've kicked their money-grubbing motives into racing trim.

War profiteering is the superrich's ultimate, high-volume money-maker. With the pending destruction of the US national economy by the monster freak of nature lurking at Yellowstone, buying or coercing SCOTUS to create the 3-branch Bush-Cheney fascist despotism would have been cheap at twice the price -- whatever the price was.

If Yellowstone and its many related monsters were even part of the motives for hi-jacking our governments, then the financial and governerning elites have been murderers from the start -- premeditating murderers. And politics as usual is right out the window -- starting right now.

The Yellowstone Caldera (supervolcano) is a two-week, radiation and sulfuric acid loaded explosion ready to happen. Think huge thermonuclear explosion lasting for two weeks or more.

The Yellowstone magma chamber is about 125 miles deep. Its maw at the surface is about 70 km by 30 km -- about 44 by 19 miles. Per the USGS, there were 113 earthquakes in Yellowstone during February 2007. The caldera's surface has risen by 14 centimeters over the past 31 months.

Tectonic plates move at 1 millimeter per century. The magma chamber at Yellowstone lifted its lid by 140 millimeters in 31 months. I've seen the data a hundred times in black and white. It electrocutes me every time. Aaarrrrgggg. 14 centimeters uplift? Less than three years?

The cooking caldera could cook off just any time now. And scientists have no earthly idea how quickly a supervolcano goes from cooking to cooking off. Nonesuch has happened for 74,000 years. The geologic record is mute on warning time.

Will we have a St. Helens warning period? Yellowstone 4 -- there've been three previous Yellowstone supereruptions -- has so much more explosive gas in its magma than St. Helens did that its likely to give us no warning at all.

First venting to the atmosphere -- kaboom -- two weeks or more. Think pin-prick of an over-inflated balloon. There's no way to relieve the pressure building up inside the monster. Drilling to tap off the pressure equals pin-prick.

Scientists think that Yellowstone's magma chamber is still capped with 3.6 to 6 miles of earthen rock. But they don't really know. Or, if they do, they're not releasing the real-time data to the public. And, of course, the magma chamber is constantly heating and melting away the overhanging rock, working its way to the surface. Another ghoulish evil face in the dark.

Admittedly, the two-week-explosion measure is an estimation of Yellowstone 3, which happened 640,000 years ago. It was Yellowstone's medium supereruption. It blew out about 240 cubic miles of molten rock. About 960 times more than St. Helens' one-quarter cubic mile of molten rock in 1980.

Scientists estimate that Yellowstone 3's blast-kill radius was about 1000 KM -- 600 miles. Moonscape. Little or no life remaining above ground inside the radius.

We should hope that Yellowstone 4 is Yellowstone 3 or smaller.

Yellowstone 1 blew out 600 cubic miles of molten rock -- about 2400 times more than St. Helens in 1980. I can't go there often. And the stays are brief. Yellowstone 3 is hard enough to get my mind around.

It doesn't help that the Al Qaeda message that went along with the Madrid bombings (11 March 2004) mentioned the "black wind of death" that will blow over America. If Yellowstone 4 is a medium rip, its volcanic/nuclear winter will run six to ten years. And there seems to be many ways that an Al Qaeda nuc could be delivered to near-enough the Yellowstone magma chamber to start it blowing.

Joseph says in A-2012 that there are "three rings of doom" coming in Yellowstone 4.

First is the blast-kill radius. Live things above ground will be killed. If it's a medium rip, Denver is toast. LA might live, if the booming shocks from Yellowstone 4 don't trigger the San Andreas lock-up.

Second ring of doom is the radiation poisoning. The Yellowstone hotspot exists because it is home to the planet's largest deposit of uranium and other naturally radioactive minerals. It might be the only supervolcano on the planet whose cause is radioactive. Degree of radioactive blowout in its supereruption is an unknown ghoulish evil.

The third ring of doom is the ash fall. At a distance of 900 miles, Tulsa can expect -- I'm estimating from various scientific writings -- three to twenty feet of ash depth, depending on the winds.

In two weeks time, the jet stream(s) and associated winds wander all over the continental US. We should expect significant ash fall all across the country -- to water's edge on the Atlantic coast. The large supereruption 74,000 years ago -- Lake Toba, Sumatra, 600 cubic miles of extruded rock -- left over a foot of ash depth at a distance of 2600 miles. It's 1800-1900 jet-stream-assisted miles from Yellowstone to Philadelphia.

A cubic meter of wet volcanic ash can weigh up to 4,400 pounds. Our building codes for snow load is a tiny fraction of that. We should expect -- and be prepared for -- roof-crushing ash loads In Chicago and Detroit. Oh, yeah, we don't know much about ash removal.

Volcanic ash particles are tiny jagged pieces of glass. They can't be breathed without ripping up lung tissue. Dust masks and respirators are required.

Wet, volcanic ash is slipprier than ooze. It's electrically conductive. In the atmosphere, its conductivity causes T-storms. Ash fall is almost always in a rain. When the ash fall comes through the radiation and sulfuric acid droplets that will cloud downwind from Yellowstone's super-eruption, it will be wet, heavy, slippery, radioactive, and heavily acidic. The acid will attack anything metal. This could be ugly.

Of course, there's a fourth ring of doom -- zero preparedness. Katrina times a hundred million. It's the whole point of this essay. We must hold our elites responsible for knowing that Yellowstone 4 is inevitable. Makes no difference whether it happens next week, three years from now, or twenty years from now. Zero preparation means a death toll in the tens of millions before any significant counter-measures can be taken. And, in an informed choice, zero preparation is exactly what Monkeybrain's government has chosen.

Worse, Yellowstone 4 is just the paradigm -- just the single disaster-tip of the iceberg. Yellowstone could trigger, or help trigger, the Cascadia Subduction Zone lockup on the NW coast, the San Andreas lock-up near LA, the New Madrid (Missouri) Seismic Zone's fabled multiple 7.5 earthquakes along the Mississippi, the Long Valley supervolcano SE of Yosemite, and/or the Valles supervolcano just west of Los Alamos, NM. Both of those supervolcano calderas are somewhere between due and past due.

Combined natural disasters? Monkeybrain's government has chosen zero preparation.

Even if you reject Gaia concepts, you might be killed by explosion and impact chain reactions among the building and inevitable natural disasters.

We haven't even begun thinking about national preparation for the next space rock that slams home about every 60 to 65 million years. That cycle is hard-science documented. Did the dinosaurs die in vain 65 million years ago? You'll know the answer to that question when they announce the next space rock. We're somewhere between due and overdue right now. Schumacher-Levy 9 was soaked up by Jupiter. Had it lined up on us, we'd likely be space dust right now. However, prepared, some of us would survive the dinosaur-killer.

And we haven't even begun thinking about national preparation for the probable magnetic pole reversal process, which is already weakening our magnetic field protection against human-harmful solar flares and massive increases of ultraviolet. Now is a good time to start. As our Milky Way galaxy rushes toward its collision and merging with the much larger spiral galaxy, Andromena, it seems to be moving our solar system through a high-energy area of interstellar space. The sun is going crazy, shooting more and bigger flares in the recent years of its solar minimum than what it shot in recent solar maximums. We've already lucked-out once, with an earth-frying solar flare shooting away from us instead of at us.

The volcanic-spacerock-nuclear winter and solar-flare-earth-frying that we face in those ugly scenarios have underground prep work written all over them.

Downside. If we're unprepared, Yellowstone, by itself, will crush the national economy as we know it. But it won't get the offshore production facilities of the long-fled, US-fed corporations. It won't get the corporate Swiss bank accounts. And it probably won't get any of the superrich. (The unAmerican cowards need an attitude adjustment and other retribution.)

Big downside. Yellowstone's volcanic winter will last long enough that all plants and animals restricted to the earth's surface will die. Obviously, the less we're prepared, the more death, and the more difficult the national recovery.

GOING UNDERGROUND

When the Roman Empire broke up, much of the population survived by moving to country estates. The 'villa' was a self-supporting unit. It provided shelter, food production, water, community, and the Roman politics of elite control. Over time, elite control twisted into the feudalism of the Dark Ages, butchering ordinary people at the whim of elites for centuries.

We should be able to do better this time around. With nothing more complicated than a medium Yellowstone supereruption, Roman Empire breakdown parallels will be operative. Disruption of the Asian monsoons will make Yellowstone 4 a near-extinction event.

Survival in underground communities is just about the only national option we have. Happily we can still take most of our technology with us -- if preparation begins very soon, and if the Yellowstone monster stays quiet for a few years.

Above-ground power generating systems -- windmills, photovoltaics, and small hydroelectrical units -- will have to be stored until the worst is past. But, if we're quick, we can still create self-supporting fuel cells that run on hydrogen fuel produced by algae feedstock and mini-biorefineries. The fuel cells could supply the juice for grow-lights needed for the small algae farms.

The algae farms can also grow a different feedstock that would supply high-grade biodiesel. Before oil-crony Clinton shut down the research in the early 1990s, scientists had already established that we could replace 100 percent of our transport fuel needs with algae biodiesel. (See Michael Brigg's essay, "Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae", at the Biodiesel Group site, University of New Hampshire.)

Food production will need a lot of fuel cell power, too. Hydroponic systems need water pumps and grow-lights. Shrimp aquaculture can go on in near darkness, but most livestock raised for food will need some light.

Some of the small scientific/engineering communities will have to take DNA and cloning technology underground with them. On the far side of volcanic winter, we'll have to be able to clone all the species of ducks. I love ducks. And trout. I love wild trout in a little mountain freestoner. And how important would survival be without the migration of Monarch butterflies or Bottlenose Dolphins?

Not that we'll duck out from under our volcanic winter and loose all those lovelies back into the world on the first summery day. The cold snap that followed the last volcanic winter led directly to a major ice age.

Of course, there'll be a plankton die-off in the lack of sunlight. The pelagic food-chain will starve from the bottom-up.

The Swiss can put every one of their 7.5 million citizens into underground shelters in a matter of minutes. Why that same level of preparedness is not available here can be laid on the superrich and their corruption of US government to gain their obscenely excessive profits.

CLEARING THE POLITICAL DEBRIS

The upside is that, with our bare-bones survival at stake, we have solid reasons to impeach, remove, criminally prosecute, and imprison any and all of the treasonous constitutional criminals who pervade our national and state governments.

The six-plus years of anti-Constitutional governance under Monkeybrain, the Congressional Republinazis and Demofascists, and the fascist thugs masquerading as SCOTUS judges must be ended short of the sovereignty-crushing North American Union. The deep planning and secrecy of the elites' NAU can now be seen as the intended despotism for the sovereign people's post-Yellowstone torturous future. We don't need another Romanesque Empire, with tomorrow's absolute despot butchering ordinary people for power, profit, and entertainment.

We purely do not need Monkeybrain's anti-Constitutional, 3-branch fascist despotism ruling our supervolcano catastrophe and non-recovery as it did our New Orleans catastrophe and non-recovery. We need a government that represents all the people, not just the white billionaires and their financial corruption machines.

We need to start smash-mouth politics with the constitutional criminals -- right now. As soon as we've cowed the criminals, we need Constitutional amendments that give us fully independent citizen lawmaking, nonpartisan government in all three branches, a corruption-minimizing unicameral Congress, an independently elected and recallable Attorney General, and an independently elected and recallable federal bench that is dependent on a majority of the citizens in each court's jurisdiction. All arguments against such reforms are vacuous.

The constitutional republic/democracy is still the best. But an indifferent, dumbed-down, and politically unsophisticated civil society is its certain death. And civil society just must have the fully independent tools to check and balance the corrupt collusions open to the bribery and coercion of the financial and governing elites.

We should expect the small underground communities to go many different directions with their politics. Most, I think, will opt for a combination of vertical hierarchy and horizontal direct democracy. It was how our first New England towns thrived. But we should also expect to see theocracies and elities-controlled pseudo-democracies. There are still a lot of American servile. We'll have a long time to sort it all out, after volcanic winter.

For now, as the truckers have been singing for decades -- we've got a long way to go and just a short time to get there.

________________________

See especially:

BBC Supervolcano Links at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/supervolcano/

USGS, Volcanic Hazards Program at http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/

USGS, Volcanic Ash at http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/ash/

USGS, Yellowstone Volcano Observatory at http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/

ACPD, Initial Dispersal ... A Yellowstone Case Study, Timmreck and Graf, 22 Aug 2005, at http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/acpd/5/7283/acpd-5-7283.pdf

The Geological Society, Super-eruptions: global effects and future threats, June 2005, at http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/pdfs/Super%20Eruptions.pdf

------------------------
Supervolcano Politics was originally published Sun 18 Mar 2007. It was caught in a kludge-knot of Blogger kludge this date, 28 Mar 2007, and deleted, when there was no order to delete it.
Modified Wed 21 Mar 2007, at 9:30 a.m.
© 2007 by Stephen Neitzke

Ides of March

2,051 years ago, Roman Senators committed dagger-intensive tyrannicide against Julius Caesar. The tyrant was guilty of hi-jacking Rome's republican government for the benefit of himself and his superrich clients. He became the model for tyrannical fascists forever.

There's no chance that any of our well-paid Senators will commit tyrannicide against the fascist usurper Bush, no matter how many more times he hi-jacks our republic's government.

Senators no longer center on republican principles. Money first, ordinary people last.

The do-nothing American people no longer center on republican principles. Social, economic, and psychological cocoons first, citizen action last.

Our republican principles, dead of neglect and ignorance, were gone long before the 3-branch Bush-Cheney fascists buried our Constitution and rule of law.

No more tyrannicides. Things are definitely better for treasonous fascists these days.

---------------------------------------------

Extracts from Homegrown American Fascism:

No waffling. As with German and Italian fascism in the early 20th Century, the Bush-Cheney Usurpation is pure fascism. It demonstrates a strong-man leader, extreme secrecy, controlled media, fraudulent elections, judicial rulings clearly violating the Constitution, negation of the rule of law by all three branches of government, obstruction of justice for political and corporate leaders, the making of ex post facto law to immunize political and corporate leaders from past crimes, redefinition of established law for corruption and ideological purposes, redefinition of commonly understood language terms to avoid legal retribution (e.g., 'torture' to mean only treatment resulting in severe organ damage or death, and 'terrorist surveillance' to mean the interception of any communication or bank activity done by US citizens), the making of unconstitutional law to limit rights, suppression of Constitutional rights for profits and power, misuse of policy and law for unstated intentions, cronyism and corruption, sham national security obsessions, warmaking for profits and power, supremacy of the military, sham nationalism for the masses while leadership creates policy to benefit the transnational and stateless superrich, hard science made politically relative, anti-intellectualism outside the political and corporate elites, suppression of critical thinking in public education, intermixing of government and religion, enemies and scapegoats obsessions, destruction of undesirable minority population and cultural centers (e.g., Warsaw ghetto and New Orleans), male chauvinism and suppression of women's rights, and corporation protection extremes including lassez faire economic policy and suppression of labor's rights and power.

Fascism is not only a form of absurd, predator elitism governance, it is a national trait. Just as there was something inherently fascist about significant numbers of early 20th Century Germans and Italians, so there is something inherently fascist about significant numbers of late 20th and early 21st Century Americans. History will damn the American people for their fascism and fascist war crimes just as it damns the German and Italian peoples for theirs.

With the Bush-Cheney Usurpation, the fascist thugs masquerading as public officials and judges have created treasonous, despotic governance wholly beyond the Constitution. ...

--------------------------------------------

Usurpation is the exercise of powers by an agent which have not been delegated to him by the principal. In a constitutional republic like the United States of America, acts by officials are legitimate only if they are consistent with and based on a constitution, a body of laws which are superior to all subsequent statutes and other acts of officials, which embodies all delegations of power, and which may recognize certain rights to further define the limits on the powers delegated. It is a fundamental principle that all acts of officials not derived from the delegated powers of the constitution are null and void from inception, not just from the point at which a court may find them unconstitutional.

--Constitution Society, "Abuses and Usurpations"

----------------------------------------

© 2007 by Stephen Neitzke