{"id":42642,"date":"2014-01-05T16:29:43","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T00:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/?p=42642"},"modified":"2014-01-05T16:29:43","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T00:29:43","slug":"the-doomer-congressman-who-went-off-grid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/?p=42642","title":{"rendered":"The Doomer Congressman Who Went Off Grid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/\/magazine\/story\/2014\/01\/roscoe-bartlett-congressman-off-the-grid-101720.html\">Politico<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><em>Roscoe Bartlett spent 20 years on Capitol Hill. Now he lives in a remote cabin in the woods, prepping for doomsday.<\/p>\n<p>When Roscoe Bartlett was in Congress, he latched onto a particularly apocalyptic issue, one almost no one else ever seemed to talk about: America\u2019s dangerously vulnerable power grid. In speech after late-night speech on the House floor, Bartlett hectored the nearly empty chamber: If the United States doesn\u2019t do something to protect the grid, and soon, a terrorist or an act of nature will put an end to life as we know it.<\/p>\n<p>Bartlett loved to conjure doomsday visions: Think post-Sandy New York City without power\u2014but spread over a much larger area for months at a time. He once recounted a conversation he claimed to have had with unnamed Russian officials about how they could take out the United States: They would \u201cdetonate a nuclear weapon high above your country,\u201d he recalled them saying, \u201cand shut down your power grid\u2014and your communications\u2014for six months or so.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bartlett never gained much traction with his scary talk of electromagnetic pulses and solar storms. More immediate concerns always seemed to preoccupy his colleagues, or perhaps Bartlett\u2019s obsessions just sounded more like quackery than real science, even coming from a former Navy engineer who had worked on the space race. Whatever the reason, Congress\u2019s failure to act is no longer Bartlett\u2019s problem. The octogenarian Republican from western Maryland\u2014more than once labeled \u201cthe oddest congressman\u201d\u2014found himself gerrymandered out of office a year ago and promptly decided to take action on the warnings others wouldn\u2019t heed, retreating to a remote property in the mountains of West Virginia where he lives with no phone service, no connection to outside power and no municipal plumbing.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via: Politico: Roscoe Bartlett spent 20 years on Capitol Hill. Now he lives in a remote cabin in the woods, prepping for doomsday. When Roscoe Bartlett was in Congress, he latched onto a particularly apocalyptic issue, one almost no one else ever seemed to talk about: America\u2019s dangerously vulnerable power grid. In speech after late-night [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,17,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collapse","category-energy","category-infrastructure"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42643,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42642\/revisions\/42643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}