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May 25, 1998 - Art Bell

02:36:46

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Gary North - Y2k

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37:32

gary north

01:28:32

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm Art Bell and this is indeed another week of Coast to Coast AM underway.
		Coming up in a minute is the thousand pound gorilla of the Y2K problem.
		He's Gary North, Ph.D., University of California Riverside in 1972.
		Was a congressional research assistant for Congressman Ron Paul.
		A Republican slash libertarian.
		Author of 43 books published in the Wall Street Journal.
		National Review, American Spectator, Freeman.
		Newsletter editor of Remnant Review in 74.
		and for him the year two thousand project began in november of nineteen ninety six and uh...
		In December of 1999, I suspect there is going to be nothing but this on our lips because you should hear what's going to happen.
		Bank runs will start around the second half of 99.
		No bank will survive to 2001.
		An all-cash economy in 2000.
		Dow Jones Average, January 3rd, 2000, because it'll be shut down.
		Demise of the IRS, April 15, 2000.
		You can almost hear the clapping.
		No more government checks, no more checks, period, no credit cards, no pension plans.
		And that's kind of only the beginning.
		So in a moment, we'll find out if all this really is going to occur.
		So I thought I would have my little moment of levity right now.
		Let me...
		So I thought I would do this before Gary actually gets here.
unidentified		Check this out.
		Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale of the doom that bizarre fate that started when programmers used two digits for a date.
		Two digits for a date.
		May memory was smaller than artists were smaller too.
		Four digits are extravagant.
		So let's get by with you.
		Let's get by with you.
		This was your 1999 son.
		The programmers did say let's be right before that.
		We'll all go away.
		All will go away.
		I'll go.
		I'll be in management at night.
		It works fine.
		I know you bet we might do that straight.
		He won't do that just yet.
		He won't do that just yet.
		Now when two thousand rolls about, It all goes straight to people.
		You won't let night enough.
		As anyone can tell.
		yes anyone can tell the mail won't bring your attention check it won't be said to you when you're no longer 68 but minus 32.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure you get the idea called Two Digits for a Date was Done for Us.
unidentified		As you probably know, Kingdom of God, of the country, around the world, throughout the universe.
		This is Coastal Ghost Day with Art Bell on the CBC Radio Network.
		The CBC Radio Network All right, here we go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Here is Gary North.
		He's a hard guy to get hold of.
		Gary North is really a hard guy to get hold of.
		Gary, welcome to the program.
		Thank you, Arch.
		Where are you actually located?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I am in the Sticks.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		We are in the Northwest Arkansas region.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Way out there.
		Well, I am too.
		By the way, is that a good thing or a bad thing considering what's coming?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, I suppose it depends on exactly which Styx you're into.
		My goal here was to get as far away as I could from any major metropolitan area without going completely into, say, northern Minnesota, which my wife really was not too enthusiastic about.
		And then I've also, at the same time, got access to the University of Arkansas Library, which is very important to me because I still do my writing.
		And so I want it to be close to a good library, but yet pretty much away from a large city.
		So that we found the Payatville area.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you mean all you need is not available on the Internet?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, in all honesty, all I need is available on the Internet, but I do write some material, historical material, where that has not been put onto the web yet.
		But yes, you're correct.
		As far as my business is concerned, yes, I can do it and do most of it off of the Internet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What will happen to the Internet, by the way?
		I make extensive use of it.
		I'm online all the time, like you are.
		I'm just lucky enough to have a second phone line.
		What's going to happen to the Internet in 2000?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's going to depend very heavily on how well and if the telecommunication industry gets itself compliant.
		And at the present time, it does not look good.
		You can't have the Net if you do not have functional phone lines.
		And AT ⁇ T has about 500 million lines of code to correct.
		Sprint has about 100 million.
		MCI is not saying, but since it's about halfway between the two, it's probably 250 to 300 million lines of code to correct.
		This is an enormous undertaking for these companies.
		So if they get it compliant, yes, there is at least a possibility that the web will stay up, but we do not have any large telecommunications firm claiming compliance at this time, which means the news is probably not good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I notice it says here, you live on 60 acres, have two natural gas wells, and three power generators.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're living what you're preaching then.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I did decide, and one of the strong reasons I decided, in fact, come to the region where I came, is that it is still possible for a private citizen to buy property that does have natural gas on it.
		There are several regions where you can do this in the United States.
		Eastern Kentucky, eastern West Virginia, you can find properties like this.
		And so I decided that was a way of preserving electrical power should there be blackouts.
		And I think the likelihood is that there will be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've got one generator, and it operates on a large propane tank, and then I'm dead.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, propane is cheap, especially this summer.
		And I would say that's a very good investment for people.
		Now, people say, well, why should I be worried about the possibility of electrical power going down?
		There are in the United States approximately 7,800 power generating or power transmitting organizations, public utilities.
		There is no compliant public utility in the United States at this time.
unidentified		None?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		None.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		About two weeks ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sent out a letter to every power plant in the U.S. that is under their jurisdiction, about 108 of them, and said, gentlemen, you have 90 days to get to us a complete report on how you plan to be completely compliant by July 1st of next year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that possible?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Compliant nuclear plant in the world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it possible?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I don't think it is, but if it is, we don't have a working model.
		And that's your problem.
		Let me give you an example.
		This is a real horror story, although there are lots of them that we could talk about, but this one really stunned me.
		Governor Bush of Texas found out about Y2K probably sometime last fall, and in November sent a letter out to the state agency saying we want to know if you're compliant, fine, but if you're not, then let us know when you intend to be compliant.
		And this went out to the Public Utilities Commission to all of the power generating plants in the state of Texas.
		Now, seven of those plants generate about 85% of all of the electrical power in the state of Texas.
		Those plants, one of the representatives of those plants testified about three weeks ago to Congresswoman Morello's committee in Washington.
		At that time, this public utility representative said, on average, these seven gigantic firms have allocated $300,000 to fix the problem.
		Now, at that same testimony, PEPCO, which is the company that supplies the power for the capital of the United States and the regional area of Maryland, said, we have allocated $10 million, and we do not expect it possible to be able to keep that allocation that low much longer.
		Now, the disparity is enormous.
		The difference between $300,000 allocated this late in the game and $10 million indicates that the plants in Texas are simply not going to make it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let me do a couple of things here.
		It also says you believe Western civilization could actually collapse in the year 2000 if the power grid goes down for over 60 days.
		I was on a Lynn Samuel show on WABC earlier tonight doing a sort of a thing, a one-hour thing with her.
		And I told her, Lynn, if you doubt what will happen, just go to the fuse box in your home and throw the mains off and start walking around your house or apartment and see what a dead place you're living in.
		Now, there was a movie called The Trigger Effect, Gary, in which the power went off.
		I don't know if you happened to saw the movie.
		And do you think that's a good example of what would happen if the grids went down?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		No, the trigger effect was much too mild.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They were killing each other.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes, they were.
		The problem of the trigger effect, some of the script was quite good.
		I don't think the movie as a whole was.
		But there were some sections of that movie which people really should watch very carefully.
		One was the section of what happens in the supermarket, and the other was the section of what happens in the local gun store.
		Those two sections are worth watching the movie.
		The problem with that movie, which presumably it's Los Angeles they're talking about, is that when the power goes down, it goes down for three days or four days before people really sense that it may not come back on.
		Then they head for the open highway.
		The fact of the matter, Art, is that at that point in Los Angeles County and the L.A. Basin, you would not get onto that highway.
		It would be wall-to-wall, bumper-to-bumper stalled cars.
		It would be like a gigantic candle that the lights had gone out and the wick had gone out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You would not move out.
		A good example of that, Gary, is this last winter in Chicago.
		They had some terrible snows.
		And what happened is, and I'm sure it's exactly the same thing, that a bunch of cars got up on the freeway and they ran out of gas and they stopped everybody else.
		And before you know it, you had 13 miles of cars with people in danger of freezing to death.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, that's exactly what would occur because people trying to get out of town would get up there and run out of gas and they would stop everybody else.
		You'd have 18 wheelers turned over.
		It'd be horrible.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The best example of this I ever saw was forecasted in a book which I downplayed and dismissed and I think did so erroneously over 25 years ago.
		A book written by Roberto Vaca called The Coming Dark Age.
		And in that book he has a description of the freeway blockage when a power system goes down and stays down.
		The United States government is aware of this and over the last six weeks has begun making plans to, I believe, I think there's no other way of explaining it, of implementing a martial law situation in 2000.
		They're doing it under the guise of the phrase cyber terrorism, which is okay because that really is in effect what we're dealing with, except we did it to ourselves.
		The St. Patrick's Day speech by Secretary of Defense Cohen to the National Press Club was very clear.
		They are setting up right now a fusion of the National Guard units and the Army Reserves.
		And they are specifically doing this because they have said we're going to be hit by cyber terrorism in an unstated period of time, but they say it is inevitable.
		And the next day, General Schultz released a press release saying, yes, the war is going to come to America.
		We are going to be hit by these terrorist attacks.
		And we have to have an emergency, essentially a SWAT team or rapid deployment force to keep peace in the cities.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good Lord.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You really think it potentially could be that bad?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It's on the web.
		And by the way, let me say this tonight, and I want the listeners to understand, what I say about the web or the documentation is on my site.
		You can click to the documents.
		Now, I will interpret, and I'll tell you when I'm doing that.
		But if you're talking about did Cohen give the speech, did Schultz release the press release, not only did they do it, you can get it on my site and read the original document.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is your site, please?
unidentified		It's called www.garynorth.com.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, we'll get an immediate link up if we don't already have one.
		I'm sure we do.
		www.garynorth.com.
		That's it.
		That's easy.
		And I'm sure my webmaster is listening, and he does a lot of code writing.
		I'd like to, before we get into the specifics of this horrible thing that's going to occur, I would like to go back to the beginning.
		I played a stupid little song called Two Digits for a Date.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it implied that way back when, it was just a bunch of programmers who wanted to save money.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What was the genesis of all this?
unidentified		Was it that simple?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It was, in a way, let me tell you, it's even simpler.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		In the 1950s, they had punch cards.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I remember.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		80 digits on a punch card.
unidentified		Right.
unidentified		Those digits were scarce.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		They saved two digits of the 80 by going to 9, by dropping the 1 and the 9 of the century.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And just putting in 55 or 56 or 58 or 62 in the digits, not filling up those extra two digits on the punch cards.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, suddenly.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The one and the nine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Suddenly, I understand.
		That makes all the sense in the world.
		When they were using punch cards, space was indeed very valuable, wasn't it?
unidentified		Yes, it was.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'll be damned.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so then that just carried over to the writing of code in all of these important basic programs.
unidentified		Yes, it did.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Let me tell you the most famous code writer who was involved in it.
		He admitted this about, I believe, on February 25th, essentially not cross-examination, but questioning.
		This was Alan Greenspan, who was the head of the Federal Reserve System.
unidentified		Alan?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And he had testified to Senate Banking Committee about things in general.
		And then finally, Senator Bennett, who's been very good on this issue, said, well, Mr. Greenspan, what do you think of the year 2000 problem?
		And Greenspan began to reminisce.
		And he said, well, you know, I was working on these things back in the mid-1960s.
		I was a programmer.
		He said, I was just so proud.
		We were all so proud when we could come in and save a little space.
		And he said, that's what we did.
		We saved space.
		We saved memory.
		We were quite proud of ourselves.
		Then he went on and he said, now, by the way, he said, I don't think I could recognize my own code today.
		And there wasn't any documentation.
		We didn't write any of this down.
		And so he said, this is a very, very serious problem because those of us who did it can't remember exactly how we did it, and now we have to fix it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, an obvious question, and when we come back, we're about to break here at Bobadale, but when we come back, a lot of people are going to want to know, well, how come we can't just fix it?
		I mean, how come we just can't go in and make two more spaces and modify the software very simply?
		Why is this a big problem?
		And why are we saying it's too late to fix it?
		So hold on, Gary, we'll be right back.
		My guest is Gary North.
		And as I told you earlier, he is the thousand-pound gorilla of the Y2K thing.
		Along with about one or two others, the predictions really are extremely dire.
		And tonight, you're going to find out just how serious it's going to be.
		No cash.
		If we have a cash economy, that means people are going to start making a run on banks as we enter the second half of 1999.
		I don't know, we'll ask.
		Is it reasonable they would do so?
		Is panic ever reasonable?
		I'm Art Bell.
		This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		Coast to Coast AM
		Bye.
		I'm a fan of my heart.
		And now, back to the best of Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, now back to Gary North.
		Gary, the obvious question is, why is it a problem?
		Why can't we go back in and simply program the ability to handle the year 2000 into these mainframe computers?
		What is the problem?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It's not to say that you can't with a mainframe computer.
		Visa and MasterCard seem to have conquered most of the problems that they had had as recently as eight months ago.
		One company may be able to do it if it gets enough programmers.
unidentified		May not also.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		But we don't have many success stories.
		Visa MasterCard is the largest of the success stories that we have.
		There's nothing other, no other that I know of comparable.
		The basic problem, Art, is that it's not just the program itself, it's 30 years of data.
		30 years of information that in the old days was key-punched in and that is filled up, which constitutes now something in the range of three-quarters of all the information that we have in the Western world today, is in a mainframe computer somewhere.
		And I've called it the Alzheimer's economy, because when you cannot access the data, and you can't access it because it's in the wrong format, that it thinks that 00 is 1900 instead of 2000, and all of the numerical programs to access that data are accessing the wrong century, that data, or those data, technically, plural, those data simply disappear from view.
		You can't access them.
		You can't consult them.
		You can't compute with them.
		That's your problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what disappears?
		I'm trying to apply this to the average person.
		For example, somebody who has a bank account, somebody who's got a CD, somebody who's got a retirement plan, what happens?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		If the bank runs begin when I think they will, which is the second half of next year, and I may be overly optimistic they could begin as early as next April, what you're going to see then is the classic problem of every fractional reserve banking system, and that is the money isn't in the bank.
		It's been loaned out.
		It's in the company's coffers.
		They've gone in, they've borrowed money, they've got their plans operating, they're paying their people, they're supporting inventory or whatever has to be done with the money.
		The money's not in the vault.
		The money has been loaned out.
		The difficulty then is that all over the world, people have been told you may get your money in cash on demand.
unidentified		Well, they can't.
unidentified		They can't.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And so when this negative psychology hits, and I think it'll hit, frankly, I think it'll hit first in Japan, not in the United States.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's bad, too, because they'd begin recalling funds that they have invested here, and they are substantial, of course.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes, huge, gigantic.
		They're the lender of the world.
		When the Japanese housewife figures this out, which I think will happen probably, begin to figure it out next April, because they're on a fiscal year on April 1st, which rolls into 2000.
		And when the Japanese housewives begin to understand that the Americans have sold them computers that do not work, I think the run will begin in Japan.
		The same day, by the way, Canada rolls over into 2000, and New York State rolls over.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is July 1st now?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
		It's early.
		This is April Fool's Day.
		That will be on April 1st of 99.
		Now, 44 other states roll over in this country on July 1st.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, you're being heard right now all over Canada, coast to coast in Canada, as probably most of the Canadians up are listening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're saying that their nightmare begins April 1st.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That will be the first big trigger.
		Japan first, because, of course, they're on the other side of the dateline.
		And then Canada, technically, the next day.
		But both April 1st.
		That will be the first large-scale test of the system.
		Because all of those systems will record then, if they're mainframes, that they've rolled into fiscal 1900.
		And that's your problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, then on April 1st of 99, you say it'll be sort of like a first lightning strike.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you expect to occur on that day?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I expect that computer systems will begin to break down in both those countries, that they will begin to act haywire.
		Bad data will be spewed out of them.
		People will begin to realize there is a fundamental problem.
		Some will shut down.
		And the word will get out that something fundamentally is wrong with the system.
		But the public will finally realize it can't be deferred anymore.
		And all the background noise, which Y2K is right now, its music is all it is.
		Because people do not understand that it's real.
		When they finally begin to perceive that it's real, they're going to say things like, well, maybe I ought to get a little cash out of the bank just for safety's sake.
		And the difficulty is, is that when enough people do this, and as the lines get longer, people will say, maybe I ought to get even a little extra out of the bank more than I planned.
		And by the time they're at the front of the line, it's give me it all.
		And of course, they can't do this.
		So there will be a shutdown of the banking system.
		They will simply say you cannot get your money out.
		That cannot be done.
		It will not be done.
		And they will impose emergency banking orders.
		At that point, you have the rationing of money.
		They've never done it before, but they're going to have to do it then.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean, rationing of money?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It means that you will be limited on what you can spend and what you can take out in the form of cash.
		You will not be able to get access to cash, which will create probably an enormous havoc problem for coin-operated vending machines or anybody connected with that industry.
		That industry will be in really big trouble a year from now.
		And then, as people realize that they can't get their cash out, that their money has been locked up on a permanent basis, then they're going to look to say, what can I do with my money?
		Where should I put my money?
		What kinds of things do I need now with my credit card or with my checks?
		Because if it's this bad now, what should I do with my money?
		And that is when I think you will begin to see selling, perhaps even earlier, but selling out of the stock market around the world of people saying, I'm going to buy things.
		I'm going to buy consumer durables.
		I'm going to get my hands on stuff instead of electronic promises to pay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Does this mean that people go out and run their credit cards up to the limit?
		Yes.
		Let me tell you an interesting story, Gary.
		We once were talking about the possibility of a comet, like we'd get about three or four months' notice that a comet was going to crash into the Earth.
		And we were talking just humorously about running our credit cards right up to the limit, because who cares, right?
		And so some lady in my audience called, it was either Visa or Mascard, one of the big ones, and actually asked them, and they put a management person on the phone and gave her an honest answer.
		They said, you know, we've actually considered that, and our answer would be, we would allow everybody to run their cards right up to the limit, because what do we have to lose?
		On the one hand, if the comet hits, we're all gone anyway.
		But on the other hand, if it misses, look how much money we've made.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was actually their management level answer.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You can do that if.
		And the if is this.
		Art, let's assume you really think it's going to come.
unidentified		Okay.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Now, and let's assume I really think it's going to come.
		Do I want to loan, for example, my money at 7% for a 30-year mortgage for somebody else to buy a house if I really think there is a suspicion that the electronic records of the transaction and the bank's solvency is in question?
		Am I going to loan 30-year money at 7% if I really think I can't get it back because of failure of electronic impulses?
		So my assumption will be the one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that when the banks say you cannot get your cash out, the response of the public is going to be that I'm not putting any more in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And at the same time, you will get exactly the credit card effect that you're describing.
		So your classic squeeze takes place.
		You have very high demand for loans running the interest rates up, and you have very low desire on the part of lenders to give the institutions any extra money to make those loans.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So the wise people will go out and borrow at 7% first, right?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		First.
		That's correct.
		Is this what I think is going to happen?
		I think interest rates will go double-digit and towards the end of next year, triple-digit.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, this is Armageddon virtually you're describing.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Let's put it this way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Small A. Small A. Small A, Armageddon.
		All right.
		Is there a chance, Gary, that, in other words, can you is there any way you can forecast how long this total trigger effect is going to last?
		Will we recover from it?
		And if so, in what form?
		What do you envision post-Y2K?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Art, the big one, as I call it, the big one is the question of the power systems, the power grid.
		That's the big one.
		Good men, and I trust them, say you're going to get at least blackouts, brownouts, and unpredictable behavior throughout the year 2000.
		I think that's the minimum that you say is likely.
		The difficulty we're facing is that we have never had one of these production systems get compliant.
		They're operating with embedded chips that have the programs in them.
		And worse, this is the biggest problem.
		This is the horrendous one.
		All of them exchange information and data with each other.
unidentified		That's true.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And if company A gets its computers compliant and imports non-compliant data from company B, it completely reinfects its own system.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		This is the problem of the systemic failure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's like a virus.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It, I think, is exactly like a virus.
		And so the difficulty you have is everybody is saying, oh, well, you go first.
		It's the you-go economy.
		Everybody else says, you spend the $300 million or the $400 million.
		Let's see you get it done first, then we'll think about getting it done.
		If the power grid acts like it did in New York back in 65, where it's an unpredictable event, and it is unpredictable because we don't know how these systems will respond because of the programming, and we don't know how they will interact.
		If the grid overloads, then you have a crisis of monumental proportions.
unidentified		Because how do you get them booted back up?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		They need power from the other one, just as they did in New York in 1965.
		You have to get power from outside your region to boot you back up.
		And they're all going to be hit with the same problem the same day.
		If they go down, and if they don't get back up within, I believe it's a 60-day minimum, I don't think they'll get back up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At all?
unidentified		At all.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Now, again, that's my view.
		I can't tell you there's an official out there saying this is true, but let me tell you, Art, what they do say, the Electric Power Research Institute, which is the $500 million a year think tank of the electrical industry, was approached by a Businessweek reporter in February.
		And he reported in March that when he asked them, can this system go down, will it be able to be maintained, the answer is, we don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We don't know.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Now, that's a very chilling answer when you're talking about an institution which supports the whole civilization.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have there been any experiments, Gary?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, has any large mainframe had, you know, has somebody reset it just to see what would happen?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and usually they shut down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They shut down.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		One specialist in embedded chips, a man named David Hall, said he has been present in several of these testing situations.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And he posted just about a week ago, he said, in every case I have been associated with, the system has simply shut down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good Lord.
		Well, then what about, people would obviously ask, what about 2001?
		Would it all be fixed by then?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		How do you fix it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the point is, if you can't fix it when interest rates are 7%, if you can't fix it when everybody's content to live in the city and you've got whatever programmers you have out there working on it at exceedingly high wages and rising, if you can't fix it now, how do you fix it if there's no bank?
		If you can't pay your programmers, why are they going to sit in New York and Chicago in the middle of winter of the year 2000 to sit in a freezing building to work on computer code?
		What do you pay them with?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Stuff.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, in a sense, that's right.
		Now let's talk about stuff.
		Stuff in the United States, we don't think of it, but stuff in the United States is almost entirely dependent on the operation of the railroad system.
		Because the big stuff, coal and chemicals and wheat and grains out of our farms, all of that big-time stuff is shipped in by the trains.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, railroads and, well, listen, I live out here in the desert and I can assure you Las Vegas is almost entirely dependent for its food and everything else on trucking.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		Both forms.
		However, and of course both are completely vulnerable, but let's talk about the trains because Las Vegas is presumably bringing in its stuff from larger cities, grain processing plants, and so forth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		The average large city, its power generation is probably coal.
		About 40 to 45 percent of America's power is powered by coal.
unidentified		Right.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Now, the trains are not compliant.
		Union Pacific is not compliant.
		They have been working on getting compliant since 1995, and I checked their website today.
		They are still not compliant and not putting any date on when for sure they're going to get compliant.
		They all hope they're going to get compliant next year, but nobody is sure.
		The difficulty is if there are problems with the train switching systems, all computerized and mostly run out of Florida, if those train switching systems begin acting haywire, then the engineers have got to stop those trains until the situation is fixed.
		Now the difficulty is it takes something like three train loads of coal per day to run a large city's power generation plant per plant.
		If there's any interruption of the coal shipments, then what you're talking about is a breakdown.
		Again, the running out of power to generate the power stations in the cities in the middle of winter.
unidentified		And that's the big one.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And nobody has an answer for that one.
		They don't address it.
		There's almost no public discussion of it because it's an unsolvable problem at the present time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So no power.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No power from several points of view.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		This is what it looks like to me.
		Now, I'm willing to say, okay, someone out there may have this great solution, but I have been spending 20 to 30 hours a week of donated time that I'm just doing because I want to do it.
		I've been spending this amount of time since January of 1997, and I have yet to see any public document in which this is even discussed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		People are going to say, if it is as bad as you are saying, Gary, or even potentially as bad as you're saying, then what about our elected government?
		I mean, they are there supposedly to take care of our health and welfare.
		Well, this clearly has to do with our health and welfare, right?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It surely does.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what are they doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're planning for martial law?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes, they are doing that.
		They generally do not discuss year 2000 as the basis of it, though there is one document in which it is marginally mentioned.
		And that is on the President's Commission, what's called the PCCIP, the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection.
		This was created by executive order in July of 96.
		And they have a fact list, a frequently asked questions list.
		And if you go to that fact list, and I've got it on my site, they do say that the effects of the year 2000 problem are comparable to a terrorist attack.
		That's all they say.
		They don't go into it.
		They don't talk about dealing with it, but they do admit it.
unidentified		Great.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Gary, hold on.
		We're at the top of the hour.
		You've got a good rest here.
		I know I need one after hearing all of this.
		And I thought I was the Dr. Hume of Toshio hosts.
		My guest is Gary North.
		He knows about Y2K.
		I suspect by now we've got your attention.
		If not, keep listening.
		Well, actually, if we don't have your attention by now, probably you're not educable.
		So, stay right where you are.
		We'll be back.
		This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		Oh, give me this way.
		Oh, give me this way.
		Oh, my God.
		From the Kingdom of Nye, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
		First-time callers may reach Art at area code 702-727-1222.
		702-727-1222.
		Now, here again is Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Once again, here I am.
		Good morning, everybody.
		My guest is Gary Nort.
		The subject is Y2K.
		Gary Nort received his PhD from the University of California at Riverside in 1972, was a congressional research assistant to Congressman Ron Paul, a Republican slash libertarian, has authored 43 books published in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, American Spectator, The Freeman, newsletter editor of Revenant Review in 1974.
		Year 2000 project began for him in November of 1996.
		He lives on 60 acres, has two natural gas wells, three power generators, and believes Western civilization could collapse in 2000 if the power grid goes down for over 60 days, and sees no reason why it won't.
		The predictions are as follows, and we'll talk about some of them.
		Banks will begin to have runs on them in about the second half of 1999 worldwide.
		No bank to survive to 2001.
		An all-cash economy in 2000.
		The Dow Jones average, January 3 of 2000, zero, because it'll be shut down.
		Demise of the IRS, April 15th, 2000.
		No more government checks.
		No more checks.
		No more credit cards.
		No more pension plans.
		Shutdown of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, family payments.
		No more airline service.
		The FAA is not going to meet the deadline.
		We'll talk about that.
		No more Las Vegas, Reno, and Orlando tourism.
		Trains will cease operating in 2000.
		No more automobile production.
		That would be from the Domino Effect.
		No elections in 2000 because there won't be any computers.
unidentified		Martial law in our cities.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Other than that, it'll be a fine day.
unidentified		The End.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Speaking of World Wide Web Addresses, if you will go to my website, I talked to Keith Rowland, who was my webmaster during the break, and I asked him about Gary's website.
		He said, of course, yes, the link is there now.
		And he said, you know, you better go read it because he's got an awful lot of information to back up exactly what he's saying on his website.
		So those of you who have me bookmarked, just go to my website at www.artbell.com.
		Scroll down to the guest areas down at the bottom and click on Gary North's name and you'll be right there.
		And there is information to back up what he's saying.
		And what he's saying is pretty serious.
		Here he is, once again, Gary North.
		And Gary, here's somebody who takes me on and says, Art, Gary North is fear-mongering.
		All financial transactions are backed up on paper.
		There is not going to be a problem.
		What do you say to that?
unidentified		How are you going to get the paper?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You're going to call your local stockbroker on his toll-free 800 number and get a perpetual busy signal until the phone shuts down?
		How are you going to get the paper?
		You're going to send it by mail?
		The U.S. mail's not compliant.
		Art, I'm a fearmonger.
		I've scared myself out of business.
		I know that there's no chance that I'm going to be in business in 18 months.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		None.
unidentified		None?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I'm out of business.
		Because the U.S. postal system is not compliant now.
		Neither is UPS.
		They're not compliant.
		How are they going to deliver this stuff?
		You can get your piece of paper.
		What is the piece of paper to?
		It's a promise to do what?
unidentified		It's an IOU nothing.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		If General Motors, and this is true, this was verified.
		In fact, this came through Fortune just about two weeks ago.
		General Motors has 100,000 suppliers of parts, equipment, and services.
unidentified		None has been registered as compliant.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Now, it's not just General Motors, it's Honda, it's Ford, it's Chrysler.
		Now, what value is a General Motors stock or promise to pay if General Motors suppliers cannot deliver General Motors the parts to make the cars?
		You're talking about a company that's $150 billion company a year.
		Well, yeah, you can get your piece of paper with the pretty symbol that says, yes, you own a piece of this action, but what's the action?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's a very good point.
		It's a very good point.
		I have no answer for it.
		Listen, you said specifically in here, no more Las Vegas Reno or Orlando tourism.
		Now, I'm just over the hill from Las Vegas.
		We depend for our livelihoods on tourism here.
		What do you mean by that?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Okay, let's give an analysis which actually was not originally mine.
		It's a friend of mine by the name of Anthony Easton, who is a professor out in California.
		And he began playing around with this project for his class about six weeks ago, and he ran it by me, and I said, yep, can't argue with that one.
		It's the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration.
		IBM earlier this year went to the FAA and said, gentlemen, the computer that you are using, the 40 of them, to route your 20 major routes, is not only non-compliant, gentlemen, there is no one left in this company who understands it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean the original code?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The original computer which the FAA uses to route all flights.
		It is going down.
		IBM told them it is going down, to which the FAA said, we're going to study this for 90 more days.
		You may be wrong.
		Now, the FAA has been repeatedly identified by the General Accounting Office of Congress as not being compliant and not going to make it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what does that mean is going to happen?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It means that you're going to have to find some way other than computers to route 600 mile-an-hour jets that take off every minute.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's what it means.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, in other words, airplanes are going to stop flying on that day?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Ethan's estimate is they'll probably at best have to cut back to what the flight patterns were probably in 1970 to 73.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, brother.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Now, that would mean the bankruptcy of every airline because they have bought these multiple billion-dollar devices called planes to fill them, to fly them, to take them off every 60 seconds.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You won't have that.
unidentified		You can't have that.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		So then what's going to happen to airline tickets?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		They're going to go from 300 and 400 to 2,000.
unidentified		They're going to be business class only.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You're not going to have this massive tourism because they will not be able to fly those planes in that kind of numbers.
		Then what happens to the banks that have loaned the airline industry hundreds of billions of dollars to buy these planes?
		And by the way, Art, it's not just us.
		Britain has the same problem with its computers.
		This is an international problem.
		Besides, ART, none of the planes is compliant.
		The average Boeing plane probably has 100 to 165 non-compliant systems in it.
		There is no compliant airport, ARC.
unidentified		None.
unidentified		There's none in the United States that meets the qualifications.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Even this new multi-billion one out of Denver, they've admitted they're not 2,000 compliant.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Dallas isn't compliant, and neither is the Atlanta.
unidentified		Now, if you take out Dallas and Atlanta, you've taken out the American Airlines.
		I know.
		I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there time?
		I mean, if they began today and just with a crash program to get it done, would they get it done?
		Or is it already, in many cases, not just with the airlines, but in so many of these areas, is it too late?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The general assessment is the United States is short programmers.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The minimum, I have seen the estimate, the minimum estimate is 350,000.
unidentified		We are waiting Britain to get them.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Howard Rubin says of Hunter College, he says it's between 500,000 and 700,000.
		Now, you don't go out and recruit 700,000 COBOL and assembler programmers overnight.
		These guys are all 60 and 70 years old.
		Nobody speaks these languages anymore.
		There's something like 400 of them.
		You can't just throw money at this problem.
		You can raise the wages of those who are in the business, but you don't get 300,000 skilled COBOL and assembler programmers in the next three months, which is what you'd have to do, just because you throw money at it.
		They aren't there.
		They don't exist.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're saying, yes, it is too late.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It's too late.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You go so far as to say there will be no elections in the year 2000.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's my belief, yes.
		I don't see how you would run them.
		And besides, what would be the point?
		If the federal government cannot collect taxes because the banks are down, if the federal government cannot distribute money because Medicare and Medicaid are down, because the Social Security system didn't make it, because it's not compliant, if you can't distribute the money and you can't collect the money, what's the point?
		The military won't be functioning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're covering so much.
		Can I be absolutely certain that if I were getting Social Security, my check, after at the beginning of 2000, I would not get another check.
		Is that correct?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		At present, Social Security is not compliant.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		They have worked on this since 1989.
unidentified		They haven't got it fixed.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The reason I got into this, two years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine, and I happened to say, what do you think of the 2000 problem?
		And he says it's going to collapse the system.
		And I said, why do you say that?
		He said, because I was one of the original Medicaid programmers.
		And we programmed it knowing that it would go down in 2000.
		And I said, wait a minute, can't you fix your own code?
		He says, no.
		And the compilers we used to write it are gone.
		And the companies used to produce it are gone.
		And the guys on the team who worked on it are scattered.
		And they don't know where I am.
		And I don't know where they are.
		And he says, count on it.
		I guarantee you, Medicaid is going down.
		Programmed it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, I know what compilers are.
		I used to write in BASIC and Compile long ago, so I know what those are.
		And you're saying the compilers or the decompilers or both probably don't even exist anymore.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		They don't exist.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And the companies that made them are gone.
unidentified		This was 30 years ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You actually also say there will be a collapse of all national governments in 2000?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All national governments.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		All national governments.
		If you can't collect the taxes and you can't pay the Army, you don't have a government.
		The U.S. military has not even completed its inventory of systems.
		As of April 28th, General Accounting Office one month ago said the U.S. military, the Department of Defense, has not completed its inventory of systems, which is the first 1% of the job.
		They don't know how many computers they've got, except it's a, well, they know the number of computers.
		Yeah, a million and a half computers, 28,000 systems.
		They are not at this point compliant with at least 8,000 mission-critical systems.
unidentified		They've admitted that.
unidentified		They won't communicate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So the military stops.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The military stops.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You say there will be collapse of every Fortune 1000 company.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm probably being optimistic there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Optimistic?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Probably, yeah, it's because it's going to take the ones down to the 2 and the 5,000 category 2.
		As of Wall Street Journal, April 28th, made a report that said, Howard Rubin's study already has said of the largest companies, the Fortune 100, two-thirds of them have yet to devise a plan.
		Not begin working on it, Art.
		Two-thirds of the Fortune 100 companies have not devised a plan to begin working on it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, give me an example of what will happen in a Fortune 500 company, for example.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		On that day, what is going to happen?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		On January, well, let's say January 3, because that's when they come back to work from Monday.
unidentified		Right.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Because January 1st is on a Saturday.
		They will come back, assuming the banks are still open, and that's a huge, huge assumption.
		They will come back on a Monday morning, and they will find, in many cases, probably most cases, either the computers literally are shut down and not functioning, other will not boot up, or that the data that they're throwing out at you simply don't add up because they've moved into 1,900.
		They don't think it's 2,000 anymore.
		So the problem with the data then becomes how can you trust any of the information coming out of these systems?
		And the answer is you can't unless you hand-check it.
		But you can't hand check it because you don't have paper and ink systems to hand-check it.
		These companies will not be able to interchange data with non-compliant companies.
		Now, let's consider the banks.
		Let's go to the big one.
		13,000 banks in the United States.
		Not one is compliant.
		No major money center.
		Bank is compliant.
		Now these banks exchange trillions of dollars a day, one with another.
		The wire systems that do the exchanging are not compliant.
		Now, how does a bank that gets compliant keep itself compliant if it has to interact with 12,999 other banks not knowing whether any of those other banks are compliant?
unidentified		Because if you take their bad data into your system, you've messed your system up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I understand.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It's a systemic problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think it was Britain's major who said that one day it's all going to come tumbling down, that overnight trillions of dollars are exchanged by computers and satellite, and one day there is going to be a problem, and it's all going to come tumbling down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Without that exchange of money, everything stops.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes, everything stops.
		It's the collapse of the division of labor.
		That's really what we're talking about.
		It's a collapse of the modern division of labor.
		That's the great threat to it.
		That is what we're looking at.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, here's what a lot of people are going to say.
		I'll save them the trouble and I'll say it myself.
		If what you're saying is true, or even partially true, Gary, my God, the networks, for example, ought to be all over this.
		If it's almost to the inevitable point, there ought to be major stories on every network about this, getting people ready, telling them the truth about what's just around the corner.
		And if Dan Rather doesn't say it, it can't be true.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, I will say this.
		ABC had me on last Thursday and had Ed Jordan on and treated us, I think, fairly.
		Did not say we were nutcases, said we were extreme.
unidentified		That's pretty good.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		We are extreme, so that's okay.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The point is, let's say you're a New York reporter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You've got a pension plan.
		North says you won't have one in 18 months.
		You've got a career.
		I say you won't have one in 18 months.
		I say you're living in an incredibly dangerous place to live.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about me, Gary?
		I'm a broadcaster.
		I'm uplinked on any number of satellites to accomplish what I do and then downlink to radio stations that then broadcast my show.
		What's going to happen to me?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, I hope you sell a lot of Beijing because that's what it's going to take to receive the broadcasts.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The difficulty that you and I have is that we both use the web, telecommunications, electricity, and we both have to be paid.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I use not only electricity, but I use KU-band and C-band satellites.
		I use all kinds of, you know, it all runs through the center in New York and then on to New Jersey where it's uplinked.
		Is all of that going to go down?
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		Great.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So I'm out of business.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Look this way.
		Art, I want someone to get out there in the industry to show me how it isn't going to get down.
		They are linked.
		They are not compliant.
		They are completely dependent on ATT and MCI.
		Those companies are not compliant.
		They know they're not compliant.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For example, in my case, if a satellite goes down, Gary, we communicate to the uplink Point by telephone using what are called Comrex lines or other types of phone lines, and those will be gone too, huh?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I can't point to a link on my site of a guy from AT ⁇ T who says clearly it's going down.
unidentified		Sell your stock quick.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		But what you can point to in case after case is that representatives of each of the companies say we're not compliant now and we're working on it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Hold on, Gary.
		We're at the bottom of the hour.
		Sometimes my own show scares the hell out of me.
		This is one of those nights.
		I'm Mark Bell.
unidentified		This is Coast to Coast A.M.I.O.
		From the Kingdom of Nine, this is Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell.
		From East of the Rockies, call Art at 1-800-825-5033.
		West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, at 1-800-618-8255.
		First-time callers may reach Art at Area Code 702-727-1222.
		And you may fax ART at Area Code 702-727-8499.
		Please limit your faxes to one or two pages.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
		It is.
		And here's Doc.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, I always jump in, mess up my own announcer?
unidentified		Silly, huh?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The following is from the Associated Press, Dateline Washington Associated Press.
		Listen to this.
		I'll just read you part of it.
		Scattered bug bites are already being felt.
		For one, government is throwing out old but durable computer systems that work all right except for the Y2K problem.
		For another, several major Y2K tests have failed.
		In one case, a system, get this, that manages the military's vast inventory wrongly marked 90,000 items for deletion.
		The public faces a high risk that critical services could be severely disrupted.
		This is from the GAO in a report on federal agencies, quote, financial transactions could be delayed, flights grounded, power lost, and national defense affected, end quote.
		That's the Associated Press, folks, not Gary North.
		My guest is Gary North, and he'll be right back.
unidentified		The End.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Once again, here is Gary North.
		So Gary, you're not really the only one saying this.
		I mean, I just read from the Associated Press.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I think anyone who has watched this very carefully is now getting to the stage of, if not panic, to extreme concern because so little has been done despite the warnings that have been going out for the last three or four years.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Almost nothing is being done.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A lot of people want to know about, I'm going to ask about something very trivial by comparison, and that is personal computers.
		Are they basically okay?
		Is this a mainframe problem or are personal computers at risk?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		All computers are at risk.
		All software must be tested.
		There are testing programs.
		You can download them free.
		I've got them listed on my site.
		You can go to it in the personal computer section.
		Go to that page.
		Download any of them.
		No computer is fully compliant, except a Macintosh that uses only Macintosh software designed only for the Macintosh.
		Those are probably compliant.
		But one of the great problems is that you've got 300 million computers out there all interacting, mostly, for example, with spreadsheets in business, and the spreadsheets have been two-digit entries.
		Those spreadsheets will not be reliable after 2000.
		So all the data coming out of your highly developed spreadsheet program that's being fed into your mainframe or from your mainframe into your spreadsheet, all of those must be rechecked by hand.
		You can't trust any of them.
		And that's your problem.
		And that's a huge problem.
		They can be fixed, but the cost of fixing them and to make certain that every one of those spreadsheets is accurate is simply astronomical.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you were the Y2K czar and you could issue orders right now about what should be done, what would you order?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I'd tell him to subscribe to my newsletter immediately.
		But of course, you're serious.
		The answer is I would...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You'd resign.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Koskinen is the Y2K czar, and he's paid to go out and give mild-mannered speeches.
		He has said publicly, and I've got this on my site, he has said, I can't tell you really bad gloom and doom materials because it could create a panic.
		They know that.
		You can't get a straight answer out of anybody in authority.
		The only national figure, well-known national figure who's really been pushing on this is Tony Blair of England.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of England.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		He is the only national figure who has really said, gentlemen, we have got to get this thing fixed.
		And he pushed and pushed at last week's G8 meeting to get some kind of a statement out of the other seven.
		And what came out was cornmeal mush.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, here's what I've heard.
		I've heard that we are probably as far behind as we are and as doomed as we are in this problem, we are way ahead of a lot of the rest of the world.
		And so my question would be, if we generally get compliant, which you say we can't, but let's say we did, and the rest of the world didn't, what would happen?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know what would happen.
		It's an international economy.
		So we have 13,000 banks compliant.
		We have none.
		But say you get them all compliant.
		You've got probably 100,000 banks internationally that you're exchanging data with, and those banks go down.
		80% of the code, or at least 78% estimate, Caprice-Jones estimate, that 78% of the code in the world is outside the U.S. And they're not spending any money.
		What do you think Asia is spending?
		You think Indonesia is rolling up its sleeves to get this problem at this point or Japan?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of course not.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		No, they're not doing anything.
		And yet it's an international economy, international banking system.
		That's why I, you know, when I tried to get, I've done a little report on this thing that people can get for nothing.
		I can only do it because it's web-based.
		And so when I said, what am I going to call this thing?
		I said, I'm going to call it collapse.
		So it's collapse at trapped.com.
		If you want my, you know, 10-page analysis of why I think it's collapsing, you just write an email to it and get it, and you get it back in 30 seconds.
		But the point is, I don't see, with the interdependence of all of us on all the rest of us, all hinged to money, all hinged to telephones, and all hinged to electrical powers.
		And yet the computers have threatened the banks, the computer has truly threatened the telecommunication system, and it's threatened the generation and distribution of power.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We had a very simple little case the other day when Galaxy 4 satellite began to spin out of control, and I guess it's gone for good and they're replacing it.
		But when it went, in my little town, I'll tell you something.
		The ATMs all stopped working.
		When you went to the supermarket and tried to put your card in to pay for the groceries, that wasn't working.
		When you tried to pay for something with a credit card, they couldn't use their little machines to validate that your card was okay.
		All of that went down when Galaxy 4 went down.
		And that's just a little nothing compared to what we're talking about in 2000.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		There was that great scene, and it was a great scene, in the trigger effect where the guy was in the supermarket, and you hear this voice, and it was kind of fake because there wouldn't be any announcement system.
		But you heard the voice, and the voice said, our computers are down.
		We cannot take credit cards.
		We cannot take checks.
		Cash only.
unidentified		Small bills, please.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Whoever wrote that script understood.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		He understood.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So potentially there could be no phone service, potentially, or even probably there could be no power for periods of time, or at least brownouts and blackouts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And what do you mean by no water, no sewers?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Let's give a real-world example.
		This actually happened.
		Horror story.
		Bad one.
		During the ice storms last January and early February in Montreal, the water treatment facility could not get power from Quebec Power because Quebec Power had shut down.
		They had power generation and enough fuel to run for another six hours to keep the water treatment facility open.
		So they went to the mayor and they told the mayor, we've got to tell the public that six hours from now, if we don't get Quebec Power to restore power to us, we're going to start spewing untreated water into the system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh my God.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The fire marshal said to the mayor, don't you tell them that?
		Because if they do that, they'll fill their bathtubs with water.
		And if there's a fire, I will not be able to guarantee being able to put that fire out.
		And the poor mayor had to make a decision between the two bureaucrats.
		He sided with the fire marshal.
		Now, they were very fortunate because within that six-hour period, Quebec Power did restore power operation, but they came within six hours of poisoning the public.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, here's a very important question, I think.
		As we really get close to this date, the FAA, the various banks, all of these, the power grid, power companies, we could go on and on and on.
		They're going to begin to certainly know what may be about to happen.
		So in some cases, there will be preemptive shutdowns or brownouts, won't there?
		What will begin to happen just before that critical date?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think you will begin to get brownouts.
		You will begin to get crisis runs.
		People will begin to try to get extra water or whatever it is they think that they need.
		Stuff.
		There'll be a run on stuff.
		They're going to charge it if they can to their credit cards.
		You're going to see the supply of stuff disappear.
		The reason why we have such an incredibly productive economy, why there's been this extraordinary output of goods and services for the past 25 years is because there are no more inventories.
		When Sam Walton made real-time computer transactions the basis of Walmart, he cut probably 20% out of the marketing expenses, and everybody had to imitate him.
		Nobody's got any inventories anymore.
		And when you don't have inventories, it means that when there is a rush to get whatever it is, you can't get it.
		Now let me give you an example.
		The Mormons have pretty much dominated the field of stored food.
		I began recommending to my clients about a year ago that they begin to buy up a year's supply of food for the families.
		And I said, because I've gone to the largest of the wholesalers in the Mormon stored food business, and I asked him, I said, Steve, let me ask you straight.
		If 10% of the members of the Mormon church decided that Y2K was a reason to do what the church says it ought to do, could you meet the demand?
		He said, not a chance.
unidentified		Really?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		They are now, in some cases, backed up eight months.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know that we had a food supplier that sold bulk foods, a year supply of food, on my program.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And they were, about six months ago, beginning to get backed up in orders by about a half a year.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you think it's people that see this coming?
unidentified		Yes.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I have been told specifically by guys in the industry that Y2K is the driving force right now of those people making the year's supply orders.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Here's another question that people are going to obviously ask.
		They're going to say, all right, I guess I believe.
		What do I do?
		What do they do?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, I really have tried to deal with this in that report of mine.
		And if they've got an email, just send an email to collapse at trapped.com, and they'll get it back.
		Let's go to the basics.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so I've also got to cover this before you do it, and that is not everybody obviously has a computer, strange as that may seem to you and I. What about an address or something?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Art, you'll swamp me.
		You've got the greatest true believers in the business out there, and I'm doing this thing for free.
		I can't really do it.
		So let's quickly go through some basics.
		No joke, and I'm not paid to say this, you do buy a Beijing.
		You need communications, and that's a very good way to get it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The next thing you do, I tell people, go out and get that year's supply of food.
		But when you call the company, you tell them, gentlemen, I want a deadline date.
		I'm not paying for this unless I can get in writing that I can get this food by a deadline date.
		So what's the date?
		They've got to be told.
		You've got to have that.
		Now, the next thing you need, in my opinion, it's a strong feeling of mine.
		I think you need to build with your church or your other community service organization some sense of what's going to happen because neighborhood is crucial and the groups around you who cooperate with you can make you or break you in a crisis.
		I'm completely convinced of that.
		So you need neighbors, you need friends, you need other people to share this with because this is a real tough burden.
		I'd like to believe the churches were taking a strong hand in this, but they're not.
		I wish they were.
		The next thing I think you need is some amount of cash.
		I think you need, like they said in that wonderful scene, cash only small bills, please.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But would even that last, in other words, would paper money continue to be of value if it really got bad?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I think it would because the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is stretched out to 24 hour a day just to do replacement of paper money.
		In a crisis, they couldn't continue to operate.
		They'll shut the Bureau of Engraving and Printing down.
		Or at least they can't increase it any more than they're operating right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good lord.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		So you will have a fixed supply of paper money.
		Under those conditions, I think paper money probably will be at least better than electronic money because there's no guarantee with electronic money.
		Now, should you have some gold and silver coins?
		Yes, I think you should.
		I think that's a basic investment that people should have.
		But I think some cash is a good idea at this point.
unidentified		Because what are you giving up?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		3% per annum?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's not much to give up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, that's true.
		You know, I'm sure you have stopped several times before you would deliver this kind of a message to a national audience, and you've said to yourself, am I really sure of what I'm saying?
		Are you?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		To the extent that I completely disrupted my own life.
		I sold a beautiful house that my beautiful wife was very sad to get rid of.
		I sold it at a loss to get out and get it fast enough.
		I'm living in an area where I don't have my house built yet that I want, and she is unhappy, and we have been disrupted for months.
		I have left what I thought was a relatively safe area to go to an even safer area.
		Now, I would not do this, personally, if I just thought that this was a possibility rather than a probability.
		So in my own personal planning, I'm telling people that I'm doing it and I think they ought to do it.
		Did I buy a year's supply of food?
		No, I bought a two-year supply of food.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Possibility, probability, or certainty.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Certainty is, and I mean certainty, expect at least a 1974 level recession.
		Edgard Denny's right, that's what you have to say is the minimal possibility.
		But I don't see any compliant system.
		We've never seen this before, Art.
		We have never been in a situation where you could date a crisis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about this possibility?
		I'm getting several faxes that say things like, well, why not just put another date into these computers while you work on the problem?
		How about that?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That is one of the strategies that some outfits have said they're using, but usually when they, you have to interconnect the data.
		Let me give you an example.
		The Internal Revenue Service has already announced that they will only accept four-digit year, four-digit century.
		That's an IRS requirement.
		Of course, they're not compliant, but that's what they have required others to have.
		There is no standard.
		There's no agreed-upon way even to whether the date, the century comes at the beginning or the end.
		These computers have to talk with each other.
		Joe can fix a computer one way, Fred can fix it another way, and Sam can fix it a third, and Taruro Yamamoto can fix it a fourth way.
		But They've got to talk with each other.
		They've got to agree.
		And each of the computers has to interact with each other, and they can't get them to interact with each other.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what we do is almost academic if not everybody else does it as well.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's the problem.
		It's the interoperability.
		That's the technical phrase.
		It's the problem of interoperability.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about national security?
		In other words, you've already said, and I read something from the AFL on the military, deleting items like crazy.
		What about real defense systems like ICBMs?
		Now, you may not have knowledge in this area, but our big defense ring of nuclear long shots.
		What about those?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		They're tied to the global positioning system, which is going down on August 22nd of 1999.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		All of the positioning software was designed to collapse on August 22nd of 99.
		So how do you know where you are and how do you know what time it is?
		The systems that depend on the global positioning satellite system of the 24 U.S. satellites, all of those systems must be completely reprogrammed in order to compensate for the loss of 1,024 weeks that will take place on August 22nd of 99.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good Lord, but that includes aircraft and ships and all the navigational systems?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that's what it includes.
unidentified		And they have got to get it fixed.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And I don't, people claim, well, they think they've got it fixed, but the Navy has posted and has posted over a year and a half ago a warning saying, we are not responsible if you get lost because they've said we will lose the thousand 24 weeks.
		Now that happens even before 2,000.
		So again, you've got your problem of redesigning all of this software so fast and then deploying it and testing it that we have simply run out of time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, we've run out of time.
		When all of this, when do you think our government, our government, forget all the rest of them, but our government will be forced to begin making public statements about what's coming?
		Or will they not do it?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Middle of next year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Middle of next year.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		When the bank runs begin, they're going to have to take action.
		They will have to begin to confront the reality that the computer systems that the government has will not be compliant.
		So what you're going to get is a tax revolt that will begin next year.
		As soon as the general public figures out that the IRS is not going to be able to find them, or as the head of the IRS said a month ago, if we don't get it fixed, the public won't get its refunds.
		He said that.
		Rosati said that in front of Congress.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Scaring the hell out of me, Gary.
		All right, look, we're at the top of the hour.
		What I want to do is allow the public, skeptical public, to ask some hard questions.
		Can we do that?
		Yeah, that's right.
		All right, all right.
		Coming up then after the break, you've got a good long one.
		Hang in there.
		Gary North is my guest, and the subject is Y2K.
		If you have questions, that's what we'll be up to when we get back.
		I'm Art Bell.
		This is Coast to Coast Air.
unidentified		Coast to Coast Air.
		Coast to Coast Air.
		You're listening to a rebroadcast of one of Art Bell's most popular programs.
		When you hear phone numbers, please do not call.
		Now, please enjoy this encore presentation of Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Back now to Gary Norse.
		We're about to go to the phones.
		Gary, my wife made me ask about this.
		She said, ask him, please, about gasoline.
		Now, gasoline stations, which dispense gas to us when we go up and put the hose and the nozzle into the car, would that continue?
		Also, trucking, we're dependent on trucking here for supplies.
		Would they be able to get fuel to move?
		What would happen to the gas stations all of the trigger effect?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		If the electricity is down, they're down.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Because they all use electrical pumps.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No gas.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Not if the power is down.
		Second question is, if the power isn't down, now you get back to that wonderful scene in the trigger effect at the gas station.
		If you can't get your credit card cleared, then it has to be cash.
		And that will be a real debate and problematical situation.
		Let's give an obvious example, Art.
		If you were hiring a guy to take your quarter of a million dollar tank truck out, and you knew that guy was going to pick up the cash at those gas stations, which you and I had paid the gas station attendant to pump the gas, how would you know your money or your truck would ever come back?
		Our whole security system is based on electronic payment.
		If electronic payments go down, then you've got your problem of how do you actually collect from your trucker whatever he was paid in cash and get your truck back.
		My opinion is there will be a drastic decrease of the amount of gasoline and the amount of trucking on the road.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, one more.
		Here's from a senior citizen who says, look, I depend on Medicare.
		Senior citizens depend on nursing homes.
		Everybody needs to be able to get their medication.
		What's going to happen?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You won't get it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's what's going to happen.
		All right.
		Here we go.
		First time caller online.
		You're on the air with Gary North.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you, sir?
unidentified		This is Dave in Des Moines listing on TXTK.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Dave.
unidentified		Hi, how are you?
		Fine.
		I had a question for Gary.
		Assuming there's going to be complete societal chaos, military collapse, complete infrastructure collapse, I mean, I'm just scared to death, and I'm thinking it might just be best to get the hell out of here.
		So where would a safe place to go be?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, a safe place.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're in Des Moines, which is actually among cities, probably a pretty good area.
		I tell people, in most cases, if you get water, you've overcome your biggest problem.
		That is, water that is not dependent upon electricity to pump.
		You could probably go an hour outside of town and buy a vacation property.
		Call it a vacation property.
		You don't have to call it a survival property.
		Your wife wouldn't like that probably.
		Call it a vacation property, an hour, 90 minutes outside of town, put a mobile home on it and a well.
		If you were to do that, in all honesty, you would probably increase your likelihood of getting through this thing by 50, 60, 70 percent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A mobile home and a well.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it doesn't sound like a lot of money, and compared to what most people have in their 401ks, it isn't a lot of money, but people won't do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's what I've got, a mobile home and a well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Actually, Art, you probably will make it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We just won't be able to listen to you.
		Yeah, that part of it bothers me a lot.
		It's like I should do a, I guess I should do a Y2K program.
		In fact, I'll be, you know what?
		I'll be on the air that night.
		I'll be on the air.
		I'll go on the air.
		Well, let's see.
		It'll already be Y2K time by the time I go on the air on the East Coast.
		So maybe I won't be on the air that night.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It'd be interesting to see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Gary North.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hello.
		This is Mary Ann.
		I'm calling from Ventura.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ventura, yes.
unidentified		My question is, I've read, and I'm sorry I can't cite the exact source today.
unidentified		I don't remember, but under the rules or auspices of FEMA, I've read that the government will have the authority to confiscate food supply no matter where the source is from.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a very good point.
		In other words, there will be some with food.
		There will be many or most without food.
		But as she points out, there is this presidential directive that some have heard about that would allow the confiscation of food.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I have looked for that.
		FEMA is incredibly dead silent on this issue, given the fact that FEMA really is in charge of emergency management in this country.
		There is nothing that I have been able to find on the FEMA site, and I've looked, relating to the year 2000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How can that be?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that is their mandate.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes, you bet it is.
		And that's what is so incredibly suspicious.
		Because of any topic that ought to be on the FEMA site, it's this one.
		Now, admittedly, if some of you out there are web surfers, if you find out something, go to my site, communicate with me, send me the link.
unidentified		I'll put it up.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		But I've looked.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I can find nothing on the FEMA site related to Y2K.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Easy to the Rockies.
		You're on there with Gary North.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, this is Wanda in Lawley, North Carolina.
		Hi, Wanda.
		And I'd like to ask your guest a quote.
		Well, first of all, I want to say you definitely have my attention.
		It's the first time I've been frightened over anything in my life.
		Okay.
		I own my own home, and I've been one of these people that was very diligent to make sure I've paid all my bills, and I don't owe anyone anything.
		And I would like to ask what Mr. North's advice would be for a person who I'm 50, and I own my own home, I don't owe anyone anything, and I have a very limited cash flow.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Could I ask, did you say Raleigh?
unidentified		Yes.
		In the city limits?
		No.
		I'm 20 miles outside of the city limits.
		I own my home and I have a well that pumps an Artesian well, so I've got 100 gallons a minute that I have.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, basically, I would tell you you've done what 99% of the public would like to do or will want to do in 2000.
		You've done it.
		You are in much better shape than the vast majority of Americans.
		My opinion is the most important thing you do, get some food in and make certain that you can pump that well, indicate that you can.
		I would say sit tight.
		It sounds to me as if you're in a much better situation than most people.
unidentified		Okay.
		Thank you very much.
		I'll be listening for further.
		Thank you all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Merriman.
		I know this is a very sensitive question, but as you recall, in that movie that we've talked about tonight, The Trigger Effect, which, by the way, I've been recommending to people before we even talk, things quickly got out of hand.
		Now, if you have a lot and somebody else has a little, they're going to want to take what you've got away.
		And it brings up a sensitive question of protecting what you've got.
		Any comments?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Are you speaking to me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Or you lost her.
		Yes, indeed.
		I think, oh, we're all here.
		Good.
		I think the right of self-defense is certainly legitimate.
		And I think, however, and this is important, this is really important.
		Sure.
		The key to that movie, as I think about that movie, the key fact of the movie was not the trigger, but the effect.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The key to that movie is understanding the breakdown of community.
		Because at the end of the movie, they do get to go back to the city.
		Somehow the lights are restored.
		But it is clear as he's sitting on his front porch that he'll never trust his neighbors again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And that theme, it was subtle but powerful in the movie.
		It was the story of the breakdown of community trust.
		And that's why I want to stress, and I really believe this, if you're in a situation where you have to have a gun to protect yourself, do whatever you can to get in a situation that's better, where you can trust your neighbors.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I hear you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, ma'am, have we answered your question?
unidentified		Yes, I'd like to ask one more question.
unidentified		When we had a hurricane frame that came up through, from the coast, up through Raleigh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I well remember.
unidentified		Right.
		We were without electricity for about nine days.
		It was absolutely miserable.
		And I live in a relatively small community, housing development outside the city.
		Everyone did band together because no one had generators, so we had to use all of our frozen food.
		And as a small community, which was shocking to everyone, we didn't know each other and like shared food.
		But, you know, if this thing happens, I'm going to be probably the only person on this property lot that has enough water for everyone.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're going to be a popular lady.
unidentified		Well, maybe I can barter.
unidentified		Is that how this is going to work?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I think that's perfectly legitimate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, ma'am.
		Yeah, bartering.
		That would be as well another alternative to cash, wouldn't it?
unidentified		Bartering.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've got this, you've got that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's trade.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		But remember, Art, yes, it can be done, but the brilliance of the free market modern economy is that you do it by money because barter is not very efficient.
unidentified		I mean, if you don't have what I've got, I'm out of luck.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's desperate, of course, but I mean, it is one possibility of obtaining something you want.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that is correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gary North.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, this is Scott from Arizona.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Scott.
unidentified		You'd be happy to know my computer is it's January 1st, year 2000.
		It's about 114.
		It seems to be running okay.
		That answered your question about checking your computer.
		My major question was, everything's relating down to, is they're not upgrading their systems because of money, correct?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's one reason.
unidentified		If they don't upgrade and everything goes down, there's not going to be any money anyways.
		Why don't they upgrade now?
		I don't understand that at all.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Because people defer until next quarter and the next quarterly budget report making any decision involving the expenditure of large quantities of money.
		And you can see that if the hundred largest companies of America, if two-thirds of them, have not yet even developed a plan to deal with Y2K, which is what Rubin says and I believe him, then we've got a situation where deferral and denial are dominant in the thinking of the decision makers because nobody wants to be blamed for spending $200, $300, $500 million.
		That's what has been budgeted by Citicorp, $600 million.
		$300 million, Bank of America, actually $350.
		$300 million with Case Manhattan Bank.
		Now they haven't spent it.
		They've spent maybe a quarter of it, but that's the kind of numbers we're talking about, and nobody wants to do it.
unidentified		Yeah, but you're not going to have any money.
		Yes, that's nothing when you have no money flowing in.
		You got it.
		I just don't grasp that at all.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Because it's not their money.
		It's not their personal money.
		What they have to hope for, and I think you're going to see it beginning early next year, is that they can cash out their position and go into quiet retirement with their whatever they get for their retirement obligations, and they're going to sell on their stock options and off they're going to go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there going to be a lot of that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, people liquidating, sort of a circle of people who will be in the know, who will liquidate and go away quietly for a long time.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's one of the things you want to look for for those of you who are stock watchers is insider trading early next year.
		The legal liability that these people will face is so gigantic that the general estimate is in the United States of $1 trillion of litigation in the year 2000 and beyond if the system holds.
		It will be the ultimate feast day of the lawyers if the system holds.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there's no question about it.
		Thank you, Culler.
		Look, if, for example, I went off the air, Rush Limbaugh went off the air, the company that airs us, that sponsors us, is going to sue the providers who were not ready, and that's the reason we went off the air.
		So you're damn right they're going to sue them.
unidentified		They're going to sue them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's going to be a lot of litigation going on.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And I think it's going to go in the case of board and trustee members.
		It will not just be corporate, it will be personal.
		They'll say it's personal liability.
		Yep.
		And the lawyers are gathering.
		I have a whole section on my website under litigation.
		You can see the extent to which the lawyers are putting on seminars for each other on how to get ready for Y2K litigation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Circling vultures.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air with Gary North.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Yes, you.
		Where are you?
		I'm still listening.
		San Diego.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		And one good thing I have going for me is that I don't have a lot of money somewhere.
		Unfortunately, I also rely on SSI.
		I'm a young mother with four children.
		Very poor.
		And I've been listening to you for about a year now.
		And the thing about your radio station that fascinated me was mostly the comment things and all the different things about the stuff that I try to talk to my family about because it's exciting.
		Well, now I'm scared to death.
		I can't sleep.
		I got you on every radio station in my house.
		And I said, okay, I'm calling.
		I wrote down my little lamp number.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, I hate to say this, but I bet that it's true.
		We'll ask Gary.
		Usually when this kind of thing happens, the people with means make out the best.
		And the poor people, particularly those dependent on our government for checks, I'm sorry, but are going to be the ones that are going to get hurt the most.
		Is that true, Gary?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		If they're in the cities, it is.
unidentified		Uh-huh.
unidentified		Yeah, I'm in a, well, I'm in a small city, but.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		San Diego's a pretty good size.
unidentified		Yeah, I'm in a small city in San Diego.
		And I don't know what to do.
		I talk to my family that does have money.
		They do have jobs.
		My aunt works for a big company that makes a lot of money in computers.
		And, you know, you talk to her about, oh, don't worry about blah, blah, blah.
		She's bragging about money she's making now.
		It's going to be gone.
		Then what are they going to do?
		What am I going to do?
		Because nobody that does have money right now that could set up something ahead of time don't listen to me.
		They don't listen to my computer.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		They don't listen to me either, so don't feel bad.
unidentified		Well, what is this?
		Where can I get more information if I want to, you know, I don't have internet anymore and stuff like that.
		I do have a computer, which is bothering me because I'm not knowledgeed in the computer thing.
		And I don't know what's going to happen.
		I can walk on and turning the clock back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, now listen on the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead, Gary.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		All right, one thing you can do, almost every large city public library now has Internet connection, usually for free.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		So I would go to the library if you really want to study this thing, and you can go to my site, www.garynorth.com, and what I've done, and I did this deliberately, on my site, you can click through to the original document that I'm quoting from, and you can read it for yourself or print it out.
		I wanted verification that people say, yeah, he's not faking it.
		There really is documentation on this.
		So I would go to the public library and spend a couple of hours, if you can, in a week or maybe, you know, go on a Saturday and just look at it for yourself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that most people who go through your material are going to believe it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, does it seem, when you read through it, it really takes your time, to be irrefutable?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Belief is a very complex thing, Art.
		Belief has to do with people's conditions and what they think they can do in response and what they've been raised to believe.
		Belief is not just looking at documents.
		But I will say this, I have really devoted a lot of time, probably close to 1,500 hours that I could have been using on my own personal preparation to create this site to say at least if I'm going to make these wild conclusions, I at least have provided the best evidence that I can to justify the conclusions, and then people get to make up their own minds.
		That's all that I could do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good enough, Gary.
		That's generally what I do on this program, too.
		Hold hype.
		We'll be right back.
		It's the bottom of the hour.
		Gary North is my guest.
		He's up late, never up this late.
		So I really want to thank him for hanging in there with us to tell this story tonight.
unidentified		This is Coast to Coast A.M. Now,
		from the Kingdom of Nigh, more Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell.
		Here again is Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gary, what is likely to occur to the telephone system?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I was just sitting here thinking, you know, if I couldn't give out 800 numbers, not that I'd be on the air, but I'd be out of biz anyway.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, by the way, Art, let me say with respect to that, if I get cut off, it's because we're starting to get one of these Arkansas lightning storms, so it's not because I'm angry, it's because we got hit, just a warning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I understand.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The weather, by the way, has been turning rather south on us.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Now, the question of the telecommunications is really crucial for both of our businesses for obvious reasons.
		I would like to believe that the companies have it ready to go, that there's not going to be a problem.
		They are really silent on it.
		There is almost nothing published.
		What little that is published is the standard form letter stuff that says, well, we'll be ready to test this in late 98, and we'll probably get it done sometime next year.
		And I wish them the best.
		But the complexity of 500 million lines of code is very great complexity, which is what AT ⁇ T is facing.
		The Telecom Managers Association, the president of it, of Great Britain, has said that he thinks there's a very real possibility that nobody will be able to phone out of Britain in the year 2000.
		That, of course, would shut down the banking system because the computers couldn't communicate with each other.
		So again, on this one, I don't want to overstate it.
		I'll simply say this.
		There is no evidence that any telecommunications company is at present compliant, and there's no evidence that I have ever seen published on the web that says the interconnections between the various companies, that that problem has been solved.
		I am assuming, however, that the banks are totally vulnerable, even if the telcos aren't, so they can call my 800 number, but I don't think they're going to be able to buy because I think you're going to have a banking crisis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I hear you.
		All right, this is an average Joe kind of question, and then we'll go back to the phones.
		Most people make a car payment.
		Most people make a mortgage payment, right?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, we certainly have those in utility payments.
		Now, if the power goes off, don't have to worry about the utilities.
		But what about car payments?
		What about people that we owe money to?
		What about mortgage payments?
		Are cars going to be repossessed?
		Are houses going to be foreclosed on?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It's very doubtful.
		And now we get back to that original question you raised, Art, which was, well, if I think it's going to happen, do I go out and run up the charge card?
		The answer is, of course people are going to do that because they'll figure out there'll be almost no way to get repossessions.
		The court system will be so jammed up, if it exists at all, it will be so jammed up with who owes me what in the billion-dollar range that the little nickel and dime stuff of $1,000 here and $1,000 there is not going to be relevant.
		Those issues will never get settled.
		The difficulty is the companies that relied upon those payments will be out of business.
		That's why I think you're going to have a horrendous bankruptcy rate for what you have Just described.
		People won't pay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		People won't pay, and they'll stay right where they are.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		They'll stay because they have no choice but to stay where they are.
		So, my opinion is you are going to see a collapse.
		I mean, absolutely no questions asked, collapse of those large mortgage lending organizations, federally insured lending organizations, because they will be stiffed by literally tens of millions of mortgage holders who will simply stop paying.
		And there's no way to come repossess the house.
		You couldn't get it through the courts.
		And even if you did, who are you going to sell it to?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think I'm starting to get a headache.
		First time caller line, you're on the air with Gary North.
		Hello.
unidentified		Good morning, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		Out in cyberspace, listening through Audionet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, but physically.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
unidentified		Well, not too far from you over in El Paso.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		El Paso, Texas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		Yeah, I'm a dinosaur.
		I'm one of the programming dinosaurs Gary's talking about.
		Speaks COBOL, Assembler, Fortran, and all those dead languages.
		And believe me, he's understating the degree of the problem and what has happened over the last, in my case, 26 years.
		Some of us had the good sense to see what was coming, but in every case, we would get overruled, gone behind our backs, have the code ripped out, have the space ripped out, and it's just, I don't even know what the word I'm looking for is, malicious negligence.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, programmers are pretty smart people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Shouldn't they have seen what would, I mean, even if you take it from after the punch card days and when we finally got into real computers, at that point, shouldn't the alarm bells have been going off?
unidentified		They were.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For people like you?
unidentified		They were.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They were.
unidentified		We did.
		And management overruled us.
		Do you have any the argument being, we can't afford two extra characters for a date in that record?
		I mean, look how many records we've got.
		We'll have to buy an extra disk drive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and they were expensive, man.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		I mean, $50,000.
		I mean, and, I mean, I at one point was ripped a new one from both sides for wanting to include a mechanism to take care of this problem in some systems because, you know, the argument that I was given was, who cares?
		We won't be working here by then.
		And Art, this was in a criminal justice system.
		Great.
		Imagine what it'll be like when it rolls over and suddenly hundreds of millions of criminal records disappear.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can that happen, Gary?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Art, I do prison evangelism, or at least did until I moved to Arkansas, with a maximum security prison in Texas.
		And I was friends with one of the guys who's sort of your jailhouse lawyer type.
		And I warned him over a year ago, I said, don't make a lot of noise, but be certain that the guys you work with have got paper records of when they are to be released and that those records must be in their possession.
		Because I said they're going to lose your records.
		And you've got to be able to prove that if you're legitimately allowed to get out, that you will get out.
		I warned them.
		Yes, what he's telling is guaranteed.
unidentified		And the worst part about it, of even wanting to do anything about it now, is I'd say in the last 12 to 15 years, the mindset of management and the programming of the data processing industry changed so much that programming ceased to be an art.
		It became a job that any bozo off the street could be taught with all the new programming techniques where you didn't have to know diddly about anything.
		And now you've got offices full of 20 and 30 year olds that wouldn't know a PAC's date if it jumped up and did them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right.
		Thank you, Caller.
		So that's true, then.
		And these older programming languages, Gary, in order to fix this in a lot of cases, as you point out, they're not going to be able to do it in the older programming languages.
		We don't have the programmers for that.
		What about rewrites in the newer language?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It's too late.
		Look, Art, he's talking about a mindset that was built into management 20 years ago that wouldn't pay.
		These systems are gigantic.
		The interconnections are gigantic.
		We're not talking about small systems.
		They're huge systems that we're talking about here with interconnections into the millions.
		Let me give you an example, and I've got this on the site.
		There was an Air Force system that they went into to try to fix.
		That system had 70, that's 70 different computer languages in the one system.
		All of them, except for COBOL and maybe Assembler, all of the rest of them virtually forgotten.
		These languages, these systems have been built 25 and 30 years ago, and the guys who built them are gone.
		They're dead or retired.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, like that guy, retired.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Like that guy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And he tried to point it out a long time ago and got absolutely nowhere.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That is what happened to any of them who tried to point it out.
		Their careers were on the line, and management did not want to listen.
		There's joint responsibility in this.
		But ultimately, management's got the bucks.
		And if management won't do it, the programmer is stuck, just like he was.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So programmers in these languages are going to be real popular guys for a while.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		For a period they will be popular and the best of them are getting huge amounts of money, the really most skilled ones.
		But remember, Art, these guys are not dummies.
		They can look and they can say pretty confidently that one of two things will happen.
		Either the company I work for is going to go belly up sometime in the second half of 99 or early 2000, or I'm going to fix it and then they're going to fire me again.
		They're not real interested in going back to New York City if they're sitting on the beach in Boker Ratone.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's true.
		Wild Guard Line, you're on the air with Gary North.
		Where are you, please?
unidentified		I'm in Wichita.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wichita, Kansas.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		I work on Y2K projects, and he is right about the fact that there's an awful lot of source code out there that's obsolete.
		But the one thing about it I do know, because I work on IBM mainframe, that IBM has done an awful lot with the new upgrades to their operating system over the last 10 years to force these companies into Y2K compliance.
		In fact, this is what we're doing right now for the company that I'm under contract to is we're in the process of converting all their software into full compliance with Y2K, and we'll be ready to go by the end of this year as far as the thing being productional.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's really good, but even if you are compliant, if all the people you deal with, your suppliers, the people who buy from you, if they have no electricity and no phones and no internet.
unidentified		Well, I'll make you a bet that they'll have the internet, they'll have the supplies, everything else.
unidentified		Because one of the things you're running into, you know, he talks about putting the century on the date.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
unidentified		In most cases, if you go out and start looking at the new date routines, they don't carry century.
		They're basing it off of a base date that's, say, well, an example with the IBM, of the new IBM software, they use a date that they call Lillian date, which is the number of days that have elapsed, say, for the current date from the year of, well, it's December 31st, 1600.
		And the same way there's another system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I'm not qualified to answer this, Gary.
unidentified		Well, there's another thing.
		Jerry made a comment about the criminal justice system in our...
		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Attack the first one, Gary.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you know anything about that?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's one option that they're using.
		Our problem, Art, is that he can't repair all the systems.
		IBM, sir, is not compliant, is it?
		Neither is EDS.
		The companies themselves are not compliant.
		They're hiring outsiders to get compliant.
		IBM is not compliant as a company.
		If this is so easy to fix, how come the guys selling the services like EDS and IBM have not got their own companies compliant?
		This is the blind leading the blind.
		Those companies aren't compliant.
		What do you think is going to happen to IBM if you're right?
		Do you, I mean, the magnitude of the lawsuits, will there be a trace of IBM in 2001 when the lawyers get through with that company?
		Not a chance.
		They'll be blamed for it all.
		Every company dependent upon an IBM product or someone like you working for IBM, those companies, those individuals will have a big neon sign that says, lawyers, come and get me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You have any comments, Scott?
unidentified		Well, I have a comment for him.
		If I were the lawyers, I wouldn't plan on it.
		Another comment I want to make to him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The lawyers are planning for it.
unidentified		I know they are planning for it, but I'm saying that it's not as big an issue as he's making it to be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, go ahead with something else.
unidentified		Okay, another question, another point I want to make to him.
unidentified		You're talking about the Arkansas criminal justice system?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I was talking about the Texas, but go ahead.
unidentified		Okay, the Arkansas, well, the Texas is probably pretty much in the same shape because they've been forced into compliance.
		They were forced into compliance about four years ago as far as Y2K was concerned by the federal government.
		Once again, because I'm a contractor, I was in Arkansas when they were in the process of rewriting those systems.
		And the same way with the new child support enforcement systems, if I were somebody who was making child support payments, don't plan on getting by with not making those payments as of year 2000 because, once again, those systems are in compliance.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		How are you going to pay them?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You're going to write a check?
unidentified		You have to write a check or you can go down and pay them in cash.
		You got to do it.
		I got it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're paying them.
unidentified		I do it every two weeks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Caller, hold on a second.
		Caller, hold on a sec.
		Go ahead, Gary.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Sir, there aren't going to be any banks.
		There's no compliant bank on earth.
		There's no money center bank that's compliant.
		How are you going to write the check?
unidentified		I want to ask you a question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, answer the question.
		Wait a minute.
		Hold it, caller.
		He asked you a valid question.
unidentified		What's that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There is no compliant bank.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How are you going to write a check?
unidentified		Okay, I want to ask you a question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, no, no.
		No, wait a minute, caller.
		Answer that one first.
		Okay.
unidentified		First of all, I disagree with it.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Okay, would you please name the compliant bank and tell me how you found out?
unidentified		Okay, well, you asked me, answer me a question.
unidentified		What do you define as compliant?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I define as compliant any bank that will let its lawyers write to the customer to say, this bank is 2,000 compliant and we have let go all of our 2,000 Y2K repair staff because we don't need them.
		Citicorp can't do it.
		Chase Manhattan can't do it.
		Bank of America can't do it.
		No Japanese bank can do it.
		Come on, let's get real.
unidentified		Okay, we're not formally.
		We're right now not in compliance because we are in the process of getting it done.
		Lots of luck, Jack.
		I'll tell you what, I'll make you a bet.
		Since you're in Arkansas and I'm in Arkansas, your 2000, when it comes to pass, I'll meet you at the steak and ale.
		If you lose, you will buy.
		If we lose, I'll buy you dinner there.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		What are you going to buy it with?
unidentified		I've got cash.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Come on, man.
		That's a no-win situation for me.
		If I'm right, you can't take.
		Let's go on.
		Let's talk something serious.
		Where's the compliant bank?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's pretty serious.
		He has no answer for that.
		And every time I tried to get him to answer that, he simply wanted to ask you another question.
		So there you are.
		We are at the top of the hour.
		You've got a break, and I'm sure you need one, Gary, so hold on, and we'll be back to you after the break at the top of the hour.
		I'm Mart Bell.
		And of course, this is Coast to Coast AM, and we are absolutely swamped with requests for copies of this program already.
		So let me give you the number.
		And if you can't get through now, because they are swamped, just keep trying.
		It will be, by the time it's over, it's going to be a four-hour program.
		And it's probably a program that you want to get to a friend or give to a business or give to your business associates, I would think.
		The number to get a copy is 1-800-917-4278.
		That is a 24-hour number, but right now it's going into utter log jam.
		That number again is 1-800-917-4278.
		We'll take a break, check out the news at the top of the hour, and be right back.
		I'm Mark Bell, and this is a very thought-provoking Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		I'm Mark Bell.
		I'm Mark Bell.
		I'm Mark Bell.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And now, back to the best of Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me try one other question with Gary.
		Gary, welcome back.
		Thank you for staying up so late.
		I think when I first tried to book you for the program, you said you haven't been up this late since you were 19.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's probably about right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		People are suggesting the possibility of patches.
		In other words, that some programmers, perhaps, for mass programs can write some kind of patch that will go in and fix the problem.
		What about that approach?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, I keep thinking of Citicorp, and they're spending, they say, $600 million to fix it.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		When Citicorp spends $600 million to fix it, that's either a real expensive patch, or else there isn't a patch.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or else there isn't one.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The federal government, I think, is lowballing it, talking now $5.5 billion to fix it.
		The figures that come out from these large organizations are gigantic.
		We really should ask that of the programmers who call in.
		They did have patches before, by the way.
		You know, this happened before, twice?
		People forget about that, but it happened first in 1969, back when it was a one-digit patch, and they hadn't foreseen it.
		And frantically, IBM in 69 alerted people and created a patch to get into 70.
		It happened again in 79.
		So we've had this thing go through the bringer twice.
		But now, when you get to the 2000, the whole architecture is at stake.
		Now, by the way, Art, let's now go at least briefly to mention the other problem.
		And this, in my opinion, is the big one.
		We haven't talked about it.
unidentified		That's embedded chips.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The chips that are built into the microprocessors and into all kinds of telecommunications equipment and electrical equipment, the chips themselves have been programmed with the Millennium Bug in them.
		The latest I have seen was David Hall.
		By the way, it's not the David Hall of the coin selling, but David Hall, the programmer.
		He hit me with a new one just in the last week.
		He estimates 40 billion chips have been produced, and he's estimating now above one, possibly as high as 5%, are defective.
		Now that means not only must you find those chips, you've got to find a way of locating them in the system.
		Then testing them, then you've got to replace them by hand.
		Now the difficulty is if they're over three years old, they're probably out of production and they won't fit in the motherboards.
		Now these chips run our satellites.
		They're 10,000 feet below sea level running North Sea oil drilling rigs.
		You have got embedded chips and embedded programming systems built into the entire modern world systems.
		And by the way, you quoted that statement, which is an accurate statement, the British statement about one in seven hospitals maybe not making it.
		The embedded chip problem is one of the biggest problems that the hospitals are facing because they've got them in the diagnostic equipment.
		And they are not compliant.
		There are whole systems that are not compliant.
		And they've been not compliant for over a year or two.
		They've known about it and they can't get updates on them.
		Now these systems, you don't just hire a bunch of programmers.
		You can't hire programmers.
		You have to have the chip in production ready to be substituted when in fact you find them.
		Now we're talking Anywhere from 25 million to 50 million defective chips, but we don't know where they are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Try this one.
		I work for a gigantic company called JCOR.
		If I were to call JCOR and have somebody high in management, which I could do, call our suppliers, mainly General Electric, Hughes, the satellite people, MCI, the people we depend on for our communication links to get this program on the air, and demand to know if these companies are Y2K compliant, so I'll know whether I'll be on the air or not.
		What kind of answer would I get?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I'll tell you what the answer you're going to get.
		You'll get a form letter.
		And by the way, you should do this.
		Absolutely, you should do this.
		You're going to get a form letter back.
		If you get anything back, it will say, we are very diligent.
		We've known about this problem for, and it boils down to months.
		They'll say maybe 1995, the real conservative ones, we've already heard from one caller that it's been in there for 20 years or more.
		They'll tell you we are really diligently working on this, and we've hired this team to work on it, and we expect to have the coding done on December 31st, 1998, leaving one full year for testing.
		Now, the answer to that is, by the way, fellas, where are you going to get the excess computer capacity to run the parallel testing?
		Because to do a thorough test, you've got to run the data in your existing computer and the fixed one, and you've got to make certain that the fixed, repaired one doesn't shut down at some point, which means you've got to double your computer capacity in order to run the tests.
		You've got to double the size of the number of programmers on your staff to run the parallel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a monstrous hardware problem.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's a monstrous kind of hardware.
		It's impossible.
		It can't be done.
		And yet to get accurate testing, that's what you need to do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		The size of this problem just staggers the mind.
		Now, again, let me go back to when our government will begin dealing with it in the sense of beginning to make announcements, beginning to mandate, that's what the government does, and beginning to address the people with regard to what's going to occur.
		How do you imagine the government is going to approach this to the masses?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I don't think the government is going to be able to approach it to the masses until such time as the freeze on the bank accounts takes place.
		They cannot possibly go public with this while the public still has access to the bank accounts.
		So, what I think is being done and is being done rapidly over the last 45 days, especially Friday, last Friday, President Clinton signed a document which has not been released, but he referred to it Friday in his speech to the Naval Academy at Annapolis.
		An emergency cyber terrorism series of orders.
		We have not yet seen it.
		I've been searching the web.
		There are trickles of information out, but he did talk about it.
		I've got his speech posted on my site.
		It was to the Naval Academy.
		He has signed a series of documents beginning February 4th of this year, which are leading to emergency reactions against the unnamed and unidentified cyber terrorist organizations.
		Now, see, here's the advantage that that has.
		Nobody is going to be in favor of letting cyber terrorists get away with anything.
		So what did they do?
		Last week, they had those masked guys in the suits who would not give their last names testify before Senator Thompson's committee.
		All of them saying, we shut down the Internet or we disrupted the Internet.
		It was easy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they said, actually, we could take the entire Internet down in 30 minutes.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that's what they said.
		Now, they may be telling the truth.
		I'm not going to say that's not true.
		Maybe they can do that.
		But the point is, we are getting an orchestrated series of warnings against an amorphous, vague group or multiple groups that can do this.
		But remember the advantage from a political standpoint.
		This is not datable, and you can't identify which group is going to do it.
		So the public does not have the fear that says on a particular date, all over the world, the same effect is going to take place.
		Now, the government has admitted in that fact list on the PCCIP side, they've admitted that the effect of Y2K is the same as cyberterrorism.
		So the point is, when this happens, they can blame it either on cyberterrorists or getting ready for cyberterrorists, and the same rapid deployment forces can be used.
		The same strategy of defense is going to be employed.
		But they can now talk about it without scaring everybody to death to say there is a specific date on which it's going to happen.
		Gotcha.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Back to the lines we go.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gary North.
		Where are you, please?
unidentified		I am in Virginia.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Virginia.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Yeah, I had a quick comment for Gary, and then I had a question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		Quick comment.
		One big problem the government has and a lot of other companies do are the original programmers, once they write a module, especially if it's not really documented well, the minute that guy leaves or is fired or whatever, that becomes a black box.
		They know what they put in and they know what they get out, but they have no idea what's in it.
		So you've got to sit there and go through the whole thing to be able to do anything to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, you've got to reinvent the wheel.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's what you're saying.
		Yeah, of course that's true.
		Yes.
		A lot of the programmers who did this are long gone or retired.
		So a lot of companies are going to have to, in effect, reinvent the wheel.
		Yeah, you're right.
		A question?
unidentified		A lot of time and money.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Your question, sir?
unidentified		I'm a retired geologist.
		I'm heading down to Panhandle, Florida, and it is an Artesian area.
		And I was just kind of thinking about what kind of survival kit.
		I was thinking, you know, 100 pounds or so of Salt, and I've got a charcoal-fired smoker.
		But I'm just wondering what else you would advise people to kind of get together on hand to prepare to survive this thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, cash, have cash.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And anything else you want to add to that, Gary?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		There is a catalog called the Layman's Catalog.
		They went into business about 1955 to serve the Amish.
		And they are products that are non-electrical.
		That's a very good catalog.
		And I don't have the address in front of me, but you can find it on the web.
		L-E-H-M-A-N apostrophe.
		Yes, I think there's an apostrophe.
		But Lehman's Catalog and the kinds of 2,000 or more products that are in that catalog, I think are things you've got to think about.
		Non-electrical operation.
		But you start, as you already have said, sir, you start with water.
		That is your first criterion.
		Then you work from there.
		You have to have independent source of water if you're going to survive this in a worst case scenario.
		So I think that's where you start.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, as of today, as of May 26th, are you thinking now that it's going to be mild or where between mild and worst case do you think now, as of today, it's going to fall?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Worst case.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You think worst case?
unidentified		Yes.
unidentified		Okay.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I'm planning on that assumption.
		I'm investing on that assumption.
		I'm warning people on that assumption.
		Anything better than worst case, I shall be ecstatic.
		My greatest single fear in this is the shutdown of the power grid.
		That's the great problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there's no question about it.
		If that goes, everything goes.
		Again, I tell people, if you want to know how it is, just go turn off the mains to your house and spend about an hour sitting there.
		It'll all be apparent to you.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gary North.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, this is Patrick, currently of Tucson.
		Thankfully, soon to be Patrick once again of San Diego.
		Thank you, God.
		I have a couple of quick comments and then two quick questions.
		It seems to me that we could be headed for a Wild West scenario where, forget the militias and their survivalists, the people in the catbird seat are going to be military, National Guard, and law enforcement personnel.
		It would be interesting to see what kind of morals these people have.
		I'm thinking of the Marjo Gortner character in earthquake.
		It also seems that family members who are separated geographically now in different states are going to be completely isolated because of no travel, no communications.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a good point.
unidentified		My two quick questions were, I was not a twinkle in anybody's eye when the 29 crash and the depression occurred.
		Are people going to have problems with banks if they have cash in safety deposit boxes?
		And my second question is, if this is a global situation, are we going to be in greater or lesser danger of surprise or accidental nuclear attack?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Both good questions, one at a time.
		Safety deposit boxes.
		Cash in safety deposit boxes.
		What do you think, Gary?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I think up until late 99, that's a safe place to put some of your money.
		Afterwards, you have the whole question, will you be allowed in, or in fact, will vaults work?
		But in any case, you're going to have a great amount of fear, and they may even, conceivably, they may even lock the boxes.
		That is the threat.
		Remember, in 29, the largest banks did survive, at least in the United States.
		It was the smaller country banks that went down.
		This time, it is the whole system that is at risk.
		And so anybody who is not in a position of saying, look, the old rule, and I call it Max's law, a friend of mine's father, Max Blummert, had it, and it's a good law.
		Write it down, buy the best, pay cash, take delivery.
		That is a really good law.
		And I think it's a rule that we all should use as much as possible.
		Now the second question on military attack or military disruption.
		My personal opinion is the great winner of all of this is likely to be Red China.
		Now I don't think they're going to launch an attack on us, but I think they will become the dominant force in the Asian area because they have a gigantic army and a gigantic navy, and most of their technology is pre-computer because they didn't have the money to computerize the systems.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		So, now, I'm not saying there are no computers there.
		Their financial system, their banks, they're in the same soup as the rest of us.
		But if you're talking about sheer military power, the Red Chinese, I think, will be the dominant force in the world in the year 2000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've been there.
		I've been to Red China, and I can tell you from just sitting there and watching the commerce, it's unbelievable.
		It is one of the most frightening things I've ever seen.
		If nothing else happened, Gary, China is going to be the dominant economic nation in another decade, two at the most, if nothing else happened.
		I mean, they are just going to take over everything.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It's a dominant force.
		Now, with respect to us, I really do not think that any nation in this hemisphere is going to be in a position to launch a tax or any of the rest of it simply because the fundamental fact of every government is this.
		There is only one law of government, and that is you've got to pay your army.
		All other laws are secondary.
		When you cannot pay your army, you cease to have a government.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're certainly correct.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		So my assumption is that domestic control, domestic violence, domestic terrorism, the gang culture, that is what the military forces in this country are going to have to be dealing with.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The Mad Max scenario, they call it.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I'm afraid that's it.
		And the gangs are very well organized, exceedingly well organized In the larger cities.
		And so, in a way, a gang is a government looking for territory.
		And when the conventional government organizations begin to break down because their telecommunication system is not compliant and 911 is not compliant, and all the other factors that are involved in paying Gary Holt, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour.
		I'm Mark Bell.
		This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		The Coast to Coast AM And now, back to the best of Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, back to Gary North.
		Gary, here's a question for you.
		I'm beginning to think this is so serious that I should get a monthly update of some kind and get it on the air at the very least.
		Could I come to you, even if it's pre-recorded and we do it during the daytime when you generally live, could we do sort of a monthly update or something?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that'd be all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And then the second part of the question is, there's going to be a lot of other media after I run something like this that I think ought to be addressing this, and they're going to probably want to get hold of you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So not for the average person, but for media, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Sun, whatever, if they want to get hold of you, is there any way for them to do it?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, the best way is simply to go to my website and send you email?
		You can send email, or you can send it just a, I have an AOL.
		I have pretty good.
		I got a GaryNorth at AOL.com.
		They can send something to me there.
		But again, in all honesty, my site really does have most of what I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know, but the media, they like people.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know, I know.
		It's not good enough just to have all of it written.
		It's not good enough.
		But you go to GaryNorth.com and you got the thing.
		Or you call, you know, collapse at trap.com and you've got it.
		But yes, I'll talk to them if I have to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, obviously the Washington Post, for example, is going to want it to have you.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		By the way, the interesting thing is this, Art.
		The Post has been really quite good for a major conventional media source.
		They have reported some of the scariest stuff around.
		They've been pretty good about this.
		And even the New York Times now has begun to focus on this much more.
		But the British press, especially the London Times, they have a Sunday report every Sunday.
		You can get online.
		I don't have to register.
		But for some reason, the British press has been much better about reporting this stuff.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about The Economist?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The Economist is everywhere in Europe.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		I have not seen as strong a reporting as the Sunday Times has done out of them.
		But Financial Times has done a pretty good job, too.
		There are sources out there.
		It's not that this thing is being buried in a corner.
		It's just that it's not on the front pages.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It sure ought to be.
		All right.
		First time calling the line, you're on the air with Gary North.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you, dear?
unidentified		Sparta, Tennessee.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sparta, Tennessee, all right?
		You're going to have to yell at us.
		You're not too loud.
unidentified		Okay, I'm sorry.
		I'm very nervous.
		Can I make a quick comment before my question?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
unidentified		Gathering everything that you just said about Red China and on the total chaos that we are definitely facing in the near future, I feel like I just read the book of Revelation just listening to him talk.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
unidentified		And it's scary.
		It's really scary.
		It's really frightening.
		And on with my question, I know you have other callers.
		Concerning Bill Gates, if he is the richest man in the world and owns Microsoft, with his company and the computer technology that they do have, why in the world is he not footing at least some of the bill for this?
		Because definitely he would come out and only gain from this opportunity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, that's a pretty good question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bill Gates and Microsoft, what's he doing, do you know?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, what they've been doing in the last year is denying their previous year's assertion that they're year 2000 compliant.
		About the last two months, their website has finally admitted that some of their programs are going to have problems.
		But remember, Gates has made his money in micro-computer architecture.
		Our problem is embedded chips and the old dinosaurs, as one guy put it, to the non-work programmer.
		It's the old mainframes.
		Completely different technology, completely different systems.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's really interesting because I remember a 60-minute piece a year or two ago about how our government has nothing but these old dinosaur mainframe computers in just about every agency, including the IRS.
		And they were talking about how far behind government agencies in general are computer-wise.
		And I wonder why.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		They wouldn't spend the money.
		It's real simple.
		And the data.
		Remember, you've got mountains upon mountains of data if it were printed out.
		You have to restructure your data to bring it into compliance and move it into a new architecture.
		Nobody would pay for it.
		They're still not paying for it.
		So it's like the guy said with respect to private industry, if you made too much noise, you got fired.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Gary North.
		Hi.
unidentified		This is Bernita in Robinsonville, Mississippi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Welcome.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Art, first I'd like to say I enjoy your show tremendously.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		And I've listened for over three years.
		I own a piece of property in Michigan where I plan to retire in a small town of about 150.
		And I have, it has its own well and septic system and everything.
		They don't have the public one.
		I don't know about wells, but my first question is, don't they need electricity to start them?
		And are we going to have that?
		Or will we need compressors or build our own the kind of electricity that people had when they I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I know some people that used to have their own produce their own electricity, if I'm making any sense.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		No, you're making eminently good sense.
		It depends on the depth of the well.
		Some wells that are less than 100 feet can be pumped by hand pump, but that's not the way we'd like to do it.
		Sure, if you could have a small generator or solar power, something of that nature, I think that would be a good investment to do.
		That sounds like a very good property, and I would keep that property.
		I would strongly recommend that you begin to get up into that area, make your friends, get things rolling.
		This is not so easy to do as I have found.
		It's expensive.
		It's difficult.
		The transition is tough.
		You're in a position to do it.
		I would recommend you do it.
unidentified		My family is there and everything.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You have a tremendous advantage over most.
unidentified		And two other quick questions.
		Bill Clinton has wanted to put a computer in every school for every student in all the schools.
		And we have all these home computers also.
		What about that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The problem is in mainframes and, as Gary said, embedded chips in these big computers.
unidentified		Those old ones.
		Okay, and the last question is, what about our 401ks and IRAs and things like that?
		We won't have access to them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gary?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's how it seems to me.
		I call them electronic promises to pay.
		They're as good as the electrical system.
		They're as good as the banking system.
		They're electronic promises to pay.
		If you trust them, go ahead.
		In the long run, and I say long run is 18 months, maybe less.
		I don't trust electronic promises to pay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Because they're electronic.
		Precisely.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gary North.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi again, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you, sir?
unidentified		Marty from Oakland, New Jersey.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Just one quick comment.
		I know a lot of people are going to think I'm crazy for saying this, but I also know a lot of people out there are going to agree with me.
		I do not own a computer, Art.
		I will never own a computer.
		I despise the damn things.
		And I've got to tell you, in all honesty, I am almost glad that this crisis is happening because the number one function of computers has been to throw people out of work.
		And I can tell you as an absolute fact that for many, many years, these computer salesmen went to all of these different corporations and companies trying to sell them their computer system.
		And the number one selling point has always been, look at all the people you'll be able to get rid of.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Marty has an interesting point in that when all of this comes down, Gary, isn't there going to be kind of a witch hunt?
		In other words, aren't there going to be some real evil, bad people out there?
		And don't we face the possibility of almost Old West justice?
		In other words, the people who have been into computers, the people that have caused this problem, everybody's going to want to blame somebody.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The amassing of blame is going to be a full-time industry if you don't have a complete breakdown.
		And as I said, the lawyers are going to be at the front of the line.
		The basic point, in a sense, is correct.
		And that is, that's why I call it the Alzheimer's economy.
		We have substituted the machines for the knowledge and skills that generations of managers had and workers had.
		And they were very efficient, these machines, for a while.
		But the knowledge now has been lost and it's in retirement.
		And the systems that made that knowledge valuable, paper-based management systems, have all been scrapped.
		And now we're left with systems that we really don't understand that have been programmed badly.
		And it's the collapse of information that is the central fact.
		Art, that's the central fact.
		It is the loss of knowledge that is incarnated in the electronic machines.
		And the guy's right.
		You can't get it back overnight.
		And it is a problem.
		These people have been fired.
		The knowledge that they had was dismissed.
		And now how do you get it back and integrated?
		That is the central problem facing us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If you try to look ahead, you obviously see what's coming.
		Is there going to be a day when the economy will rise again like the Phoenix from the ashes?
		And if so, how do you prepare for that?
		Do you get everything on paper if you have money in the bank, if you have money invested in CDs or IRAs or whatever it is you've got it in?
		Do you make sure that you've got a good paper trail so that when everything does come back someday you'll be able to...
gary north ▲ ● ▼		My position is all electronic promises to pay will be defaulted on, or at least that risk exists.
		I don't like that risk.
		So my position is more the David Hall coins approach, which is I would rather have an asset or the object that I was going to buy.
		Why don't I buy it now?
		I'd rather have the object than the promise because I don't trust the promise.
		So I'd rather have the object.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Makes sense.
		West to the Rockies.
		You are on the air with Gary North.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
unidentified		This is John from Seattle.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, John.
unidentified		Listening to you on Como 1000?
		Of course.
		First of all, I'd like to say it was a great pleasure to meet you.
		I was on the Great Debate of 98 Cruise.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, wasn't that something?
unidentified		Oh, that was a really good time.
		I met a lot of nice people.
		And by the way, I've collected a list of Email addresses and have opened up a chat room.
		And I sent you an email on it, so maybe you could join us sometime.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Perhaps so.
unidentified		For your guest, with concern of the YTK problem, every time I've heard that, I've just said to myself, bull, I just can't believe that it's such a big problem.
unidentified		And the reason I say that is I don't see why they couldn't just go out and buy new systems, new Pentium II servers, and like with the electrical companies, simply run the grid on the new systems and then take the old ones offline.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, that's a question unto itself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So why can't they go buy new Pentium IIs to replace these old mainframes and just move to switch it over?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		First, radically different architectures.
		Secondly, how do you convert the old data, the old knowledge into off-the-shelf software?
		You don't go down to Kmart and buy the equivalent of the United States military defense system in a package.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You've got to write the software.
		They haven't written the software because the software is written in arcane languages, and all of the information embedded in the software will be lost unless they can port it, and they can't port it over to new systems.
		There's not time.
		It's the information that's the key.
		It's the loss of information.
unidentified		Well, that may be true with some of the military codes or whatever, but like with the power system, I don't see why they couldn't just run it with a new system.
unidentified		You don't need old knowledge for that.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		The simplest answer is there are 7,800 companies in the United States who make money doing it.
		Not one has done it.
		Not one.
		The answer is they can't do it.
		But even if you don't like that answer, they sure haven't done it, and they've known the problem exists.
		Companies are paying right now to the Electric Power Research Institute $75,000 per year just to exchange information on how to fix it.
		If it were easy to fix, they wouldn't pay it.
unidentified		Well, one thing I was thinking is, you know, you were saying earlier that you couldn't get access to the old data.
unidentified		I was thinking, worst case, you could print it out on paper and then scan it into the new systems, and they have software that will take text off of a scanned page and put it into computer format.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		To solve the embedded chip problem.
unidentified		Right.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I've got 1,650 documents on my website, of which about 1,600 are negative.
		I publish the positive if I find them.
		I suggest you spend a couple of hours looking through that on those questions and just see what you conclude afterwards.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, plenty of people are going to be doing that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I imagine.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I hope it doesn't jam up my system.
		My system will probably go down, Art.
		You've got too many people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, so far so good.
		It looks like you're up.
		You must be on a backbone part of the internet somewhere.
		We'll hope so.
		Okay.
		You can find, by the way, everybody, if you have a computer, you can find Gary North's website either by going to my website and simply scrolling down to Gary North's name and clicking on it or going to his website directly, which will save my site a little bit.
		And Gary's website is www.garynorth.com.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That's it, just like the direction, GaryNorth.com.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good and simple.
		Almost out of time.
		First time caller line, you're on the air with Gary North.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hello, Arts.
		This is Grant.
		I'm a specialist in the year 2000 issue, and I've worked for a major computer corporation for two and a half years now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		And I've gotten many letters and many emails about this particular issue.
		And one thing that really crosses my mind is if the average home user can have a normal solution to this particular problem, why can't the government come up with something as easily, you know, if you're really a Y2K expert, then you ought to know the answer to that.
		It's simple.
		It's simple, Art.
		You've got either a BIOS upgrade or a motherboard upgrade.
		It's very, very simple.
		Even though they use POSEX, which is an operating system that's derivative of Unix, you can still go with hardware upgrades, and it's not that hard.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It's impossible, sir.
		And if it were not impossible, they would have done it.
		It cannot be done, and the time remains.
unidentified		Okay, are we talking about a government conspiracy theory?
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I'm talking about the banks, the governments, the power industry.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		If it could be done, it would have been done.
unidentified		Well, you know, maybe in the next few months or weeks, they might come up with a solution unless it's a government conspiracy.
unidentified		I mean, it's not a very difficult solution to the issue.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Sir, it is an impossible solution.
unidentified		It is not.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		What company do you work for?
		I want to know what company you work for.
		What is the name of the company?
unidentified		I've worked for Gateway for approximately two and a half years.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		That is not a mainframe company.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You're working in micros.
unidentified		It doesn't matter.
unidentified		The architecture is similar.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, even I know there is a complete difference between Gateway personal computers, IBM clones, Macs, whatever, and mainframe computers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Come on, even I know that.
unidentified		But mainframe architecture is not completely different.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		It's utterly different.
unidentified		It is not completely different.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Well, son, I'll say this, and as an elderly declining dinosaur, I'll say this.
		If you can solve it, it's worth a trillion dollars.
		Get humping, boy.
		You have hit pay dirt.
		Don't fool around with a salary.
		Go solve it.
		You have hit the mother load.
		Don't talk to me on the phone.
		Go make the billion, trillion dollars.
		Because that's what it's worth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		We might have time for one more.
		Maybe, if it's fast.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Gary North.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, Gary.
		I just want to tell you, back you up on what you're saying.
		A few years ago when gold was at the bottom, God told me to buy gold.
		And he said hard assets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, God was right.
unidentified		Yeah.
		And just recently, he told me there's going to be a bank failure.
		And I've heard people talk about a run on the banks when they realize this 2000 millennium problem.
		But wouldn't there be a run on gold, too?
		I mean, shouldn't people start getting their gold?
		And I think my son had a dream the same night that he was having to bite off gold bars to buy a yogurt.
		So I'm thinking not collectible coins, but actually gold bars with certificates.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ma'am, we've got to hold it there.
		And Gary, we've really got to hold it there.
		We're utterly out of time.
		We went the whole way.
		I really appreciate it, Gary.
		We'll keep the link up on our website to yours.
		I hope yours holds up.
		We'll get to you for monthly reports.
		How about that?
		That's good.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		And if anybody, one more time, if you really want a quick summary, it's just at collapse at trapped.com.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		You can get the report.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good night, Gary.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		Thanks.
gary north ▲ ● ▼		I appreciate it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, my friend.
		Good night.
		There you have it.
		Definitive program on Y2K.

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