Jan. 10, 2023 - Epoch Times
13:05
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| Good evening, and right before we dive in, I'd like to quickly mention that with all the crazy developments happening right now over in Brazil, with quite literally over 1,200 protesters there having been arrested for breaking into their capital, well, over on EpochTV, our Brazilian team, the Epoch Times' Brazilian team, just published an awesome documentary called Brazil, A Last Stand in the Americas. | |
| Detailing the inside story, a rare look that you'll never see on the legacy news outlets of what's really happening in regards to their most recent election, and what it would mean for the country of Brazil if it were to once again have a socialist president. | |
| If you'd like to check it out, the link to that documentary will be right there at the very top of the description box. | |
| I hope you do check it out. | |
| Now, let's dive into today's main topic, which has to do with this right here. | |
| This is a satellite image of the United States lit up at night. | |
| It's a great visual of America's power grid, showing how vast it is going across the entirety of our country. | |
| And the entire thing is supported by a fairly large network consisting of over 50,000 electric substations as well as over 700,000 miles of transmission lines. | |
| However, recently, the U.S. power grid has been under attack, as different extremists have shot at, sabotaged, and vandalized the electrical equipment at power stations across the entire nation. | |
| Now, if you were paying attention to the news on Christmas Day, then you might have heard about two men who used firearms, who used guns, to paralyze four electric substations in Washington state, leaving quite literally thousands of people without electricity. | |
| Now, that particular story did make national news. | |
| However, oddly enough, there was another attack just last week on the power grid in Las Vegas, which went completely ignored by the national media. | |
| You see, last Tuesday, a 34-year-old man named Mohamed Mesmarian, who was born in Iran, conducted what can rightly be described as a domestic terrorist action. | |
| That's because Mr. | |
| Muhammad ran his Toyota Camry through the gates of a solar power generation plant right there outside of Las Vegas, a little bit north of Las Vegas, and then, once inside, he siphoned gasoline from inside his car, put the gas on the wires of one of the transformers, and lit the entire thing on fire, including his car. | |
| For your reference, the plant where this all happened was called the Mega Solar Array Facility, and it provides the electricity for a lot of the MGM properties on the Las Vegas Strip. | |
| Here is a local news report documenting exactly what happened in regards to the Simpsons. | |
| Photos the 80s now investigators obtained show the burnt car police suspect a man set on fire inside a Las Vegas area solar facility. | |
| The giant array producing energy for MGM, generating power for its strip properties. | |
| Police believe 34-year-old Mohamed Mesmarian, seen in these surveillance images, rammed the car through the gates at the plant Tuesday afternoon. | |
| Around midnight Wednesday, Mesmarian allegedly drove that car into this pit, siphoning gasoline onto wires and setting the vehicle on fire. | |
| Police say Mesmarian then sat in a chair watching the car burn. | |
| Detectives believe Mesmarian was scoping the site for at least a day. | |
| A nearby business calling police, saying a man, later identified as Mesmarian, was trespassing. | |
| Officers say Mesmarian reportedly told them he was born in Iran, works odd jobs, and was in town with his mother. | |
| Now, the damage that Mr. | |
| Mohammed was able to cause was significant. | |
| According to police documents, the officers on site were able to interview an employee at this particular plant who said that, quote, the fire caused major damage and estimated that it would take two years to receive replacement parts. | |
| Think about that. | |
| Two years to receive the replacement parts. | |
| Furthermore, the fire caused the entire facility to go offline. | |
| According to a spokesperson for the company that runs this plant, quote, Following an incident at the Megasolar Array facility, on-site personnel immediately notified authorities and shut down the plant's operations as a precaution in accordance with industry-standard safety protocols. | |
| No one was injured, and we are currently restoring the facility's full operations. | |
| Meaning that Mr. | |
| Mohamed was able to damage the facility to such an extent that it was taken offline and it might take two years to fully rebuild. | |
| Now, one day after the fire, police were able to capture Mr. | |
| Mohamed Mesmarian, who is now facing quite serious charges, including committing an act of terrorism, first-degree arson, third-degree arson, destruction of property, as well as attempting to escape police custody. | |
| He's currently being held in a Las Vegas jail without bail. | |
| However, this story raises, I believe, two major issues. | |
| The first is the question of why it was ignored by the legacy news outlets. | |
| Because you would assume that when you have an Iranian-born man driving from Idaho to Las Vegas to burn down an electricity plant, well, that would be big national news. | |
| But it wasn't. | |
| Aside from a few local news outlets, none of the major publications throughout the entire country touched the story. | |
| I wonder why. | |
| Regardless, the second point that this story raises, and this point I believe is the much more significant point, is the reality that a single individual can cause massive damage to our electrical grid, which might make it so that thousands of people don't have power. | |
| Which unfortunately is a situation that we're seeing more and more frequently across the entire country right now. | |
| In fact, during the first part of 2022, between January and August, there was a total of 106 attacks on the electrical grid, which was the highest number ever recorded in a single year. | |
| Here's in fact an excerpt from a report in NBC News describing the situation. | |
| Quote, There have been 106 attacks or vandalism incidents from January through August of 2022, which is the latest the Energy Department data tracks. | |
| Among the years that were reviewed by NBC News, 2022 is the first that reached triple digits and it only contains 8 months of data. | |
| Meaning, with just 8 months worth of data, 2022 was already the highest month on record. | |
| Now, in terms of what these attacks actually look like in practice, well, here are a few examples. | |
| In Portland, Oregon, two power substations were deliberately damaged with gunfire, which damaged the equipment and left thousands of people without power. | |
| Then, just a few days later in North Carolina, several substations there were likewise riddled with bullets, which left tens of thousands of people without power for several days. | |
| And according to a spokesperson for the energy company that ran that particular plant in North Carolina, the facilities there experienced damage at least in some areas that he described as being just beyond repair. | |
| And these examples show the vulnerability of our electrical grid in pretty stark relief, given the fact that you have individuals, sometimes one or two people, that can attack a substation, cause power outages for tens of thousands of people, and then never get caught. | |
| However, the silver lining here is that this nationwide increase in the number of attacks on power facilities seems to at least finally be getting addressed by the federal agency that's in charge of this particular issue. | |
| That's because just a few weeks ago, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, it issued this memo right here, you can see it up on your screen, calling for an evaluation of the physical security of America's electrical grid. | |
| Here's specifically part of what that order states. | |
| The order directs the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to conduct a study evaluating the need for improvement which pertains to the physical security of the electric grid. | |
| In recent months, there has been an increase in reports of physical attacks on electric substations that in some incidents have resulted in thousands of customer outages. | |
| Then, if we go to the very bottom of this order, it lays out three points that are meant to be studied in the coming months, including, for one, the adequacy of the current safety standards, secondly, the adequacy of the current risk assessment protocols, and then lastly, quote, whether a minimum level of physical security protections should be required for all bulk power system transmission stations and substations and primary control centers. | |
| But this story actually gets a lot deeper, which we'll get into right after I show you this beautiful coin. | |
| This right here is an American Walking Liberty one ounce gold coin. | |
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| The reason I do so is because, I mean, as you likely know, the inflation rate in this country is the highest that has been in, what, the last 40 years now? | |
| Everything like the price of food, the price of housing, the price of gas is absolutely going through the roof. | |
| And in fact, market experts like the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, he's not only predicting a recession, but he's even using words like unprecedented economic hurricane. | |
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| So pick up the phone and call 866-242-2352. | |
| That's 866-242-2352. | |
| Or text Roman to 65532. | |
| The link will also be dialed in the description box below. | |
| And then let's head on back to the studio. | |
| Meaning that after a record number of physical attacks on our power stations, which have allowed one or maybe two people to knock out power for thousands of households, the government now has the idea of finally looking into whether a minimum level of physical security protections should be required for all substations. | |
| And they're going to be taking 120 days, which is roughly four months, to compile this report. | |
| Meaning that sometime by April or maybe May, this agency will come back with a report saying whether or not these substations need more protection. | |
| And then if the answer is that they do need more protection, then they'll have to decide what that protection looks like, how much it will cost, then they'll need to figure out how to get the adequate funding, and then in some way implement the actual solution. | |
| And so probably by the end of maybe 2030, we can hope to have some more security features on our nation's electrical grid. | |
| And that, my friends, is living life at the speed of government. | |
| If you'd like to read more about these cases, including the case out in Las Vegas that for some reason fell into a media black hole, I'll throw all those links down into the description box below this video for you to peruse. | |
| And furthermore, I'd love to know your thoughts on this particular matter. | |
| Do you believe that these are just isolated incidents with just hundreds of different disgruntled or disturbed people attacking their community's power grids? | |
| Or, do you believe that there's a thread which ties all these attacks, or at least some of these attacks, together? | |
| And if so, what is that thread? | |
| Who benefits if America's power grid is not secure? | |
| I'd love to know your thoughts. | |
| Please leave them in the comments section below. | |
| I'll be reading them later today and throughout the entire week. | |
| And also, as always, as you're making your way down there to the comments section to leave your thoughts, take a quick detour to smash, smash, smash that like button so this video can be showed out to ever more people via the YouTube algorithm, and also consider subscribing to this channel as well, so that we can get this type of honest news content delivered directly into your YouTube feed every time we publish it. | |
| And now lastly, as I mentioned at the top of today's episode, since right now there are some crazy developments happening over in Brazil, with over 1,200 protesters there having been arrested for breaking into the nation's capital, I'd like to mention that over on Epic TV, Epic Times' Brazilian team just published a phenomenal documentary called Brazil, A Last Stand in the Americas, detailing the inside story that you won't be seeing on legacy news outlets about what's really happening in regards to their most recent election. | |
| Here's a trailer for that documentary. | |
| Latin America can, at this moment, be the great flag for the new left that we need to create in the world. | |
| We don't want Brazil dominated by other power. | |
| And we have other few power in the eye on Brazil. | |
| Dilma Rousseff is in Cuba and today participated in the inauguration of a port financed by Brazil. | |
| During the ceremony, the president classified as unjust the commercial blow to the Caribbean and the United States. | |
| The president of the United States. | |
| I'm going to define the importance of China for Brazil. | |
| There is no future of relations in Brazil without China's participation in all areas. | |
| If you'd like to watch that phenomenal documentary, the link will be right there at the top of the description box. | |
| And I should mention that our team over in Brazil, well, they put a lot of hard work and research into that documentary, and quite frankly, it shows, which is why it's such a rare look into the Brazilian election that, again, no matter how many news channels you watch here in America, you likely will not get this perspective. | |
| And so if you want to check it out, the link, again, will be right there at the top of the description box below. | |
| And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epoch Times. | |
| Stay informed, and most importantly, stay free. |
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