Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special edition on the Paradigm Press YouTube channel. My name is Sean Ring. I’m the editor to Rude Awakening. And joining me today is the venerable Byron King, who contributes to the rude and to strategic intelligence and to all our publications, really. How are you today, Byron? I’m very well, thank you, Sean. Hello, everybody out there. Who’s watching, right? It’s weird. I got up this normal, normal morning here in Italy.

I go to my cafe, having my espresso, and then I see the Francis Scott key bridge, as was get rammed by a freighter, essentially a big, huge boat, and go right into the drink in Baltimore. That’s the most shocking videos I’ve ever seen. And for me, Byron, the one thing that kind of set that freeze on up my spine was I’m like, man, that river, like, between the two posts on the bridge, the supports, it’s like a mile and a half.

How do you hit these things? And the last time I thought that was when the planes crashed into the World Trade center. I’m like, how do you hit those things unless you mean to do it? So I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions or anything like that. But in the rude, I was a bit concerned that this was kind of accidentally on purpose. What’s your initial take? Being an old navy man? Well, being an old Navy man, my inner intelligence officer, my inner suspicious.

There are no accidents, comrade. Sort of brain. What happened? First reports from the front lines are almost always wrong. So there’s the basics. Yeah. Ship hit a bridge, pier, bridge collapse, big bridge, important bridge. And what? Where? Why? Right now, as we speak, the authorities are absolutely ruling out that this was an intentional act. They say the ship lost power. They say they had electrical problems. They lost rudder and steering control.

The ship rammed a pier, and that led to the collapse. They’re saying that the ship was being steered by two harbor pilots and not the ship’s crew, not the ship’s captain at the wheel or anything like that. They have harbor pilots in that area, the Chesapeake, there’s the Maryland Harbor Pilot association, and then in Virginia, there’s the Virginia Harbor Pilot association. These are both very professional organizations. Very, very high degrees of training required to be a pilot, certainly for the really big ships.

I don’t know who the pilots are or whatever, but I am sure that if they have the certifications, they are older people at many years of experience, literally thousands of transits up and down the waterway to take the test to be a pilot. They give you a blank map of Chesapeake Bay. It just has the shoreline. And they tell you, or they ask you on your test, you have to draw the ship channel and you have to draw the major buoys, and you have to draw the shipwrecks and the bridges and all these sorts of things.

So the qualifications to be a harbor know, certainly in Baltimore and pretty much everywhere know that’s important to America and around the world. The qualifications to be a pilot are very, very high. So it apparently was not the ship’s crew, I mean, the guys in the engine room or the guys while they’re down in the engine room. And something may have happened down there. Must have happened. If they say they lost power, what happened? I don’t know.

We will find out. They hit the bridge pier, the bridge itself. I was doing a little research this morning. It was built in the 1970s. It was completed and opened in 1977. It was designed in the steel and everything else dates from the 70s, back when America had an industrial capacity to build these kinds of things. So it’s called a single arch truss, which means it’s basically you’re spreading the weight over the whole bridge, as opposed to trusses that just sort of rest on the piers.

That’s good and it’s bad. I mean, on the one hand, you use less materials and better design and all that. On the other hand, if something gives, then everything else kind of gives. And that’s where you’ll see the video where part of it falls down, then the other part of it falls down. So the design of the bridge, I mean, it is what it is, almost 50 year old design, which doesn’t mean that it’s not that it’s a bad design.

It just means that’s how they built it back then. Named after Francis Scott Key in 1976, before that was completed during the bicentennial of the United States, named it after Francis Scott Key. So the bridge carries 11 million cars? Over 11 million vehicles, you might say, a year of importance. It is a hazmat designated bridge, meaning you can haul hazardous materials over the bridge because otherwise you would have to haul them through the tunnel in Baltimore.

They don’t want hazardous materials in the tunnel in Baltimore that goes under the harbor. You don’t want explosive things or whatever. And they don’t want you driving through Baltimore, for obvious reasons, with hazardous materials. So it is a transportation catastrophe to the US. And the blowback, I don’t know if that’s the right word. Excuse me, not trying to be insensitive here. The spillout or the effects of this loss of the bridge will be felt literally immediately in the sense of transportation problem.

More south through that 695 I 695 corridor. All sorts of strategic implications of the bridge. Yeah, great, you’ve got the image up. Yeah, I just brought the map for you because it’s interesting that you bring up the hazmat route. It’s also, as you’re a military man, this is where all the tanks and all the maneuvers kind of go over to avoid the city as well. And it’s one of those things like if you’re a foreign actor, this would be one of the best bridges in the United States as a target, surely.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, you can think of a lot of different places where, you know, blow a bridge, know, wreak, don’t, we don’t want to get out in front of our skis here. I mean, initially, when you first wake up, at least here in the US, you’re 5 hours ahead. In Italy, I’m on eastern standard time here in the US. When I woke up and I kind of, what’s going on? I grabbed my phone and what’s the news? It’s like, holy smokes, look at that.

One of the first things went through my head was, is this an just without knowing anything else, it’s like, is this an had? We had the ISIs attack in Moscow the other day. Look at how hard the Ukrainians have tried to blow the Kirch bridge in Russia between Crimea and kind of mainland Russia there. Bridges are targets. And so bridges, pipelines, things like, know, big fixed structures, big important mean.

So the first thing that went through my mind was, man, what’s going on? Know? The authorities in the US are downplaying know, which is what you would expect one way or the other. Although I’m giving them the benefit of the just in terms of circumstantial evidence, in terms of circumstantial developments. I mean, you have a big ship, it’s headed outbound, you sail with the tide. I mean, you’ve probably heard that expression.

But we have the solar day where the earth reballs in 24 hours, but then there’s the tidal day, which is like 24 hours and 55 minutes or something like that, because it has to do with where the moon is relative to the earth. The tides shift every sort of half hour, every 55 minutes and every half hour, high tide, low tide, whatever tides goes in, they go out.

There’s all sorts of complications on things like that. So they were sailing with the tide, which is why they were leaving at midnight when it’s dark. And the weather, who knows? I don’t know what the weather was, but it’s probably crappy because the weather at night is always crappy. You can’t see anything, whatever. You really have to know what you’re doing. You’re guiding yourself by shore lights, by radar, whatever.

And then there you are sailing out, and let’s say something bad happened down in the engine room. Something broke, something caught fire. I don’t know. We don’t know. I’m sure that the coast guard will figure this out when they do their investigation. But the ship apparently lost power, and what they’re saying is just it lost steering. And just as you move with the tide, you’re also moving with the general current, the general drift of the water, and boom, they hit the pier.

Big 100,000 ton ship full of containers. I don’t know if they’re empty or full. Who knows? We’re leaving the United States, so I don’t know what we export. Maybe we export plastic bags or something, but they bring them in stuffed full of things that are made everywhere else in the world, and we export the empties back there, kind of recycling your beer cans kind of a thing. But a big 100,000 ton ship hits the bridge and the disaster and ensued.

One of the things, if I could just interject for one of the things that I found interesting was it was on the way, like. So this ship, clearly, whoever the pilots got in, they steered it to the port of Baltimore. Everything was absolutely fine. Crew has dinner, whatever. They stay for a couple of days, and then on the way out, this happened. I mean, is my thinking incorrect? To me, it’s almost like you could switch your crew and get some bad actors on there that could kind of precipitate this.

I don’t know, maybe my head is just in La la Land, but is there anything to that? Wouldn’t it make more sense if you were going to, I don’t know, just on the way in? To me, it seems if you got something hot on the ship, you’re going to get caught. So load it in Baltimore and then take it on the way out. I don’t know. Am I going crazy? You know, I think that the investigators should rule out nothing, no matter what the authorities know.

The mayor here, the governor there, some spokesperson here, whatever. They don’t know, okay? They weren’t there. They weren’t on the ship. I wasn’t on the ship. You weren’t on the ship. You need people to get on that ship who trust nobody and believe nothing. And I’m not saying we should interrogate people the way the Russians interrogated those four guys that they got. We don’t do that. We won’t do that.

But they should sit everybody down in a different room, and they should ask them to tell their story about 25 different times, and they should look for every different discrepancy or whatever, be down in the engine room, comb that ship with an absolute, with a vacuum cleaner, and just suck up every piece of evidence you can find. This is too big and this is too important to sweep under the know.

We had the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. We’ve had all sorts of disasters where the transportation department has totally dropped the ball. The US dot, the National Transportation Safety Board. We got Boeing blowing out door panels and whatever. We got these problems, and now we have this. How big do the problems have to get before the investigators really comb it? And I’m not even saying it’s political. I’m not saying, oh, it’s a Democrat governor, a Democrat city, Democrat Biden administrator.

I mean, a ship hits a pier, the bridge falls down. The bridge has been there for 50 years. Could have happened anytime in the last 50 years. But it’s time to get serious about this. Who were the pilots? What’s their story? The pilots are on call, on, I think, a two hour call. So they’re 24 hours scheduling. If you’re a ship and you need a pilot to get yourself, and you must use a pilot to get out of the harbor, certainly for a really big ship, I mean, I’m not talking little sailboat or even certain small vessels.

They’re on their own in some respects. Everybody is under the jurisdiction of the US coast guard. But a big ship like that, it doesn’t just sort of show up and pull into the pier and know there’s a whole process of things that has to happen and then getting ready to sail. This ship was under lease from Marisk shipping lines. Merrisk is a big global company. We have all sorts of people who worry about this stuff.

It was a Mersk ship a couple of years ago. The evergreen wasn’t that wedged itself in the. I think it was under Mersk, but, mean, when you look at all the shipping problems in the world, you can’t go through the Red Sea because you’ll get hit with the houthi missiles and have to go around the Africa. You’re having trouble going through the Panama canal because they don’t have enough water to fill the locks.

So they have to really limit the transits and everything. I mean, there’s shipping problems all over the world. And a company like Mersk, they have entire staff of engineers, of logistics people, logisticians, entire rooms full of these people. This is their job. Worry about this. When you move in and out of Baltimore, it’s a huge harbor. You’ve been to Baltimore. I’ve been to Baltimore. Agora Paradigm is in Baltimore.

We were founded there. We go there all the time for meetings and what have you. And I’ve driven over that bridge. This is hometown for us, even though I’m here in Italy and I’m up in Pennsylvania, but this is the hometown. Team took a hit here. There’s a lot at stake here. What is the 8th or 9th largest port in the United States? Literally billions and billions of dollars of commerce every year.

Hundreds of thousands of vehicles get landed there. Foreign car imports. This is going to affect supply chains everywhere. And you’re not going to fix this thing quickly? You’re not just going to. Not just some erector set where. Oh, just. We’re going to pull the steel out of the water and open it all. Doesn’t happen that way. No. They’ll make a priority to open the channel. Yes, but how many weeks, months? Once you clear the channel, have you really cleared the channel? What’s still down there right now, it’s a search and rescue mission.

I think they’re still looking for people who might be survivors. God bless them. I hope they do. Soon it will become recovery and salvage operation for whatever they can find. And then you’ve got to do a forensic analysis, you’ve got to survey it. What’s where, what fell, where, where is everything? Anything could be a clue to what really happened. What was the method of failure of the bridge? The engineers will have a field day on this one.

And so it’s fascinating to talk about in an abstract sense, it’s a human tragedy. It is a serious economic issue for Baltimore, for that region of Maryland. A lot of people work at those ports. The guys who load and unload the cargoes, the truck drivers who come in and out, the guy who fills the gas tank on the trucks and drive in and out, the lady down at the diner who sells lunch to the truck drivers.

There are tens and tens and tens of thousands of people whose livelihoods could be affected will be affected by a closure of this port. Not to mention that this is a vital node in the american supply chain. Well, it’s really interesting that you bring up the supply chain and infrastructure. I mean, if I could take Ian Fleming out of context for 1 second. He said, the first time something happens, it’s happenstance.

The second time it’s coincidence. The third time is enemy action. To take that out of context, what is it going to take for America to go? We need to rebuild our infrastructure now. Okay, enough’s enough. With East Palestine, with this happening in Baltimore, with having trouble with shipping all over the world, now we need to know what made America great, which was basically manufacturing and industry. We need to rebuild that.

We can’t outsource that to the Chinese and the Mexicans anymore. Is this going to be maybe when the shoe drops? Know you wish, and I wish. I mean, a couple of years ago, remember, the Oakland Bay Bridge was damaged by an earthquake and California had to replace it. The state of California had to replace it. Most of that bridge, most of the steel, most of the structures, most of everything in that bridge that was replaced was built in China.

They built in China, assembled it, floated it on ships and brought it over, and they rebuilt the bridge in the Oakland Bay out in San Francisco. By contrast, if you look at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, people say, oh, the Golden Gate bridge was built in San Francisco. No, actually, it was built in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, because most of the steel and most of the design and most of the prefab and most of everything, that bridge was built by Beth Steele in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Then they put it on boats, and they took it through the Panama Canal ships, and they hauled it up to San Francisco Bay. They unloaded all the prefabs, and then they erected the San Francisco Bay bridge. Much of it was designed. The structure, the steel was designed in the old industrial east of the United States. This was back in the 1930s, of course, when we had. The country was filled with steel mills and what have you, manufacturing facilities, most of which are long gone now.

We say, oh, we still have a steel industry. Yeah, but it’s not that steel industry. We roll coils that go to the automakers and they can stamp them into hoods and fenders and stuff like that. Or we send it to Iowa, where the people who make refrigerators bend it into refrigerators and stuff. But a lot of that really high tech, high spec engineering stuff doesn’t happen in the United States anymore.

It’s very, very difficult building things like, say, a nuclear reactor. We saw that in South Carolina and Georgia over the last few years, just trying to build a new, from the ground up, stick built nuclear reactor system down there. It’s hard to get the materials. It’s really hard to get the labor. We joke about the welders, the electricians, the pipe fitters joke about it, except that it’s a crisis.

I mean, we don’t have enough people doing that. Our education system isn’t geared for that. Ask anybody in the shipbuilding industry. Ask anybody in the defense industry. One of the people say, well, how come those aircraft carriers cost so much? Well, because you’re not buying an aircraft carrier, you’re buying labor hours, and you’re highly paid people to weld very expensive steel into an aircraft carrier or a submarine or whatever.

We’re getting off the path of the Baltimore disaster. But in terms of the mean, this is a cultural problem, it’s a sociological problem. Across the know, we say, well, we’ve got to rebuild that bridge in Baltimore. Okay, great. Let’s look at the Baltimore public schools. How are the Baltimore public schools doing? How many kids in the Baltimore public schools are reading or doing math to grade level? Oh, about this many.

I mean, I’m sorry. Just look at the statistics. They speak for themselves. That’s a fair point. Good luck, everybody. We’re all going to need it. We’re living on 50 year old infrastructure like this bridge. I’m the geologist for our group, and I often say, you’ve heard me say this. We have these editoriums. We are living on oil that was discovered before the year 2000. We’re not living on oil that we’re just finding.

We’re living on oil that was discovered 25 and more years ago in the copper industry. The copper mines of the world. Not a little in the United States. The copper mines of the world are decades old. I mean. I mean, the biggest copper mine in the US. For example, Bingham Canyon, Utah, with Rio Tinto, the Kennecott smelter. Bingham Canyon was, I think, discovered in 19, six, something like that.

So it’s 118 years old. I’m really glad that there was a lot of copper there when they found it, but we’d better start opening new copper. Not lately. We don’t do that. One of the largest nickel copper mine potentials in the United States is in northern Minnesota. Good luck with that. Okay. I have heard the secretary of the interior under this administration say that we’re not going to grant any permits for northern Minnesota.

The Minnesota is like, well, our vital watershed and everything else. Excuse me, but we actually do know how to mine copper these days without wrecking the watershed. But it goes all the way back to the ore in the ground, the education system. It goes back to your kindergartners and your first and second and third graders. Who can’t do math. And so this is more than just, oh, we’re going to rebuild the bridge.

Yeah, we can. We will. We probably will. It’s a question of how long will it take? How much money will we throw at it? How much grift and graft will there be in know? But yeah, something’s going to get rebuilt. But man, oh, man, it really raises a lot of other questions. Yeah, last thing, if we could put Fleming back into context, and if we assume, and again, folks, just to remind you, we have absolutely no evidence of this at all.

So this is just me playing board games here. Okay, but Byron, when we were talking before, we said, well, if this is the first thing that might happen, what might be the next? We just chat about that bridge right by the naval base of San Diego. Oh, there you go. Oh, my goodness. I was just out there at a little navy gathering last week. Yeah, I drove across the corner.

I was stationed at North island there. That’s sort of the gray thing back in part of my navy days. This is for the people out there watching. This is San Diego. San Diego, California, southern Cal. You can see where it says San Diego. There’s downtown San Diego there. And Lindberghfield, the airport is one Runway, very busy. Six in the morning till midnight, whatever. They’re just taking off and landing like you wouldn’t believe.

Right across the way, that big gray thing is Naval Air Station North island. As you come in the channel, you come in on the left side of the map here, you come in the channel. Just when you get past the Cabrillo national monument down there. That’s the submarine base, San Diego. That’s, they have submarines there, except there aren’t very many. They’re all out at sea doing their angles and dangles and things like that.

You can imagine. Then, you know, you sail around the harbor and North island is where they park the aircraft carriers. When I was there last week, it’s no secret because you can see them from the shoreline. But the good ship USS Carl Vincent and the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carriers were tied up at the pier along with the hospital ship USS Mercy, I believe. And so anyhow, this Coronado bridge, know the island? It’s not really an island, but it connects this Coronado island to mainland Cal there.

But everything down to the southeast of know, down below the bridge is the national shipbuilding Company, which is owned by general dynamics. And then the naval station in San Diego. And this is your third fleet. This is much of the navy’s Pacific fleet, is where they live right down here. And if something bad happened to this Coronado bridge, you would bottle up a big whack of the Navy’s third fleet.

Now, I assure you that when they built the Coronado bridge, people thought about that in terms of if it ever collapses, how do we get it out of there quickly? But if it ever collapses, you’re faced with the problem of getting it out of there quickly, or else your fleet is stuck in the harbor. So that’s just one example. Just one example. I’m not giving away any state secrets or military secrets or anything else here.

We’re just looking at whatever this is, a Google map or something like that, and just applying a little bit of basic thinking and basic logic to it. But go around the country, go to big ports and harbors and big coastal cities. Take a look at the big bridges, look at the Mississippi river, look at, there’s Long beach there. You’ve got a map on there. You could do lots of things.

Even though it’s open to the sea, there are a lot of things you could do in that area that would totally screw things up for shipping in and out. Let’s see. Oh, here’s New Orleans. Oh, my know, I think we’ve seen issues, know, bad things happen in New Orleans, whether it’s the pumps and the levees or what have you, the ship channel, like I said, we could go all around the US coastline and look at ports and harbors.

And, you know, there are people who worry about this and people who think about, know, the coast guard, homeland security, Navy, private entities, insurance companies are big on worrying about these things. Good for them. That’s their job. Worry more. We live in a world, well, we live in a world where we live in a country where we have ten or twelve or 14, whatever the number is, million new Americans, as they call them, who just showed up, new arrivals, our friends from wherever, whoever, we have no idea who they are.

They fill in a little application by the immigration and customs online on their little cell phones and stuff. They fill it out online. They say, yeah, my name is XYZ and I’m from here and there. And they show up and they have an appointment, they cross the border, or they get on an airplane in some foreign country and fly to the United States. I think the number is, what, 230,000? Or was it 330,000? Whatever it was, have literally been flown in in the last year and a half due to various government policies.

Who are these people? What are their names? Where are they from? What’s their education? How is this legal? Texas military? Do you know how to use an AK 47? Have you ever been trained in rigging high explosives? And just a few questions I’d like to ask you. Not that they’re going to give you a truthful answer, but this country is wide open for terrorism. Kurt Schlichter, columnist on townhall.

com he’s not one of ours. We don’t work with him. He’s a good guy and everything else, but we make no money off of him. But he wrote a book just published a month or two ago, the attack, about a mass attack of just fanatics who want to hurt this country, everybody on the same day, at the same time, whatever, they all got the signal on their cell phone.

They all got their signal. They broke out the cache of guns and whatever they had, and they went out there and started spray and pray, just blow people away. This is fiction. But in, you know, the attack, which recommend on Amazon and what have you, it’s fast read, fabulous, fascinating read. It’s a really beautifully written book. Kurt Schlichter, the attack, it’s bone chilling, it’s blood chilling, curdling, whatever.

This country is so wide open, and as far as anybody out there watching, you can think whatever you want. But best thing you could do for yourself is be aware, be in at least decent physical condition, be healthy if you can. And if you don’t own a gun, okay, well, maybe you should think about it. Oh, I hate guns. Okay, well, you’re one of them. Fine. If you’re not averse to it, if you can do it legally, what have you, get a gun, get training.

Not that you have to walk around armed. You’re not some old western cowboy or nothing. But when time is of the essence, don’t call 911, because I live in the city of Pittsburgh, and many, many nights in the city of Pittsburgh, we have 14 police officers on duty. Well, I live right outside the city, but I mean in the city, which is like right over there, just across the border from my little leafy suburb here, they have 14 cops working the night shift for the whole city.

A friend of mine just said that she drove by one of the police stations near where she lives, and it was a big sign on the door closed until further notice. It’s like, oh, great. Okay, thanks. That’s Pittsburgh, but this could be your town, too. This could be your country. It’s your country, but this could be your town, too. The cops may or may not make it, but you got to go about your life.

You’ll live your life and everything else, but when something bad happens, you want to be ready for it. And we started off with this news about the bridge and we’ve gone off on all these different tangents, but the takeaways are that we’re living on old infrastructure. Lots of bad things can happen, maybe accidental. They’re saying it’s accidental. Okay, fine. But if it wasn’t accidental, it could just as easily be terrorism in the sense that the ship lost power and drifted into the bridge pier.

Okay, yeah, shit happens. Then again, other things can happen too, of way more intentional nature. And the country is wide open in terms of the electrical system, the pipeline system, the logistics system in general, the rail system, what have you. We have enough problems with accidents, just with trains derailing in Palestine, Ohio or whatever. We have enough accidents, just bridges falling down. Pittsburgh, we have Shenley Park Bridge or the frick park bridge which fell down, I think like a month into Biden’s administration, back in 2021.

Yeah, I went to school about three blocks from that bridge which collapsed. So I walked across that bridge many times a long time ago when it was a good bridge, but then it fell down. It just, plane fell down. It was just a cold winter day and the temperature was such a heavy bus drove over it collapsed. It. We have a lot of problems in the country and they’re only going to get worse, I think, because I don’t see a lot of policy to make them better.

Oh, we have an infrastructure bill. Yeah, but a lot of that money is going to grift and graft. It’s not really steel. Well, listen, Byron, that was brilliant. Thank you so much for your insight on this. Again, folks, just to remind you, we don’t know, we’re just speculating here. I’m literally 6000 miles away from that bay Bridge, so I don’t know. But like I said, there were eerie similarities that I last felt on the morning of September 11, actually the afternoon in my time, London when it happened.

So thank you for joining us and we’ll keep our eyes peeled to see if we could piece any more of this together. Hopefully it was just an accident. It, but we don’t know. And again, Byron King, thank you so much for joining us. You’re brilliant, man. Always a pleasure. It’s a pleasure, Sean. And whoever’s watching out there, thank you for your time and attention. And we’re paradigm press and this is what we do.

.

See more of Paradigm Press on their Public Channel and the MPN Paradigm Press channel.