EMP is not your friend

Mark Steyn's lastest column is a potentially disturbing read, starting with the effects of an EMP blast and moving to odd investment advice:

And at that point I stopped thinking of One Second After as a movie-thriller narrative, and more in geopolitical terms. After all, the banks in America and western Europe are already metaphorically weed-choked, and may yet become literally so. In the Wall Street Journal a couple of months back, Peggy Noonan predicted that by next year the mayor of New York, "in a variation on broken-window theory, will quietly enact a bright-light theory, demanding that developers leave the lights on whether there are tenants in the buildings or not, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression no one's here and nobody cares" — or, to put it another way, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression Manhattan's already been hit by an EMP attack. A friend of mine saw his broker in February and asked him where he should be moving his money, expecting to be pointed in the direction of various under-publicized stocks or perhaps some artfully leveraged instrument novel enough to fly below the Obama radar. His broker, wearing a somewhat haunted look, advised him to look for a remote location and a property he could pay cash for and with enough cleared land and a long growing season. My friend's idea of rural wilderness is Martha's Vineyard, so this wasn't exactly what he wanted to hear.

And this is before EMP hits.

And North Korea would probably be quite happy to detonate a nice big nuclear weapon that would wipe out most of Japan's or North America's electronics . . .