Flirtin' with Disaster Once Again: Welcome to the 2025 trump Hurricane Season

Update: Hello again, those of you coming from Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Thanks as always to Batocchio for including this blog to the array of socio-political blogs still out there. Good luck, and stay safe.

In the "What Could Possibly Go Wrong" category of bad news today, Reuters is dropping this particular tidbit about trump's pick to run our federal disaster relief agency (via Leah Douglas, Ted Hesson, and Nathan Layne):

Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were left baffled on Monday after the head of the U.S. disaster agency said during a briefing that he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season, according to four sources familiar with the situation.

Insert every facepalm GIF you can find, folks.

The U.S. hurricane season officially began on Sunday and lasts through November. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast last week that this year's season is expected to bring as many as 10 hurricanes.

The remark was made by David Richardson, who has led FEMA since early May. It was not clear to staff whether he meant it literally, as a joke, or in some other context.

Richardson said during the briefing that there would be no changes to the agency's disaster response plans despite having told staff to expect a new plan in May, the sources told Reuters.

Richardson's comments come amid widespread concern that the departures of a raft of top FEMA officials, staff cuts and reductions in hurricane preparations will leave the agency ill-prepared for a storm season forecast to be above normal.

Hurricanes kill dozens of people and cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually across a swath of U.S. states every year. The storms have become increasingly more destructive and costly due to the effects of climate change...

Richardson, who has no disaster response experience, said during Monday's briefing, a daily all-hands meeting held by phone and videoconference, that he will not be issuing a new disaster plan because he does not want to make changes that might counter the FEMA Review Council, the sources said.

President Donald Trump created the council to evaluate FEMA. Its members include DHS head Kristi Noem, governors and other officials.

trump, of course, would like to use that "council" to make recommendations to gut that relief agency - and anything that would highlight the reality that climate change is happening - altogether. When you consider how trump is refusing to send aid to states like North Carolina still recovering from last year's hurricane season, we are facing a grim situation that when the storms do slam into the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts that our federal government is not going to lift one damn finger to help even if the heavily Republican-controlled states getting hit are screaming to high heaven.

Add to this how trump is denying aid to the midwestern states getting hit by tornadoes, and we're talking about an administration that doesn't give a damn about the lives on the ground. 

And so YES, Red state America. Every single one of you who voted for trump this 2024 you are getting exactly what you voted for: Cruelty and denial.

We are so royally fucked (again).

trump Normalizing Terror

Update: Thank you again Batocchio, for including this blog at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! To everyone showing up, I hope you're getting the vote out for Democrats across every ballot. I'm heading to the Florida Early Voting poll place in a few minutes. Balz to the Walz, America! And uh, please ask your friends to buy my book. (hey if trump can grift, so can I and with better product!) --->

While my part of the world of Central Florida is recovering from the wreckage of Hurricane Milton, other states are still recovering from the damage left by the previous storm Helene. Places like upper Georgia and the mountain regions of North Carolina and Tennessee were ravaged by mass flooding and erasure of entire towns.

At least, some of those places ought to be recovering with help from the federal government, except that recovery officers are avoiding efforts in areas suddenly swarming with so-called "militias" convinced that FEMA is a threat to "their liberty and property" (via Gary D. Robertson and Sarah Brumfield at AP News):

Federal disaster workers paused and then changed some of their hurricane-recovery efforts in North Carolina, including abandoning door-to-door visits, after receiving threats that they could be targeted by a militia, officials said, as the government response to Helene is targeted by runaway disinformation.

The threats emerged over the weekend. The Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Monday that it received a call Saturday about a man with an assault rifle who made a comment “about possibly harming” employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency working in the hard-hit areas of Lake Lure and Chimney Rock, in the North Carolina mountains.

Authorities got a description of a suspect’s vehicle and license plate and later identified him as William Jacob Parsons, 44, of Bostic, a small community about 60 miles west of Charlotte. Sheriff’s officials said in a statement that Parsons — who was armed with a handgun and a rifle — was charged with “going armed to the terror of the public,” a misdemeanor. He was released after posting bond.

Threatening harm with firearms is a MISDEMEANOR???

FEMA confirmed in a statement Monday that it adjusted operations. It emphasized that disaster-recovery centers remain open and that FEMA continues “to help the people of North Carolina with their recovery.”

Workers from the agency’s disaster-assistance teams — who help survivors apply for FEMA aid and connect them with additional state and local resources — have stopped going door to door and instead are working from fixed locations while the potential threats are assessed, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they could not publicly discuss details of the operations...

The Washington Post reported Sunday that the U.S. Forest Service, which is supporting hurricane recovery work, sent a message to multiple federal agencies, warning that FEMA had advised all federal responders in Rutherford County to leave the county immediately.

The message stated that National Guard troops had encountered “armed militia” saying they were “out hunting FEMA.”

Which begs the question "WHY are they hunting federal agents who are working on RECOVERING devastated communities in their literal neck of the woods?"

Because those "militias" are getting hit by "runaway disinformation" coming directly from donald trump himself (via Barbara L. McQuade at Bloomberg): 

Shortly after the storm, presidential candidate Donald Trump told rallygoers in Michigan that the Biden administration “stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.” This is not true (and undocumented immigrants can’t vote). Yet these claims have been amplified on social media by billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. A scroll through the replies to FEMA’s posts on the Musk-owned social media platform known as X shows a slew of ugly insults and statements echoing their lies.

In addition, Trump has also baselessly alleged that the Biden-Harris administration has failed to communicate with the affected states, a claim refuted by their governors, both Democrats and Republicans. Trump has also said without evidence that Biden and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, denied relief to Republican communities...

trump is lying because he knows enough members of his wingnut voting base already believe the worst about federal support - thanks to decades of anti-government narratives pushed by conservative Republicans from Goldwater to Reagan to Gingrich to today's GOP leadership - and will believe whatever he says they're doing is criminal even without any proof to his allegations.

trump wants his followers angry: Angry enough to make vile insults and threats on social media and government websites; Angry enough to arm themselves and go "hunting" for those agency workers to commit whatever level of violence they wish to inflict.

trump's objective with demonizing federal relief efforts - more than just trying to weaken those efforts to make Biden (and Harris by proxy) look bad to the national voter base - is to normalize violence towards our government. he's making it easier for these self-appointed "revolutionaries" to go on the warpath should he lose this November.

trump is trying to terrorize us. To make us cower or whimper for his mercy. To make us too afraid to do anything to stop him.

The only honest response is to stop him, and deny his effort to bully and steal his way back into the White House. These threats of violence are acts of desperation: trump cannot appeal to the broad base of American voters and so he's lashing out the only way he can. He's more afraid of us than we need to be of him.

The MAGA factions are already riled up to the point where they will attack their fellow neighbors, their communities, their fellow Americans - in victory, convinced trump will sanction their violence towards Latinos, Blacks, and women; in defeat, convinced they need to force insurrection and ruin - no matter what. In some respects, there's no stopping the wave of violence that's about to hit our communities.

But we need to be ready. We need to prepare to stand up for what we know is right and true about America, to deny trump's angry mobs any power over us.

You want to help people affected by the hurricanes? Provide aid to the recovery efforts as best you can. And get the vote out for Democrats from Harris on down who will deny trump and his ilk any future chance to threaten us again. 

I Survived Hurricane Milton But

Milton tore the roof off of Tropicana Field.

 

Image from CNN

The hurricane took the tarp cover but left behind the damned catwalks! NOOOOOOO.

LOOK HOW THEY MASSACRED MY BOY.

Seriously, Milton's caused a lot of damage, there's a number of horrifying deaths - most from a tornado that spawned on the Atlantic coast (Palm Beach Gardens) when the outer bands reached there - and as of Friday afternoon a lot of Hillsborough and Polk Counties are out of power.

Especially where I live. I'm doing this from my library workplace - Bartow had their grid back pretty quick this time - and part of me doesn't want to go home right now because they'll be no air conditioning or Internet access waiting for me.

Gotta go feed the kitties though.

Hopefully by tonight they'll have the power fixed. Hoping.

The Oncoming Milton

As I write this, a hurricane formed off the coast of Mexico and is projected to do something few hurricanes do: head straight east towards Florida. The models all predict Milton will hit the Tampa Bay area - between St. Petersburg and Bradenton - by Wednesday night. It's already a Category 5 and threatening to be one of the strongest storms we've ever seen (thank you, decades of climate denialism!). Even if an incoming northern front can break Milton into a lesser Cat, we're talking devastating storm surges along the Tampa Bay shoreline to where everything south of Clearwater and half the landmass in Tampa itself gets washed away forever.

I am living right in the path of that monster. And yet, I have my duty to my workplace: I have to stay and prep the library with my coworkers for any possible damage. By the time we're done with that, I won't have time to get out of the way of Milton. I'll have to do what I've done before: Hunker down with my cats, pray that my place doesn't get destroyed by high winds and that the flooding won't happen in my area, and wait for the power to come back on.

This is going to be a stressful week.

I'll try to blog once or twice before the power goes, but if I don't make it... If you don't hear from me by next week... Promise me you'll vote for Kamala Harris and every Democratic candidate across the board and stop that Shitgibbon once and for all.

(muttering) why the fuck won't that Weather Space Laser flatten the hell out of Mar-A-Lago, huh...?

Hurricane Ian Rolling In

It's become legend that whenever Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel shows up on your beach, you're getting doomed with a hurricane...

So here comes Hurricane Ian aiming for the Tampa Bay area with Jim goofing off on Clearwater Beach. More from Michaela Mulligan at the Tampa Bay Times:

After a night of intensification, Hurricane Ian has emerged as a major hurricane Tuesday — still following its track toward Tampa Bay.

The Category 3 storm is just off the coast of Cuba, about 10 miles south of Pinar Del Río and 130 miles southwest of the Dry Tortugas, according to an 8 a.m. update from the National Hurricane Center. Ian is moving north at about 12 mph and is expected to turn toward the north-northeast while beginning to slow Tuesday night into Wednesday.

Forecasters predict the center of Ian to move over western Cuba Tuesday morning and then emerge in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico, where it likely will strengthen...

I'm a little further inland (Polk County), and if the storm keeps tracking straight north - or better turns west - I won't get hit with anything serious. Still, this is the first year I've gotten sandbags for my porch doors, which were vulnerable to the last hurricane that passed by.

This year, given the uptick in climate change and the noticeable erosion of the Florida coastline, my home metro of Tampa Bay may be hit real hard with lasting - and tragic - damage. Too much residential development along the coastline has made us too vulnerable to big storms like this, and we're looking at serious flooding and power outages to last well into next week.

I may try to get a few more blog articles in before the storm hits, so we'll see.

Quick News Tonight III: There's a Storm Comin'

Every year, between June to November, we got to cope with the hurricane season. We've had a couple of close calls, some tropical storms hitting the United States, but this weekend there's a big one acomin' with Ida. Here's some more detailed info via Kevin McGill and Janet McConnaghey from the AP Newswire:

Ida intensified rapidly Friday from a tropical storm to a hurricane with top winds of 80 mph (128 kph) as it crossed western Cuba and entered the Gulf of Mexico. The National Hurricane Center predicted Ida would strengthen into an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane, with top winds of 140 mph (225 kph) before making landfall along the U.S. Gulf Coast late Sunday.

“This will be a life-altering storm for those who aren’t prepared,” National Weather Service meteorologist Benjamin Schott said during a Friday news conference with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.

The governor urged residents to quickly prepare, saying: “By nightfall tomorrow night, you need to be where you intend to be to ride out the storm.”

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell ordered a mandatory evacuation for a small area of the city outside the levee system. But with the storm intensifying so much over a short time, she said it wasn’t possible to do so for the entire city. That generally calls for using all lanes of some highways to leave the city...

This is really catching the area at a bad time, not just because of the COVID pandemic overfilling hospitals facing power outages and storm surges.

This is an anniversary of the last big storm that blew threw New Orleans and left the worst damage a hurricane ever did to our nation: Katrina. Just that name alone will summon dread to anyone who lived through those weeks. This article on the ten-year anniversary in 2015 from Letitia Stein for Reuters:

...But recovery has been uneven in the city, which took the brunt of the 2005 storm that killed more than 1,800 people and was the costliest in U.S. history.

Many properties still bear physical scars from the hurricane, particularly in poorer African-American neighborhoods. Social, demographic and political changes still ripple through the city.

In the mostly black Lower Ninth Ward, devastated by the flooding, Charles Brown is still attending services in his pastor’s nearly empty living room, waiting for the day when Mount Nebo Bible Baptist Church is rebuilt.

The black population of the city, long a hub of African-American culture, has plummeted since Aug. 29, 2005, the day Katrina swept in from the Gulf of Mexico and overwhelmed the levees meant to prevent flooding in the low-lying city.

Income gaps between blacks and whites have widened. Many African-American neighborhoods and the businesses supporting them have not fully recovered...

Brown, an emergency responder, stayed behind to search for the missing.

“We should have made so much more progress,” said the 55-year-old Brown in an interview before a series of events the city is planning this month to mark the storm’s 10th anniversary. “I don’t see anything to celebrate...”

I remember visiting New Orleans in 2006 the year after for a library conference, and then taking a cable car ride up into the Ninth Ward area where the post-storm flooding was at its worst. Entire neighborhoods empty. Debris piled up that were never getting picked up for the trash heaps. Houses still showing the watermarks for how high the flooding got. I get the sense from the 2015 article that a lot of the cleanup still hadn't happened, and that not a lot of people came back to rebuild.

And now here comes Ida, possibly as strong as if not stronger than Katrina. Those levees that broke in 2005, were they ever truly repaired or upgraded? 

They're about to find out.

The hard way, in the Big Easy.

God help them.

As Chaos Reigns, More Blood In The Streets

There is chaos across the globe. Not just with the Pandemic, not just with nations wrapped in a decade's worth of civil wars, not just with the caging and pain of minority groups in both China and the United States...

There's a Category 4 Hurricane about to hit the coast of Louisiana, we're about to get another replay of 2005's Katrina, and it's not even in the top five stories tonight.

This weekend saw yet another Cop-on-Black shooting, this time in Kenosha Wisconsin, prompting a fresh round of protests because the cops are still abusing their power and still piling up a body count of unarmed victims.

Only this time, the cops in Kenosha allowed a number of Far Right white supremacists with their own firearms to show up and confront the Black Lives Matter protesters, and things got bloody. Via Adam Mahoney, Julia Wong, and Victoria Bekiempis in the Guardian:

Hours before a 17-year-old white man allegedly killed two people and injured a third at protests over a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a local militia group posted a call on Facebook: “Any patriots willing to take up arms and defend our city tonight from evil thugs?”

It’s not yet clear if Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois teenager arrested on suspicion of murder after last night’s shootings in Kenosha, was among the people who responded to the call the militia group had posted, which was later featured on the conspiracy theory site InfoWars.

A Facebook account listed under Rittenhouse’s name included images of the young white man posting with a military-style rifle, as well as multiple posts expressing support for law enforcement.

It's been confirmed for years - Adam L. Silverman over at Balloon Juice has been writing about the Right-Wing terrorism that's been building in this nation since 2016 - that the Far Right militias have been spoiling for a fight, convinced they're at war with the librul commies and dark-skinned Others (encompassing Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, even Hindus and Greeks). The recent rash of law enforcement killings of unarmed Blacks has been their clarion call, and they've been rushing out to each protest eager to show off their AR-15 murdersticks.

Well, in Kenosha not only did the gun-toting wingnuts find protesters to threaten, they found a police force willing to look the other way regarding their efforts to destabilize peaceful protests... and worse. Back to the Guardian article:

Before the shooting, the presence of armed white men at the Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha on Tuesday night prompted criticism from protesters – and some support from law enforcement.

In a widely circulating video from Tuesday night, Kenosha police can be heard thanking and tossing bottled water from an armored vehicle to what appear to be armed civilians walking the streets.

“We appreciate you being here,” an officer is heard saying over a loudspeaker.

But David Best, the county sheriff, told media outlets after the shooting that people patrolling the streets in Kenosha were a “like a vigilante group”, and said that the shooting was evidence of why suggestions to deputize citizens to help law enforcement contain the unrest in the city had been a bad idea.

YA THINK?!

It's like the local law enforcement still hasn't grasped the idea that the best way to keep protests peaceful is to reduce the presence of weapons and means of vandalism, rather than encouraging trigger-happy extremists who WANT to start a fight and earn their blood-stripes.

This incident is more evidence that our police forces across the United States are in bed with - or at least comfortable hanging out with - a Far Right group composed of racists and neo-Nazis who want to increase violence (even against the cops who are all so chummy with them).

The wingnuts are presenting every sign of wanting to go to literal civil war with everyone they hate in America. Even the guys in Homeland Security on trump's payroll tried to warn him and the Republican leadership. Here's how Betsy Swan at Politico reported it:

For Neumann, her nightmare scenario of globalized white supremacist terrorism was coming to life. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was doing far too little about its own homegrown extremists — often "lone wolves" radicalized online by white supremacist websites and fueled by hostility toward immigrants and minorities. But White House officials didn’t want to talk about the rising domestic extremist threat or even use the phrase “domestic terrorism.” The administration’s relentless, single-minded focus on immigration enforcement — coupled with nonstop turnover on the National Security Council — constantly pulled senior DHS leadership away from everything else. And her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, was part of the problem...

Trump often expressed irritation when he saw the DHS secretary anywhere other than the border. Miles Taylor, who was Nielsen’s chief of staff, told POLITICO Trump used to lambaste her if she didn’t physically spend enough of her time there...

Early in Nielsen’s tenure as secretary, she and Taylor discussed the domestic terror threat at length. In the months before her confirmation, a far-right extremist named Jeremy Christian had murdered two men on a train after harassing two Black teenage girls. One of the girls wore a hijab, according to news reports, and Christian yelled “fuck Muslims” at them. Just days after Nielsen was confirmed, a man with a swastika marking on his leg murdered two students at a high school in New Mexico before killing himself.

“I said, ‘Look this is a pretty big deal right now, it’s getting serious, a lot of it’s racially motivated,’” Taylor recalled telling Nielsen. “‘I don’t think we are well positioned against it. We’ve got to do more, but it’s really got to start with the president.’”

At the time, then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster was overseeing the drafting of a new national counterterrorism strategy. The document would lay out priorities for using resources from across the U.S. government to combat terrorism.

Taylor wrote a “dream draft” emphasizing everything DHS would want from the strategy document — including a focus on domestic terrorist threats, along with threats from radical Islamist terrorism and other foreign actors. Four months after Nielsen started as DHS secretary, Trump replaced McMaster with John Bolton. The process of drafting the counterterrorism strategy continued under Bolton’s leadership.

“What ended up getting significantly dropped was all the stuff we talked about on domestic terrorism,” Taylor said. “We got a draft back from John Bolton that barely referenced domestic terrorism...”

Part of this is the Republicans' obsession against immigration - which is racially-tinged to begin with - blinding them to the problems of domestic violence, and a lot of this is the Republicans' refusal to clean their own house of Far Right extremism they rely on to keep their voting base happy. There is no other way to explain this inaction.

And it's this inaction that keeps ending up with more American blood spilling into our American streets. The wingnut in Kenosha left behind two dead and one severely wounded, and more than just that community torn apart by the escalation of hostilities.

This is not going to end well, not even if Biden wins this November.

And yet, we dare not let the gun-toting militia extremists win. Damn them. We have better things to live for than their goddamned rage and fear.

A trumpian Storm of Sharpies

I didn't even want to write about this, but the story about trump making an incorrect claim about the state of Alabama being threatened by Hurricane Dorian won't go away...

...by dragging in an NOAA hurricane map from the day he made his wrong statement to show how he was correct, except for the fact someone used a black Sharpie ink pen to extend the white projection cone to touch Alabama in what has to be the WORST manufactured piece of evidence in human history...

Zoom in on that map. The White House couldn't even be bothered to hire
someone to Photoshop a faked image to pull this off.

...leading to the formation of the silliest ScandalGate in the history of -Gates with #SharpieGate...

...and then making it worse by getting a Rear Admiral to take the fall...

...Political analysts speculated that Trump was lying about being briefed “every hour,” because if he was hearing the updates, he would have gotten one of the 15 other projections from the National Weather Service that said the hurricane wasn’t heading east.

By Thursday afternoon, Trump found a scapegoat.

“While Dorian batters SC, the White House just released a statement from Rear Admiral Peter Brown defending the president’s comments on Dorian and Alabama. Brown says he briefed the president on Sept. 1 on the ‘possibility of tropical storm force winds in southeastern Alabama,'” tweeted Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey...

...because trump won't make it go away. Tell it, Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice:

Trump can’t let it go because he’s a walking collection of untreated personality disorders who relies on bullying and dominance to bubble-wrap his fragile ego. I think valued commenter Gin & Tonic was onto something yesterday when he noted (paraphrasing) that the media has glommed onto this because it’s both absurd and an easy story to cover.

I’m finding the story hard to let go too because it’s such a perfect example of the how the Trump presidency is ridiculous and frightening at the same time: this demented crybaby is inventing stories that would shame a fourth grader, and government officials are serving as props and defenders, as if this whole episode wasn’t bug-fuck nuts...

We are LITERALLY at the moment in the story where Captain Queeg obsesses over the goddamned strawberries.

trump can never be in the wrong, can never apologize, can never step up and say "You know what, I misspoke, I got it confused with Georgia, I was concerned that the whole southeast U.S. was at risk, let's focus on getting the Atlantic coast states prepped for Dorian and let's move on." trump - and his handlers - will warp all of reality to make our reality fit his falsehoods.

This is all, by the by, overshadowing the reality that the Bahamas were devastated by Dorian hovering over them for a full 40 HOURS of Category 5 destruction and we're likely going to see more deaths and despair reported as the weeks roll in.

This is all avoiding the possibility that Dorian - now a Cat 3 - is a serious threat to North Carolina and maybe the Virginia coastline.

And it doesn't help that trump is trying to pull off more inhumane destruction by gutting the U.S. military budget in order to pay for a border wall to fulfill his ego. Not to mention the damage still being done to families and legal immigrants across the nation.

This is not going to end well, even if we can get trump voted out in 2020.

Gods help us.

Brief Current Status Update: Hurricane Dorian Situation

Kinda sitting here right now waiting on a hurricane that could still slide across Florida and cause some serious damage to us. Dorian, which started off as something that threatened to cross the southern half of the Sunshine State by this weekend, has slowed over the Atlantic and is now hovering over the Bahamas. Problem is, by slowing down the storm was able to strengthen up to a Category 5 (!) with reported winds above 200 MPH (!!!). The island chain is likely getting crushed by the power of Dorian as I type this, and it's horrifying to think how people living there are going to survive that.

We've been seeing more and more of these Cat 5s, at least once every year since 2016, and the vast majority of 5s have happened since 2000. This is, let's be honest, a clear sign of global warming leading directly to climate change (warmer waters and winds are primary factors in creating these storms). The hotter things are getting, the stronger these hurricanes are going to get.

In the meantime, I got paperwork to keep up with... while I keep the Weather Channel on the TV in the background. Good luck, citizens.

trump Wants to Do WHAT to Hurricanes???

We interrupt your regularly scheduled panic about trump's misrule for this important message.

trump thinks dropping/detonating nuclear weapons inside hurricanes is a good idea.

...

Okay, from me, neither an expert on radiation nor an expert on hurricanes (although I've lived through three of them now): ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR GODDAMN MIND?!

Even without looking at the evidence like the bit provided here by National Geographic, I know damn well a hurricane - usually the size of a big state or on some days the entire Gulf of Mexico - is too big to be affected by one nuke (or even several). Neither the shockwave of the blast nor the heat of an H-Bomb is gonna put a dent in Hurricane HolySh-tta. What you will get is the radioactive aftermath getting sucked up into the system and spread by both wind and water for hundreds of miles.

I'm not the only one stunned by the news:

They ended the Sharknado series too soon (wait, they used a bomb to end a sharknado I think in the first movie. Is that... is that where trump got the idea...?)

This goddamn nightmare can't end fast enough.

The Storms of September Stay With Us

Right about now, the outer bands of Hurricane Florence are covering the coastline of North Carolina.

If there's any good news at the moment, it's that the storm weakened on approach down from a Category 4 to a Cat 2.

The rest of the situation, of course, is a disaster for the East Coast.

It's not that Florence will be a monster storm with deadly winds, deadly floods, and deadly power outages.

It's that Florence is predicted to overstay its visit. Most times, these storms move past within a day, no more than two days, and pulls itself away from its source of energy - the oceans - to where it disappears over the land.

Florence will be different. The weather models are all predicting the hurricane will get stuck hovering over the middle of North Carolina - right along the South Carolina border, soaking both states - for three straight days. It could still feed off the Atlantic coast to retain its shape and strength as a Tropical Storm, meaning high winds preventing any repair jobs to downed electrical wires... and especially meaning constant rainfall that will get measured in feet not inches.

The context is last year's Harvey: a standard hurricane that slammed into Houston TX but then stayed put for days unleashing so much rain the entire city flooded. What had happened: Both the city and the state failed to observe natural flood zones, overdeveloping neighborhoods into places that would turn into rivers and lakes. A lot of these places built into wetlands or riversides, ignoring the need for water to flow away in case of massive rains. We paved over a lot of places with concrete and asphalt, preventing the ground from absorbing rain and forcing the water to flow in ways we didn't expect.

This is a horrifying reality of the last 30 years or so where the suburban expanse of metro areas did not plan well or outright ignored warnings. Developers are gonna develop, and state legislators across the country are usually more than happy to let rich developers build fancy big neighborhoods in the most scenic of places...

New Orleans was the first big warning. With Katrina in 2005, it wasn't the hurricane itself that was the killer, it was the aftermath of aged out levees breaking and flooding half the city that no longer had wetlands or canals to manage the overflow. They built into areas they shouldn't have built.

Harvey last year was the reminder: The city failed to build highways away from flood zones, allowing roads to turn into rivers trapping residents and delaying recovery efforts.

Florida is a constant threat to collapse. We're dealing with coastal cities facing flooding issues even without hurricanes blowing in. All it will take is one powerful hurricane to wash this all into the sea...

And yet, we're still not learning. We're still at the mercy of developers who want to keep putting up condos along our beaches, shopping malls in our wetlands, and highways connecting everything without care of how roads become rivers in a hurricane.

September is usually the worst month for hurricanes: while June-November is the schedule, September is where all the conditions for Atlantic-based storms are just right to cause these types of nerve-wracking nightmares. This is fast becoming a month of dread for the East Coast anymore.

Well, when the levee breaks...

P.S. and things might be tolerable if we had a government that knew what it was doing when handling these crises. But it's clear from trump's mismanagement of Puerto Rico relief - DEAR GOD what the HELL happened here? - that we're in for Katrina-style disasters for now.

Puerto Rico the Forgotten Scandal

June is traditionally the beginning every year of the hurricane season on the Atlantic coast.

And yet, we're still trying to recover from last year's season, especially with the horrific devastation in Puerto Rico. Months after getting shredded by Hurricane Maria, only now are we getting even an estimate on the costs of that disaster:

A new Harvard study estimates that at least 4,600 people in Puerto Rico have died from causes related to Hurricane Maria, a far larger number than the official government death toll of 64.

According to the new study, which was conducted by a group of independent researchers from Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, these deaths could often be attributed to delayed and limited health care in the aftermath of the storm, which shuttered several hospitals, crippled the power grid, knocked out cell service, and made many roads impassable...

It’s been eight months since the hurricane hit Puerto Rico, and the island still suffers from a damaged power grid, a short supply of clean water, and a dearth of other essential services. The stress from and effort to rebuild and recover after the storm also continues to put a strain on those suffering from medical conditions...

I can tell you on an anecdotal level I know someone who had family in Puerto Rico, and that person lost at least one loved one in the aftermath of Maria. Here in Florida, we've received thousands of fleeing Puerto Ricans who couldn't stay in their own homes because their homes were gone and the risks were growing worse by the day.

A lot of this can be placed at the foot of President Loser of the Popular Vote trump. Referring to Jamelle Bouie at Slate.com:

Puerto Ricans were still recovering from Hurricane Irma when Maria made landfall last autumn. The storm devastated the island, destroying homes and crippling vital infrastructure. The crisis that ensued demanded an immediate and robust response from the federal government. But the response was sluggish, even as early reports made clear that this was a serious tragedy in the making. The White House made few preparations in the lead-up to the storm, and it was weeks before the Federal Emergency Management Agency committed its full resources to the island. During that time, clean water was scarce, food was hard to find, and hospitals struggled to care for patients, some with serious injuries and illnesses. Most of Puerto Rico lacked electricity for months, and medical supplies were few and far between. When FEMA did eventually act, it dropped the ball. To deliver 30 million meals, the agency contracted with an Atlanta-based wedding caterer with no experience in emergency management. By the time the company’s contract was terminated, it had delivered just 50,000 of those meals...

Master chef Jose Andres - one opposed to trump on a personal level - did far more serving meals to Puerto Rico than our own government, on his own time and dime. Back to Bouie:

A faster, stronger response would have prevented some of those deaths. Even if the White House was unprepared when the storm initially hit, much of the aftermath could have been averted if President Trump had focused his administration on the disaster and brought the weight of the federal government to bear on the unfolding tragedy. Instead, Trump sent every signal that he simply didn’t care. He downplayed the devastation to Puerto Rico and blamed Puerto Ricans for not doing more to repair the damage. He went after the mayor of San Juan, who had criticized the government’s response. He didn’t use his Twitter account to publicize relief efforts or generally encourage Americans to help...

And as soon as FEMA and other government agencies could get out of Puerto Rico, they did, leaving behind little in the way of repaired cities and working utilities.

As much as this is a sin of the trump administration and a Republican Party unwilling to help anybody who's not in their circle of rich friends, this is a dark stain on our nation as a whole. Nobody else really wants to look at Puerto Rico and do anything about it:

Out of sight and out of mind. It's not really a state (even though it's a Territory our nation is responsible for), it's not really our citizens (despite the fact that YES Puerto Ricans ARE Americans), it's not really our families or children left to suffer (if this were Florida we'd be sending every emergency truck and crew we've got like we did responding to Hurricane Irma).

Of all the places most vulnerable to another hurricane this 2018, Puerto Rico tops the list. Far more likely than Florida or Georgia or South Carolina or Mississippi or Texas or Louisiana or Alabama or North Carolina or Maryland or Virginia or anywhere else along the East Coast.

And yet our government still won't lift a finger. Because we are not yelling at them every minute of the day to do anything about it.

What does that say about us, in the end?

We should be better than this, America.

For the 4,600 dead. For the thousands left alive, we need to do better by Puerto Rico and to our own.

Charity services are still up. Contact and help:

Unitarian Universalist Disaster Relief Fund

MariaFund.org

United For Puerto Rico

Jose Andres's World Central Kitchen

The Crisis

To say that the relief efforts for Puerto Rico after getting slammed by Category 5 hurricane Maria are going far too slow is an understatement.

Relief efforts that should have taken a day to begin took instead almost an entire week. Shipping supplies to the island was hampered by trump's refusal to exempt the Jones Act - necessary to allow cargo ships to deliver the bulk of needed goods - during the earliest days of this crisis. While there are military and FEMA response teams in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, they are too meager a presence compared to the scale of rescue and recovery required.

Compared to relief efforts for Houston (Harvey) and Florida (Irma), the response of the trump administration to Puerto Rico seems intentional negligence.

So, responding to all the harsh criticisms rising up as the national news outlets began covering Puerto Rico's recovery efforts, trump went and tweeted...

Basically accusing the Puerto Ricans of being lazy nobodies unwilling to save their own communities. Accusing Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz of partisanship, and accusing the "fake news" of established networks CNN and NBC of "disparaging the first responders" when those news channels are actually disparaging him.

And he's tweeting all this while going on yet another golfing weekend to one of his clubs. He's not on the ground, finding out first-hand how packed the hospitals and shelters are, how much damage needs to get picked up before any rebuilding can happen.

I lived through Irma as it smashed through Florida. I work in Bartow, and even with all of the emergency electrical crews and tree cutters helping out, this small town still has debris to pick up and parts of the surrounding county without power. And this is two weeks after that storm passed through. Try multiplying the damage and recovery of a small town with 20,000 to a large island with 3.5 million people, and then add onto that how Maria was more powerful than Irma.

There has long been this dread, ever since November 9th, of how a trump-led White House would respond to genuine crises. Up until now, most of the disasters of this trump Era have been self-inflicted. But now we're here: an honest to God national crisis of watching our territorial members Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands suffer through the aftermaths of a powerful hurricane season (which isn't over yet), and "trump goes golfing" replaces the "Nero fiddled while Rome burned" meme in the national consciousness.

The reports coming out now aren't good. There may be 16 confirmed deaths, but it is still far too early to know the final death toll because of the lack of power, food, clean water, and air conditioning. Hurricane Maria hit the entire island, and Puerto Rico has 3.5 million residents to account for.

Right now, this dog has done more for Puerto Rico than trump has.

It is clear trump does not care what is happening in Puerto Rico.

62 million of you voted for that.

God help us.

Aid to Puerto Rico

If trump is too busy to tweet about Puerto Rico's financial woes before the hurricanes hit, the rest of us might actually try to do something about HELPING OUR FELLOW AMERICANS (yes, Puerto Ricans are citizens ever since 1917):

Charity Navigator

Florida Association for Volunteer Action in the Caribbean and the Americas

All Hands Volunteers

ShelterBox USA

Unitarian Disaster Relief

United for Puerto Rico

National Voluntary Organizations Active In Disasters (supplies)


Do take the time to make sure the charities you're donating to are legitimate and have a history of helping out.

I Survived Hurricane Irma With This Realization

Either we need to upgrade our electrical grid so that we NEVER lose power in any community; or we push our engineering industry to develop a durable, reliable solar-powered air conditioning system that will keep us Floridians chill while we recover from passing storms.

The woman who invents that solar-powered air conditioner becomes a GODDESS in the state of Florida, I kid you not.

Hurricane Irma Report Sunday September 10 2017

The winds are here now. It's been raining since 10 AM. The streets aren't flooded but there's still hours more for rain to fall.

This may be my last blog update. Irma's eye is aimed for Tampa Bay and I will be in that path. I just want to say one last thing.

I hope the Southernmost Shed in Key West survived.

Wait, also, one more thing. Impeach trump.

And I hope Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a good movie. I hate to miss it.

And Thor: Ragnarok! I don't wanna miss that either!

And Hugh Jackman should get nominated for an Oscar for his final role as Logan. Also Sir Patrick Stewart for Best Supporting. And Robin Wright for her supporting role in Wonder Woman.

I don't want to go.

Looking For Cover With an Oncoming Storm

I mentioned in an earlier post I was looking at a hurricane hitting Florida by the end of this week.

Well, it's still coming: say Hello to Hurricane Irma!

It's the most powerful hurricane to come along (I think) since Andrew. It's currently at a Category 5 (there is no 6) and at power and size that hasn't been seen in years.

It's already wiped out Barbuda in the Leeward Islands.

That video is a clip of Irma's winds hitting Puerto Rico. It's currently at 180 MPH (sustained). By comparison, the hurricanes I sat through while living in Gainesville FL in 2004 - Charley and Frances - had 150 MPH and 145 MPH winds. The winds can be lethal: They blow buildings and forests apart and then turn the debris into weapons. Granted, by the time Irma hits Florida it could downgrade to a Category 4 at lesser winds, but the way things are going

I have two options: get in a car with my kittehs and drive out of the path of the storm, or hunker down and wait it out. I've got enough food and water for now to wait it out, but if it stays at Cat 5 when it hits Miami, I might consider getting the hell out of Polk County.

We're already looking at the damages and lives lost from Harvey over in Texas. We're now facing something worse here in Florida.

And there's another hurricane - Hi, Jose! - in Irma's wake.

Just saying here: it's not that climate change makes more hurricanes, it's that the climate change makes these hurricanes more dangerous...

The Friday Night Trumpster Fire

Fridays at 5:00 has turned into the Infodump Hour in American politics. Government agencies or officials would just throw out there some scandalous tidbit or perform a questionable act before rushing off to hide until Monday. Let's be honest, most people just shut their brains down for the weekend and when they have to go back to work they'll get distracted by something else.

This particular Friday August 25th was noteworthy because that day the Texas coastline was getting slammed by Hurricane Harvey, a Cat 4 storm that promised to linger over the eastern half of the state for the entire weekend, which anyone with any experience with storms will tell you was going to cause massive floods, serious damage, and loss of life.

So what does Loser of the Popular Vote trump do before he heads out for yet another golf holiday?

he drops the mother of all Infodumps, with the knowledge that most of America is going to be focused on the Texan catastrophe.

• trump issued an executive ban on transgender troops in the military, causing untold havoc. he's intentionally kicking out those who would WILLINGLY SERVE THIS NATION WITH HONOR all to placate the religious wingnuts who can't handle gender identities. This also underscores how trump - who begged out of the Vietnam War and got a deferment for bone spurs no one has ever verified - is a goddamn gutless coward not fit to lick a transperson's marching boots.
• Just after that, trump pardoned convicted ex-sheriff Joe Apraio, who was facing six months for ignoring federal court orders trying to stop him from violating Hispanic Americans' rights.

The transgender ban will likely get delayed: organizations like the ACLU are already heading to courts to stop it. The most shameful and horrifying act was the pardoning of Arpaio, for two key reasons. First, referring to guest columnist Charles Kaiser at the Moderate Voice:

Here is the most logical way to view his pardon of Sheriff Arpaio: It is the latest and gravest step he has taken in his continuing efforts to undermine the rule of law. Obviously Trump delighted in fueling the racism of Arpaio’s supporters by pardoning this convicted criminal — he made that clear earlier this week during his repellent speech in Phoenix. But I am certain that is not the main reason for this heinous act.

For many weeks, Washington has been swirling with rumors that Mueller already has secured the cooperation of Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort in his investigation of the president. And Trump undoubtedly is more vulnerable to the testimony of these two men than he is to that of any other players in this fearful drama. Therefore, Trump must feel compelled to send this message through Arpaio’s pardon: The president is eager and willing to do the same thing for anyone who might be pressured into testifying against him...

Second point: Arpaio is one of the worst persons in American history in terms of his racist and criminal misdeeds as a county sheriff in Arizona. How bad was he?

The Phoenix New Times ran a list. It's horrifying:

• He ran his prisons like concentration camps... and bragged how he did so.
• He left prisoners out in the Arizona heat, or stuffed into cells without air conditioning.
• He would publicly humiliate prisoners beyond anything the Eighth Amendment allowed.
• An alarming number of hanging deaths - suicides? staged? - happened in his jail cells.
• Female prisoners are denied access to medical care, to the point where pregnant prisoners lost their babies.
• He obsessed over arresting Latinos to where even bystanders at crime scenes would get rounded up.
• His department routinely under-investigated other crimes such as rape while he posed on the national stage over his anti-immigrant acts.
• He oversaw a department of like-minded sadists. How else to describe what the hell they did to a poor dog?! JESUS...

THIS was the piece of shit trump pardoned. This is a guy who gives John Chivington a run for Worst American Ever. And trump pardons him to appease the hater base.

Because as a like-minded bully, trump didn't see anything Arpaio did as wrong. Because trump wants to do exactly those things to everyone of his own critics and targets.

So that was what happened Friday night.

As for the weekend?

Everyone's pissed about Arpaio. Everyone's horrified by the mass flooding that's wiping out Houston. trump is busy bragging about a book getting published by one of his sadistic buddies.

We are so royally fucked, America.

Helping Haiti

I'm gonna try to end this day on a positive note:

Trying to get aid sent to Haiti. That poor country has been devastated by Hurricane Matthew, and still hasn't fully recovered from their earthquake and other natural disasters over the decades...

United Way has a charity going you can contribute to if you want. Operation Helping Hands. Thank you.

Couldn't Stand the Weather

So here I am facing the oncoming storm of Hurricane Matthew, hunkering down while my library closes tomorrow with hope that the damage in central Florida is minimal and that things will be normal by Saturday.

And here's Rude Pundit yelling and screaming because Matt Drudge - one of the founding members of the Far Right Noise Machine from the 1990s - is being an idiot about hurricanes:

Because, see, in his Twitter feed and on his website of the godforsaken, Drudge has said that the National Hurricane Center is hyping Matthew and lying about wind speed because they want to "make exaggerated point on climate" change. He has also declared that the winds in Haiti weren't as intense as reported so we shouldn't be as worried because, apparently, meteorologists get off on gridlock and panicked people, I guess...

Drudge's original Tweet:

Here's what Drudge is selling. The Far Right has long accused the scientists pushing a political agenda - a Communist-inspired New-World-Order - to hurt our energy producers by going after the negative effects carbon-based pollution has on our global climate. Rather than accept the slight possibility that 98 percent of scientists who study and research this stuff are actually freaking out that our planet is artificially heating up into a civilization-ending extinction-level event, the media elites of the Far Right alongside the Republican party leadership try to convince enough people that global warming is a myth and that every warning of environmental disaster is exaggerated or worse.

The reason there's a controversy over Climate Change is because the Far Right WANTS the controversy. Any settled acceptance of this fact would destroy one of the key elements of their precious Conservative Narrative.

Ergo, the strength and destructiveness of hurricanes has to be downplayed or mocked: Any proof that the weather is becoming more extreme due to the temperature shifts would ruin the Far Right wingnuts.

Apparently, the Weather Channel is now part of the Vast Liberal Conspiracy alongside NASA, NOAA, Al Gore, and pretty much anybody with a degree in Meteorology, Environmental Sciences, or (insert most college degrees here).

Worse, we got idiots claiming Obama controls the weather.

NO, YOU MORONS, THAT WAS DESTRO. /headdesk

In the meantime, if Drudge questions the strength of Hurricane Matthew, he's more than welcome to head out to West Palm Beach and stand on US A1A along the beaches and measure that storm surge himself. See what results he gets.