By Robert Willmann
After growing up on the coast and spending time there, I have personal knowledge about hurricanes. My parents built their house to withstand hurricanes, and stayed during the vicious Hurricane Carla in 1961, which had wind gusts over 200 miles per hour. As little kids, we thought it was exciting, with kerosene lamps, candles, and relatives staying with us. But the adults were keeping a careful watch. After it was over, in other parts of the county, shrimp boats and butane and propane tanks had been blown quite a distance inland. Some houses were completely gone, except where a sink or commode had been fastened to a concrete slab.
In more recent years, an annoying practice began of quoting the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Radio, television, and print articles constantly referred to Category 1, Category 3, Cat 5, or Category 4. Or, “Will it be a Category 2?” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) started saying the same thing. This told the people nothing.
In order to make decisions, the public needs to know five things: 1) The wind speed in the hurricane; 2) Where the hurricane is located and its relation to a land mass; 3) How fast it is moving; 4) How wide it is, or its diameter; and 5) How high the water line might get at the shoreline, also called a storm surge.
Rain comes with a hurricane, but the issue of flooding is known throughout the year.
The Saffir-Simpson scale divided up hurricanes according to how much damage they might cause. But any damage depends on how buildings and infrastructure are built and maintained.
“Emergency management” is done by family, friends, church, your associates, and the community. Before the recent storm Beryl on the Texas coast, I called a friend who was also going to stay and offered to let the family use an electric generator, but they had one. As it turned out, the electricity in the area did not even go out for a second, mainly because the company is attentive and responsive. Beryl was not a real powerful storm at all, but in the Houston area, an electricity company, which makes millions of dollars a month and is on the public stock exchange, did not spend some of that money to maintain the electrical lines and trim back tree limbs, but instead kept it. That resulted in a scandalous outage of electricity in Houston.
Whether you decide to stay during a hurricane or leave, your family, friends, church, and associates can and almost certainly will help before and after. You and they are the “first responders”. Not the Sheriff or police department. And definitely not the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
As of around noon eastern time, Hurricane Milton is about 150 miles away from Fort Myers, Florida and about 175 miles away from Tampa. It is moving at about 17 miles per hour, which is not slow.
The virulently antisemitic material prevalent on Elon Musk’s X is off the charts.
(Freeze Peach!)
In particular it’s instrumentalisation in the Hurricane emergencies. In excerpt 3 below these same critics acknowledge the profound social devastation of Biden and Harris’s priorities. Fortunately it appears that Uncle Miltie has chosen to return to his present duties of making the immensely powerful Sky-Volcano and lately Exploding-Pager Deity return to his humble role as a parental-projection of the terrors of infancy and childhood. Good luck Uncle Miltie!
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Fascist antisemitism rears its head in hurricane disinformation campaign.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/10/10/tqmq-o10.html
Excerpt 1:
The role of X, formerly Twitter, is critical. X owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest billionaire, is a leading supporter of fascist Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, appearing with him on stage last week at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. When he gained control of Twitter in 2022, Musk reinstated hundreds of fascists and antisemites whose accounts had been suspended for spreading hate propaganda. Among these were many of those cited in the ISD report, as well as the account of fascist Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In the wake of Helene, Greene has publicly tweeted that the hurricane was deliberately aimed to strike heavily Republican areas of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina by scientists working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the DHS, in order to depress voter turnout in next month’s presidential election. Notorious for suggesting in 2018 that “Jewish space lasers” were causing wildfires in California, Greene wrote last week on X, “Yes they can control the weather,” going on to claim that anyone who denied the ability of the government to control the weather was part of the conspiracy.
The antisemitic content of the latest barrage of right-wing propaganda is not subtle. One viral post listed DHS and FEMA officials who are Jewish, claiming, “No wonder FEMA is so slow to help rural White Americans!” Another statement cited by the ISD reads: “So DHS is just basically a talmudic patronage club mostly replacing Whites with infinity browns when they bother to do anything competently at all,” accompanied by an image of Adolf Hitler’s face.
Excerpt 2:
It is therefore remarkable and revealing that when Biden, Harris and other top officials held a press briefing on Hurricane Milton on Wednesday, they denounced Trump and other Republicans for spreading conspiracy theories about how aid was being distributed after Hurricane Helene, as well as Greene’s demented ravings about weather control, but made no mention of antisemitism.
For an entire year, the Biden administration, congressional Republicans and Democrats and the corporate media have joined forces in a bipartisan campaign to depict widespread protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza as “antisemitic.” It has become the ideological spearhead of a McCarthyite campaign to witch-hunt and intimidate students, professors and anyone else outraged by the mass murder of Palestinians. This charge is entirely slanderous and provocative, especially given the widespread Jewish participation in the anti-genocide protests.
But confronted with real, actual, brutal antisemitism, complete with crude references to “big noses” and other anti-Jewish tropes typical of the neo-Nazi right, Biden and Harris say nothing—even when their own aides and officials are the targets.
This demonstrates, once again, that the principal concern of the Biden-Harris administration is the stepped up prosecution of its war policies, against Russia in Ukraine, against Iran in the Middle East and ultimately against China. The Democrats have reserved the charge of antisemitism to smear opponents of these imperialist wars and thus effectively deprived the concept of any genuine political content.
Excerpt 3:
Millions trapped in the path of catastrophes like Helene and Milton, experiencing sudden and massive deprivation, losing their homes and possessions even if they manage to survive, can see the disparity between the social need and the aid provided by the state and federal governments. They can see the obvious indifference of top government officials—presidents, governors, cabinet members—as they pour billions into war and corporate subsidies, while offering a pittance for those devastated by the storms. The fascists offer a scapegoat for this social devastation, and Trump seeks to exploit the crisis to return to the White House.
fart lingus it’s the cunni man! 😛
nah it is all just missing infomation.
elon musk would never allow misinfomation on x.com.south africans just do not do that sort of thing.
Thanks I forgot.
Just one of several African oligarchs.
We came through rather well. There is some minor damage and a lot of cleaning up to do. I was up most of the night and took a few rounds around the house to watch for any damage. The level in our canal went up about 3 feet and is slowly coming down. I do not see any boats in distress and only one tree down in the neighborhood. Gratefully the storm moved across at a fairly good speed, which helps. We never lost power, but it flickered a few times which knocked out the WiFi. Of course the TV crews were as usual rather alarmist. I recently played golf with a TV weatherman and asked him about that language and he said it started with the Weather Channel and they all are urged by management and consultants to “pump’ up coverage. I can agree that we could get a better rating system, but it will be hard to get one size that fits all. I live on a barrier island and it is different that inland. But frequently inland get more flooding that causes more damage and flood insurance is rare there. The good thing about weather is that there is a plethora of data available, so maybe somebody can come up with a better system.
Lars,
Glad you came through it okay. The prognostications when the storm was still young and around Yucatan was that it would intensify to a cat 5 and diminish to a cat 3 when it hit land near Tampa and quickly go down to a cat 1 or tropical storm by the time it reached you. There was a lot of cat 6/armageddon talk in the meantime, but the original prediction seems to have been fairly accurate.
It was actually better than the forecast. It seemed that the storm lost power when crossing Florida. I was awake and waiting for the winds to increase and instead they went down some.
Lars
Funny you should mention.a woman on x tweeted the same thing.had a pic for proof.but then she said God was protecting them and collapsed the winds from the hurricaneNot sure what to make of that.
Is that what you observed or is it to be filed under S for “shit happens”
mcohen,
The NOAA meteorologists predicted the same thing when the hurricane was far from shore. It would strengthen to a cat 4 or 5 but would weaken to a cat 3 as it hits land due to wind shear. It’s a common weather phenomenon. By making landfall south of Tampa, it caused water to be sucked out of Tampa Bay because of the wind rotation. I guess you could attribute it to God. It was a natural phenomena, certainly not in man’s hands. The worst case was avoided, but it was still pretty bad.
TTG,
Yes. That’s why I said 50/50 it fizzles out and/or changes its path. I looked at the original science concerning Milton.
We have all seen media hype and human panic psychology overcome the science before. The global warming angle adds a political and, almost, religious dimension to the foolishness. Then, in the midst of the next, “crisis!!!!” we forget our experience.
The Houston electrical company should have maintained the trees better but it would not have helped much. I live in the main area that was hit. It’s an old area with massive trees. It’s not typical tree trimming and the trees are everywhere. Most people have 10-20 of these large trees in their yards. No tree trimming is going to help that situation.
On the community networking absolutely. I loaned an elderly neighbor a generator and maintained it for the 11 days the power was out. My other neighbor would go on fuel runs and take my cans. Others were helping get trees out of roads and off houses. Food and water were not an issue because everyone knows the drill around here which is always have supplies and fuel on hand.
Hurricane Kamala Blows Herself …….. Off Course.
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Did CBS edit their 60 Minutes sit-down interview with Kamala Harris? • FRANCE 24
https://youtu.be/71MescuXnwo
CBS News is facing heavy backlash after being accused of conducting a grotesque edit on Kamala Harris’s ‘lengthy’ response to a question on Israel, in the interview that the network aired on October 7. Critics say that CBS did this in order to portray Harris in a more favorable light. We explain in this edition of Truth or Fake.
I briefly observed the interview from a safe distance and the words that came to my mind were “not ready” for the presidency.Even with the pedigreed backing vocals.
At least the orange man has some experience to go with his biffon
mcohen —
You’re not the only one who reached that conclusion re KH. Tis a crying shame, a pity, a travesty and much else. Biden gave the Orange Man everything he requested regarding air cover and other prophylaxis at Mar a Lago minus an F-15 or so. Which has led some folks with advanced degrees in tea-leaf reading to conclude that it’s already a done deal, because “as everyone knows” the results of our presidential elections are known to insiders a year in advance. If so, some “folks” in Iran better be stocking up on iodine pills and ultra-heavy duty suntan lotions found in the “Better Lead (Pb) than Dead” aisles.
Hold on mcohen — some good news finally. Sky News is bankrupt!
We need to start throwing things away at a higher level Saphir-Simpson Scale.
The first 4 minutes at the link says it all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2aoff-SMQE
Greetings Eric,
The brightest comet of the 21st century will pass close to Earth on October 13.
The comet will appear very brightly in the sky and will be visible to the naked eye.
And because of Shabbat, that’s the first opportune date for “our” favorite:
A) Morons
B) Just regular guys and gals
C) Astounding geniuses
To launch an attack on the Shiite bearded and sandaled ones of notoriety (and feeding human corpses to vultures once upon a time).
It is, Eric, as you rightly often say:
All Good.
F&L,
Everything is always all good because it is all God’s will – even the pain and death.
The earth plane is the only one where good and evil can interact as they are separated by spiritual barriers in non-physical world. This is the battle field. The test environment. The opportunity to grow, learn and prove. The anger and the hate are as much a part of it as the love and compassion. We can’t understand hate until we hate. The hater should not be condemned for hating. We cannot understand love until we love and are loved, but it is possible to love wrong – and that should not be condemned either. Everything must become wise and balanced though experience.
A little hurricane
https://capitalresearch.org/article/marching-toward-violence-the-domestic-anti-israeli-protest-movement/
Milton tore up the barrier islands as expected. Wind damage at other areas nearby and flooding in Tampa too. My place appears unaffected according to friend’s reports. Moved up to Savanah (work) lots of impolite hotel staffing reverse price discounts. I won’t be staying in a Hampton ever again. On a bright note dog grooming 1 mile down the road. Half of what I usually pay too.
Traffic report from the 10th: in the 1.4 hours from St Mary’s to Savanah i saw 150 bucket trucks and 45+ more from Aspluhnd (tree trimming) heading South.
Fred –
Half those tree trimmers are Guatemalans. Hard workers.
Leith,
Nice bait. Certainly not disinformation. I really appreciate how a retiree out west can have some believe he can access the hr records of a tree trimming company so easily and thereby determine the nationality of people driving trucks painted orange.