This blog post is a long ramble, but I want to get this stuff off my chest. I realize most people don’t follow the news as closely as I do, but I’ve been analyzing the Dem spin information war closely since 1999.
I heard a crazy story at the grocery store the other day, from the lady in front of me in line at the check-out. She told me that this past week, when the power was out in a nearby town, there was a confrontation at a gas station where a customer pulled a gun fighting over ice. One of my sons told me there were stories like that in Augusta too and he said the Walmart had a security person by the ice. I never thought about people going berserk over ice, but when the power’s out and you aren’t prepared to keep you fridge and freezer going, ice might become a precious commodity. Civil order can degrade quickly – that’s something we should all understand.
Most people aren’t even minimally prepared for emergencies and there are way more people with learned helplessness, who expect other people to save them, than people with a self-reliant mind-set. Watching this hurricane Helene disaster, made me think of a blog post I wrote in 2012, Survival: The Mind-Set. I’ve been committed to preparedness since I was a Girl Scout, as a kid, but I avoided the term “prepper.” In 2012 I wrote:
“Reality TV garbage, like Doomsday Preppers and the fixation on extreme survival skills, like Bear Grylls, marginalize the seriousness of learning practical steps to take to be prepared. In fact, stockpiling and building a fortress probably won’t increase your odds of survival anyway. The surest way to survive lies in building that team, where individual strengths and skills can lead to innovation, creative-brainstorming and more ideas on how to tackle our problems, even in the most dire situation. If you are stranded by rising water, calling Washington won’t help you, but calling your neighbors, who can pool resources sure might.”
The first responders are almost always going to be your neighbors and local officials, like your police and fire department, but in a massive disaster, like with the flooding in NC and TN, we should expect a prompt state and federal government response. The people in TN & NC are shining examples of neighbor helping neighbor in this disaster. They should be very proud of their people, who often get ridiculed as backward hicks from Appalachia. I grew up in rural PA, in the mountains, that are part of the Appalachian Mountain range and close to the Appalachian Trail. I understand how backwoods people get treated.
There’s plenty of time to do a post mortem on FEMA and problems with this disaster response and that should happen, so that problems can be addressed and better policies and procedures implemented.
Every American watching this on the news should be motivated to start taking practical steps to become better prepared for emergencies, learn more skills, and even if you’ve been committed to personal preparedness for a long time, it’s time to go assess your supplies, skills, and look for gaps in your preparedness plans and supplies. I have a list of things I want to do better or stock up on.
Elon Musk’s Starlink has been mentioned repeatedly as a lifesaver for communications in a disaster. Donald Trump wasn’t the only one who didn’t know anything about it. I had heard about it, but not being interested in technology, it wasn’t something I learned anything about, so I googled it. One of my sisters told me buying a Starlink kit might be a good thing to have and I think so too. These are the kinds of things I’m reassessing.
Sure, I’m disgusted with the Biden administration and yes, I do believe they were very slow to respond – Biden was on the beach and Kamala was at a big fundraiser in San Francisco last weekend, they weren’t concerned about the hurricane at all. Fort Bragg in NC and Fort Campbell in TN weren’t called in until a week after the storm. They were awaiting orders. Now, it’s all about how to spin it for damage control, but I am trying to leave my anger and disgust aside and trying to focus on positive things.
One of my sisters messaged me that she has attended two FEMA emergency communications webinars with her civilian job. She’s retired from the Air Force and worked in Public Affairs at the Pentagon years ago. She was lamenting that she thinks we aren’t as prepared as we were more than a decade ago and she expressed disgust at the DEI focus in her FEMA webinar training. She said the one before hurricane Helene focused mostly on climate change and pushed out a concept of Radical Collaboration, whatever the heck that means. She said they talked at length about stakeholders in shared spaces. And this is a direct quote from my sister, “It was all bullshit from a practical standpoint. It seems FEMA is mostly absent from meeting Helene victims in their shared spaces.” She also told me FEMA’s top communications person worked in campaigns for various high-level officials her whole career and has no practical experience in disaster response. She said they knew Helene was coming & the focus was on climate change, not disaster response.
I believe my sister is telling the truth about this FEMA webinar and I think most Americans watching this on the news or online know something is very, very wrong with this hurricane response and in this WH.
Dems and their liberal media allies are going to gaslight us any way they can to win this election. Today, some liberal media flacks were back on hyping signs of Trump’s cognitive decline and at the same time Axios has a piece out:
It’s totally insane. We have no information on the two men who tried to assassinate former President Trump. We have no answers on what condition President Biden really has, despite the almost dozen visits of a Walter Reed Parkinson’s specialist to his WH physician since January. The media just breezes past all of this. It was only a week before the hurricane, when Biden held his first full cabinet meeting in almost a year, and he turned it over to Jill to run, but now Kamala is vouching for Biden’s mental fitness. Only a few months ago Dems & liberal media claimed Biden was so impaired that he needed to step aside and let Kamala become the candidate. Trump does lie a lot, but he’s got nothing on Dems and liberal media with their non-stop gaslighting.
These people are recklessly endangering all of our lives with this charade – all for power and control. We have a seriously cognitive-impaired POTUS and CINC.
Finally, because she never goes away, Hillary did an interview and she’s angry that if they can’t force X to censor speech, they will lose total control of social media:
It’s amazing that so many Americans are now talking about how free speech is under attack and alarm about these Dem efforts at censorship, like it’s something that’s new and alarming that Dems are trying to control information in America. For years I’ve felt like a lone voice in the wilderness, as I tried to explain the 1990s Clinton spin information war, which expanded to the Dem spin information war. This isn’t some sudden new plan – they have been working on this since the 1990s. Most of the media in America, Hollywood, social media (except for X), and Silicon Valley tech giants are all big players in the Dem spin war This cabal of elites is the most corrupt, political machine in American history and they’re determined to control information and to not let Trump get in the way of their “total control.”
I don’t care for Trump and have loads of very anti-Trump posts on my blog, Almost every time Trump speaks he blurts out something that offends me or hits me wrong, but at the same time I sympathize with him. He’s also been right about many issues and his administration implemented many policies I support.
Trump is the #1 target of the Dem political machine, which will do anything to, not just defeat him in this election, they are trying to destroy him financially and use lawfare to send him to prison. I don’t know if the two assassination attempts are connected, random crazies, a foreign plot, or some nefarious plot by domestic political enemies. All I can say is I do know how far the Clinton machine went to silence a nobody homemaker (me), when I got in the way of their spin effort on a popular online political message board, during the Clinton impeachment. Trump poses a much, much larger threat to their power. I’ll be amazed if he survives to election day, but if he wins it will only get crazier.
I do not believe Dems will peacefully transfer power.
The wheels are coming off the American bus.
I hate to sound alarmist, but we are not living in normal times. Last week, with most of the southeast US reeling from severe hurricane damage, a thug union boss announced a strike of port workers along the entire east coast and all the way to Texas. The secretary of commerce, Gina Raimondo, was asked about this potential strike the day before and she said she hasn’t been very focused on that. She had no clue about the impact a major port strike would have on hurricane disaster recovery? The Biden crew don’t have a clue how to think ahead, piece information together to identify potential threats, and certainly no ability to prepare ahead of time.
There was also a large Verizon service outage and then a Bank of America outage, while over a million people in the southeast were still without power.
It wasn’t Biden or Kamala who put pressure on the thug union boss, who said he would shut down the economy to get what he wanted. It was governor Ron DeSantis, in FL, who stood up to that thug:
Hours later the union delayed their strike until January and Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, tried to take credit for negotiating this settlement, but it was DeSantis who really called that thug’s bluff.
There’s another hurricane approaching FL this week.
Things seem very uncertain these days, so we should all put some time into becoming better prepared – this isn’t something to procrastinate about. Just do the best you can and if you need inspiration, just look at the people in TN and NC, who just loaded up whatever supplies they could muster to help their fellow citizens in trouble. That organic emergency response is very heartening.
The spirit of America is still alive across our great land, even if it’s dead in Washington.
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