#fox-news/us/disasters/disaster-response

[reasonsforhope]

The loss of life and impact on the communities in Helene’s path is unfathomable — and both the immediate and long-term needs are vast. 

If you’re reading this, it’s likely because you want to help and care about making a difference for those who’ve been impacted by Hurricane Helene.

You’re in the right place. When we see tragedy like this happen in the news, it’s important to not tune it out. Instead, pay attention and truly feel the heartbreak of it — t​​hen, look for and be inspired by the people stepping in to help, and use that energy to make a difference ourselves.

Looking for the helpers

Instead of turning away from tragic events like the devastation from Hurricane Helene — we look closer for people stepping in using what they have, where they are, to make a difference for others.

Inspired by Mister Rogers’ famous quote, we call them the “helpers,” — and they’re usually found wherever there’s bad news in the world. Hurricane Helene is no different. Here are some people, businesses, and organizations helping right now:

Chef José Andrés and ​World Central Kitchen teams are serving thousands of meals to communities in need — from Mexico, and the Big Bend of Florida, and into Appalachia.

Volunteer pilots with the Port City Aviators Flying Club are flying supplies to storm victims in western North Carolina.

The national Disaster Distress Helpline is providing free multilingual crisis counseling to those in need.

Southern Smoke Foundation, an organization that supports food & beverage workers in crisis, is providing financial support for groceries, medical bills, lost wages, and more.

Volunteers with veteran-led disaster response organization Team Rubicon are on the ground in Greenwood, South Carolina clearing roads of trees and debris.

A local library branch in Asheville, North Carolina served as a hub for community members in need of internet service.

Workers at Waffle House were “unlikely heroes” providing food to people in need.

A local Fox News correspondent stopped his live broadcast to help rescue a woman trapped in her car in rising floodwaters.

Emergency response teams rescued more than 50 staff, patients, and caregivers from the roof of a hospital in Erwin, Tennessee.

The SPCA of Brevard rescued 20 animals from Hurricane Helene’s path — and it’s now helping them get adopted.

‍

How to make a difference

After we’ve allowed ourselves to feel the weight of the pain and heartbreak associated with bad news, and look for hope and helpers in the midst of it — we always have the opportunity to join in and make a difference, too. 

Here are some ways to help — whether you’re local or far away:

Donate to national organizations 

Here are just a few large-scale organizations that have helpers on the ground in the region.

American Red Cross

World Central Kitchen

Feeding America

United Way

Salvation Army

CARE

Donate to local organizations

Local organizations, recovery funds, and mutual aid groups have been deployed across the states impacted by Helene. Find donation links and updates below:

All States:

GoFundMe Hub for Hurricane Helene Relief

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

Southeast Climate & Energy Network

Convoy of Hope

Appalachia Funders Network

Americares

Organizing Resilience

The National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster

Tennessee:

East Tennessee Foundation

First Aid Collective Knoxville

RISE Erwin

Second Harvest Food Bank of East Tennessee

North Carolina:

North Carolina Community Foundation

Hearts With Hands

Manna Foodbank

BeLoved Asheville

Foothills Food Hub

Haywood Christian Ministry

Samaritan’s Purse

Forsyth Humane Society

Hope Mill

‍

Volunteer locally

Organizations in the affected area are seeking volunteers to help distribute resources and support crucial aid efforts. While many of us are not local to the region, those who are nearby are encouraged to join in a myriad of volunteer opportunities.

(Note: If you aren't in the area, the best way you can help is by supporting local efforts with a donation. Keeping roads clear for rescue crews and local relief agents is vital in maintaining safety in these already devastated regions).

For local volunteers, check out:

World Central Kitchen

Operation BBQ Relief

Marco Patriots

Operation Airdrop

Baptists on Mission

‍

Contact your elected officials and ask them to take climate action

Climate scientists agree, the intensity and extent of the devastation brought by Hurricane Helene was made worse by climate change. 

While we can’t go back in time and burn less fossil fuels — we can make a difference now to secure a safer future and prevent future climate disasters. 

In addition to talking about how this disaster is connected to climate change in our own conversations and holding media outlets accountable for how they talk about climate change — this is a great time to tell your elected officials that you want them to take meaningful climate action.

We’re making incredible progress in the U.S. and globally in reducing emissions, but we need to work even faster — and incorporate climate mitigation efforts into our plans — to limit the most severe impacts of global warming.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?

An exhausted Bradley Boone, the assistant Fire Chief at Pensacola, took to Facebook on Saturday. As his community was recovering from Hurricane Helene he asked viewers for help. Not with aid or supplies. They had plenty of that for now. But to dispel the rumors that were making it harder for him to do his job. These rumors include that 150 people were missing, that the community was overrun with violence, that there were not sufficient food and water, that roads which were in reality in need of repair were being shut to limit the flow of help, and that FEMA was unwelcome. He said he had spent a large chunk of his day talking to citizens face-to-face to dispel the rumors. Boone is an example of how emergency responders have become one more category of public service worker who have discovered that they now have a second job they did not sign up for. Alongside librarians, teachers, public health officials, election officials, and law enforcement, emergency responders must now also be misinformation experts. They have to spend their days separating facts from reality for constituents who are being lied to via right-wing conspiracy theorists. FEMA set up a website to battle misinformation. Some of it comes from the usual suspects, like foreign adversaries such as Russia, seeking to sow mistrust, or professional conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones. But many of the lies (that FEMA is only offering $750 to disaster victims, running out of money, that FEMA money has gone overseas) comes directly from the people who could be in charge of the national disaster response next year.

JD Vance, Trump, and Fox News are key conveyers of the $750 lie. ($750 is intended to cover up-front costs, but citizens can apply for tens of thousands of dollars more in relief for property damage).

Trump said that Biden refused to talk to the Governor of Georgia, part of a pattern of discriminating against red states. But earlier in the day, Governor Kemp described the conversation he had with Biden the day before, and praised Biden’s support: “He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly, which — I appreciate that. But we’ve had FEMA embedded with us since a day or two before the storm hit in our state operations center in Atlanta; we’ve got a great relationship with them.” Other Republican leaders have issued similar praise of the responsiveness of the administration.

Trump: “They 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.” Yeah, this is also untrue. But fun fact: Trump raided the FEMA budget to redirect money towards his immigration policies, including building a wall.

The misinformation, and much worse, is coursing through social media because much of social media has given up on policing lies, and some social media (e.g., Truth Social, Elon Musk’s X) see a strategic advantage in lying about the disaster. This false post from Elon Musk was viewed 28 million times. No community notes.

[...] We could be angry here about the hypocrisy. Trump says Biden does not want to deliver disaster aid to Republicans. Biden not wanting to visibly help swing states like Georgia and North Carolina, right before an election, doesn’t make much sense. But it fits with Trump’s own attitudes about disaster response. Multiple Trump aides say he was reluctant to allow FEMA support go to blue states. “One of his first questions would be: Are they my people?” according to a former aide, Stephanie Grisham.

But setting aside the hypocrisy, we should care because conspiracy theories affect the competence and quality of service delivery. I used to do research on disaster response. One thing that was clear is how important it is to have a functional national crisis response agency, and how dependent the response is on human factors. FEMA itself is not a large organization: it organizes and relies on a broader network of responders, and on the trust of the public. Take that trust away, and their ability to help people collapses. Competence really matters for disaster response like few other government functions. You can't bluff your way through it. You can’t learn the job as you go along. Mistakes are costly. Musk’s Cybertruck is on its fifth recall in the space of a year, while the boss spends his day on social media. His status as a natural disaster schmuck emerged when he promised to rescue a group of kids in Thailand stranded in a cave with a tiny submarine. When a cave diver who advised the successful rescue mocked the impracticality of Musk’s plan, Musk labeled him a pedophile, and hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on him.

[...] There is a basic asymmetry here. Democrats would certainly attack missteps by a GOP President failing in disaster response. The failure of Hurricane Katrina marked a key point in the decline of President Bush’s popularity. Trump was criticized for his sluggish response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and for pushing his appointees to violate scientific and ethical guidelines when releasing public information about the path of hurricanes to align with his Sharpie additions to a map. But that criticism was grounded in reality. Instead, the GOP simply turns to conspiracy theories rather than engaging in troublesome facts. More climate-driven disasters are coming. This is the future. Trump won’t acknowledge or prepare for this reality. Indeed, Project 2025 has proposed that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should be “broken up and downsized” because it is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

Another top notch post from Don Moynihan, this time addressing the hydra of lies and conspiracy theories about FEMA and the response to Hurricane Helene (and Milton).

[jymwahuwu]

alani, what if the reader who wants to be one of the sages dream (to be a sage) was rekindled by old classmate of y/n who visited them after they never met. that old classmate heard y/n's location from the researchers that came back from avidya forest and yes, the old classmate went there seeing y/n's and tighnari babies. however when tighnari went to forest while eating with the old classmate, the old classmate told y/n that they can continue studying while they're taking care of a baby. y/n was encouraged but of course, tighnari heard it.

yandere tighnari breeding reader part 1

tw: non-con, yandere, misogyny, forced breeding, kidnapping, pregnancy, breastfeeding

I like this!! it will be a disaster💀😂 and he will remind you not to leave🥺

After recovering from the emptiness and shock of knowing you were pregnant, you lived a safe pregnancy under the care and protection of all the forest watchers. You live in a tree house with Tighnari, and the books you can read are parenting guides, but you do learn more than a thing or two from the forest, including nature, animals, aranara, and more. This is a leisurely life that cannot be experienced in akademiya.

Sometimes, Tighnari sits with you in the forest enjoying the breeze. Tighnari allows you to run your hands into his large tail fur when it gets a little chilly. He loves listening to baby's little kicks and rolls on your belly - which might be really sweet if the reality wasn't him forcing you to get pregnant and keep you in the woods.

Eventually, a baby…no, babies were born. Unexpectedly, not one, but three. You bear not to cry. All three fox cubs are adorable, two of them are more lively and one is quieter. All three of them have similar furry fox ears and tails. Breastfeeding becomes a challenge - Tighnari comforts one while two babies suckle from your swollen breasts. Housework takes up most of your time, and the rest of the time you teach Collei how to read and write, and… and continue to get breeding from Tighnari. He always likes to breed you in different poses - doggy-style, mating press, spoons, etc. He's a little mean in bed.

When the leaves start to turn yellow and orange, a new guest visits avidya forest. It was afternoon, and Tighnari had set off to patrol the forest. Ah, that guest is an old classmate of yours, you both studied together at akademiya and took the same course. You didn't expect him to visit! You're a little scared that your old schoolmate knows about your current life, but it seems he already does.

You know the news has spread in akademiya now.

To entertain old school friends, you cooked sabz meat stew and pita pocket. He chats with you about the latest research and recent events - but you find that seems unfamiliar to you, and you can only nod occasionally in response. He noticed your expression and asked if you want to go back to akademiya and continue your research. "You know what? That scholar used to be a housewife. They've gone back to study linguistics now, and I think you can too." Your eyes widen, a little hope rekindled in your heart. "Re-really? But I have babies to take care of…" He suggested that you can take care of them while studying, or you can go back to akademiya when the babies are older and pursue your dream of becoming a sage.

"May I ask you not to put these irresponsible thoughts in my wife's head?"

Just as you were about to discuss it, you heard a familiar voice. You look up to see Tighnari standing at the door. He was staring at the strange man in the room. "Meddling in other people's lives - the akademiya scholars are getting so disrespectful now. Or are they arrogant to think that family life is not worth going all out for?" The old schoolmate was instantly awkward and overwhelmed. He tried to explain that he didn't mean to be rude, but Tighnari asked him to leave.

After the old classmate leaves, you shudder and explain that you didn't mean to say yes, but it's too late. Tighnari knows you're a little encouraged. Once you discover that this is possible, you will try to leave him again. He has to stop you right here. You obediently go back to bed and spread your legs. His pelvis hits you, burying his dick inside of you. And your whisper like please don't cum inside- please don't- was ignored by him.

[a-d-nox]

pluto in aquarius: a prediction of what's to come

this is a huge astrological event, pluto is moving into aquarius for the first time since the late 1700s. last time pluto was in aquarius america fought for independence from britain, uranus was discovered, the french revolution began, the bill of rights was ratified, etc.

so for day one, i want to create predictions of what is to come!

some house matters!!!

TWO PLUTO RETROGRADES WILL OCCUR - june 11th - jan 20th, 2024 is the first so we won't see too much wildness just yet as pluto will return into capricorn during this time and THE FINAL RETROGRADE BACK INTO CAPRICORN will be september 1st, 2024 - november 19th, 2024. then we are full steam ahead with pluto in aquarius until march 9th, 2043.

i personally am NOT a witch or anything wild, everything i am saying is purely theoretical - it is not fated to happen just because i am saying it. i am simply socially aware. i know what's up generally in the world today and what was up in world in the 1700s - "history typically repeats itself."

i live in the usa so my post likely will be slightly more focused there examples wise so i apologize in advance! feel free to comment, dm, or reblog with other examples from your country based on my prediction key phrases.

i am going to start light and get darker so mentally prepare yourself for that (tw: STI/STD outbreaks, war, 9/11, COVID-19, and other abrasive topics that may make people uncomfortable depending on where they are currently reading from) - but we are talking about pluto so... expect the unexpected?!

let's do this.

renewable energy sources

aquarius is electricity, light, inventions, electronics, telephones, televisions, etc while pluto can be change! i recently bought a new tv and the back of the remote has a solar panel instead of a battery pack. i do believe we will see more evolution with technology; perhaps we will see solar changed phones! otherwise pluto is also pollution and natural disasters - the climate is in crisis mode perhaps we will see more responsibility and thus changes in our sourcing of energy! example: recently i read that japan has a great source of geothermal energy. currently the conversion to using this source (instead of coal, gas, and nuclear energy) is being held up by a higher up in the hot spring business who claims switching to a new energy system "threatens centuries-old traditions" (bang - a capricorn term - tradition - so perhaps after the retrogrades are through we will see a major shift in energy sourcing).

general technological advancements/inventions

last time pluto was in aquarius the cotton gin was invented; which aided in quicker production of goods and higher demand for american cotton. i strongly believe this is a general indicator that AI is going to become an even bigger part of day to day life. i have seen AI already replace those who take orders in the panera drive thru, there is a higher demand for philosophy/english grads to help teach AI, etc. aquarius is also new teachers/occupations so AI could become the new teachers OR new careers could be coming in the area of interacting with AI generally so it gains more consciousness. so it could be AI or it could be something else that is only just a dream in the back of someone's mind at this moment in time.

altruistic extremists

we may see utopian dreamers rise up! they are likely to advocate for the deconstruction of pre-existing political institutions in favor of either self governance or egalitarian policies. they will likely do whatever it takes to make this statement; we may see more protests / political statements similar to wynn bruce's.

fanatical/extremist announcers radio/tv

we already have biased stations and channels (fox, abc, cnn, nbc, etc). we are likely to see a further rise in politically biased newscasters and announcers.

demonization of astrology

astrology is aquarian in nature but pluto is fanatics, evil, demonics, etc. the community has been saying about the next world war for a while now. we are moving out of conservative pluto in capricorn, so we may find that those of deep belief systems accusing us [astrologers] of conspiring with the devil if/when something militant arises (similar to how the tarot community gets told constantly by christians that they must be satanists).

something with birds

i don't have this nailed down yet specifically, but both aquarius and pluto are rulers of birds. aquarius is large birds while pluto is wading/swamp birds and/or flesh eating birds. no one freak out and start thinking that i am indicating something like the 1963 horror film the birds. if anything i can see more bird-spread illness and/or parasites. OR pluto can be archaeology! there may be a bird related discovery or something to do with the distant relative of the bird - aka the raptor (dinosaur related).

a new STI/STD discovery/outbreak

aquarius represents the distribution of bodily fluids while pluto is often representative of sexual activity. this could either be an outbreak because pluto can be death, extremes, catastrophes, and/or casualties OR pluto can be ph balance in the body (possible new discoveries for feminine sexual health), kidneys (perhaps a discovery will be linked to the diminished functionality associated with syphilis, hiv, etc and how to combat more symptomatic issues), and even purification (aka a cure perhaps to help viral carriers to no longer pass the sti/std to sexual partners).

collapse of congress / house of commons/representatives

i mean it only stands to reason that the bill of rights was created/approved last time pluto was in aquarius that either those rights will disappear (pluto also represents dictators) OR simply the people rise up and demolish the institution as it stands: "...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..."

airplane catastrophes

aquarius rules over planes and pluto can represent accomplices, catastrophes, casualties, b0mbs, and t3rr0r!sm. we may experience another event similar to 9/11 OR we may see air strikes in a potential world war 3 scenario.

societal change: crime, war, leadership, and more

world war 3 is on the horizon so say pluto in aquarius (probably in the wake of election year in the US - when the final retrograde into capricorn concludes). but this could also just be governmental restructuring - this could be seen as rebellions (similar to the French Revolution), the rise of organized crime if good become more scarce, religious shifts (pluto is the antichrist, aquarius is freewill (first amendment), and capricorn is the old church (christian schools of thought)), etc.

aquarian terms i can't think of change in but seem important to note / keep in mind: freethinkers, hamburg germany, heart weakness (biden - perhaps the early death of a president in office?), motion picture (already changing as more theaters close), photography, psychology (we are already starting to care more about everyone's mental health), science (general scientific discoveries?), social affairs (there is always something going on - the question is how big will this be?), society, sweden, syria, and xray.

plutonian terms i can't think of change in but seem important to note / keep in mind: abductions (aliens - ufo sights?), aliases, alibis (governmental riffing similar to how no plan was in place when for COVID-19), assass!nat!0n (hopefully not), betrayal, bootlegging (bootleg tiktok if america bans it?), cemeteries (removal of that method if too many are dying at any giving time - mass graves?), convicts (prison release due to overcrowding? the mega-prison of el salvador?), corruption (governmental likely?), demolitions, earthquakes (more environmental issues?), electrocution, executions (war?), fanatic, extremes, floods (environmental? emigration - society is aquarius after all?), liars, massacres (the rise of crime?), murder, nihilism (the rise of philosophy at the time of war?), ransom (war?), satire (rise of political satire?), stolen goods, and taxes (trump-esque no?).

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© a-d-nox 2023 all rights reserved

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Every editorial board must do the same. Bravo, Charlotte Observer. This is how it’s done.

+

THE PARTY TOLD YOU TO REJECT THE EVIDENCE OF YOUR EYES AND EARS. IT WAS THEIR FINAL, MOST ESSENTIAL COMMAND.

TCinLA

Oct 07, 2024

Brian Beutler described this perfectly this morning:

When Donald Trump started telling conspicuous lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, all of MAGA understood the assignment.

His supporters understood they should spread rumors or fabricate anecdotes consistent with Trump’s claims. They should portray their own confusion as government malice or incompetence. They should claim to have witnessed FEMA abandoning Republican-heavy regions and illegal immigrants walking away with relief money first hand. They should even use artificial intelligence technology to fabricate images that reinforce these lies.

Elon Musk and Trump’s other ultra-wealthy supporters understood it as their solemn duty to draw as much attention to these lies as possible.

Its also a trial run for the chaos they intend to sow through the election.

David Simon expressed disgust on behalf of many: “For the chance to gain some political advantage, the Republican nominee for U.S. president is willing to lie, and in doing so, actually impair the ongoing efforts to help the Americans made vulnerable by this hurricane. That level of sociopathy simply astonishes.”

(The old astonishing has been astonishingly surpassed by the new astonishing.)

From The Hill today:

SPEAKER JOHNSON CALLS FEDERAL RESPONSE TO HELENE ‘A MASSIVE FAILURE’

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called the federal response to Hurricane Helene a “massive failure” and pointed to the hundreds of people still missing.

“At the federal level, this has been a massive failure. And you can just ask the people there on the ground. I have been there. I was in Georgia. I was in Florida, where Hurricane Helene made landfall, there on the coast. And then we’ll be going to the hardest hit parts of North Carolina on Wednesday of this week,” Johnson told Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.”

Johnson said the federal government had advance notice of the hurricane and should have been better equipped to respond.

“When you talk to the people who are directly affected, they will tell you this has been an abject failure. FEMA has lost sight of its core mission, I think, in so many cases, and the administration has not shown that they were prepared for this, this eventuality, and this terrible disaster.

“They had more than a week’s notice of this, and yet we still have people who have not been served and even rescued,” Johnson added. “In North Carolina, it is a heartbreaking, tragic and infuriating situation to have the federal government fail, as they have well.”

The remarks come as Republicans have sharpened their attacks on the federal response to Hurricane Helene, just one month ahead of Election Day.

The federal government and other local and federal officials have fought back against claims that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is inept.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said recently that he was impressed with the federal response, noting North Carolina’s impact was not expected to be as severe as it was.

“For anybody who thinks that any level of government, anybody here, could have been prepared precisely for what we’re dealing with here, clearly are clueless,” Tillis said. “But right now, I’m out here to say that we’re doing a good job.”

The federal government has also sought to dispel rumors about the lack of federal funding available to residents affected by the national disaster.

FEMA has set up a designated “rumor response page” to fight misinformation and inform residents of available funding.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates responded to Johnson’s criticism by pointing to “a wide range of leaders in both parties and from every affected state” who “have praised the bipartisan response to Hurricane Helene.”

Bates pointed to Tillis’s remarks, as well as to comments made by other GOP officials, including South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who called the federal response “superb,” and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who said he “appreciated” Biden’s offer to “call him directly” if the governor needed further assistance.

Bates also quoted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who said, “This is an incredible experience for me. So, to President Biden, thank you for coming. Thank you for paying attention to our needs. We have had a good working relationship between the federal government.”

[userautumn]

Fact Check & Recap (Oct. 8, 2024):

Mike Johnson, a Republican in the House of Representatives [Legislative Branch, the branch of US Government that has several powers assigned exclusively to it, including the power to initiate revenue bills, impeach federal officials, and elect the President in the case of an Electoral College tie] is hesitant to reconvene the House to provide disaster relief funding until after United States Presidential election, which will occur on November 5th, 2024.

Joe Biden, the current United States President, wrote a letter urging Congress [Congress is comprised of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Senate takes action on bills, resolutions, amendments, motions, nominations, and treaties by voting] to provide funding to the Small Business Administration's disaster relief loan program to help the effected communities rebuild and cover financial losses due to natural disaster.

Mike Johnson is refusing on the grounds that the individual states which were effected "need some time to [calculate the actual damages]."

Donald Trump and the Republican party are claiming that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is allocating funds toward aiding migrants who are entering the country illegally. This information is false. FEMA and Border Control are two different divisions with two different avenues of funding [FEMA is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, and the funds cannot be reappropriated for another division. Source: Congressional Budget Office; FEMA Hurrican Helene Fact Check Rumor Response]

Mike Johnson is using this lie to divide the American people and to foster a sense of distrust in FEMA, one of the agency's Donald Trump plans to gut and disable through state-by-state privatization once he enacts his harrowing Project 2025 plan.

Johnson has said, "The American people are disgusted by [the Biden Administration allegedly using FEMA money for migrant relocation], up with it, and so are Republicans in Congress. And it will stop after Nov. 5, because we’re going to have unified government with Republicans in charge and we will bring sanity back to this situation.”

Source (NBC News):

Mike Johnson won't commit to bringing House back before the election for more hurricane relief.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Biden urged Congress to restore funding to the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program as it faces potential funding shortfalls.

By Summer Concepcion

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday did not commit to calling Congress back into session before the election after President Joe Biden pressed congressional leaders about potential funding shortfalls in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Johnson was asked about Biden’s letter to congressional leaders on Friday requesting more money for federal disaster recovery efforts and after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that the department doesn’t have enough money to get through the rest of hurricane season.

In his letter, the president urged Congress to restore funding to the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program, which was facing potential funding shortfalls even before Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the Southeast. The president noted that the White House requested more funding for the program as Congress prepared a short-term funding bill that passed last month to avert a government shutdown.

Pressed on whether he would call Congress back into session before the election, Johnson replied, “We’ll be back in session immediately after the election.”

“That’s 30 days from now. The thing about these hurricanes and disasters of this magnitude is it takes a while to calculate the actual damages, and the states are going to need some time to do that,” Johnson said, adding that determining “specific needs and requests based upon the actual damages” from natural disasters takes time.

Johnson noted that before Congress went on recess, the day before Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida, Congress appropriated $20 billion additional dollars to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to address immediate needs.

“Then after that, Congress always takes its the due approach of providing what is necessary,” he said. “Congress will provide. We will help people in these disaster-prone areas. It’s an appropriate role for the federal government, and you’ll have bipartisan support for that, and it’ll all happen in due time, and we’ll get that job done. There shouldn’t be any concern about that.”

Johnson’s comments come after Biden said in remarks at the White House last week he expects to ask Congress for a supplemental funding request for areas affected by Hurricane Helene.

Asked at the time whether he would ask Congress to return from recess for a special session for a supplemental request, the president left the possibility open, saying, “That is something I may have to request, but no decision’s been made yet.”

Congress has taken swift action on funding natural disaster relief efforts in the past even when it was on recess, a Biden administration official noted when reached for comment.

Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Johnson was also pressed about false claims by some Republicans that FEMA was using funds on migrants who have illegally entered the country instead of on the disaster response, which White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called “categorically false” on Friday.

The speaker acknowledged that the streams of funding for the border and hurricane response are different at FEMA before going on to insist that FEMA’s mission is to help people affected by natural disasters, and not engage in funding that helps migrants who crossed the southern border.

Johnson claimed, without evidence, that the Biden administration, Vice President Kamala Harris and Mayorkas “have been engaged in this program,” saying they used taxpayer dollars to assist migrants with resettlement by reimbursing nongovernmental organizations transporting migrants into the country.

“The American people are disgusted by this, up with it, and so are Republicans in Congress,” he said. “And it will stop after Nov. 5, because we’re going to have unified government with Republicans in charge and we will bring sanity back to this situation.”

[oheck-trainwreck]

I can’t sleep so I’m thinking about my catastrophe crew au again.

I think the main cast would looks something like this:

Badboyhalo: initially an average channel 11 camera man who was assigned to the news helicopter, who becomes the helicopters reporter after tragedy and/or upper management befalls several of the replacements. He is kind of the head of the crew, in that he often comes up with the insane solutions to the problems they face (a reference to his big-finding skills on the Qsmp), but he always assists the others when they need it (after some teasing and being mischievous). He has a son, Dapper.

Tubbo: the helicopter pilot, and the youngest of the crew. He’s very smart and insightful, giving the crew advice and inspiration, and sometimes straight up solutions based on his observations. He’s very good with technology and mechanics, but since he’s too busy flying the helicopter, he doesn’t use those skills too much. Despite being fairly young, he has an adopted daughter, Sunny, who he takes care of when he’s not at work.

Bagi: the copilot. She takes over flying when tubbo is incapacitated or doing tech-y stuff elsewhere. She does copilot things (I don’t know how helicopters work) but she also has incredible deductive skills and logical reasoning. She’s very good at connecting the dots, and ends up finding out how the disasters that the crew faces are all related. (At the beginning of the show, she does not yet have Empanada).

Aypierre: the crew’s technician and mechanic. He stays on the helicopter to fox anything that breaks, and bring out odd little inventions to help with whatever bizarre situations the crew finds themselves in. He co-parents his daughter pomme with a number of other French people (they live in the same apartment complex as Bad and Dapper, which leads to Pomme seeing Bad as a father as well)

Tina: I don’t know what her job title would be, but she manages the broadcast of the sound and video from the helicopter to the newstation. She controls whose voices are broadcast on the air, which she occasionally uses to mess with people (I don’t know a whole lot about Tina, but I’ll probably come up with more details for her later)

Recurring side characters:

Cucurucho: a higher up (but not the highest up) at channel 11 news. He is the boss of all members of the crew, and is/was responsible for putting the crew together. He is mostly impartial and mainly focused on efficiency, but there are situations where they base decisions on their own desires.

Skeppy: the other reporter for the catastrophe crew, who stays within the channel 11 building. (Tbh also don’t know a lot about him. He’s probably beefing with cucurucho tho)

Relationships:

Bagina: the only relationship that will be canonized within the show. They are gay disasters around each other for a bit, flirt, date, and end up getting married and going on honeymoon right before thing get VERY BAD. Let’s go lesbians.

Cucuhalo: cucurucho has a crush on bad. Bad is dense as rocks. Cucurucho sometimes abuses his power for the sake of this one sided crush, like when he had skeppy relocated (to be further away from bad). Maybe they also live in the same apartment complex, next door neighbors or something.

Skephalo: you know how they are (probably). As the two reporters/anchors, they often have a bit of banter as the newscast switches from one to the other. They work very well together, but can’t work nearby to each other due to the jealousy of cucurucho.

Cucurucho and skeppy work in much closer proximity than either does with bad, so they have little passive aggressive interactions sometimes. Bad is also oblivious to this, and thinks that everyone should just get along.

[tomorrowusa]

I suspect that the vegetative MAGA crowd is showing the effects of Long COVID on their memories. They have forgotten that Trump's horribly botched response to the pandemic triggered a recession and caused unemployment to spike. Let's not even get into the death toll for 2020.

Sore LOSER Trump left office on 20 January 2021. The 12 months prior to that consisted of one disaster after another.

Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman looked at "Trump-stalgia".

The Peculiar Persistence of Trump-stalgia

Soaring deaths aside, four years ago more than 20 million Americans were unemployed; Trump left office with the worst job record of any president since Herbert Hoover. Also, the country was in the grip of a violent crime wave, with murders soaring. Today, by contrast, we’ve just experienced the longest stretch of unemployment below 4 percent since the 1960s, and the violent crime wave — Trump didn’t cause it, but it did happen on his watch — has been rapidly receding. [ ... ] One common explanation of Trump-stalgia is that many people give the former president a mulligan for 2020, attributing all the bad things that happened in his final year to the Covid pandemic (and ignoring the extent to which Trump’s botched response to the pandemic added to the death toll). That is, when they say “four years ago” they actually mean “before the pandemic.” That surely explains part of what’s going on. But there are also problems with this story. If Trump gets a pass for the economic and social damage inflicted by the pandemic, why shouldn’t Biden get a similar pass for problems that manifested on his watch but surely reflected delayed effects of Covid disruptions? For example, ripple effects of the pandemic clearly explain a lot of the inflation surge of 2021-22. How do we know this? Because prices rose almost everywhere. Different nations measure inflation somewhat differently, but if you look at the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, which is available for a number of countries, you find that cumulative inflation since the beginning of the pandemic has been almost eerily similar in the United States and in Europe. Also, Trump boosters aren’t consistent about sending 2020 down the memory hole. Trump claimed that he presided over gasoline prices of less than $2 a gallon, but this was true only for a couple of months in 2020 — a period when global oil prices were low because the pandemic had the world economy flat on its back.

Trump can't get away from his pandemic catastrophe. Telling Americans to drink bleach, take ineffective malaria pills, and stick ultraviolet lights up their butts certifies him as a two-bit quack. And it took him 50 days after the first COVID-19 case appeared in the US before he declared an emergency. Remember his infamous January 22nd comments on CNBC?

It wasn't "just fine".

As for now, feelings haven't caught up with the facts.

Trump-stalgia is undoubtedly a powerful force. Biden helped lead us through a time of turmoil — much of which happened even before he took office — to a pretty good place, with very low unemployment, fairly low inflation and falling crime. But many Americans seem unaware of the good news; for example, the drop in crime doesn’t appear to have broken through to public consciousness at all. And there seems to be a romanticized vision of what things were like under Biden’s predecessor, which somehow omits the terrible things that happened in 2020. So are you better off than you were four years ago? For most Americans, the answer is clearly yes. But for reasons that still remain unclear, many seem disinclined to believe it.

Good news is seldom reported. And when it does occur these days, you absolutely won't hear it on Fox News.

One thing that's certainly worse now is the situation regarding reproductive freedom. Roe v. Wade got overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2022. Though if Hillary Clinton had made those three appointments to SCOTUS instead of Donald Trump, Roe v. Wade would have been upheld by a 7 to 2 vote instead of being tossed.

Remind people (repeatedly!) of who appointed the SCOTUS justices who made abortion nearly impossible in many states. In an age of short attention spans and low information voters, don't assume that everybody knows. Trump bragged about killing Roe v. Wade – his influence lives on through his awful appointments to the federal courts.

Most Americans probably couldn't pass those simplistic civics tests given to wannabe new citizens. Patiently explains how the system works – or is supposed to.

Even when times are good, people will still find stuff to complain about. As the late author Randall Jarrell wrote: "The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks."

Though this may not exactly be a "golden age", it beats avoidable pandemic dystopia, a coup attempt, and dreadful appointments to the federal courts. And it's certainly superior to having Trump back as a sleazy dictator on day one.

[libraford]

I remember early on in the trump administration- I was sitting at the mechanic's lobby and he was on the news with a giant stack of papers wrapped in a big red ribbon. And he talked about how the regulations imposed by previous administrations got in the way of business and prevented every day americans from reaching the american dream. And he took a pair of shears and cut the ribbon, symbolically cutting the red tape, as a promise to undo all regulations that hot in the way of moving forward.

And I looked to the woman waiting in the lobby with me, in her 60s, who shook her head along with me at the gesture, because we both lived on a low income side of town and people in our tax bracket know what happens when regulations are slack- people get sick, they get hurt, they die.

Disaster happens when people are careless and each regulation is written in blood.

Fuck that guy.

Picture id/transcript: (a screenshot of a news report by Heather Cox Richardson from february 15 2023)

But the derailment of fifty Norfolk Southern train cars, eleven of which carried hazardous chemicals, near East Palestine, Ohio, near the northeastern border of the state on February 3 has powerfully illustrated the downsides of deregulation. The accident released highly toxic chemicals into the air, water, and ground, causing a massive fire and forcing about 5,000 nearby residents in Ohio and Pennsylvania to evacuate. On February 6, when it appeared some of the rail cars would explode, officials allowed the company to release and burn the toxic vinyl chloride stored in it. The controlled burn sent highly toxic phosgene, used as a weapon in World War I, into the air.

Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine has refused federal assistance from President Biden, who, he said, called to offer “anything you need.” DeWine said he had not called back to take him up on the offer. “We will not hesitate to do that if we’re seeing a problem or anything, but I’m not seeing it,” he said.

Just over the border, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said that Norfolk Southern had botched its response to the accident. “Norfolk Southern has repeatedly assured us of the safety of their rail cars—in fact, leading Norfolk Southern personnel described them to me as ‘the Cadillac of rail cars’—yet despite these assertions, these were the same cars that Norfolk Southern personnel rushed to vent and burn without gathering input from state and local leaders. Norfolk Southern’s well known opposition to modern regulations [requires] further scrutiny and investigation to limit the devastating effects of future accidents on people’s lives, property, businesses, and the environment.”

Shapiro was likely referring to the fact that in 2017, after donors from the railroad industry poured more than $6 million into Republican political campaigns, the Trump administration got rid of a rule imposed by the Obama administration that required better braking systems on rail cars that carried hazardous flammable materials.

According to David Sirota, Julia Rock, Rebecca Burns, and Matthew Cunningham-Cook, writing in the investigative journal The Lever, Norfolk Southern supported the repeal, telling regulators new electronically controlled pneumatic brakes on high-hazard flammable trains (HHFT) would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.” Railroads also lobbied to limit the definition of HFFT to cover primarily trains that carry oil, not industrial chemicals. The train that derailed in Ohio was not classified as an HHFT.

Nonetheless, Ohio’s new far-right Republican senator J. D. Vance went on the Fox News Channel show of personality Tucker Carlson to blame the Biden administration for the accident. He said there was no excuse for failing infrastructure after the passage last year of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and said that the administration is too focused on “environmental racism and other ridiculous things.” We are, he said, “ruled by unserious people.”

:end id/transcript

[bxllevy]

"Y'ellooo!! You seem new. Hey, why don't you hang a bit? Let's get to know each other; I'm Ivory, Ivory Belle! But, Ivy will do. That's what all my friends call me anyway, heh. And youuuu are? Don't be shy, I don't bite! Unless you want me to, that is."

rules and character info below the cut :)

SONIC OC 🗣️🗣️🗣️ she is almost two years old I'm gonna sob

RULES !

no explicitly sexual actions towards Ivory, mod is a minor in high school !! suggestive things like jokes and I guess innuendos and all that junk is fine,, but no trying to implicitly be sexual, y'know?

don't be a dick, we're just having fun

(note: Mod has around 5 years of roleplay experience, and is a writer; roleplay style is and can be flexible depending on the type of roleplay, the second-person's preferences :))

CHARACTER INFORMATION

Name:

Ivory Belle

Animal type:

She was supposed to be like a red panda... but now she's pink and silly so pink panda, I suppose

Any powers?:

Similar to Silver; Psychokinesis !! The usual stuff along with opening portals at will (just to get from one place to another)

Backstory (just a little rundown):

Ivory's always been one for an adrenaline rush, even when she was young. She grew up with her little sister, Evelynn, and their mother. New additions would be added to the family, however, when their mother encountered two foxes alone in the rain, offering them a home of which became permanent, and adoption was inevitable. One adventure went poorly, with the four siblings forcing themselves to separate — Ivory and her older brother finding themselves under the willing, yet rather reluctant order of Dr. Robitnik himself. This wasn't permanent, as working with the doctor led them to discover the whereabouts of their little brother, who had been taken under the care of a blue hedgehog. Inevitably, they disbanded themselves from the evil mastermind, and the story takes on from there.

Canon Relationships:

(NOTE: if chosen to roleplay with other canon-character-centered roleplay blogs, feel free to disregard some of the things stated within the relationships of those characters. Feel free to start as strangers if not friends, let alone close friends or family.)

Xavier Prower - Older brother by adoption, and her go-to partner in crime. Though he oftentimes acts exasperated and maintains a more sassy and nonchalant attitude, he still takes up offers to get into random bullshit with his sister. ... As long as she's safe, of course.

Evelynn Belle - Younger sister biologically—and while the gap is only far two years, with Ivory obviously being the oldest, it can be said that Evelynn is a bit more responsible than Ivory. That doesn't mean the little witch (taken after their mother) won't get into a few things...

Miles "Tails" Prower - Baby brother, whom of which she adores. Enjoys bringing him random parts to use on inventions, and listens to him as he talks in languages she will never understand (science). Reminds her of Robitnik, though cuter and not evil.

Eggman - Former boss, whom she's on decent terms with. "Decent," as in, "oh, of course I won't be late to the tea-date this Friday. Did you have a movie picked out already or are we just talking?" When with the "Hero" side of the team, she'll fight Eggman with them, but she's more taunting... Kinda like Sonic, but on a less personal level.

Sonic the Hedgehog - Respects, mostly because he's not opposed to get into trouble with her. Quite close, and they've eventually picked up the name "Disaster Duo" overtime as adventures dwelled on. Also respects him for taking care of Tails for a few years, of course.

Amy Rose - Extremely close - like the big sister figure she never had. Absolutely adores Amy, and isn't afraid to show it. Even when Amy's chasing her with a giant hammer to get her to chill out... they're pretty awesome together.

Shadow the Hedgehog - Respects... But unintentionally gets under his skin. She just thinks he's really interesting. Apparently, she's considered lucky—the blue blur envies her ability to get close to Shadow without a harsh quip. She still oftentimes gets scolded and brushed away, though.

Silver the Hedgehog - Best friend. Sparring buddies. Platonic soulmates (aside from her and Amy). The contrast in personalities, mixed with a lot of commons, is absolutely amazing to her, and often enjoys gardening with the white hedgehog. Holds him to pretty high regard.

Personality:

Mostly upbeat and optimistic, despite also being a realist. Very cheeky, yet kinda tired most of the time. She's content sitting in one place doing nothing, but she doesn't prefer it. Can absolutely be serious, but on rare occasion does she actually get scary. One of the times being when a couple of jerks started messing with Amy while she was babysitting Cream ... Just a look sent them running for the green hills.

Extra info:

She's British 😞😞😞😞☹️☹️☹️🙁🙁🙁🙁🙁🙁😔😔😔😔😔😭😭😭‼️‼️‼️‼️ also runs a little cafe as a past time !! enjoys baking

DOODLES !!!

Sinic snd ivoru 🙈

ivy <33 (+ alt hair color)

Xavier :3c

sonk

and an old wip of ivory exe comcept

[talkingpointsusa]

The Right-Wing Stupidity Hall Of Shame

This is what one might call a living document as well as a sort of “best/worst of” for this blog. How this is going to work is that we are going to do this by year and month and every time I cover a right-winger who says something particularly dumb I’ll add that post to the hall. In short, watch this space every time I get ticked off in a post.

October 2024:

Allie Beth Stuckey plugs her book for fifteen minutes and then uses a grocery store checkout magazine to prove that witchcraft is on the rise.

Tim Pool and three other morons discuss government weather control and AI. It’s as bad as it sounds.

Steven Crowder makes agonizingly dumb arguments against feminism and declares that the left isn’t charitable because…they think that the government is responsible for disaster relief.

September 2024:

Ben Shapiro accidentally comes out against lobbying

Michael Knowles doesn't understand poetry at all and decides that the reason that Trump is being made fun of on TikTok is because Trump intentionally set himself up to be mocked so that he could be associated with "delight"

Dave Rubin discusses the latest way the Democrats are going to steal the election....Taylor Swift.

August 2024:

Matt Walsh tries to go "undercover" at the DNC, it goes about as badly as you might expect and he gets his cover blown on the first day.

Matt Walsh doesn't know what a "holiday park" is, can't seem to decide whether he likes riots or not, spews white nationalist bigotry, and then defends colonialism.

Laura Loomer desperately tries to spin a conspiracy theory about Tim Walz having ties to terrorist organizations

Charlie Kirk has no idea how to handle Tim Walz and advocates for parents to financially abuse their kids into voting for Trump.

July 2024:

Broadcasting live from a Bitcoin convention, Michael Knowles lies about Kamala Harris and complaints about the Olympics and lab grown testicles.

Dave Rubin thinks that Biden isn't president anymore. This has nothing to do with him wanting to walk out of a bet he made in 2020.

Candace Owens compares transgender people to baphomet, cites a guy who talked shit while he was high, and declares that the Beatles were a psy-op

June 2024:

Charlie Kirk hosts a "Young Woman's Leadership Summit" dedicated to how he feels that men are under attack and allows Candace Owens to tell ridiculous lies about the Daily Wire during her speech.

Charlie Kirk interviews a felon who seems to think that COVID was engineered as a bio-weapon.

Dave Rubin knows absolutely nothing about New York's justice system

May 2024:

Matt Walsh's absolutely horrendous take on the dating market.

Tim Pool devotes an excruciatingly long amount of time to using ChatGPT to predict the 2024 election results.

April 2024:

Charlie Kirk speculates that the Pro-Palestine protests on college campuses are Soros funded because "the tents all look similar" and then goes on a bizarre rant about how oppressed he is because he's white.

Michael Knowles defends a Republican politician who admitted that she shot her dog and, seemingly forgetting that he made an episode with a segment praising predictive AI just days earlier, warns that predictive AI will corrupt our humanity.

Tim Pool dedicates an entire episode to yelling about furries in Utah.

The Daily Wire attacks women's sports and accidentally reveals their hypocrisy around trans athletes.

Fox News and the Daily Wire freak out over European Scrabble with hilarious results.

March 2024:

Candace Owens uses old photos, an RT writer, a clairvoyant that defamed the French prime-minister, and an antisemitic blog that says that Emmanuel Macron wearing a pink tie is a sign that he's a satanist as sources to prove that Brigitte Macron is secretly a transwoman.

February 2024:

According to Ben Shapiro, AI is anti-white. To prove this he lies about an executive order, ignores a massive amount of data, and digs through the old tweets of some guy who works at Google.

Chaya Raichik gives a terrible interview where she endorses a white nationalist conspiracy theory and split hairs about how ok it is for journalists to lie (but only her, not everybody else)

Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro attempt to argue that society has abolished all taboos and that's leading to an increase in "sexual boredom"

Matt Walsh advocates for harassing trans kids and tells people who are having difficulty living on the minimum wage to "stop being on the minimum wage".

Tim Pool makes multiple poor defenses for some guy's who defaced a rainbow crosswalk meant to honor the LGBTQ victims of a mass shooting and then calls on Ron DeSantis to commute their sentences.

January 2024:

Dave Rubin accidentally reveals that he may be the laziest journalist of all time multiple times over the span of a single episode.

Charlie Kirk teams up with a guy who collaborates with Neo-Nazis, a guy who got fired from FOX for being too racist, and some guy who works for him that sued Arizona once to declare that all movies are psyops, make disgusting false statements about the border, and praise a white nationalist who works at VDARE.

Tim Pool puts out an absolutely ridiculous episode where he uses jokes from TV shows to prove how AI women are going to lead to the death of society.

Matt Walsh thinks it's gay to love your wife and misrepresents every point he argues in the episode.

Tucker Carlson interviews a congressman who thinks that his wife having a nightmare is proof that COVID is a ploy to take away American liberty about supposed January 6th evidence that we will never get to see.

Michael Knowles wants to create cartoon Nazi propaganda to "own Disney for transing the kids"

Tim Pool thinks that "sneaky fucker males" are turning women lesbian.

December 2023:

Michael Knowles is really concerned that a five second clip from a CocoMelon video is going to turn kids gay.

Dave Rubin casually suggests that 65,000 people being laid off due to the Bud Lite boycott is OK because "They'll just get a job somewhere else"

Matt Walsh fantasizes about misgendering trans people on air and generally conducts himself like an unempathetic child.

Ezra Levant doesn't even bother to read a document he's citing even though it directly contradicts his point

Tim Pool uses an out of context tweet containing disinformation as a source and as a result ends up spreading misinformation about Taylor Swift.

Michael Knowles decides that porn videos turn people trans and gay, to prove this he interviews a woman who tries to push back on his stupidity but ends up getting steamrolled by him

Ben Shapiro has no reading comprehension and declares that everyone on the left worships Beyonce

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Oliver Milman at The Guardian:

A slew of falsehoods about Hurricane Helene, including claims of funds diverted from storm survivors to migrants and even that Democrats somehow directed the hurricane itself, have hampered the response to one of the deadliest hurricanes to ever hit the US, the nation’s top emergency official has warned.

Misinformation spread by Donald Trump, his supporters and others about the hurricane has shrouded the recovery effort for communities shattered by Helene, which tore through five states causing at least 230 deaths and tens of billions of dollars of damage. Many places, such as in western North Carolina, are still without a water supply, electricity, navigable roads or vital supplies. “It’s frankly disappointing we are having to deal with this narrative, the fact there are a few leaders having a hard time telling the difference between fact and fiction is creating an impedance to our ability to actually get people the help they need,” Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), told MSNBC on Monday. Trump has accused Joe Biden’s administration of “abandoning” people to the crisis and, baselessly, of being short of disaster relief funds due to money spent on undocumented migrants. Such claims are “frankly ridiculous” and creating a “truly dangerous narrative that is creating this fear” among affected people, Criswell said.

In multiple rallies in the past week, Trump has accused Biden and Kamala Harris of favoring migrants over disaster-hit areas. “They 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,” Trump has said. “Kamala spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal immigrants.” Trump added the places worst hit are “largely a Republican area so some people say they did it for that reason”.

JD Vance, Trump’s Republican running mate, echoed this theme on Monday, telling Fox News that Fema’s focus on migrants is “going to distract focus from their core job of helping American citizens in their time of need”. Last week, Stephen Miller, a far-right Trump adviser, said that “Kamala Harris turned Fema into an illegal alien resettlement agency”. Fema does, in fact, have a housing program that offers shelter to migrants leaving detention but this is separate from its disaster relief program. “No money is being diverted from disaster response needs. None,” the White House has stated. In remarks on Monday after speaking to Criswell by phone, Harris urged politicians to stop “playing games” with lives at stake. According to the White House pool, the vice-president said: “There’s a lot of misinformation being pushed out there by the former president about what is available, particularly for the survivors of Helene. First of all, it’s extraordinarily irresponsible. It’s about him, it’s not about you. The reality is Fema has so many resources that are available to those who desperately need them.” Congress recently provided an extra $20bn for disaster relief but Biden has warned that more funding will be needed to help the long-term recovery of places increasingly assailed by powerful storms fueled by global heating.

Other conspiracy theories and erroneous claims have swirled online and in areas affected by Helene, such as the assertion that Fema will give only $750 to individuals as a loan (it is, in fact, a grant, and can be followed by further claims for more than $40,000) or that the agency is seizing people’s land. Fema has, unusually, put up a web page to counter these claims, with a spokesman saying the misinformation is “extremely damaging” to response efforts as it deters people from seeking assistance. “We are going to continue to message aggressively so everyone understands what the facts are,” he said regarding the looming Hurricane Milton, which is set to hit Florida. Some social media posts spreading misinformation about the hurricanes called for militias to be formed to confront Fema workers, while other posts contained antisemitic hatred aimed at figures such as Esther Manheimer, mayor of Asheville, North Carolina, a city badly affected by the storm.

[...] So far, Biden has declared the federal government will pay for the entire cost of activities such as debris removal, search and rescue and food supplies for Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The president has also already approved disaster help for Florida ahead of Milton’s arrival. This approach has garnered some rare praise for Biden from Republican governors of affected states, with some Republican lawmakers calling for the conspiracy theories to abate. “Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet about the floods,” Kevin Corbin, a Republican state senator for western North Carolina, posted on Facebook last week. “Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you or have you continually contact your elected officials to see if they are true.”

FEMA Chief Deanne Criswell calls out the dangerous misinformation about Hurricane Helene peddled by Donald Trump and right-wing media pundits. FEMA

[tearsinthemist]

Opinion

Mike Johnson Shows His True Colors With Hurricane Victim Response

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling

Mon, October 7, 2024 at 9:24 AM CDT·2 min read

371

While executive branch figureheads float around the American South in the wake of Hurricane Helene promising relief, one Washington politico’s actions could actually make all the difference for thousands of victims—but he doesn’t seem to be doing a thing about it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson will not be calling the House back early to vote on emergency hurricane relief, reported Politico’s Olivia Beavers.

The speaker said that the damages from the storm have to be “tabulated” before Congress can pass supplemental aid to help the victims, adding that he believes the situation is weeks away from that being achieved.

Johnson will visit western North Carolina on Wednesday, a region that was devastated by Helene and its subsequent floods. More than 100 people died in the storm’s aftermath. Across the six states that the Category Four storm hit, at least 231 people have been reported dead, making Helene one of the deadliest recorded storms in U.S. history. Overall, Helene has been described by weather forecast offices as “one of the most significant weather events” to hit the area “in the modern era.”

More than 300,000 people remained without power in Georgia and the Carolinas by Sunday evening, with nearly half of those customers in North Carolina, reported CNN.

So far, President Joe Biden has deployed 1,500 troops to help with recovery efforts, alongside more than 6,100 National Guardsmen and 7,000 federal personnel. The Biden-Harris administration has also distributed more than $137 million in federal assistance to support the beleaguered region, the White House announced in a press release Sunday.

Meanwhile, Johnson has continued to undermine one of the federal agencies tasked with responding to the storm surge. In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Johnson elevated a

false claim

launched by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, insisting that the Biden administration had diverted emergency relief funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to aid immigration efforts.

“The streams of funding are different, that is not an untrue statement, of course,” Johnson told the conservative network. “But the problem is with the American people, see, and what they’re frustrated by, is that FEMA should be involved. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, their mission is to help people in times like this of natural disaster. Not to be engaged in using any pool of funding from any account for resettling illegal aliens who have come across the border. That’s what the Biden administration, Kamala Harris, and Secretary Mayorkas have been engaged in.”

In response, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told ABC News that the charge was “frankly ridiculous and just plain false.”

“This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” Criswell said on Sunday. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people.”

[soulstagger]

Yura Yurei's goal, and the mantles.

The mantles, the bearers, the name I can't decide on. Is a set of five marks imprinted on individuals passed down through the pages. They all were made with the original five heroes who helped save the world with Ueno Tsubame.

The idea was originally, that if five well trained people were always ready for any danger than could arrive after Tsubame's death. There would always be five people to mentor a young hero to the cause, someone worthy of taking on great power.

But this plan became legend, and legend because religion. Five mantle bearers would bring a hero when the time came. And it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

From the red sky crisis, the Mikadzuki civil wars, The great fox, every time a generation needed heroes they five who inherited their mark by challenge or skill, would always find someone who wanted to save the world, and would help them to that point.

It was like an artificial cycle, what started as someone with the guts to save the world meeting 5 friends, became someone with guts to save the world meeting five teachers.

It became like a law, the prestige of having a bearer in your country, in some cases it was like a religion to pass down, such as Gao and Kawa/her sister.

The mantle itself was just a mark that transferred if you beat the other holder in challenge, and/or passed it down in training. usually by beating another in challenge/graduation.

Often people couldn't just take it or kill for it, there had to be grounds for the bearer to accept challenge.

Yura Yurei who wishes to change this, grew up in regions where problems and injustice were common place. And always if a disaster happened they would wait or rely on the arrival of the local bearer or trainee to be to solve it.

The complacency in the current era to put too much trust in these heroes or would be heroes left Yura with pain and trauma, losing her father due to the inability for people to act. When if they had just earlier acted, everyone could be saved.

While Yura doesn't hate bearers or hopeful ones, she can't abide by its existence. Worried that its reliance will one day be the undoing of everything. She sets out with her closest friends and others who at least share her idea that things need to change.

She uses underhanded tactics to finally force Kurousa Kiyoko into a challenge. Where she wins and steals the first mantle, her allies too share the same all or nothing approach and have to do the same to their targets.

Her hope is to gather them all, to with her friends 'fulfill the prophecy' before anything bad even starts, to get the approval of the ocean spirit, to because the heroes and then...throw it all away.

So they can move the nations and cities early to prevent a disaster instead of react to it. She even tries to thwart the cult of the red at every turn believing they'll be the one's responsible for it.

Ultimately it brings her into conflict with Vee, and though Yura beats Vee to the ocean spirit, and the spirit chooses her. Yura is too blinded by her own goals and how they've been twisted, doing more damage than the good she intended. As her actions leave everything in chaos.

That she cannot see the thing that's chosen her. Ultimately she is beaten by Vaimiti and the mark transfers, Signe as well beats her companion, and others too.

Vaimiti and her crew gain all five mantles.

Vee's goal is to restore the order as it was, but then use their new positions to change it slowly. The Red witch's arrival and cult's explosion of order changes everything as the ally Yura has, turns outto have been compromised, using her own good intention-ed ambition to undo everything they've all worked for.

From there Vee takes the titles and instead of using them to 'wait for a hero' they act with them to save people actively and combat the cult.

As the original five heroes were, just people trying to make a change for the good, to save people and push back against the riftmaker. Long before they ever met Tsubame.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Judging by the video that Kamala Harris’s campaign is circulating, her aides are pleased with one particular exchange during her interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. In it, Harris dressed down Baier for playing video of Donald Trump that sanitized away his threat to unleash the military on “the enemy within.”

Many observers immediately surmised that this moment—which showed Harris digging in hard against Baier—could wreck Trump’s most cherished spin about Harris. As Andrew Egger noted at The Bulwark, Harris punctured the “right-wing caricature” of her as “an insipid airhead with no ability to think on her feet.”

But this is a seminal moment for another reason as well. It starkly revealed the degree to which Fox News—and by extension Trump’s other right-wing media propagandists—has constructed an informational universe around Trump that, at the most fundamental level, is comprehensively fictional.

MAGA’s biggest deception of all may be its portrayal of Trump as enjoying public support that is not just authentically, broadly, deeply majoritarian but also is only constrained from realizing its full explosive potential by interference from corrupt institutions like the media and the Deep State. The reality is the opposite: Without the massive propaganda support system he benefits from—and the gravitational pull it exerts on mainstream news outlets—Trump, who has never enjoyed majority support in this country, probably could not long politically survive.

Harris’s confrontation with Baier illustrates the point. After Harris pointed out that Trump has threatened to target an “enemy within,” Baier said that Fox News had asked Trump to address those comments at its town hall on Wednesday. Baier then played Trump’s response at that town hall, but he left out the footage of Trump recommitting to targeting the “enemy within,” only airing Trump’s insistence that he is the one treated as the enemy.

That makes Trump look uniformly like the victim of corrupt political prosecutions—prosecutions that are actually in keeping with the rule of law—while omitting Trump’s explicit doubling down on his threat. Harris called out the omission.

“With all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within,’” Harris noted. “You didn’t show that.”

Baier protested, but Harris kept it up, essentially accusing him of concealing what he knows to be true about Trump. “You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people,” Harris said. She added:

He has talked about going after people that are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake.

What Harris revealed here is that, at the most basic level of all, Trump is campaigning on an explicit vow to treat the opposition and its voters as sub-American. He has threatened persecution of the “vermin” opposition, vowed to use federal disaster relief money to extort blue states into doing his bidding, floated sending the military into Democratic-run cities, and, now, made it all even more explicit with his latest “enemy within” rants.

Trump is essentially running on an open promise to serially violate his oath of office to carry out a kind of scorched-earth campaign against blue America. Baier knows all this is toxic among swing voters. And so the picture of Trump he presented was one in which the only victim of persecution is Trump himself.

What’s more, in a little-noticed move, Baier also inflated Trump’s public support. Baier asked Harris: “Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states?” But that’s false: It’s largely tied in all of them, with Harris retaining an almost imperceptible edge in enough states to win the Electoral College. Baier also repeatedly said “half” or “50 percent” of the country backs Trump. But again, Trump has never enjoyed majority support at any point.

MAGA is a minoritarian movement that derives energy from treating itself as “the people” and the non-MAGA majority as rooted in political aspirations and beliefs that are in some sense illegitimate. Yet Baier erased Trump’s lack of majority support and downplayed his explicit campaigning on a vow to violate his oath of office toward the more populous rest of America that doesn’t support him. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters has shown, Fox often downplays and sugarcoats Trump’s most explicitly antidemocratic threats and actions. Baier carried out that project at an exceptionally high-profile moment.

Something similar happened with Baier’s widely discussed questions on immigration. It’s true that Harris had trouble answering them—no one would deny that the Biden administration has struggled to manage the immigration system—but this is partly because here, again, Baier constructed a largely imaginary world. The basic premise of his questions was that under Trump, all migrants were either detained all the way through their removals or forced to wait in Mexico; that none were released here; that crimes committed by migrants occurred only during the Biden years and are directly traceable to lax border policies.

But as the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick has demonstrated, none of this is true. During the period that Trump’s Remain in Mexico program was in effect, only a small minority of apprehended migrants were forced to wait there. And according to Reichlin-Melnick’s calculations, tens of thousands of migrants were released into the interior while Remain in Mexico was in place, which debunks the Fox News host’s suggestion that the program created some sort of enforcement panacea.

In fact, as the Cato Institute’s David Bier has shown, hundreds of thousands of migrants were released all throughout the Trump presidency. That’s fewer than under Biden—in part simply because more have migrated during his presidency for all sorts of complex geopolitical reasons—but far from the migrant release–free utopia Baier presented.

Why did Trump release so many migrants? Because Congress under-resources the executive for processing and detaining them and because the law requires some releases. In Baier’s fictional portrayal of the situation, if migrants are released, it can only be a function of the executive’s permissiveness. But every administration has done this—including Trump’s. How many migrants released by Trump then committed crimes? We don’t know—in part because Democrats don’t highlight such crimes to demonize immigrants the way Republicans do. In the universe Baier constructed, none of these complications exist.

Harris deserves credit for calling out Baier’s MAGA cleanup efforts. But all this raises a bigger question: How much public support would Trump have right now if Fox and other right-wing outlets had not been pumping out sanitizing propaganda about him and his presidency for the last 10 years?

Greg Sargent @GregTSargent

Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimedbook An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.  

[wuxiaphoenix]

On Writing: Druid Vs. Zombies

If you’re consistently stuck in trying to get a new story going, consider that sometimes your plotbunnies may burn out on specific parts of story-writing, and need a break.

At the moment I want an Idea to play with, to keep the plotbunnies occupied as I plow on through filling draft holes in Colors. Something new. Something shiny.

...Something that, honestly, doesn’t require too much in the way of worldbuilding, because the setting of Colors has taken a ridiculous amount of time and energy to research and build. The plotbunnies would rather not be working on two master’s-thesis-plus-level-effort research projects at the same time.

(Can you blame them? I don’t!)

In particular, I want a story that’s a lot more small-scale and has close examination of the bits of the world we do see. Less epic trek across the continents, more, “ooh, what wonders can you find in your own backyard?”

On top of that, I kind of want to poke what I see as a few recurring plotholes in a lot of zombie stories.

First, that everyone, always, freaks out - and those rare few who don’t get dragged down by the panickers.

Second, that no one ever has any warning.

Third, that zombies never seem to rot at realistic speeds. They often remain dangerous for years, even decades or centuries later.

The first plothole can be revealed by looking at actual human responses to disasters and combat. Do people freak out? Yes. Do some of them die? Likely. But we are social beings, and we self-organize amazingly fast, throwing solutions at problems as soon as we can half-cobble them together. Heck, if zombies were to attack your average library I’d give even odds on a human win. There are chairs. There are tables. There are books to throw, to bludgeon with, to hold between gnashing teeth. Humans die fighting.

The second makes me grumpy because humans actually have an inborn, finely-tuned revulsion to Things Not Right. There’s lots of speculation as to why the Uncanny Valley perception exists, but one of the most persuasive I’ve run across is that it may be an evolutionary response to prion disease and/or rabies. Both of which lead to animals and humans acting very oddly indeed as their brains melt. (Shudders.)

So while the conscious brain may be going, “What’s wrong with Bob?” The rest of the brain, the part that controls instinct and reflex, is dragging up, this is not right, this is dangerous. Something that’s Not Right trying to attack you isn’t a surprise.

Third... yeah. Admittedly, zombies vary based on the movie or book, but if they were anything like regular corpses, they ought to be too decayed to move in a few weeks. No intact muscle and tendons, no movement. Vultures could pick them off. Heck, in the Solomon Kane story “The Hills of the Dead”, vultures do pick them off, and the hero uses that to finally wipe out the horde.

And classic D&D style druids could certainly enlist the help of friendly vultures. Heck, druids could have a very good reason to set up a way to watch for, catch, and contain any critter acting unnaturally. Rabies.

If you’re a druid who wants to maintain a healthy wilderness, you want people not to indiscriminately kill the top predators. For that to happen, you need local humans (and other races) not to see them as kill-on-sight threats. A rabid wolf (or dog, or hybrid) is one of the fastest ways to get every human in the vicinity aimed at wiping out wolf packs. And that is not an unreasonable impulse. Wolf social behavior means they try to help their own sick. The whole pack can be infected.

In the U.S., with emphasis on “you must vaccinate your pets”, the usual rabies vectors tend to be bats, raccoons, and foxes. In many other places in the world, the most common viral reservoir is wild or feral canines. Every dog or similar beastie’s bite must be treated as potentially rabid, as some overseas military people have found out to their distinct regret.

BTW, lunar caustic was used to treat rabies bites in 1800s India. Silver versus “infectious werewolves”, anyone?

Adding to all this I have a minor grump about druids always being associated with charismatic megafauna. Sure, taking a tiger or owlbear shape rocks! But if druids are the guardians of nature, then where are the druids who focus on little wetlands, weeds in empty lots, bees on the rooftops? The urban-wild interface is a valid ecotone. Druids ought to think of moss and pitcher plants and raccoons after mice and garbage, not just Proud Wild Beasts of the Untamed Forests. Give me a druid who worries about butterflies, dragonflies, mosquitofish. Whose reaction to a dangerous aberration in a lake is, “oh good, local cryptid to scare off most people; let’s negotiate to see what it might like as prey instead of humans.”

...I have a Fiend Folio and I’m not afraid to use it. So many neat monsters!

So. Picture a druid running along the top of a very tall and dangerous hedge maze, a maze meant to attract Things Not Right, because an alarm ward has gone off at one of the shallow ponds (and water traps) inside its corridors. A pond full of living things... including an aquatic ooze that the druid has an agreement with. That being, wait until the druid gets there, in case it’s a kid being a Stupid Kid that she needs to remove, in which case she’s bringing a snack for the ooze. If it’s not a kid, she straight-up says so and the ooze gets to mercifully drown and devour the poor doomed critter. Win-win.

She gets there, following a sound of moaning. And the ooze is definitely not interested in eating this, ick, indigestion...!

From there she’d have enough info to warn the nearby town. Yes, of course there’s a nearby town, that’s why she has a Stupid Kid precaution....

This idea needs details and supporting characters. And I kind of want to throw in a maker of caryatid columns and a lake with an ahuizotl. They love eyes, teeth, and fingernails. Zombies have those too!

Thoughts?