These past few days have brought Hurricane Helena, a horribly tragic lethal and destructive storm, to the people of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and West Virginia, and people in the Appalachian portions of Kentucky and Virginia.
Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people may be isolated.
Donald Trump showed up in Georgia Monday Sep. 30, visited victims and volunteers, worked with fellow big money businesspeople and many people of modest means to provide millions of dollars of aid to the afflicted. Elon Musk started providing commo links to the affected areas to help the residents and the first responders.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden was figuratively drooling on himself on a Delaware beach chair and Kamala Harris was out soliciting donations from Democrat sugar daddies and mommas like a lap dancer.
Reports are coming in from everyone from Elon Musk to many volunteers on the ground who are saying the Harris/Biden regime’s FEMA are actively interfering in hurricane relief in North Carolina.
Some Democrat mucky-mucks think the hurricane will help them carry North Carolina in the election in a few weeks because most of the victims who are isolated are presumably Trump voters.
Meanwhile FEMA spent more than a billion dollars in the past year or so sheltering illegals so the Harris/Biden regime says they can’t give Americans hurricane disaster relief. Overall, illegal immigration costs the people of this nation tens of billions of dollars a year. This doesn’t count the life costs of murders or rapes or other violent crimes, or the costs of property crimes to the victims of such crimes committed by non-citizens the Harris/Biden regime sides with.
FEDS ARE SITTING ON BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF FROZEN AND HIDDEN DISASTER RELIEF MONEY
Over the weekend Kamala announced her regime is sending close to $200 million to Lebanese people caught up in the war between the Israelis and those embedded like termites and roaches in Lebanon who have been firing rockets at Israel. This comes on the heels of her promising $750 vouchers to hurricane victims who have lost everything. (And they don’t have phone or computer service, so they can’t use the government ap. Nicely done, Kamala.)
Maybe the people of North Carolina can rename their battered state West Ukraine and the people of Georgia can rename their drenched state South Lebanon. They might get help quicker.
Just when you thought the Harris/Biden regime couldn’t get any more crooked or heartless, it turns out they are sitting on many billions of dollars of unspent disaster relief, some of it from as far back as Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
From Elizabeth MacDonald in Fox Business, 10/7/2024, this:
“Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas faces a new firestorm of criticism for claiming FEMA is out of disaster funds right as the DHS’ Inspector General released a report saying FEMA is sitting on at least $8.3 billion in untapped, unspent funds.
On Oct 2, Mayorkas said, “We are expecting another hurricane hitting. We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and what is imminent.”
This new controversy is surfacing as Hurricane Milton has become a Category 5 storm, and massive evacuations are now underway in Florida, which is still struggling from Hurricane Helene, as is much of the Southeast.
An August 2024 report from Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General noted, “As of October 2022, FEMA estimated that 847 disaster declarations with approximately $73 billion in unliquidated funds remained open.” The report also says “$8.3 billion in unliquidated obligations” was “for disasters declared in 2012 or earlier” that analysts say could be returned to help people battling for survival in disasters now.
The IG report concurs, saying, “More than $7 billion in unliquidated funds… could potentially be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund.”
Jeremy Portnoy, at the watchdog group Open the Books, notes that the way FEMA has set it up, the agency has locked in grant money that it must use during and before a “period of performance” deadline. That means the funds are obligated for that time period.
However, the Inspector General report finds that FEMA has been extending deadlines by up to 16 years for $7 billion worth of grants, sometimes without explanation. For example, FEMA is still sitting on $4.5 billion in unused, frozen funds for Super Storm Sandy, which happened 12 years ago, in 2012. FEMA officials have to justify and explain why they’re extending deadlines in writing, but it’s unclear what they’re saying to justify freezing the funds for so long.
The IG report also notes that FEMA officials extend spending programs based on “subjective” criteria and that “as a result, the potential risk for fraud, waste, and abuse increases the longer a program remains open.”
Translation: The Harris/Biden regime could use the money to help Americans in distress, instead of resettling millions of foreigners, most of them here illegally, in our nation to leach off of social services, commit many thousands of violent crimes (like raping and sometimes murdering girls who don’t submit to them) and even more property crimes, drive up housing prices, overwhelm medical facilities, screw school systems up worse than they already are, and skyrocket auto insurance with their high rates of car wrecks. IMHO, Harris/Biden and their people hope Carolinians for Trump in the Appalachians won’t vote. And they won’t help them after the election either, no matter how it turns out.
Would it surprise you to find out that the DHS IG, Joseph Cuffari, a Trump appointee, is facing an investigation from the Democrats?
Several news outlets note Cuffari reportedly fired a top careerist, Jennifer Costello, allegedly for misconduct. The Intercept, a leftist publication, reported Jennifer had joked about the killing of Cuffari’s predecessor at DHS. Some said this was because she wanted to be the IG herself. Cuffari must have felt his office didn’t have room for Jennifer standing behind his desk, figuratively with a knife in her hand. After Jennifer was canned, she sued, and the feds paid her more than a million dollars and upgraded her separation status to “retired.”
Cuffari did do his job in exposing the abuses of the Harris/Biden Department of Homeland Security, which controls FEMA. His reward will be an expensive legal and possibly criminal case battle. When you’re not a Deep Stater, that’s how it goes.
(Sources: Intercept 2/2/2021, Daily Beast 2/2/2021, Federal News Network 1/25/24, Newsmax 10/4/2024)
WHEN YOU NEED HELP NOW, THE FEDS ARE WEEKS AWAY
The Southeast and Appalachia are homes to a lot of military veterans. The New York Post, in a 10/7/2024 article, reported on how many of them are rallying to help their neighbors. This is American grit and ingenuity at its finest. I decided to run almost all this long article to give readers ideas about how to organize in future times of distress.
SWANNANOA, North Carolina — Hundreds of special operations personnel in North Carolina have formed their own homegrown rescue and supply operation in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene after they grew tired of waiting for the federal government to get its act together.
The Post found an all-volunteer operation being run out of a Harley-Davidson dealership with ruthless efficiency and military precision.
“Who’s FEMA?” ex-Green Beret Adam Smith derisively responded when asked about the agency’s presence on the ground since the deadly storm ravaged the rural western part of the state.
“This disaster has definitively proven without a shadow of a doubt FEMA’s incompetence and incapability,” he said, noting that the agency didn’t even show up until Thursday — almost a week after the storm that has killed at least 232, nearly half of them in the mountainous west of the Tar Heel State.
Unwilling to stand idly by after feeling his community was languishing with inadequate support from the government, Smith enlisted the help of a few good men and women to take matters into their own hands.
This Harley-Davidson dealership has become a forward operating base, complete with a fleet of 35 helicopters that have flown hundreds of rescue, reconnaissance and resupply sorties.
Organizers were calling the effort the “Savage Freedoms Relief Operation,” but Smith says they’ve proudly adopted an alternate moniker — “the Redneck Air Force.”
The dealership teems with current and former soldiers decked out in camo pants and army boots with handguns strapped to their chests and hips. Crop duster pilots, helicopter tour guides and special operations pilots — most of them off-duty or retired military — have answered the call from Smith and others in North Carolina’s extensive military community.
They’re using their own aircraft to fly doctors, medicine, generators, fuel and food to isolated residents cut off from the world by the unprecedented floods that washed out mountain roads and wiped entire towns off the map.
Supplies and fuel for an operation of this magnitude don’t come cheap, but the group has relied entirely on donations, including around $190,000 raised through a GoFundMe page, Smith said.
The whir of helicopter blades provides a continuous soundtrack to the action on the ground, as private aircraft touch down and take flight on a large lawn beside the dealership.
Inside the garage, under a window covered in topographic maps of western North Carolina, is the nerve center of the entire operation, where a former US Air Force combat controller and a local firefighter direct relief flights based on intelligence collated at an adjacent table by a team of men and women who are scraping social media and manning a tip line.
Two military trucks were parked outside the garage, loaded with reservists from the North Carolina National Guard, awaiting directions from the volunteers.
The well-oiled machine began when Smith, 41, was unable to reach his daughter or her mother in hurricane-hit Broad River — located between the devastated communities of Black Mountain and Bat Cave.
Smith, who was in Austin at the time, drove 18 hours through the night to get back to his family, only to find there was no road access to his home or theirs. So he did what any concerned father (who also happens to know a lot of people with helicopters) would do — arranged for his family to be airlifted out by a private pilot.
Since then, the flights have been nearly constant during daylight hours.
Now that the effort has taken on a life of its own, Smith and others leading the operation have gone from cursing FEMA for its absence to hoping it never arrives.
Smith said he fears their carefully calibrated rescue mission will be bogged down with governmental red tape if the feds show up.
“Nobody out here wants the federal agencies to come in. FEMA has walked into operations centers like this and has attempted to just take over and tell them what they’re doing is illegal and they’re not allowed to keep going. I’ve seen it firsthand in this area,” Smith told The Post.
Smith said he’s even directly told agencies to stay away.
In just a few days, the “Redneck Air Force” has evolved from surveying road damage and going door to door on horseback to the military-scale operation of today.
With the group’s rescue operations now complete, they’ve turned their attention to flying supplies to communities cut off from communications and electricity.
They’ve amassed around 100 brand-new Generac GP200i portable inverter generators, all neatly lined up and ready to deploy, each with its own full five-gallon gas can.
With temperatures set to drop into the low 40s in the coming days, Harley choppers — the two-wheeled kind — have been buried under piles of warm jackets set to be distributed.
To assist with the sick and injured, they have a nurse on hand who measures and dispenses medication, with three paramedics, two nurse practitioners and even a licensed physician rounding out their medical team.
They’ve also partnered with a local pharmacy that has been filling prescriptions for those still isolated in more remote areas, which volunteers then fly out to the intended recipients.
Kevin Hill, 42, from Moore County — just north of Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg) — is a former Air Force combat controller who retired a little over a year ago. He decided to throw his lot in with the group when he heard about the operation from some of his ex-military buddies.
“We’ve got a group over here in cyber, scraping anything they get from social media, scouring for information. They put that intel into a shared document we have access to, updating the priorities for air or ground ops and matching that with assets, supplies and personnel,” (Hill) shared.
“This guy,” he said, pointing to a plainclothed firefighter, “also vets the information we get because he’s a local fire department guy. He’s been indispensable in making sure we’re doing the right stuff at the right time.”
“We’ve got a group over here in cyber, scraping anything they get from social media, scouring for information. They put that intel into a shared document we have access to, updating the priorities for air or ground ops and matching that with assets, supplies and personnel,” he shared.
In addition to the nearly three dozen helicopters enlisted in the effort, Hill says AeroLuxe Aviation out of Tennessee has been “incredible” — flying missions for the group “non-stop.”
They even had some National Guard CH-47 Chinook helicopters dropping in to help airlift some of the larger generators, the volunteers directing the massive choppers to where their cargo was needed.
So far the feds seem to have heeded Smith’s call to leave them be, with one notable exception: a visit from President Biden, whose presence shut down airspace in the area and stopped the volunteer effort in its tracks.
[COMMENT: In all fairness, it is one of a president’s jobs to check out disaster-stricken areas. It is also the president’s responsibility to minimize his team’s presence so as not to hamper lifesaving and relief efforts. I can’t fault Biden for going …. but I believe he wouldn’t have gone if there hadn’t been the outcry about his apparent indifference to the suffering of Americans earlier.]
“You know that President Trump hasn’t been here? Trump’s team called and asked us if we wanted him to come in. We said we’d love to have him come in, but we don’t want a temporary flight restriction in the area,” Smith said.
“So they said, ‘OK, we’ll wait.’ You know who didn’t do that? The current administration.”
Smith said Biden’s visit — and a later one by Vice President Kamala Harris — prompted a 30-mile temporary flight restriction, which grounded the group’s choppers, forcing the group to devise a workaround, the details of which Smith kept close to the vest.
Smith was adamant that telling the government to butt out isn’t about a power struggle.
“I don’t care who runs it. Three things have to happen: Support and stability operations have to be efficient, they have to be effective and we have to reinject capital into the local population.”
Persons unknown did decide to mess with another legitimate volunteer group.
The United Cajun Navy, an organization of volunteers who aid disaster victims, reported the pilot of an unmarked Blackhawk military chopper rotor-washed piled-up supplies they had loaded from volunteers’ helicopters and vehicles. The rotor-washing blew the relief supplies around and damaged them. They said the pilot and someone else in the chopper were wearing military headgear and masks.
Earlier, the “Cajuns” reported, persons unknown two unmarked black SUVS thru their area, slow-cruising. Then they took off. Could it be they were spotting items that could be messed up by a deliberate rotor wash?
The events took place in Burnsville, NC, a town just northwest of Mount Mitchell, the tallest peak in the United States east of the Mississippi River.
Sources: United Cajun Navy X account, a 10/8/2024 article by Jennifer Oliver O’Connell of the “As the Girl Turns” website fame, and Gateway Pundit, 20/8/2024.
Leftists slam the Cajun Navy as swamp rats and rednecks. They choose to overlook the fact that the Cajun Navy has worked side by side with the Black Panthers in saving flood victims’ lives in Louisiana.
A LEARNING POINT FOR HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE READERS: EVIDENCE IS EVIDENCE. LEARN HOW TO TAKE PHOTOS AND FOOTAGE OF EVENTS WITH YOUR CELL PHONE.
KAMALA GETS BUTT-HURT. AGAIN.
Hurricane Milton is about to smash Florida, so Governor Rick DeSantis and his people are preparing for the destruction. They are issuing evacuation orders, setting up shelters, gathering supplies and construction equipment, co-ordinating with police to hammer looters, and sending out the call for medical people, linemen, and other blue-collar folks whose skills will be needed in the recovery.
Kamala tried to insert herself into the preplanning for Hurricane Milton to make it appear like she isn’t the clueless floozy she is seen as in the wake of her performance during and after Hurricane Helene. She allegedly made repeated calls to DeSantis, who reportedly brushed her off.
Then her boss Joe Biden backhandedly spanked Kamala’s ample bottom when discussing disaster relief the next day.
Per Alec Schlemmel of Fox News, 10/8/2024, this:
“President Joe Biden praised GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for being “cooperative” and doing a “great job” in his response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, despite Vice President Kamala Harris slamming DeSantis for “playing political games” instead of doing his job in response to the storms.
NBC News reported Monday that DeSantis was denying phone calls from Harris’ team. “People are in desperate need of support right now and playing political games with this moment, in these crisis situations, these are the height of emergency situations, it’s just utterly irresponsible, and it is selfish,” Harris told reporters Monday.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s opinion about the GOP Florida governor’s response to Hurricane Helene and his preparation for Milton, diverged substantially from that of his vice president’s.
“The governor of Florida has been cooperative. He said he’s gotten all that he needs. I talked to him again yesterday, and I said – no – you’re doing a great job, it’s all being done well and we thank you for it,” Biden said at a press conference from the White House Tuesday. “There was a rough start in some places, but every governor, every governor – from Florida to North Carolina – has been fully cooperative and supportive.”
DeSantis also shot back at Harris’ claims that he was playing politics with the storm, accusing her of being the actual culprit of engaging in political gamesmanship.
“I’ve worked on these hurricanes under both President Trump and President Biden. Neither of them ever tried to politicize it. She has never called on any of the storms we’ve had since she’s been vice president until apparently now,” DeSantis told “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning following reports of the vice president’s criticism. “Why, all of the sudden, is she trying to parachute in and inject herself when she’s never shown any interest in the past? We know it’s because of politics, we know it’s because of her campaign.”
“Harris is not even in the chain of command. She has no role in this,” DeSantis added. “The idea that I should be, like, worrying about her when I’m focused on the task at hand is just quite frankly absurd.”
Biden, who has had multiple phone calls with DeSantis since Hurricane Helene began barreling down on the Southeast, told him and Tampa Mayor Jane Castor to “call him directly” if any further support is needed.”
DEEP STATE PORT STRIKE SHELL GAME?
The very brief East Coast and Gulf Coast port strike was another issue that seems to have Deep State involvement.
Up thru the 1980s, we still made the majority of clothing, footwear, and household goods used in this country. Now we don’t.
Most imports by dollar value come in via the Pacific Coast ports. In other words, it is largely crap made in China destined for the shelves of Wal-Mart and Target and Harbor Freight and many other brick and mortar and on-line emporiums of schlock.
The Deep State and the plutocrats profit off of American unemployment. They cut this huge pile of ill-gotten money with the Red overlords of China.
Notice there was no strike of longshoremen on Pacific Coast. This would have cost a lot of greedy businesspeople, the Chinese government, and people high up in the Deep State and commerce and finance a lot of money. So it did not happen for obvious reasons.
Today’s How to be Your Own Detective lesson leans on public records research and a subject they used to teach properly – geography — for help.
I searched for some public records that might indicate what’s going on at our ports. Per the US Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration, here are some facts and stats for 2023:
The top five ports for value of imports were:
Los Angeles ($297 Billion)
New York/Northern New Jersey (mostly Jersey) ($206 Billion)
Houston ($158 Billion)
Long Beach, CA ($109 Billion)
Savannah, GA ($101 Billion)
As far as containerized loads go, the neighboring ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach received the first and the second most amounts of 20-foot shipping containers of any ports in the US. They were well ahead of the ports of New York and North New Jersey. The port of Oakland, CA held the eighth spot in the Top Ten of ports receiving containerized loads.
In tonnage imported, the Gulf ports held spots 1 (Southern Louisiana), 2 (Houston), 4 (Beaumont, TX), and three other spots (5, 6, 7) in the Top Ten. New York/North New Jersey held the 3 spot, Long Beach and Los Angeles held spots 8 and 9, and Hampton Roads, VA held the 10th spot.
There is a reason for this. It goes back to geography we all should have learned in grade school. Gulf ports take in petroleum products that weigh a lot more but cost a lot less per ton than consumer goods, especially electronics, which come in via the Pacific Coast ports. Coffee, bananas, cacao, orange juice concentrate, high-end wine and beer and spirits, pharmaceuticals, and European cars tend to come in at the Gulf ports or the Atlantic Coast ports. The bulkiest items going out of the Pacific ports are Rocky Mountain States coal out of the Southern California ports, and logs out of some small Northwest Pacific ports. (When Kentucky and West Virginia underground coal mines were more productive, a lot of the coal the miners mined shipped to Europe and Latin America out of the Norfolk area ports (Hampton Roads, Newport News).)
Donald Trump correctly blamed the strike on Bidenflation.
The movers and shakers behind the scenes in my humble opinion intervened because the cost of gas was about to spike dramatically upward before the election. Why? We don’t drill in the US and off the shores of the US like we did during President Trump’s first term, so we depend upon foreign oil and foreign-refined gasoline and diesel fuel a lot more now. A cutoff of petroleum products to Gulf ports would lead to inevitable shortages and price hikes, which could cost Kamala Harris and the Democrats the 2024 elections.
The longshoremen’s union boss wound up getting his people a very nice pay raise in exchange for promising not to cause any trouble until a week or so before Inauguration Day. A strike then will cause no problems for the Dems if the Deep State can get Kamala installed like a dim bulb.
And those in the know knew the longshoreman picket sign rattling was not going to be tolerated by those who profit off the uninterrupted shipping of Chinese-made consumer electronics, questionable pharmaceuticals, fly ash wallboard, cheap clothing and footwear, crappy tools, and sex toys capable of spying upon female nether regions and modes of usage.
You might not be aware of it, but the port facilities of this nation are by and large being operated by foreigners. This is a bipartisan mess. In 2006 the leftist media made it an issue because Bush 43 allowed Dubai Ports World, an Arab conglomerate, to buy the American port operations of P&O, a British firm, five years after 9-11. They have lockjaw on this issue now IMHO because it can’t help Kamala in the coming election.
Government port authorities are the titular owners of American ports. But they use contractors to run the ports. Many are foreign companies, and foreign companies with American affiliates. Some you may have heard of are Maersk (Denmark), APM (India, some ties to Maersk), COSCO (China), and Trapac (Japan). Stevedoring Services of America is invested in by Blackstone Investments, the predatory outfit whose scavengers have bought up billions of dollars of small houses and residential rental properties and jacked their rents skyward.
This is a revoltin’ situation Donald Trump needs to change when he becomes president.
A goal of How to be Your Own Detective is to give you news and analysis you don’t get from the usual suspects. Another goal of How to by Your Own Detective is to show you how to use research and reasoning to come to your own conclusions so you can protect yourself and others. Likewise, stories like the one on the Red Neck Air Force are to stimulate your own thinking and give you some reason to believe in the unconquerable American Spirit of We the People, who kneel to God, but to no one else. You are not alone, and you have more power and ability than you realize. God bless you one and all!
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