Trolls, Jeb Bush and explosive volcanoes

Call it violent misogyny rather than trolling.

More about Jeb Bush and his preaching to a rather unimpressed evangelical crowd.  And his support of White Supremacy.  And his lack of regret for getting involved with the Terri Schiavo case. And his declaration that he too would have invaded Iraq.  Student tells Jeb that his brother created ISIS.   If you want a repeat of the wonderful years of Georgie Bush but this time with Iran.... vote for Jeb.

Oatmeal has suggestions on what we should have been taught in senior year of high school.

Bees are still in trouble:
U.S. Honeybee Population Plummets by More Than 40%, USDA Finds

Something called volcano monitoring.

From nice to nasty.

Mr. Rogers.

Temple Grandin.

Your nose may save your legs.

Barefoot college.

Prepping for disaster.

Catholicism and women.

Israelis, the new Nazis:

"Israel was born out of Jewish Terrorism" Tzipi Livnis Father was a Terrorist" Astonishing claims in the House of Parliament. SIR Gerald Kaufman, the veteran Labour MP, yesterday compared the actions of Israeli troops in Gaza to the Nazis who forced his family to flee Poland. During a Commons debate on the fighting in Gaza, he urged the government to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Sir Gerald, who was brought up as an orthodox Jew and Zionist, said: "My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town a German soldier shot her dead in her bed. "My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians." He said the claim that many of the Palestinian victims were militants "was the reply of the Nazi" and added: "I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants." He accused the Israeli government of seeking "conquest" and added: " They are not simply war criminals, they are fools."

Sandy vs Katrina

Krugman states the obvious:

The point is that after Katrina the government seemed to have no idea what it was doing; this time it did. And that’s no accident: the federal government’s ability to respond effectively to disaster always collapses when antigovernment Republicans hold the White House, and always recovers when Democrats take it back. 

Consider, in particular, the history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

Under President George H. W. Bush, FEMA became a dumping ground for unqualified political hacks. Faced with a major test in the form of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the agency failed completely. 

Then Bill Clinton came in, put FEMA under professional management, and saw the agency’s reputation restored. Given this experience, you might have expected George W. Bush to preserve Mr. Clinton’s gains. But no: he appointed his campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to head the agency, and Mr. Allbaugh immediately signaled his intention both to devolve disaster relief to the state and local level and to downgrade the whole effort, declaring, “Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.” After Mr. Allbaugh left for the private sector, he was replaced with Michael “heckuva job” Brown, and the rest is history. 

Like Mr. Clinton, President Obama restored FEMA’s professionalism, effectiveness, and reputation. But would Mitt Romney destroy the agency again? Yes, he would. As everyone now knows — despite the Romney campaign’s efforts to Etch A Sketch the issue away — during the primary Mr. Romney used language almost identical to Mr. Allbaugh’s, declaring that disaster relief should be turned back to the states and to the private sector. 

The best line on this, I have to admit, comes from Stephen Colbert: “Who better to respond to what’s going on inside its own borders than the state whose infrastructure has just been swept out to sea?” 

Look, Republicans love to quote Ronald Reagan’s old joke that the most dangerous words you can hear are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Of course they’ll do their best, whenever they’re in power, to destroy an agency whose job is to say exactly that. And yes, it’s hypocritical that the right-wing news media are now attacking Mr. Obama for, they say, not helping enough people.

Screaming and running in circles works too...

What to do Before and During a Tsunami

The following are guidelines for what you should do if a tsunami is likely in your area:

Turn on your radio to learn if there is a tsunami warning if an earthquake occurs and you are in a coastal area.

Move inland to higher ground immediately and stay there.

Stay away from the beach. Never go down to the beach to watch a tsunami come in. If you can see the wave you are too close to escape it.

CAUTION - If there is noticeable recession in water away from the shoreline this is nature's tsunami warning and it should be heeded. You should move away immediately.

How to survive the next disaster

Talking to my cyber pal Steve Bates in comments about incoming sunspot activity, I asked him how he had survived the awful two weeks without electricity after Hurricane Ike. I've always had a fascination with survival techniques stemming from my youth where my mother would explain what we would do when Russian bombs fell on Los Angeles. That and the fact Southern California has the constant threat of earthquakes and the Big One is soon to arrive...

Anyway, I've put by camping equipment in the shed so that when everything falls down, these things could be retrievable: tents, sleeping bags, camp stoves, travel sized bbq grill. For water: toilet tanks (no chemical cleaners in them), water heater (if it hasn't fallen over), 2.5 gal. water bottles. Food: stocked pantry with both dried and canned food. Had stored some in the shed, but it really really goes bad quickly out in the heat.

Special tool to turn off gas to the house tied to the meter. Awareness of where the water turn off is and the electrical meter box.

Strapped some bookcases in the house but don't have the black elastic cord that runs in front of the books to keep them from hurtling off the shelves. Don't have our aquariums strapped to the wall... another source of water, btw. (Don't know how edible the tiny fish are but really don't want to ask my husband, they're his babies.)

Each time we have our infrastructure unravel just a bit, we learn how much we count on everything to work without any effort on our part. I've overheard our town's plastic Barbie housewives huffing about some tiny detail that wasn't just exactly the way they wanted it and I wonder how they will cope when everything comes undone all at the same time.

I want to be realistic and prepared.

Here is Steve's comment:

* Ice in the freezer or fridge is good for about two days. All our frozen and refrigerated food was bad... all of it. Forget recovering it; that $200 or $400 or however much you had in the fridge is just gone.

* Canned foods are good for a couple years, maybe three. I need to change ours out now; Stella has a tendency not to want the hassle of storing it, and arguing with her about it gets me nowhere.

* A camp stove may be a good thing to have. We don't, but it might be a good thing to have.

* Portable generators fail when you need them most. A couple weeks ago, when there was a brief threat of tropical weather, people here who have generators fired them up. The local storm tracker AM station (which doubles as the local right-wing nut-job talk station) said that 183 households reported their generators failed. We don't have them; we depend on lots of batteries. (Yeah, I know, that's not environmentally sound... so sue us!)

* Packaged foods last a good while if you don't open them. Dry cereal is pretty dull fare, though.

* Bottled water... WATER, for Dog's sake... goes bad after 2-3 years. Again, I need to replace ours. Again, it's environmentally unsound.

* Don't expect traffic lights to work. Even if the streets are cleared out enough to allow passage, it's dangerous crossing even medium-size intersections.

* Your land-line phone may not work for literally weeks after the storm, earthquake, whatever. Be sure you have a car charger for your cell phone; it may be your only contact with even your local world. Gasoline may be available, if you can get to it, and cell service was surprisingly resilient after Ike.

* Expect to sweat a lot. Just don't even think about getting A/C back quickly; ain't gonna happen.

Update: Adding to the discussion is Badtux the Backpacking Penguin who has some excellent ideas as well in comments:

You can survive a couple of weeks without much food, if you're a typical fatso-American, but you're dead within a couple of days without water. It always amuses me to see people stocking up on canned foods, but making no (zero) provisions for ensuring that they have drinkable water.

Get a couple of those backpacking water filters and one of those backpacking chlorine dioxide "Miox" generators, the kind that takes table salt and water and uses a battery to "crack" it into chlorine dioxide for killing nasties. Chlorine dioxide won't kill larger parasites (thus the water filter) but kills viruses and bacteria. Make sure you keep plenty of the lithium batteries and salt for the thing. Know where the nearest freshwater supply (no matter how nasty-looking) is. Even if it's the color of tea and smells like poop, it'll keep you alive once filtered and treated.

Think about pooping and peeing. If you're of the feminine persuasion, one of those portable potty seats makes peeing into a hole in the ground (and pooping for *everybody*) *much* easier. Don't expect the sewers to work, most of them rely on lift stations that are powered by electricity, if the pipes aren't simply sheared in half and collapsed by the earthquake.

For charging your cell phone without using gasoline, you can get a very good solar battery charger at Amazon for about $90 that'll charge up two AA NiMH batteries at a time (takes about 3-4 hours of sunshine per pair) then you can use its USB port to charge a (USB-chargable) phone from those batteries. Note that it only puts out half an amp on the port, so some big power-hungry smartphone won't work, but a regular old phone will charge just fine.

For cooking, if you have access to gasoline get a gasoline-powered camping stove. See rei.com for a large supply. If you want to cook over wood, a campfire is the least efficient way to do so... what you want is a coffee can type cookstove, Google 'coffee can stove' for how to make one. There are also more-efficient gassifying stoves like the 'Bushbuddy' that allow using much less wood. You can literally cook for two weeks with a pile of (dry) twigs with one of these things.

Uhm, make sure you have stuff for starting a fire (matches, firestarter blocks, etc.) in the first place! REI has some really cool damp-proof matches that work quite well combined with normal BBQ starter blocks.

Regarding food: One mistake most people make is that they stock food they don't normally eat. Then when they go to eat it in case of an emergency, they find out that a) it's expired, or b) it's nasty and nearly inedible, which makes a miserable experience even more miserable. Stock foods that you normally eat and rotate them rapidly. That way you'll have fairly fresh foods and you'll know what they taste like *before* you eat them.

Just some hints from a non-survivalist backpacker penguin...

Just a reminder for those in the earthquake zones

Make sure you are prepared.

THIS is how you deal with a disaster, Georgie.

Not that you ever cared. President Obama didn't even tell us to go shopping....



Thank you, Mr. President.

Preparing for the worst

And thinking the unthinkable. Wow. A government that is proactive not reactive. Sounds like a meeting where FEMA should go and take notes:

The Netherlands' emergency preparedness personnel spent all of last week conducting an exercise dubbed "Ergst Denkbare Overstroming (EDO)," or worst possible flooding, a scenario in which they virtually placed one-third of the country underwater. In the computer models, the entire west and north coasts, as well as low-lying areas in the large Rhine River delta where two-thirds of the country's 17 million people live were submerged.

The Dutch have been through a horrible flood before where 1800 people lost their lives. And they haven't forgotten this lesson. What have the Bush administration and FEMA learned since Katrina and Ike? Don't bother answering that.

The article continues:

The flood became deeply embedded in the collective memory of the Dutch. The vulnerability of this prosperous nation, much of it located below sea level, depends on the technical skills of its hydraulic engineers, and their expertise will be in even greater demand in the future. "Back then the flood was two-and-a-half meters high," says Lucien van Hove, "today we assume it could be above five meters." Van Hove, the coordinator of the giant storm barriers in the delta region around Rotterdam, is standing on the first line of defense against the great storm surge, the barrier gates in the Hollandse Ijssel, a branch of the Rhine delta. Each of two enormous steel gates is 81 meters (265 feet) wide and almost 12 meters (39 feet) high. At this moment in the simulation, they are virtually closed.

The storm barrier is designed to withstand a 70-centimeter (2.3-foot) rise in sea level. But two months ago a commission concluded that a rise of 1.30 meters (4.3 feet) could be expected by the year 2100. "We must now invest a part of our gross national product each year so that we can keep our feet dry in the future," warns van Hove. New storm barriers are needed, he says, and the dikes must be raised and, more importantly, widened. In addition to the problems posed by climate change, the land is sinking by two centimeters (three-quarters of an inch) each year, for tectonic reasons and because the subsoil, which contains peat and clay, is drying out.

Because the Netherlands is sinking more and more each year, its people must begin to think differently, says van Hove. For decades, the Dutch resisted the water during floods. In the future, however, they will have to be willing to flood entire sections of the country when such disasters occur, van Hove adds. "There will simply be too much water pressure."

I hope every Dutch house has an inflatable raft, flotation vests, and a GPS locator. Because, you know, disasters happen whether you ignore the warnings or not.


(actual quote)

You have been a walking disaster yourself, Georgie. You don't just visit disaster areas, you know. You're supposed to actually DO something about it. That's what we hired you to do.

Can we just get through the election first?

California Is Due for a Katrina-Style Disaster

When the next big earthquake hits the San Francisco Bay Area, it will be a catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina proportions. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people will die, and hundreds of thousands will become homeless. Economic losses will be on the order of $200 billion, the vast majority of it uninsured. Outside help will be desperately needed, but difficult to coordinate and execute.

And just as before Hurricane Katrina, scientists have been sounding the alarm, warning that the disaster is inevitable. It's not a matter of if, but when the "Big One" will strike.

If you live in California, it is talked about constantly, imprinted onto our consciousness. We know the mantra: Be prepared, don't hang mirrors over beds, strap your furniture to the wall, put by food and water, have a meeting place for separated family members.... but every time we have a temblor, people remember what they haven't yet done and rush out for water bottles and instant food. At least with hurricanes, you have a season. Earthquakes are an unpleasant surprise party.

Be prepared, be wise.

Vote first.

THEN go out and buy water bottles and stuff.

Tornadoes appreciate irony?

Topeka, KS (AHN) - Northeast Kansas was hit by several tornadoes from Wednesday night until Thursday, causing extensive damage in the area.

[snip]

The twister also smashed the Kansas State University campus, causing cars to turn turtle and smashing glass windows.

It destroyed the university's Wind Erosion Laboratory...

Joking aside, having never lived in an area of extreme weather, I would have no clue what to do. For those who want to know:

So what can you know about tornadoes which might save your life? Knowing something about tornadoes and using common sense can go a long way towards saving yourself. Here are six tips everyone should be aware of.

1 Hail is closely related to tornadoes! Large hail may precede a tornado, so the areas of a thunderstorm adjacent to areas of hail is a good candidate for a tornado to form. Seek appropriate shelter and remain in the shelter until well after the hail has stopped, about a half hour until the storm has moved away.

2 Opening a window in a house with the idea of reducing damage from tornadoes is a myth! Most building have sufficient ventilation to allow for the sudden drop in atmospheric pressure related to tornadoes. It is a myth that opening a window will allow inside air pressure to equalize with outside air pressure. Actually, opening the wrong window can increase damage.

3 Most deaths from tornadoes are caused by flying debris. Stay in the center of a building away from windows and exterior doors. Bathrooms and closets offer good protection if a basement is not available. Bathrooms have added support from pipes. Large rooms are more likely to have roof collapse.

4 Tornado wind speeds increases with height within the tornado. Storm cellars and well protected basements offer the best protection from tornadoes. In high rise buildings, occupants should try to reach the lowest floor and take shelter in small rooms or stairwells.

5 An approaching tornado may sound like a loud roar such as that from a freight train or airplane. At night or in heavy rains the only clue to a tornado may be the roar from its winds.

6 Although most tornadoes occur in the afternoon, they can occur at any time or the day or night.

The key to survival is awareness and planning. All members of the household should know where the safest areas of the house are. Make sure everyone knows that they may only have seconds of warning and that they must never hesitate or pause to grab toys or valuables.

In ways these suggestions sound very much like our California earthquake training: going for the strongest supported areas of the house, not trying to collect valuables, planning ahead. Sadly, we did not plan ahead for the tornado currently blowing through the Oval Office....