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Awful stuff, the devastation is insane. And as others have said, there hasn't been any major flooding in these areas since 1791, apparently.
I am normally all for government incompetence and infrastructure failures being pointed out, but honestly this just seems like an act of God. I don't blame anyone in Asheville or the surrounding areas for not being prepared.
But I do blame the federal government for not doing more - where are the jets and helicopters going out there? Where is the televised response and shipping in of starlink and other supplies? I know there's been a FEMA bill signed to give funding but c'mon, this should be an easy publicity win for the left. I have 0 clue why they aren't making more of a big deal out of this.
If anyone does have videos or responses from the White House pls link, because I'd love to see it.
I feel like this would be the perfect place for that Pawn Star's meme, where flooded Appalachians are begging for aid, and the Federal Government just goes "Best I can do is 100,000, 67 IQ third worlders"
Having just finished volume three of Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire, I'm reminded of how towards the end the Roman Empire was so depopulated by mismanagement and oppressive taxes (there was a specific anecdote about I think Diocletian temporarily suspending the taxes on having children), as well as civil wars, famine and pestilence that they just started letting Goths and whoever else wanted to cross their borders to raise the GDP of the regions. That these newcomers murdered all the locals and pillaged their cities barely seemed to matter. Did they pay their taxes? Uh.... not really... in fact they demanded thousands of pounds of gold as tribute. But a bunch of Roman bureaucrats got to embezzle money and take bribes so it all worked out in the end.
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The lack of response looks extremely bad when we consider how much aid has been poured into Ukraine and Palestine, AND 10's of thousands of refugees have been pulled out of other country's (such as Haiti's) disaster areas and housed on U.S. Soil.
They should have C-130's airdropping supplies already. As it stands, Kamala hasn't even sent a tweet.
There should already be promises to put a couple billion or so dollars into rebuilding (i.e. what they claim they'll do for Ukraine once the war ends).
If the U.S. government can't even muster up the same kind of resolve and resources to rescue U.S. Citizens on U.S. soil due to a natural disaster, then unironically, they do not deserve to rule, full stop.
This is why its such a horrible idea to remove all the slack from the system to spend on relatively frivolities. When the need arises to spend your reserves due to an actual unexpected disaster, you don't have the change to spare.
I sure hope it doesn't take as long to deliver aid to North Carolina as Ukraine. Hopefully fewer fights over it in Congress as well. Maybe there should have been more funding for FEMA in the continuing resolution?
Does FEMA need additional funding? Use of the fund was approved yesterday and as far as I understood it the damage, while severe and tragic, hit mostly relatively low density areas. This isn't a hurricane Katrina situation, right?
Partly I am taking a shot at the claim that comes up every time there's some kind of disaster in the US (see also: Hawaii, East Palestine, wildfires, etc...) that foreign aid has somehow compromised our disaster response capabilities - often by the same people who oppose funding disaster preparedness - when in fact the US has capabilities for disaster relief so we don't have to respond in an ad hoc manner like we do with foreign events. When the question comes up: why aren't we doing X grand gesture of relief, the answer is usually that we have something more practical but less grandiose that we're already doing.
But also, apparently yes..
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Starlinks are a good point. In a sane world FEMA has thousands of them with batteries ready to deploy. I wonder if they do though, given the apparent hatred of Musk in the federal government.
God that’s so pathetic.
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