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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28008 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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Helene will probably be a weekly topic until every last American is rescued or buried, so I will start the conversation now with the latest updates I am aware of:

Biden has ordered "500 active-duty troops with advanced technological assets to move into Western North Carolina." I'm not sure what "advanced technological assets" they are deploying, hopefully it's something like helicopters, bridges, and drones.

There are many people asking why did he wait over a week to deploy these troops. This question is somewhat unfair in itself. In the same document Biden reminds the American people that there are already 1,000 troops on the ground (though it's not clear to me if that is across the affected region or specifically in North Carolina. The numbers he gives for National Guard is the number across Florida to Tennessee.)

I think the real complaint is not that the Federal response has been unusually slow, but that it is insufficient for the "Biblical" levels of destruction. Thousands of dead bodies, "4 Reefer Trucks" full in one county, everyone who is asking for donations asks for more body bags because they keep running out. Young kids naked and crying for their parents, ropes still wrapped around their arms from where their parents desperately tied them to trees above water. People without a roof over their heads or potable water, sewers flooded, hornets unhoused, prime matter for disease and misery. Roads and bridges gone, and no easy path to rebuilding them in the same places due to the banks and cliffs they occupied being washed out.

My husband insists that if things were as bad as I think, the US Army could get everyone out of Western North Carolina in a day. He knows more about the military than I do - he never made it past basic training due to being underweight but has two siblings in the military, one of which who has made it pretty far across 20 years of service. My husband has a very high opinion of our military's capabilities, but I wonder if his model is outdated.

In Greenville, SC, FEMA has taken over a runway with 10 helicopters that loitered all Sunday. For the past week, that runway was being utilized by private charities who were sending materials into the disaster area. Yesterday, it was out of commission for no visible or communicated reason.

Meanwhile, a Blackhawk helicopter just wrecked a distribution center in Pine Spruce (Spruce Pine?), North Carolina. Was it intentional? I hope not. But it displays a level of incompetence that boggles the mind.

All the details indicate to me that the Feds think they can just say, "X number of troops, time to deploy" and solve the problem. But there's no real leadership. No one making a plan to actually help people. The Military and National Guard is too slow and cumbersome. Private charities are able to respond quickly in a crisis, because they have a shorter chain of command and fewer rules. This might be a weakness, in that they will make more mistakes, possibly put their own people's lives at risk. But in the face of the disaster, maybe that is what is needed.

Only 230 dead people so far … not thousands?

Unless you were meaning something else?

I have seen many reports of more dead bodies that have not made it into the official statistics yet. I predict the number will be around Katrina levels, and have put my money where my mouth is, for what it's worth.

This video is one of several that, when I add things together, present this picture: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ag-hb45J6MQ?si=PBOIVJo6TvLyLZir

Update: The North Carolina National Guard has taken credit for the Rotor Wash incident. https://x.com/NCNationalGuard/status/1843780336616124896

Those helicopters do seem to be parked on Runway 10/28 at Greenville Downtown Airport (ie as opposed to a taxiway). I think that video was taken from roughly here, looking north.

There is another runway at the airport. You can also hear what I think might be a plane taking off or landing in the video.

The organization he mentions ~speaking on behalf of in the video, Greenville Aviation, posted this Instagram Story:

We need to clarify a few things.

A video was posted making some false accusations about operations happening at GMU.

Yes, there were some helicopters parked at GMU, but they in no way interrupted any of our distribution efforts. They were parked on an inactive runway, and were completely out of the way. They are no longer staged here as of today.

As for drops being made, we no longer need volunteer pilots or planes, but thank you again to everyone that has volunteered so far.

I wasn't clear enough on what my complaint was. It bothers me that there were helicopters that were not being used. Not being serviced, not being loaded, not in the air, nothing. In a situation like this, helicopters are too valuable to waste on a runway.

We are lead by accountants who will say, "I diverted X helicopters to the crisis," but never give a thought to how they are used to accomplish a goal.

In Greenville, SC, FEMA has taken over a runway with 10 helicopters that loitered all Sunday. For the past week, that runway was being utilized by private charities who were sending materials into the disaster area. Yesterday, it was out of commission for no visible or communicated reason.

The visible reason would appear to be 10 helicopters that were relocated to one of the multiple runways at Greenville airport?

In fact, the video shows another still being used by private charities. There doesn't seem to have been a 'stop' of aid flow through the Greenville airport. There isn't even a claim that this runway is needed to reach Tennessee.

There is an accusation that the FEMA helicopters are doing nothing based on... a glance towards a hanger that you can't see inside. Planning? Briefing? Crew rest? No way to know.

Meanwhile, a Blackhawk helicopter just wrecked a distribution center in Pine Spruce (Spruce Pine?), North Carolina. Was it intentional? I hope not. But it displays a level of incompetence that boggles the mind.

Yeah, whoever setup a light-weight tent on asphalt without weighting or tying it to the ground was an idiot.

That sort of thing could cause a helicopter to crash if a tent flew up like that, let alone who on the ground could get hurt if a vehicle or just a too-busy person knocked into the tent to hard. This is why airports regularly check for foreign objects and debris anywhere helicopters or aircraft engines would be near.

It's a good thing that helicopter was looking around. Can you imagine if that distribution center was supposed to receive a delivery of air-lifted aid?

Like, say, from a bunch of helicopters staged at a NC airport, possibly waiting for the results of an aerial recon to see where there was a good distribution center that could receive a helicopter lift?

Or- wait.

Was your accusation of incompetence aimed at the helicopter for the rotor wash that sent unsecured tents flying?

It's unclear. One of your links was a condemnation of what would appear to be the movement of and staging helicopters for distribution operations, and the other link was a condemnation of what appeared to be a helicopter doing an aerial recon of a distribution center.

The visible reason would appear to be 10 helicopters that were relocated to one of the multiple runways at Greenville airport?

One of the two runways at Greenville airport.

Yeah, whoever setup a light-weight tent on asphalt without weighting or tying it to the ground was an idiot.

Now you're getting ridiculous.

Greenville airport has one runway

Wrong Greenville Airport. It's not Greenville Spartanburg, it's Greenville Downtown.

Ah, ty

One of the two runways at Greenville airport.

Unless you think the loading and unloading happens at the runway itself, the point stands.

A 50% reduction of available runways is not the same as 50% airport throughput reduction, because the throughput of an airport is almost never limited by runway availability. This is why targeting runways is and of itself so rarely effective in a war, and why it's more important to target hangers and loading areas near the runways. Unless the runways are actually being constantly used at maximum capacity- which there is no reason to believe given the video's own lack of use of the still-active runaway and instead focus on a loading area- reducing runways is not what limits functional throughput.

This is especially true when a specific airport itself is not required to reach the end destination, which in this case is not Greenville but the places in Tennessee the video was claiming the flights were going to. There is no requirement for aid being flown to Tennessee to fly via the Greenville airport, because the aircraft flying to Tennessee via Greenville could fly via other airports. Fixed wing flights through Greenville could drop 100% and it wouldn't necessarily entail fewer goods reaching or passing through Tennessee airports.

Now you're getting ridiculous.

No, that was a shock-line opening of a genuine criticism. If the location is planned to be an aid distribution center, part of the plan's merit is how it plans to received aid to distribute.

Rotor wash is not an issue of aviator incompetence, it is the mechanical consequence of how helicopters fly in the first place. If you have any desire to receive aid via airlift, you need to plan your reception sites around those limitations. This means you need to not actively create aircraft safety hazards like FOD. There needs to be a place for helicopters to approach to either land or- at the very least- hover to hoist down pallets.

The issue is that the distribution point set up in the middle of a parking lot with an apparent lack of planning for receiving stuff by air. A parking lot is normally an excellent location for an impromptu helicopter zone. It's naturally flat, open, few obstructions to create rotor backwash, and naturally connected by and to roads for disseminating any goods downloaded from an aircraft quickly and efficiently to staging areas.

Instead, the on-site actors have made a functionally ground-only delivery reception point... in a disaster where ground-logistics were significantly degraded.

In order for that distribution point to receive any benefits from airlifted supplies, the airlifts will need to find somewhere else in the general area that meets helicopter requirements in order to unload. To reach the distribution site, those pallets will then need to be loaded on new vehicles, to be driven to the distribution point, which will then need to unload from the vehicles before it can be distributed.

This is not only doubles the number of logistical sites and loading logistics (forklifts, teams, etc) needed to support receiving aid, this also negates one of the advantages of air-lifted supplies in the first place, which is that they can be packaged in ways to facilitate fast dispersal that doesn't need forklifts that may be limited in a disaster area.

A pallet of rations air-lifted to a site doesn't necessarily need a forklift at all. If you have a surplus of bodies compared to forklifts- as is visible in the video- boxes of high-value/low-weight aid can just be directly carried off until the wooden pallet is all that is left, which can be picked up and moved elsewhere. This is far, far better in a disaster context than imposing a requirement to lift the pallet 5+ feet into the air (to put it into a truck for transport).

But this can't be done, because of how the organizers of the site have taken and chosen to use a parking lot. Which includes their choice of tent placement and not security it (or trash).

Now, maybe there are extenuating circumstances. Maybe that lot is the only one in the area. Maybe there are no resources to secure tents. Maybe there was literally nowhere to drag the loose trash that was just left in the middle of a distribution site, no man-hours or volunteer teams to move refuse to dumpsters to clear up more space, no time to plan or prepare for how to receive aid, no space to do things otherwise.

Or maybe they were using unsecured tents as sunroofs in the middle of the parking lot because it was convenient, and left trash in place because moving it was inconvenient, and didn't think through what that would mean if/when they become potential recipients of helicopter delivery and someone was sent by to do a check.

I get that 'FEMA bad, local volunteers good' is the narrative of the cycle, but this is what bad implementation looks like. Good implementation may be hard, good implementation may be beyond what can be expected, but good implementation is not what you are seeing if you are looking at the ground in that video.

In order for that distribution point to receive any benefits from airlifted supplies, the airlifts will need to find somewhere else in the general area that meets helicopter requirements in order to unload

In the specific instance I've seen, the volunteers were actively trying to signal to the helicopter not to land and were specifically closing that particular area to airlifts.

Also, that helicopter did not land. It just washed the area by flying low and they flew away. This seems more like a lack of situational awareness on the part of the pilot than bad logistical planning.

My attempted Steelman (but also not really) is that FEMA/FedGov has absolute GOBS of emergency resources on tap that it can shower into the area, but it has a real 'legibility' issue, and ad hoc relief efforts make that harder, not easier.

That is, due to lack of decent infrastructure in these areas (esp. after the storm) FedGov can't tell where their aid is most needed, where it can be deployed effectively (i.e. whether there's airstrips and landing areas and people on the ground to distribute aid) and how much aid has already been deployed.

From their perspective dropping 1000 tons of resources into an area that 'only' needed 100 tons is a misallocation, esp. if the place 50 miles over that needed 1000 tons only gets 100 tons.

Private groups that aren't registered and reporting to FEMA are also not legible, so FEMA can't tally the aid they provide into the totals for a given area.

Their attempts to gain enough control and insight into the region to be able to figure this out would look like what we've been seeing. Checkpoints set up in and out of disaster areas, sporadic communications, and some resources idling around while they figure out the best place to send them.

All of this is to say that FEMA 'wants' to be able to coordinate efforts and maximize the impact of their aid, but until the situation is legible enough to them to see what is actually happening, their immediate efforts will be based on figuring out how to deploy their resources.

/steelman

The flip side of the legibility issues is that from FEMA's perspective, letting people die while figuring all this stuff out is not the worst outcome because a dead body eventually becomes legible, they can tally up the dead and identify them and update their records and produce a nice, tidy report about the death toll of the storm, since a dead body doesn't get more dead they can take their time to do this too.

So I worry that the lack of urgency is in part due to simple incentives to establish knowledge and some level of control of the local region before actually attempting to help the locals, and a few dozen extra dead people in the meantime doesn't show up as a problem, just another piece of data to come out of the storm that they have to catalogue, and explain why certain decisions were made.

But if the mandate is to mitigate the logistics and supply issue, legibility is in fact a failure. All of the time spent confronting groups, confiscating their supplies to audit them, and so on means failure at *the reason we bothered to create FEMA in the first place. I think this is one of many things Neo-Reactionary thinking is correct about. The state apparatuses are rewarded or punished and basically held to account on process and legibility rather than accomplishing the mission at hand. And so these agencies spend much time making sure that they aren’t going to get dinged for not following the process that most agencies suck at the mission they exist to do.

I think at this point, most civilians are so done with FEMA that they’re actively trying to avoid FEMA knowing where they are and what they’re doing. Which is a mixed bag. Having untrained people trying to repair things or rescue people is probably a bad idea, but following the rules is likely to see supplies not get into the zone until more people die. The loss of trust in authority is going to be hard to overcome. Not much sympathy as they seem to be bringing it on themselves.

One thing to consider is that the US military just isn't very high-performance at these kinds of logistical tasks. Remember the pier in Gaza? Cost hundreds of millions, took ages to put up, got unmoored several times and then scrapped after dispersing a fairly modest amount of aid.

People may point to the initial invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq as counterexamples - but that was 20 years ago. There's probably been a lot of rot since then, DEI and recruitment shortfalls are a pretty toxic combination. They probably got used to re-supplying well-established bases in the Middle East for continual, low intensity fighting. There's probably lots of procedures and admin they feel they need to do, there's not much sense of urgency. What logistical ability there is resembles an imperial baseline, sending gunboats out to the colonies and manning forts. Sudden campaigns like this mean setting up new bases and supply routes at short notice, a different task.

I'm not saying that it's just incompetence but that expectations should be fairly low.

One thing to consider is that the US military just isn't very high-performance at these kinds of logistical tasks. Remember the pier in Gaza? Cost hundreds of millions, took ages to put up, got unmoored several times and then scrapped after dispersing a fairly modest amount of aid.

I could be misremembering, but wasn't the genesis of that plan Biden randomly announcing it in a press event? For all we know setting up an aid pier like that might be inherently almost impossible and not something the military would ever have planned themselved. Maybe the behaviour of the sea or form of the beach at that exact point makes things particularly difficult etc.

Not sure how people take Tulsi Gabbard these days, but she just posted about her visit to the affected areas and said it's pretty bad. I would give her report more credibility than random tic-toks and tweets: https://substack.com/home/post/p-149909700

overall I don't know what to believe as I've only heard random anecdotes, mostly from substack.

Hurricane Helene is about to have company- Milton will strike Florida soon, and it’s a cat 5.

Yeah, but DeSantis appears to have the FL state disaster relief organizations running well, so while the destruction may be significant, I'd bet on the response being significantly faster/more effective than normal as well.

Disaster relief is also significantly easier in Florida than the appalachians. But an additional hurricane will likely stretch resources even further.

Also outside of the coastal areas it is virtually impossible to be caught off guard by a flash flood. The topography of Florida precludes the sort of sudden deluges of water pouring down on unsuspecting towns, rather it would be a slowly rising water level that gives someone time to find elevation.

Like I try not to downplay the power of a hurricane, but Florida is uniquely well-positioned to survive and eventually recover from an event.

More importantly, this also isn't their first rodeo.

Florida is well-acquainted to dealing with hurricanes. They've had devastating category 5 storms in recent living memory that were extremely and extensively damaging, yes. But there's something odd I've begun to note with hurricanes, especially in the recent years - people have begun to learn from them. Infrastructure modified. Procedures amended. Housing codes changed. So that when the next one comes through, people and infrastructure are actually better able to handle it than the previous one.

This is the reason why Helene is so devastating - this is a region of the country that just doesn't have to deal with this sort of weather. It's a one-off fluke, their one-in-a-century storm. No one sensibly could have predicted it would have happened, no one could have accounted for it. Mother nature be like that, sometimes.

Yes, there was a marked difference between the impacts that occurred in areas that were built up in the 70's and 80's and 90's to those built up post-2003ish.

Anywhere that has lucked out to not receive a hurricane hit in a few decades is more likely to get totally obliterated when one does come through.

But houses built to recent codes and specced to survive high winds can make it through mostly without damage, sans a tree falling on it or something.

Its a 'silver lining' of a hurricane strike, the stuff not built to current code will go away, and ideally be replaced with structures that will survive future strikes, and so the whole state becomes hardened against future impacts.

That, and the absolute speed and efficiency with which utilities are restored and cleanup ensues is a stark contrast from how things went even 20 years ago.

I don't know if there's a better answer where structures that are vulnerable get updated or replaced (with whose money?) over time, or if we are just resigned to having to clean up and rebuild such places after the fact.

The topography of Florida precludes the sort of sudden deluges of water pouring down on unsuspecting towns, rather it would be a slowly rising water level that gives someone time to find elevation.

Can you help me understand why this is? I would’ve thought Florida, so much of it near the coast, would be more prone to rapid flooding. The water has a much shorter distance to reach wherever it’s flooding after all.

Or is your point just that people somewhere like Florida are accustomed to flooding so would be carefully observing water levels?

Imagine that a bunch of rain falls into the mountains surrounding a valley. It ALL has to flow down to the valley, then flow through the valley as water tries to reach the lowest point.

Enough water collected in the mountains, flowing down a valley, all at once, can be a concentrated force that crushes most things it encounters. Like a GIANT waterslide, the water collects and gains velocity on the way down.

Florida has no mountains. We're flat. All the rain falls on the state and mostly just sits there. We have a lot of rivers, canals, etc, and the big lake in the middle of the state, so there CAN be flooding, but not a huge rush of crushing water.

Thanks to Helene, one of my friends who lives on a river in Florida (just bought this year, sadly enough) had three feet of water in his house. He was there when it started coming in, and when it hit the one foot mark he was able to load up his car and drive out.

Also Florida sits on a bed of limestone, which is porous, so a decent portion of the water will get absorbed down into the Aquifers.

Downside is there's nothing to stop the wind, so a heavy windstorm will flatten whole areas. But if there's a will to do so, building back up isn't too hard.

Ah right, makes complete sense. I was thinking only of flooding caused by the ocean surging and not rain on land.

Mountains also have another possible source of flash fooding: spring melt.

More comments

Flash flooding happens when water rapidly appears from somewhere else. This generally requires a ton of water moving into a small area. Imagine you opened a dam into a giant plain. It fills with water but the water is spread the fuck out. Imagine you opened the same amount of water into a valley....it's going to be a valley with a big ass river covering the ground real fast.

Because Florida is wide and flat it fills, but evenly and over a period of time. Valley towns in a mountain though.....

You get flooding from rain when you get rain coming in much faster than it can drain. Florida is VERY well-drained; there's few bottlenecks between wherever the water lands and the ocean.

My husband insists that if things were as bad as I think, the US Army could get everyone out of Western North Carolina in a day. He knows more about the military than I do - he never made it past basic training due to being underweight but has two siblings in the military, one of which who has made it pretty far across 20 years of service. My husband has a very high opinion of our military's capabilities, but I wonder if his model is outdated.

The US Army probably couldn't evacuate Western North Carolina in a day under ideal circumstances with a perfectly compliant population, never mind in the wake of a major natural disaster. That's not some recent degradation of capability nor a comment on the urgency. Getting a million people out of a mountainous 10k square mile area is going to be an ordeal no matter what.

Yeah, there’s no organization in the history of the planet which could have done it in a day. A city, maybe. But as soon as you go to backroads you are losing 2/3 of your time just getting to the people.

Agreed, but it's kind of like how the Secret Service was viewed up until two months ago. This is Butler, PA happening to another honored USA institution.

Except that FEMA isn't really all that honored. They screwed up Katrina by the numbers.

Army/US Military instead of FEMA.

Your magnitude of comparison would be the Afghan bug out.

Afghan bug out

Was this an example of success?

I will set aside how some or most viewed the Secret Service. But a decline in prestige? How long have they been paying attention? In any case, a brief history of recent Secret Service failures:

2009: Two party crashers — a couple — with thankfully no ill intent, sneak into Obama’s inauguration without credentials and shake his hand. Just put on some evening wear and a smile and you too can reach out and touch the president. No need for vetting.

2011: A bullet hole from a rifle round is discovered by a housekeeper at the White House. It turned out to have been fired four days prior, not that the Secret Service had previously noticed.

2012: Agents in Colombia are caught drinking and consorting with prostitutes just hours before being on duty.

2014: A knife-wielding looney jumps the White House fence. Is he confronted on the lawn? Hah, no. He reaches the East Room before he is apprehended.

2015: Two off-duty Secret Service agents, both drunk, one driving, collide with a security barrier at the White House.

2017: Another looney jumps the White House fence. He wanders the grounds for 16 minutes. No rush, fellas.

2019: A Chinese national with a flash drive full of malware passes through a Secret Service checkpoint. Thankfully the elite operators at Mar-a-Lago’s front desk confronted him.

2022: Two Secret Service agents are sent home from a trip to South Korea after getting in a drunken fight with a cab driver.

Something to consider is the context of the job and the timeframe.

You're talking about the same timeframe as the Global War on Terror. Secret Service types are generally all ex-cops or ex-mil. As your stories about USSS with colombian prostitutes and korean cab drivers point out, they have the machismo that goes along with these career fields.

Well, during GWOT, the Super Bowl of male badassery was being Special Operations in the military - specifically the SEALs (because if you don't write about a raid in a book, did the raid even happen?). If you're the archetypal 18-24 year old male between 2002/3 - 2016, and you want to go out and kick ass, you're joining the military (and likely ending up in the 82nd Airborne if you fail selection, lulz).

Those who joined USSS during this time period? Head scratcher. I can see family connection being a reason - "My dad was USSS / a cop, I'm going to do it too", I can see individual level hyperfixation on the job, but that wouldn't account for more than a few percentage points of applications.

Also, keep in mind that USSS is largely recruiting from the same pool as the FBI -- who do you think wins the battle for best candidates more often?

The point is - I think the USSS has a very hard recruitment problem on its hands. This is where someone should link the GIF of the husky gal from the trump assassination fiddling with reholstering her pistol and generally looking lost. And, remember, that was the Presidential detail. The one's "guarding" the White House when POTUS isn't in town ... that's gotta be a JV team if there ever was one.

Wasn’t she some sort of deputized local official? Having trouble finding anything on the subject.

But I generally agree. No idea what the pipeline to USSS looks like. Maybe all those armed IrS agents look for a career change during their midlife crisis?

Wasn’t she some sort of deputized local official?

If she was, then it's even more of a colossal leadership and organizational failure. All of the video suggests she was stage detail (i.e. closest to Trump). It would seem to me those should be the most experienced / trained / highest performed agents there.

Consider also that the decline in mythic quality from Ike-Kennedy-LBJ-Nixon to Dubya-Obama-Trump-Biden may impact willingness to take a bullet for the guy.

Biden

willingness to take a bullet strong breeze for the guy.

looney jumps the White House fence

These are the ones that really blow my mind. Some of the other stuff is genuinely difficult, but in these cases, we've got stuff like an incompetent Secret Service agent just getting straight up trucked by a crazy guy because she's too weak to do the basics of the job. Growing up, I thought that if you jumped the White House fence, you'd be immediately sniped, and if you weren't, you'd get blown up by mines, and if you danced around those, you'd get shredded by guard dogs. It turns out you just get confronted by a frail lady when you get to the door.

Ah, you should have started a little earlier!

2007: An academic is allowed to lead the President into the basement of Mount Vernon alone. Source

Do we even know if that was an academic? Or was it a terrorist or FBI agent that had undergone then cutting-edge plastic surgery in 1997.

I'm sure everybody has their "issues" with the entire response, mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.

Here's Kamala bragging about sending $150 Million to Lebanon to pay back for some of the destruction that Israel enacted upon them somehow also my tax dollars indeed

Somehow the Texas Air Guard can go help with flooding in Czechia

The other "issue" is that FEMA is fullfilling the "too many chiefs and not enough Indians" meme. It seems like they want to occupy the role or "organizer", and less so doer. The local guys in ENC siphoning diesel fuel into excavators and building improvised bridges are doers, and they are looking to their local church leaders and community members as organizers. They want/need resources (money, equipment, helicopters) from FEMA, but they actively do not want to be "organized".

Young kids naked and crying for their parents, ropes still wrapped around their arms from where their parents desperately tied them to trees above water.

I've been watching this really closely and haven't seen anybody claim this. Can you link to a source for this?

/images/17283174732845304.webp

This is my least favorite right-aligned argument. I'm not all that excited about funding Ukraine and Israel, but I'm also not all that excited about federal spending on hurricanes. States are big, they have economies the size of medium to large countries, this doesn't need to be a federal spending priority. If North Carolinians are getting screwed because of a lack of spending, they should take it up with their governor. The federal government should fill roles that are too large for states or require coordination solutions; a small coordination role for FEMA makes sense, but there is no reason that North Carolina can't pay for its own recovery budget.

I’d say this is a great case for government intervention. It’s particularly close to the core Constitutional mandate.

Plus, look how much of the relief is being coordinated through one state’s airport. I think forcing everyone to duplicate logistics would be less efficient.

but there is no reason that North Carolina can't pay for its own recovery budget.

While I definitely agree with your sentiments, unfortunately the math doesn't work out.

I'll spare a Wall of Numbers-And-Links, but the reality is that too effectively insure or budget against natural disasters, even for states not named Florida and California, would mean a massive redirection of their state budgets such that they wouldn't be able to finance everyday things like roads and hospitals. Not only would voters not want that, society doesn't want that. We want basic levels of education and infrastructure pretty high. You don't want large swaths of states (large the rural parts) to be grossly less developed than the rest of the state. Culture and politics aside, this eventually results in economic degeneracy.

So, the tacit deal for decades has been that the Federal government will use its money printer for any state(s) that get slapped by a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, even large blizzard. The state just needs to keep funding its own "basics."

The rub, however, is that the funding for those basics has, over time, sourced more and more from Federal dollars. Daddy is not only paying for your expensive car insurance, he bought you the car and he pays for gas. But how? But why?

Congress can control state level funding down to absurd levels of detail. In Saving Congress from Itself James Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley) describes the absurdity of Congress, at one point, specifically allocating funds for a particular sidewalk somewhere. While the top line numbers might look impressive - "Congress gives Alabama $3 billion for Space Industry" (I'm making that data point up) ... the detail might be that that $3bn is sliced into pieces of no more than $5mn that have super specific targets.

Of course, you say, the states and closely coordinating with Congress so that what needs funding is funded, right?

No. Not only no, but fuck no. There's no state-to-House-and-Senate budget powwow where all this gets hashed out. Governors may called their senators, lobbying firms do their thing. Big profile stuff may get helped out but, generally, a lot of this is just stitched together as the process evolves in real time. And, then, it produces a horrible dilemma for the states - if they don't actually SPEND what Congress allocated, there's a good chance they'll have to answer for it and, likely, NOT receive that money again.

But, wait, it gets worse.

Tied up in Federal dollars is compliance with a bunch of Federal standards around spending those dollars. While much of this is compliance and accounting related, some of it has to do with what contractors can receive those dollars. This is everything from ensuring the contractor has compliant auditing systems all the way to, you guessed it, diversity definitely-not-quotas for the disbursal of Federal funds.

Tying this all the way back to the quoted text I led with, North Carolina doesn't have the money to fund its own disaster relief at scale. The money they get from the Federal government isn't meaningfully North Carolina's in a real sense. Instead, it's a weird pass-thru self-spend by the Feds ... with a lot of the back office support being in DC. This is the end result of a process started for sure during LBJ's admin with precedent to FDR. Your State government (with the bizarre and horrible exception of California and the just bizarre exception of Alaska) has probably invited in the grasping tentacles of Washington DC years ago and now cannot afford to cut them.

You don't want large swaths of states (large the rural parts) to be grossly less developed than the rest of the state. Culture and politics aside, this eventually results in economic degeneracy.

Speak for yourself. Subsidizing inefficient sectors of the economy for political reasons is ALREADY economic degeneracy.

The left has been running the "blame your political opponents for bad weather" play for 20 years, but that doesn't make it any less stupid when the right does it.

20 years? People blamed the federal government for the 1906 San Fran quake.

People have been blaming their political opponents for bad weather since we've have political opponents and bad weather

I think MITE is referring to hurricane severity being (potentially) worsened by anthropogenic climate change.

I figured it was referring to Katrina.

mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.

Can you elaborate, because I keep seeing people say things like this, and I don't get it? It just seems like a kneejerk disaste for foreign aid tied into the topic of the day*. The big Ukraine aid bill took like half a year to negotiate and almost failed. The Federal government spent ~$6 trillion in FY23. Somewhere around 1-2% of that was foreign aid and included support for the largest conventional war of the century.

*what's even more frustrating is that many of the same people who do this also object to spending money on disaster readiness

Somewhere around 1-2% of that was foreign aid

That's quite a lot. Like meme levels of spending. Stop spraying my tax dollars on other countries.

If you're trying to explain why Congress won't adequately fund Federal disaster relief it's not. Especially when you're trying to compare a supplemental that took half a year to negotiate with additional funds for a disaster that happened last week.

Stop spraying my tax dollars on other countries.

The socially optimal amount of American tax dollars given to other countries is non-zero :V

socially optimal

how do you define it in this context?

The socially optimal amount of American tax dollars given to other countries is non-zero :V

Yes, and if we are to have any impact on the massively increasing slope of federal debt, then everything must give a bit. The correct amount is not zero, but in a period of wild profligacy, everything must give a bit to return to sanity.

And this “it’s only 1%-2% responses infuriates me.

Yes if the only thing you do is cut foreign aide, then you won’t solve the problem. But if you cut foreign side and ten other similar size useless programs, then you’ve made a real difference.

And this “it’s only 1%-2% responses infuriates me.

This is why I mentioned that the same people who complain about foreign aid also don't want to spend money on disaster readiness and are just grinding an axe. What point is trying to be made? That we can't afford to fund FEMA because the Feds are giving all our money to foreigners? Objectively false (and I have uncharitable opinions about its roots). Is that we should spend less in general? If so, by all means say that, but it's pretty much the diametric opposite of "there's no money for our own citizens". It's saying we need to help people less. Maybe that's a more optimal outcome, but it's a very different point than what Stellula was bringing up.

But if you cut foreign side and ten other similar size useless programs, then you’ve made a real difference

Again, if you want to slash welfare, just say that. It's not like Congress was forced to choose between $100b to UA and $100b to FEMA.

I’m not saying they are forced to choose between these two items. But the idea that “it’s only 100b” leads to wasting American money on nonsense like Ukraine aid. 100b adds up. And it adds up fast.

I would prefer we spend less overall (including on welfare). But if I’m cutting I’m starting first with foreign aid and then moving from there.

And yes, we could in theory tax more. But why would I want the government to tax me more to give money to fucking Gaza or Ukraine? The concept is offensive.

So if we aren’t going tax more the. We need to spend less. We aren’t doing that.

A difference in what?

When states do deficit spending, they take on debt to meet the desired expenditures, they don't spend to match the debt assumed.

The distinction is that if you cut X money from the budget, it doesn't mean X more money is spent on other things. It means X less debt is assumed. That's fine and well if the debt is the difference you care about, but the argument in the current context isn't that there's a debt issue preventing more funds from being taken.

If you cut and reduce the deficit, then one time emergencies won’t hurt as much. That is, being fiscally responsible is better in bad times compared to being fiscally irresponsible.

The US is phenomenally wealthy - more so than peer developed nations. Despite this, it spend proportionally less, even after you factor out the large gap in military spending. This is a policy choice. We're not out of money. We're not brushing up against some hard upper limit of what a government can spend without wrecking the economy. We've chosen an arrangement where we get lower taxes and more consumer spending over higher taxes and more government services. This has consequences. Some of them are positive, but sometimes it's going to mean you underinvested in public services relative to the ideal case.

As I said in my other comment, it's not like Congress was forced to choose between $100b to UA and $100b to FEMA.

A difference in what?

Federal debt has exploded in recent years. That's not free.

It's also not the problem at hand. Hence why it's not making a difference to the problem at hand.

This report from a lineman mentions kids walking around naked looking for parents. Other reports of naked kids: https://x.com/MrsMcGeek/status/1843003502047707335.

Trying to find the video with the rope thing but it's hard to find the exact video when I have watched hundreds over the last week and X doesn't make it easy.

The thing about all these "kids without parents" stories, is I mean, they aren't on their face unbelievable. Tragedy happens. But they'd be a lot more believable if it wasn't random twitter accounts, or photos of screenshots of text messages from some guy.

I wasn't 100% on board with the whole "FEMA is blocking aid" stories coming out until Elon Musk personally attested that an engineer on his payroll in North Carolina was being blocked. That is a concrete event with names we can verify. Would Elon lie about that? Or misunderstand or exaggerate? Maybe. But it's a starting point of a concrete claim that can be verified.

I have seen more videos of local sheriffs, helicopter pilots who'd been running rescue missions, etc coming forward and saying FEMA is blocking aid. Are these real sheriffs? Are these real pilots who really rescued a wife and then was blocked by FEMA from going back for the husband? Don't fucking know, but it's slightly better than "photo of a screenshot of a random text message".

I doubt I'll ever know how much of this was real and how much was fake. Especially since I'm already seeing the "It's all Russian misinformation" meme getting rolled out, and the precursors to "actually what caused excess deaths are all the people spreading misinformation". So fuck me I guess. We'll be arguing about how many died and who's fault it was until this passed out of living memory.

The temporary flight restriction Musk was complaining about is a matter of record, and it's the same one involved in the other incidents. You can argue about which Federal agency is responsible (the FAA issued it of course, but who asked for it is another matter), but there's no doubt it existed.

I have seen one report on X/Twitter of supplies being confiscated that was literally translated from the Russian. Not sure if Russian trolls or other trolls pretending to be Russian trolls.

The helicopter pilot being told he'd be arrested if he kept working was told that by a local fire chief, not FEMA.

Trigger warning: this is an infuriating story and the followup makes it quite a bit worse. https://youtube.com/watch?v=s8ICG0iaHqw

Any single "kid without parents" story has not been credible, just like any single "I saw a truck full of dead bodies" story is not credible. Dozens of seemingly independent stories make it more credible. I'm not 100% convinced that there is a naked kid survivor still tied to a tree, or what the maximal claim might be. I am pretty sure it is confirmed that this event has created some orphans, potentially stranding kids without any adult supervision entirely for hours, days, who knows if there's still a kid out there all alone? We wouldn't know, because they'd be alone. With communications down for so long, and people spread out in remote communities, no one can say they have the full grasp of the tragedy yet.

I am pretty convinced at this point that the death toll is in the thousands, and give 50% odds that this final death toll will not be on the official news until after the election. There are just too many reports of people saying they personally saw dead bodies, spread out across a wide geographical region.

I’ll take that bet.

Based on my friends and family in the area, I figured the death toll would stay under 500, possibly 300. This is a first-world country and there aren’t that many unaccounted for.

$100 to a charity of your choice if the official figure clears 1000 by the end of the year?

I would strongly encourage you to define what 'official figure' means, before making that bet. An 'excess deaths' measurement like used after Maria will give drastically higher results than those marked as storm-related by a coroner.

@OracleOutlook, what say you? I get the impression we’re both talking about coroner-marked deaths, i.e. drownings, contaminated water, or injuries. Is there a site we can agree on?

Would you like to use https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/index.php?season=2024&basin=atl when the report becomes available?

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Sounds good. As far as bets go, it sounds like I win either way. Either I win the dubious honor of being able to read the tea leaves Twitter vibes, or I win fewer people dying in reality.

Make it a hurricane survivor charity for better symbolism?

mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.

TBH if it were as simple as just cutting a check I think the Feds would be quite effective. But as discussed last week, it's not that simple; they actually have to go into a chaotic and desperate situation in very rough terrain and try to coordinate between thousands of local folks, out-of-state good samaritans, etc., and they have to do it with unionized and over-bureaucratized government workers who suffer very little personal blowback for failure.

I don't accept this.

If we can send emergency money to Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and everybody else, then we should have no problem doing the same in The US. We're sending aircraft carriers to the region to assist Israel in their ridiculous war, redirect those aircraft carriers to Myrtle Beach, and make the pilots fly over ENC with thermal cameras pointed at the ground. Put a drone in the air and look for people. Send helicopters.

Even if this is pointless, it's symbolic.

I write a very fucking large check to the federal government every spring. Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

I write a very fucking large check to the federal government every spring. Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

Hey, get in line. I have sincere moral problems with many of the things the federal government spends my tax money on; stop that before giving some foreigners a discount on weapons.

If we can send emergency money to Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and everybody else, then we should have no problem doing the same in The US.

Yeah, we should stop doing that too. Much of it is probably squandered or embezzled for the same reasons I would expect this to be. I don't want more of my money confiscated on the basis that maybe it'll help someone somewhere if we just shower them with more cash.

I write a very fucking large check to the federal government every spring. Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

Okay. But how about one cent of the check of someone else willing? Would that be okay?

If you want to donate your money to Ukraine go for it.

You avoided the question. Let's make the implications more explicit for the audience.

You made a position on how your taxes should not be used on taxes you do not agree with. Does that prohibition apply to other people's taxes on causes they support? Or are you demanding a prohibition even on things your paid taxes don't touch?

'My taxes shouldn't go to things I don't like' is the motte. 'Other peoples taxes shouldn't go to things I don't like' is the bailey. However, there is no moral outrage veto on the government spending other people's taxes on things they support their taxes being used for.

Money is fungible. This allows an accounting trick where the government can say "we aren't reducing your taxes nor are we changing how much of the budget gets spent on each item, but we're taking the money for this program from other people and using your taxes for something else". Unless objecting to a particular expense actually leads to your taxes going down, using "other people's taxes" is indistinguishable from using yours.

Not one cent of it should benefit Israel or Ukraine until there are no more problems to solve here.

There's always a relevant xkcd....

Also, every bit of Ukrainian clay seized by Russia will undermine the post-WWII standard against wars of territorial expansion, which will almost certainly cause more problems here.

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries. (If everyone had open borders, Israel might not be necessary because Jews unsafe in their homes could always go somewhere else, as occurred many times prior to the 20th century, and could have occurred in the counter-factual 1930s and 1940s absent the post-WWI implementation of modern passport and visa systems.)

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries.

I look at this, and then I look at the Kurds. The exact same argument applies, except far more so because the Kurds are currently persecuted and the Jews aren't. You could also say this about the Uyghurs, or the Rohingyas, or any other nation that does not have a state. Am I missing some reason that the Jews are a priority here?

The trouble with ignoring the sentiment is that you always have to deal in the reality of limited resources. You simply cannot do everything and as such you need to set priorities that make some sort of sense. And really we don’t have the ability to police the world while also dealing with a major crisis. The same soldiers cannot both be preparing to deploy to the Middle East and mounting search and rescue in the Heléne hurricane zone. Of the two, I think any sensible leader would choose to at least delay until the S&R stuff is finished before packing them up to sail overseas.

As for the post WW2 consensus, I think it died the minute Russia invaded.

It died at least two decades prior, when the US waged war to claw an internationally recognized region away from Serbia.

I don't recall any Serbian territory being annexed by the US or any other country. A territory becoming its own country is a different matter, as otherwise India and most of the countries in Africa would have to be considered illegitimate.

If Russia funded Cascadia to secede from the US on the ground that they are oppressed by Californians, would that not violate the post WW2 consensus? And if not why not?

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countries. (If everyone had open borders, Israel might not be necessary because Jews unsafe in their homes could always go somewhere else, as occurred many times prior to the 20th century, and could have occurred in the counter-factual 1930s and 1940s

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence, it will be true if Israel collapsed tomorrow, it will be for all the evidence we have true for hundreds of years.

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel.

Has any ethnic group gotten blanket asylum in the West? There has been a slow shift away from permissive asylum policies (see the entire cats thing): nobody is letting in "the other" wholesale (Rwanda? South Sudan? Yazidis?) with maybe a few limited exceptions like Ukrainians fleeing Russian invasion or Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh. That's putting a heavy assumption that those Jews won't be treated as "the other" there (for which there are plenty of pre-WWII examples), and even then I don't think that supposedly-favored groups like white Zimbabweans (whose population there is down at least 80% since the country became independent in 1980) have ever been recognized as categorical refugees.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.

The basic model these people have of the world is that "the West", as colonisers/imperialists, have forfeited for all time the right to any ethnic criteria for who lives in their countries, while "Indigenous peoples" (basically everyone else) have always lived peacefully and harmoniously in the same spot and so have a fundamentally legitimate claim of ownership of their land.

Would you wager your life on that? Your children's lives?

Were I married to a Jew I would no more worry about the USA going 1930’s Germany on them than I currently do about an alien invasion.

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence,

That's a convenient elision of the fact that the Jews trying to escape the Nazis were in large part turned away from those nice western countries. Even years after the end of WWII, hundreds of thousands of European jews were still sitting in Displaced Persons camps guarded by allied soldiers because no "nice western country" would take them, and were only able to leave after the establishment of Israel as a national homeland for jews (those "nice western countries" still weren't willing to take them).

And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future. France is already markedly unsafe, and as Britain islamicizes over the next couple decades anti-jewish sentiment is likely to increase.

What a perverse cycle of history: the West turned away Jews, Holocaust, West feels guilty and sets up asylum laws Never Again etc, those asylum laws ultimately end the "guilty West," becomes anti-Semitic again, Jews get turned away.

And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future.

Bring back the Slattery Report.

We did get a middling detective story out of it, at least.

There’s a convenient elision of the fact that it’s not the forties anymore. Israel has the right to exist, they don’t have the right to demand a blank cheque from the rest of the world.

If Israel fell tomorrow the Jews would move to Anglosphere countries and Central Europe. Well, the ones that didn’t get massacred in the process of it falling at least. There won’t be a second Holocaust.

It's easy to play armchair general, but I think @Celestial-body-NOS made a point that can't be ignored.

While you might feel certain that Western countries would take in Jewish refugees, you presumably don't have any skin in the game. Would you be willing to be the lives of your family on this?

As a fellow armchair general, let me say that while I think it's probable that Israeli refugees would be accepted, it is far from certain. Nothing is certain when it comes to hypothetical future world conflicts. And if we're indexing from known past events, we know that Jews haven't been welcome with open arms in the past.

they don’t have the right to demand a blank cheque from the rest of the world.

A blank check would entail allowing Israel to actually do what the rest of the arab world - including the palestinians - did and continue to do: pushing all of their enemy's co-ethnics out of all territory they can martially claim. What they're doing now is significantly more humane than what the Saudis did to the Yemenis (and lost), or what the anti-Assad rebels backed by the west did to the Yazidis, or what NATO-ally Turkey does to Kurds, etc., etc., etc. Much of the criticism of Israel is one giant isolated demand for rigor.

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Elian Gonzalez has entered the chat. Progressive emphasis on immigration uber allies has long had a lot of exceptions for political utility.

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There's always a relevant xkcd....

I think a better analogy for that XKCD comic would be: We can't fund the Ukrainian space program until our space program doesn't have anything left to do. If Ukraine wants to have their own space program their citizens can choose to fund that, or if US citizens want to fund the Ukrainian space program they are free to donate their money to it.

Which...yes?

There are perfectly reasonable foreign policy objectives in funding Ukraine’s war effort.

That analogy might work better if Mexico were trying to re-negotiate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at tank-point, or if Canada were aiming for a re-match of 1812.

However, as we do not currently face any remotely credible threat of armed invasion* at this time, our 'keeping the Stars-and-Stripes flying over El Paso and Detroit' program doesn't have anything left to do.

*No, people coming in looking to work for money is not the same thing as an invasion.

Is Ukraine a US state? Do they pay taxes? Can we conscript their sons to go die for the protection of our nation?

Russia invaded Ukraine. They don’t invade The United States, they didn’t threaten to invade The United States.

Is Ukraine a US state? Do they pay taxes? Can we conscript their sons to go die for the protection of our nation?

They don't pay taxes, but the view of the people running the US is that there's a substantial benefit for the US in defending the rules-based international system*, that in the long term is probably worth substantially more in dollar terms than the cost of funding Ukraine. Maybe they're wrong but it's still largely an economic calculation, not a decision based on abstract philosophical principles for their own sakes.

*Rules that the US sets and gets to break, before anyone comes with examples of the US being hypocrites on this front.

Russia invaded Ukraine. They don’t invade The United States, they didn’t threaten to invade The United States.

You sure about that?

Furthermore, if Russia were to have encountered no opposition in the forceful seizure of Ukraine, how long would it be before they went after the Baltics? Poland? Eventually we wouldn't be able to stand on the sidelines any more.

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Funny enough paying the Danegeld can sometimes work. See Alfred.

As for Israel, as long as the US, or nations in general, maintain border and immigration controls, the State of Israel must continue to exist as a haven for Jewish people persecuted in other countries.

I broadly agree with the sentiment, but, you know, I don't think it's in the Constitution of the United States.

If we can send emergency money to Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and everybody else, then we should have no problem doing the same in The US.

But it's not as simple as sending money - that's my whole point. Money alone won't haul a tree out of a roadway or repair a washed out bridge; you need road crews and equipment for that. Money will help you acquire those things, but unless you already know where to go to put them together and how to get them quickly to the places where they're needed, you're SOL. FEMA don't appear to be logistically-competent to put together that kind of a response, so they're left waving money around in the air with nothing to show for it.

We're sending aircraft carriers to the region to assist Israel in their ridiculous war, redirect those aircraft carriers to Myrtle Beach, and make the pilots fly over ENC with thermal cameras pointed at the ground.

It's at least two weeks from the eastern Mediterranean back to the U.S., and longer from the Persian Gulf or Red Sea - even if we ordered them back as soon as the hurricane hit, they'd still be at sea.

Put a drone in the air and look for people. Send helicopters.

This is a more valid complaint; I'm not sure what, if anything, holding up the 82nd Airborne and other rapid reaction forces on domestic bases from deploying. But that's a matter of will and organization (notably we have a President who is clearly suffering from advanced dementia, works like two hours per day, and spends the rest on the beach, while his VP is notably vacuous, scared of her own shadow, and busy campaigning. Not promising) not funding.

It’s because this isn’t a money problem, it’s a logistics problem. Israel and Ukraine are already managing their responses, so it’s easy to give them aid. With the hurricane you have to figure out what goes where, and how to get it there, which is a difficult problem.

Also, I believe the majority of the value of the aid given to Ukraine in particularly is not cash, but arms, ammo, and loans.

Also, I believe the majority of the value of the aid given to Ukraine in particularly is not cash, but arms, ammo, and loans.

From https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107232:

Of the approximately $62.3 billion provided to the Department of Defense, it had obligated about $52.3 billion, such as for procuring missiles, ammunition, and combat vehicles for Ukraine and to replace U.S. stocks. In its own reporting, DOD combines this formal obligated amount with internal commitments to convey its financial commitments. Of the approximately $46.1 billion provided to the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the two agencies had obligated about $44.4 billion, such as to support the Ukrainian government's civilian budget, including salaries for first responders, health workers, and educators. Of the approximately $3.4 billion provided to the Department of Health and Human Services, it had obligated about $3.1 billion, such as in grants for supporting Ukrainian refugees settling in the U.S. Of the approximately $1.6 billion provided to eight U.S. agencies and offices covered in this review, they had obligated about $1.4 billion, such as for nuclear security and sanctions enforcement.

So, it appears at least a near majority (51.1 of 103.4 billions) are in fact cash disbursements.

ETA: Not intending to dispute the post above, just adding context that the balance is pretty close.

But the government, specifically the Army/DoD and by extension the National Guard, are supposed to be experts in logistics in impassable terrain. It's not like wars are always fought on open desert: sometimes they are, but there are plenty of battlegrounds in recent memory with far worse terrain than North Carolina. Oh, the bridge is out? That never happens in war! They are supposed to be able to cross unbridged rivers rapidly under fire. And do Search and Rescue and extraction operations day and night. If they can supply remote fire bases by helicopter, surely we could setup tents and feed hot MREs to people anywhere on the ground on mere hours notice. Or at least airdropping rations.

On the other hand, I'm clearly armchair quarterbacking. Those things are all harder than they sound, I'm sure. Maybe all the bridging engineers are already out fixing washed out roads, and helicopters are out on SAR or supply missions. But it doesn't seem like we should throw up our hands and claim that it's completely beyond us: at the very least we should be learning lessons for next time.

But the government, specifically the Army/DoD and by extension the National Guard, are supposed to be experts in logistics in impassable terrain.

What... do you think expertise means in a logistics sense? The ability to do something with investments and time, or the ability to do something without infrastructure?

Military engineers do difficult logistics in two main ways: creating one-width roads, and flying gas blivets out to help extend the range of helicopters. Both of these are relatively limited throughput, and certainly can't support large populations, hence why there is such a focus on capturing seaports and airports with higher throughput capacity.

Oh, the bridge is out? That never happens in war! They are supposed to be able to cross unbridged rivers rapidly under fire.

Ha, no, no. That's how you get things like the Battle of the Siverskyi Donets.

If you're doing a river crossing, you do it slowly (so that the vehicles don't drive a slighly off-angle and drive off the bridge, flipping everything over), and if you're under modern-era effective fires (which means artillery and precision munitions and rockets, not just a smattering of light-infantry weapons), the main reason to keep crossing is if you're trying to run away in a retreat.

In practice, most river crossings aren't even of major rivers. They're more likely to be fording operations, or only very narrow creeks, or just putting crossing plates on a pre-existing bridge. A commander in the modern era who tries to force a crossing of an unbridged river under fire would be removed as an incompetent.

There are certainly things the military can do, but you are getting some impressions more from holywood than history.

What... do you think expertise means in a logistics sense? The ability to do something with investments and time, or the ability to do something without infrastructure?

"Without infrastructure" is, in this case, more or less the definition of the task, so I don't follow your point.

The point is that military engineering is the former and not the later, and always has been.

It's not like wars are always fought on open desert

Even open desert has more logistical issues than you'd expect. Just ask Erwin Rommel or Archie Wavell. Or the crusaders at Hattin.

With the hurricane you have to figure out what goes where, and how to get it there, which is a difficult problem.

There are people in ENC at this moment who have figured this out. What they want now is for the government to get out of their fucking way. To the feds: I know it's going to hurt your pride but tuck your tail between your legs and ask the local churches how you can help and then do what they say.

To the feds: I know it's going to hurt your pride but tuck your tail between your legs and ask the local churches how you can help and then do what they say.

Amen. This is what democracy actually looks like; life-and-death power being exercised by common people for their own benefit and that of their neighbors

What specifically is making you think that FEMA is bungling the response? I see it repeatedly taken as fact in this thread, and that we should trust to random tiktok videos, but very little actual documentation of the situation.

I’m not claiming everything is perfect. I just think that rumors always swirl in the aftermath, and the insane political polarization in this case is making it worse. I expect clearer information to come out in the next few weeks.

I’ll grant that there’s a shortage of quality evidence about the state of the hurricane response, but the evidence we do have points to the government response being pretty bad.

What would you consider "actual documentation" other than people there right now saying that they're jamming it up?

I think the point is that the government is completely incompetent. So they can distribute money but they can't actually rescue people.

But they are also incompetent when they spend money overseas. For example, they sent an aircraft carrier to deal with the Houthis but then retreated in defeat after a couple months. Or, for another example, they spent a couple hundred million building a floating pier to deliver supplies to Gaza, but then it didn't work and they just abandoned it.

So, while I agree we should spend at least as much on our own disasters as those in Ukraine and the Middle East, more money won't necessarily solve the problem since FEMA seems to be incompetent.

Honestly, I think the same. We’ve lost the ability to do a lot of things that our great grandparents took for granted that would just work. I could go down the list of usual government functions and for the most part we did them better in 1924 than we do in 2024. And I think it’s a combination of easy living, culture and poor education that’s created an elite that simply cannot handle the realities of running a complex society in the real world.

Look at a map. Think logistically. There is absolutely no reason to be flying fixed-wing aircraft from Greenville to Asheville. Fixed-wing aircraft have longer ranges than helicopters. Those supplies can be flown in from further away locations. However, there are a limited number of airports within helicopter range of the affected area. Greenville is one of them. It is the correct move to dedicate the Greenville airport to helicopter missions.

The federal government throwing up their hands and saying "golly gee I guess we can't figure this out!" is a monstrous blackpill.

I don't know how to describe specifically what I mean, but there's a certain energy from high agency people that is clearly present in the local guys "borrowing" excavators and building roads, and clearly not present in the federal government. Call is hyper masculine vs hyper feminine, but if you've ever worked around these types of people it is as clear as day.

If I'm really getting out there and letting my mind off it it's leash: the type of high agency men I'm describing here terrify the federal government. I think a lot of people here work in tech and have maybe at some point met a real life 10x "cracked" engineer who pisses you off (playfully) because of how good they are.

These people exist in the physical realms too, and they're allergic to people like FEMA.

I've met people who have that energy, except 90% of them go around wrecking shit and making a mess while effete, low-agency people have to clean up after them. They're also usually incorrigible because they rarely have to deal with the consequences of "helping".

Correct. The complaint is that the helicopters aren't moving. They're not being loaded. They aren't going anywhere.

Edit: It's like someone said, "We need helicopters" and brought helicopters over, but hasn't decided how to use them yet. Just bringing helicopters over doesn't win any brownie points.

Also, the nice thing about helicopters is they don't need a runway. For loading, you can put them anywhere on the tarmac so you can drive a truck to them, and if they're not actually loading at the moment they can be on grass.

At this point I doubt we will ever really know what happened in Western North Carolina. An oral tradition might appear describing how FEMA's incompetence (at best) caused hundreds of excess deaths. Stories of people dying of exposure, dehydration and disease because FEMA sat on their hands, and didn't allow anyone into the sparsely populated mountain/valley they lived in.

All the official statistics will be weird side stepping non sequiturs. X number of personnel were allocated. Y number of dollars were spent. They compare favorably to the X number of people and Y number of dollars spent in supposedly comparable natural disaster. Therefore all complaints have been debunked. Shut up.

And everyone will talk past each other forever. One day a politician might take up the torch of what really happened after Helene, but all those investigative resources will mostly get funneled to deep state cogs who will merely look at the aforementioned statistics about X and Y and declare the government innocent, after having pulled down fabulous salaries for a bloated staff that took excessive years to tabulate their report.

I’m going to ask you the same thing I asked jeroboam.

What could possibly convince you otherwise?

Deaths. I expect there will be much haggling over the narrative. But if there are more post immediate flood deaths from dehydration, disease and exposure than not, FEMA irredeemably fucked up, no matter what the experts claim.

Yeah, this is a perfect example of "Seeing Like the State". In the eyes of many people, solving problems is as simple as allocating resources.

Want people in rural areas to have broadband? Allocate $45 billion.

Want to build a network of EV charging stations? Allocate $7 billion.

Want a high speed rail in California? Allocated $inf billion.

And in a high trust society with high state capacity that's exactly what would happen. But, of course, that's not the society we live in. No rural citizens were connected to broadband, and almost no charging stations were built, and 16 years later California doesn't have a rail system.

We have a government competency crisis.

government competency crisis

It's not just government. Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.

You can sometimes see how well this works in practice. It's like when you've a cashier that can't make change and you try to give them 2¢ so you get $1 and not 98¢ in change.

It's not just government. Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.

It's Weber's "rationalization," it's a hallmark of "modernity," and it's one of the top reasons why I want "modernity" destroyed. Go back to the personal leadership of @Stellula's "high agency people" and away from the tyranny of "idiots with checklists," to borrow from @AvocadoPanic, and away from Arendt's "tyranny without a tyrant" created by the bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility.

It’s a way to get away with using less skilled workers and cheaper and faster training. Properly training someone to handle a disaster would require the person to have some understanding of what kinds of things happen in disasters to various common systems that run society. You’d have to show them what happens to electrical grids in hurricanes, the issues involved in fixing them, and what upstream and downstream effects might be. This requires at least a basic understanding of electrical engineering. Which takes a lot of intelligence and skill to understand. It’s full of math and physics, after all. Even getting someone to understand the system as well as a journeyman electrician is going to take some time and money. It will help them understand things like why an app is a bad way to distribute aid in a hurricane aftermath zone, but you’ll have to pay more to attract a better candidate, and you have to train them. Or you can set up a generic process for every disaster and hope that they’ll be good enough for most disasters even when executed by Jenny a former secretary at a car dealership who has no idea what the issues even are. Before the disaster scenario happens, you’re getting kudos for doing this because Jenny is a pretty cheap hire, and she’s ready to go within a few months instead of years.

It's not just that the employees are less skilled, they're less capable.

Seleting for someone higher skilled may also select for someone capable of stretching. A competent person can be competent in many situations and scenarios with minimal training.

School used to do a better job of selecting for competence, graduation rates were much lower but graduates could pass competency exams.

I’ll definitely agree on the education part. I think honestly the schools are so bad at this point that they’re meaningless. It seems like it started with the end of the Cold War, mostly because we were moving all the factories to other parts of the world. That triggered a crisis as now everyone needed a HS diploma and a bit more if they wanted to have anything like a working class, let alone middle class lifestyle. And since the biggest determinant of getting a “good job” once the factory was gone was education, all barriers to education were systematically eliminated. You can’t be so cruel as to flunk a kid who can’t do the work because if he doesn’t graduate, he’s going to live in poverty and be basically unemployed forever. Then of course you have student loans so everyone could go to college. Of course colleges saw this as a cash cow. Lower the standards so that any kid who graduates high school can “earn” a diploma.

And now you have functionally uneducated college grads who believe they’re smart competent people, but aren’t and probably wouldn’t pass their grandparents freshman year of high school. Try it. Find math problems that a 14 year old in 1920 was expected to be able to solve and give it to a college grad in 2024. They cannot do it. They cannot read books that were read for fun in 1950. Forget such arcane subjects as geography, history, or science. It’s a scary sad thing that people with college degrees know less about science than high school kids in 1980.

Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.

This is the essence of modern management theory. It can be done, but probably not for disaster recovery or any other task where every situation is significantly different.

The difficulty is the 'decision makers' have often moved on before the pigeons come home to roost.

Even highly repeatable processes will often have edge cases / or odd failure modes that while rare if the process is very frequent will throw errors often enough to cause problems.

Also these jobs tend to suck which presents other challenges.

I'd rather interact with someone competent than an idiot with a checklist. I'm sure there's an appropriate Idiocracy clip.

I think the real complaint is not that the Federal response has been unusually slow, but that it is insufficient for the "Biblical" levels of destruction. Thousands of dead bodies, "4 Reefer Trucks" full in one county, everyone who is asking for donations asks for more body bags because they keep running out.

Where does this figure come from? The latest news reports I can find are still talking about a figure of 200something dead, which includes the area of initial landfall.

Really, I'm wondering where this perception of "biblical proportions" is coming from. Central Europe (approximately next door from me) had a flood around the same time which looked about equally bad to the NC pictures I'm seeing, where the death toll stood around 24. A factor of 10 difference just seems to be about what I'd expect given the lower level of preparation, inferior civic infrastructure and construction standards in the US (typical European houses would be much less likely to collapse), and the European flood is now being filed away as a fairly boring once-in-a-few-years event (outside of media that is still trying to make culture war hay of it).

"4 Reefer Trucks" in one county from here: https://tiktok.com/@glutenfreebreadwinner/video/7421950512544697642

No running water at a hospital:

Mission Hospital still has not regained running water. It’s expected to take weeks for access to water to be restored region-wide, due to widespread damage to the water system.

Healthcare workers typically use running water in abundance for tasks ranging from handwashing to sterilization. They’re getting creative in its absence.

The local population is understandably filthy:

The sewage system was so backed up after the storm, Drummond said, that it wasn’t possible to flush toilets.

“We were pooping in bags and buckets,” she said.

Access to clean water was also wiped out. Patients were showing up at the hospital drenched in floodwater saturated with gasoline, chemicals and other unknown toxins.

Those people would normally be placed in showers to clean off, Drummond said. Not so after Helene barreled through, knocking out the basics of hygiene.

“It’s been really difficult to do decontamination,” Drummond said. Her team, she said, was forced to fill trash cans with whatever clean water it could find to dump over patients in an effort to rinse them.

This is from the group of people who have made it to a hospital. How many thousands are still trapped without a road in these conditions? How many dehydrated people are drinking dirty water in desperation? How long does it take before these conditions lead to disease outbreaks and deaths?

Edit: More witnesses of mass deaths: https://x.com/KristyTallman/status/1842032303637463274

People asking for more body bag donations: https://x.com/TheThe1776/status/1842120280229158963

Over 100 bodies marked in a six mile stretch of river: https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1842908549795512354

Someone seeing bodies left in trees, thought they were Halloween decorations at first: https://x.com/KellyJo_Rn/status/1841284842085880279/photo/2

Edit 2: Going to keep links to the most credible videos here so that I can reference them as people (rightfully) ask for receipts:

https://x.com/SaltyGoat17/status/1842944529172734286 - Woman saying she needs 500 body bags. County Sheriff kicked FEMA out of the county.

https://x.com/sarahsansoni/status/1842129974888644801 - Account of bodies floating in river. Similar language as some other reports, where they thought they were Halloween Costumes, then saw the faces and realized they were real bodies.

Not directly related to body count, but interesting in itself - https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1842648530436911554 Volunteer reporting that her organization has told her to flee any FEMA agents she encounters, because they will confiscate everything she has, including her search and rescue dogs (???). Also her volunteer organization has tracked that a lot of the items confiscated from their organization have been sent to migrants (at the border?) instead of citizens. She says that when she was in the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard stopped working with FEMA because they would do similar things to them.

And in response to that video, Ryan McBeth who I also vaguely trust and respect (or at least I knew of him well before this disaster which is more than I can say for most of these) said that that this is misinformation that is killing people. He was on the phone with the National Guard (all of them at once? ha, I know what he means, but not saying who exactly he spoke to or what their position is annoys me.) National Guard is declaring that people are putting themselves in danger to avoid FEMA.

I think I trust Ryan that this is what the Nat Guard is saying, I don't trust that the National Guard has it all under control. I do not believe that if all private citizens just stopped working around the government's lack of help that it would all have turned out better.

On the more credible side: Gen. Flynn asking for donations to a Rescue/Recovery team that is normally tasked by FEMA for situations like this but, "No tasking to date (not surprising)." https://x.com/GenFlynn/status/1841822490730910109

People on the ground saying that they haven't seen FEMA or didn't see any FEMA until more than 5 days after the Hurricane: https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1842977547103219797

Lastly, most professional video of the infamous Fire Chief directly preventing the rescue of a couple: https://youtube.com/watch?v=s8ICG0iaHqw

https://x.com/SaltyGoat17/status/1842944529172734286 - Woman saying she needs 500 body bags. County Sheriff kicked FEMA out of the county.

I don't know if I'd call this credible. The woman being interviewed never mentions FEMA once; the interviewer says it in an interspersed clip taped separately. And he doesn't say where they are. Possibly because he's in Lincoln County, which got some damage but is part of the Charlotte metro and a world away from the mountain areas that got hit hard.

had a flood around the same time which looked about equally bad to the NC pictures I'm seeing

I would care mostly population affected, not comparing cherry picked pictures when comparing how many people died.

the European flood

Note that similar area was affected in 1997 floods. Wrocław (major city in area affected by heavy rants) was not flooded this thanks to new dam/polder build after 1997 floods. During 1997 it was catastrophically flooded.

Case where people actually managed to learn from history.

And this region has decent experience and equipment for dealing with floods. It is THE primary natural catastrophe expected to happen here.

I was taking "Biblical levels of destruction" to be defined in terms of the vibes of the best pictures you can cherry-pick, rather than any concrete data-based criteria. The Bible itself may not have pictures, but it certainly doesn't make its case with data.

Meanwhile, an Apache helicopter just wrecked a distribution center in Pine Spruce (Spruce Pine?),

While it may be sexually identifying as one, I don't think that's an attack helicopter.

(Sorry to make light of this, the news popping up have been rather horrifying for me as well, even with no connection to the US, but I can't resist autistic nitpicking and a bad pun).

Sorry, I edited it right after I noticed my mistake. It's a Blackhawk, probably Nat. Guard.

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