We’re three weeks into the five-month hurricane season and those of us living on hurricane prone Amelia Island understand that we will eventually be whacked again and should take precautions.
Preparedness bulletins I’ve read say that if a hurricane evacuation order is issued residents should anticipate driving 200 miles inland or beyond, depending upon the hurricane’s intensity and its predicted path. The experts say that the 200-mile distance should get you out of the worst winds and away from the coastal storm surge. For those new to the area a storm surge is when the tide comes in and just keeps coming in and absolutely refuses to go back out. When it eventually does leave it takes you and your stuff with it.
If you evacuate northward don’t go much further than 300 miles as that’ll put you close to Atlanta where you’ll escape the storm but risk being shot, robbed, maybe both, and get caught in rush hour traffic which lasts 24 hours a day.
During hurricanes one of the first things to collapse is the electric grid. If you foolishly decide to sit out an evacuation order and don’t have a generator, spare gasoline, and a couple tanks of propane you’re going to get very hot, humid, and hungry if you survive. Windmills and solar panels are useless unless you can figure out how to burn them as cooking fuel.
If you skedaddle in a gasoline-powered vehicle make sure it’s got a full tank and that you have a full container or two in your trunk. In an emergency a gas station’s pumps run on generators.
If you have an electric car as your only mode of transportation you better hope you are on good terms with your neighbors that drive gasoline fueled vehicles, as they’re your only hope of getting out of Dodge. That EV in your garage is a concrete lifeboat on a sinking ship.
Much to the green fanatics chagrin, gasoline and diesel are undisputed winners when natural disasters snuff the electric grid.
Many of the evacuation roads are through remote areas and the countryside, and few if any of them have charging stations. And even if the evacuation road takes you on the highway, expect to get stranded in traffic jams.
Last year , CNBC established that “the U.S. EV charging network isn’t ready for your family road trip” much less an emergency evacuation. An EVs only value to its owners is showing them off to their equally fanatical “Green” pals.
If you do manage to hitch a ride with neighbor you’re still not out of the woods. Even if your house survives the storm it may not survive the EV you leave in the garage. Some Florida homes that escaped south Florida’s Hurricane Ian last year caught fire due to their batteries being corroded by the floods thus burning the houses to the ground.
Florida State Fire Marshal Jim Patronis described homes that caught fire from EV’s sitting in the garage saying: “On October 6th, I joined North Collier Fire Rescue to assess response activities related to Hurricane Ian and saw with my own eyes an EV continuously ignite, and continually reignite, as fireteams doused the vehicle with tens-of-thousands of gallons of water.
“Based on my conversations with area firefighters, this is not an isolated incident. As you can appreciate, I am very concerned that we may have ticking time bombs on our hands,” he warned.
The Biden administration’s war on oil is as dangerous and deranged as it is disingenuous. Electric power blackouts are becoming common because green energy fanatics and environmental extremists want us to believe that wind and solar power are our immediate future. They are not…far from it. Ask the folks in California or Texas who suffer from black outs even when there are no storms.
What will you tell your kids when you’re stranded on the Interstate because your silly little EV wasn’t fully charged and there’s not a functioning charging station within 500 miles? And even if there was, the grid is down, and a charge takes several hours. So you’re toast as 90-110+ mph winds are bearing down on you. Oh, and there’s not an emergency container of electricity in your trunk and the only open Kangaroo convenience store just sold its last 10,000-pack of AA batteries.
Joe Biden’s pledge to put America’s oil and gas industry out of business because of his mindless advisor’s ( e.g. Lurch look-a-like John Kerry, etc.) fire and brimstone predictions is a dire prediction for those stupid enough to believe that claptrap. Why would anyone listen to these people? They’re the same ones that came up with the nutty ideas of transgendered bathrooms, racist highways, open borders, reparations, student debt forgiveness, free social service benefits for illegal aliens, etc.
H.L Mencken summed it up years ago when he said: “Their whole aim is to keep the American public alarmed and clamoring to be led to safety with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” If the problem doesn’t exist neither does their funding or their power.
I’d lay odds that those folks stranded, injured, and hit hardest by violent storms this year will mostly be registered Democrats.
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Here’s An Idea: How about a TV reality show where Marxist college students are sent to a country that most closely resembles their desired political beliefs and left to survive for a couple of months? I’d watch.
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Here Are Some More Ideas: A local pal suggested to me the other day that if Fernandina Beach wants to change its image and appear more caring and helpful to its residents it might start with a simple name change for one of its more controversial functions – Code Enforcement.
“Change the name to Code Assistance,” he said. ”That way it’ll appear that they’re there to actually help and not just shake residents down for impact fees.” OK, it’s a start but the behavior is going to have to compliment the name and so far I haven’t heard about any vocal bouquets being tossed in city hall’s direction.
Or how about at budget time the politicians stop referring to increased government expenditures as “investments” and call it what it is – “spending your money.” And stop using the term “revenue” and admit that they’re “tax increases.”
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Celebrate Us Or Else: The third Fernandina Beach Pride Parade and Festival took place last Saturday, June 10, without incident or protests. I didn’t attend but from what I’ve heard and reports I’ve read those that were there enjoyed themselves, were polite, orderly and tidy.
However, I’m still confused as to what exactly this group is celebrating and why they are insisting that others join in.
When Americans die in battle serving their country, they are recognized for one day, Memorial Day, which occurred this past May 29. If you are homosexual, transexual, bisexual, lesbian, etc. you demand to be applauded for an entire month.
We have reached a point in our society where we spend more time and taxpayer money on a minuscule percent of our society than we do on our military veterans. For example, statistics say the transgendered population of the U.S. alone is less than .03 percent and the others in this ABC crowd not much higher.
Every company, every professional sports team, every Democratic politician, even the armed forces are expected to celebrate Pride Month, Pride Night, and cheer year-round for this LGBTQQIAAP2S+ alphabet soup crowd. Military recruitment is plummeting due to the emphasis on its rainbow nonsense instead of preparedness. Pride members were invited to join the president this week and expressed their gratitude with some of them bouncing around naked on the White House lawn.
What exactly are these folks so proud of? What accomplishments are involved in being gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual, etc.? If, as these folks claim, no choice is involved in a person’s sexuality — what’s the point?
Apparently tolerance and acceptance aren’t enough for them. A commentary in the Washington Times said this week: “Join us in celebrating every sexual deviancy known to man, or we will cancel you, shun you, shame you, and punish you, for your intolerable intolerance.” In other words celebrate us or else.
The movement does everything possible to bludgeon folks into celebrating Pride Nights, Days, Weeks, and Months. It’s not enough for people to tolerate or even show respect to this group. They demand we celebrate lesbianism, male homosexuality, the transgendered, bisexuals, etc. Those that question it and don’t salute their rainbow flag are haters, immoral, transphobic, homophobic, bigots, etc. But what exactly have they done to be so proud?
Is blasphemously mocking Christians at professional baseball games like the L.A. Dodgers something to be proud about? Is being a potbellied mustachioed guy in a dress at Disneyland pretending to be a princess and scaring little girls something to be proud of? Is mutilating children for life with irreversible surgeries and puberty blocking chemicals something to take pride in? Are they proud of male athletes who say they are females unfairly winning competitive events against weaker female opponents thereby destroying the real females’ chances for athletic scholarships and a deserved place in the record book? According to this group real women have no rights now. Only fake ones do.
A Disney princess!
How many men do you know that have given birth or new born children that chose their own sex? And can anyone out there explain to me what a + or a 2 is?
If some boys like boys and some girls like girls, I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t care. If a potbellied mustachioed guy wants to wear a dress, that’s fine with me – just don’t tell me I should celebrate him, call him ma’am, or miss or expose my grandkids to him. Oh, and if that person is anatomically designed to use a urinal, stay out of the women’s restroom, particularly when my wife, daughter or granddaughter are in it.
Gay Pride month is palmed off on the entire country. And if you don’t buy into it you will be punished, cancelled, ridiculed. I’m all for “to each his own” but don’t tell me men are women and women are men. They are not. It is impossible to change sexes. If a guy wants to dress like a woman and pretend he is a woman, that is his right in a free and tolerant society, but there is no obligation for me or any entity that requires we pretend with him.
Gender change can possibly be accomplished mentally but never physically. No matter the surgery or drugs, a biological man will never menstruate, become pregnant, or carry an unborn child in a uterus. A male cannot and will never become a female and vice versa. How nutty has it become? A California university recently failed one of its students for using the term “biological female” in a term paper, that’s how nutty.
A public park with a children’s playground or any other “family friendly” venue is no place for hyper sexualized caricatures of women. There is a time and place for everything and everyone and a drag show time and place is far away from kids and family friendly events and places. Just like I would not want heterosexual women dressed as stripper’s at these types of places and events.
The local pride group did the right thing by conducting their drag show at a private venue away from the public park. The local chapters of Big Brothers/Big Sisters and Take Stock in Children wisely pulled out of the event. However, rather than coming to their senses on their own, it was reported that fear of losing state funding caused them to fold their tents in Central Park. I’m sure their state HQs reprimand was mixed with some local parental and societal backlash. The fact that these two children’s organizations would even consider being a part of the event should have their national and state organizations questioning the judgement of their local leadership.
Based on the anti-DeSantis signs the local pride folks carried in their parade Florida’s governor is not their choice for the next president, far from it. They hate the governor because of his “Child Protection in Public Schools” legislation that clarifies the term “Sex” in Florida statutes based on chromosomes.
It bans the use of preferred pronouns in the classroom that do not correspond to the “Sex” based on their chromosomes of the child. It also expands the ban on gender identity and sexual identity instruction from Pre-K through 8th. This bill will help with the removal of sexually explicit materials from schools. This bill will also make sure no child is compelled to say something they don’t agree with.
Most folks have no idea what the LGBTQQIAAP2S+ alphabet soup of letters and numerals that continue to grow even stand for except some bizarre code for liberalism/progressiveness/Marxism gone even more insane than it already is.
The continuing over-the-top outrageousness of the movement is turning Americans off according to just released polls by Pew Research.
Boycotts of Bud Light and Target are taking hold and displaying to corporate America the price it will pay for peddling LGBTQQIAAP2S+ instead of their products and services. Even the suits at far-left Starbucks got nervous this week and notified their stores to get rid of the rainbow decorations, an indication that they’ll now welcome anyone who’s foolish enough to pay for their outrageously over-priced coffee.
The ABC+ crowd should stop twerking in our faces and exercise the same tolerance and respect they demand of others?
I don’t pay much attention to the plethora of genders that are talked about these days nor do I think very often about people’s pronouns. It’s not that I’m not sympathetic, it’s more like I just not that interested. The mistake that the right often make is that they assume that everyone on the left uses phrases like “birthing persons” instead of the word mother. Nobody uses the word birthing persons when they mean mother! One thing I did realize though: gay people (as well as the other people represented by the BTWIA part) are think in terms of “pride” because the opposite of pride is shame.
As always – spot on Dave!
Great to have a real journalist on our island who speaks the truth with a lot of great humor thrown in.
Keep up the great work!
Also, from a clever meme:
Put 100 women and 10 men on a deserted island. In 100 years, you will have a thriving community of men, women, boys and girls.
Now, put 100 trans women and 10 men on a deserted island. In 100 years, you will find the skeletons of 110 men.
Follow me for more science.
Great article as usual. For those demanding the end to fossil fuels to be replaced by weather dependent, intermittent, and unreliable wind and solar need to answer this question – how will you produce wind turbines and solar panels without using fossil fuels since they don’t produce enough energy to power the machinery used in their production? From the mining and processing of raw materials (roughly 10 times the amount of earth and raw materials need to be mined an processed per unit of energy produced by unreliables compared to fossil fuels – and lots of very heavy fossil fuel powered machinery is needed for the mining and processing – except in the Congo where child labor is used to mine Cobalt), to the transportation of said materials, to the energy intense manufacturing process, site preparation, site assembly, life cycle maintenance, and ultimate decommissioning and disposal. And, unreliables come with the added benefit of a relatively short life span so they must be replaced more frequently than traditional thermal power plants, along with needing far more land.
As to the local pride, it is likely only a matter of time before the local pride parades start to include lewd performances as so many other pride parades around the country have done. When will we have out own Christina Aguilera prancing around in a strap-on? I don’t think people have any more say over their sexual preference than the do their skin color, but that does not mean we need to celebrate them just because of that preference.
I have to say, Dave is spot on with this write-up. I couldn’t care less about what a person’s sexual preference is and they shouldn’t care what anyone else’s is either. What exactly are you “proud” of LGBTQ…XYZ folks? I would caution anyone that is “proud” of themselves, to heed the words… Pride comes before the Fall.
As one whose windshield was shattered by a rock coming from the tire treads of the truck in front of me I am a believer in “mud flaps” which are intended to prevent mud and rocks from being slung from the tire treads
Dave H.L. Menken also said:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some grand and glorious day, he plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White Hose will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron”.
Baltimore Evening Sun,July 26,1920.
Here it is: Joe Biden & the alphabet mob.
In my younger years, I recall seeing many, many trucks on the road with mudflaps depicting the silhouettes of curvaceous women and Playboy bunnies. In hindsight, it seemed somewhat ludicrous and odd for them to buy those things in order to self-identify on the basis of whom they preferred to pull their pants down in front of. Who cared, anyway? And I couldn’t help but wonder: Is that all you got?
I don’t see those on trucks anymore, so I suppose they got the message.
Dave, you are accurately chronicling the dissolution of our nation. Amazing jhow most people play the boiling frogs while all that is going on, but it’s not a slow process that they can’t notice anymore. Keep speaking out as we will, too.
Perhaps your concerns for the safety of our children should be directed at our churches, It’s priests, and ministers, who defile our children. I don’t think you have to worry about a Drag Queen abusing a child. Look to the clergy Dave.
I think we can all agree that not all Christian ministers or Catholic priests are pedophiles, but some pedophiles have sought out the roles and positions of ministers and priests to exercise their sexual proclivities and abuse of children.
Drag has its roots in the English Theatre when men acted in the roles of women because real women were excluded.
Now after decades of Drag being performance art and adult fun, we have Drag Queens aggressively being introduced to children at multiple venues. Many of us are now questioning why? Children are not proactively seeking out Drag Queens, but Drag Queens are proactively seeking out children.
Well thought out and stated!
I am more worried about why a drag queen wants an audience of children than I am of people who don’t want them to have one. If you haven’t figured it out yet, we still have a choice if we want our children to be with priests and ministers and have had that choice from the beginning. So, in essence, we are only asking the same of who they are exposed to in other areas.
I am one that has little tolerance for the LGBTQ+/Gender Confused Crowd. I especially despise the men who claim to be women but do not have the guts to undergo the surgery to remove the male sex organs. Likewise I have the same intolerance for the females that claim to be male who do not have the guts to undergo the surgery to create the sex organ that will render them sterile. In fact the vast majority who claim to be trans have the organs of birth and should be required to use the bathroom of brith and compete in sports aligned with their birth gender. God created two genders male and female. The Liberal Socialist DemoRAT Party created all others.
Thank you, Dave, for another cogent commentary about how our priorities have deviated (pun intended) from caring for the masses. Less than 1% of our population have Sexual Dysphoria, yet they occupy 50% of our media. Why does their sexuality have to be a public issue? Do heterosexual couples brag about what position they prefer or how many times a week they do it? Hell no, it’s nobody’s business what they do, so they keep their “business” private!
I had a Gay business partner for many years before I escaped California. My ex-wife and I mingled socially with him, his partner of 20+ years, and their Gay friends, both male and female. How they talked, dressed, and behaved was no different from our Straight friends. A funny thing did happen one time. I was dancing with one of the women at a Gay bar that the group frequented. Her life partner tapped me on the shoulder to “Cut in.” Foolish me, I thought she was cutting in to dance with me; no, she wanted to dance with her partner. We all got a big laugh out of my error. No hard feelings, just fun. Plus, we were always welcome at that bar, as were other straight couples.
How I wish we could return to the time when people kept their business to themselves. America was a better place for everybody when we did. I remember when sex was safe and racing was dangerous. The smartest thing that Rodney King ever said was, “Why can’t we all get along?” We could if we kept our business to ourselves and concentrated on being Americans without a hyphen.
Spot on comments. When the Marxists are run out of our government, maybe we can return to some normalcy. Elections have consequences, said Obama. Let’s take him up on that.
I have been on this earth far longer than I ever imagined.NEVER has my country been in such a state of
upheaval and downright confusion.At first thought one might say: Wow how did this come about so fast?
Well,now we know the preparations started many years ago.That is why they are so far ahead of us normal
folks.First and foremost how in Gods name could any free thinking American vote for any of these fools.To me
it’s like a third grade class project to write a “Plan of Action” for America.In fact maybe it would make more
sense if it was! I have great fear for my children and grans as to what world they will experience in the up-
coming years.May God bless us and save our country from these horrible people