Tag Archives: responsibilities

Biden-Harris Helene Failure

Posted on by
Reply

Regarding the damage done by Hurricane Helene and recovery efforts by those concerned: don’t count the Biden-Harris administration among those concerned. Cynical Publius noted on X:

This is unbelievable.
XVIII Airborne Corps is located on Fort Bragg (I refuse to call it by that other woke name), a mere 268 miles from Asheville and the worst flooding areas of this Biblical-level tragedy.
The Corps’ capabilities include:

-Extensive medium and heavy lift rotary wing aircraft.
-A theater sustainment command with incredible capabilities for delivery of food, potable water, fuel and construction materials.
-A medical brigade with Level III surgical capabilities.
-An engineer brigade with robust heavy construction assets.
-A military police brigade that can provide traffic control and assist local LE.
-An Airborne Infantry division that has routinely supported disaster relief in years past.
-A world-class command, control and communications HQ capability to make it all work.

NONE OF THAT has been ordered to assist civil authorities? NONE OF IT??????
Fort Bragg has routinely supported domestic disaster relief for DECADES—Katrina, Homestead, you name it.  Hell, I myself have a Humanitarian Service Medal for support to Hurricane Fran relief out of Bragg.
Now we can’t do anything for an epic disaster in the SAME FREAKING STATE?
WTF, over?
This goes beyond mere negligence.  It must be malicious.  Perhaps Kamala and Joe don’t want NC’s rural GOP counties to be able to vote on November 5th?
This is an abomination, and one of the worst derelictions of Presidential duties in US history.

He posted in response to this, in which we have Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s cynical (there’s no reason to believe it’s merely ignorant) claim, quoted from a C-SPAN clip of a reporter’s question and Biden’s response (see the clip itself at the end of the post):

Biden on Hurricane Helene:
Reporter: “Do you have any words to the victims of the hurricane?”
Biden: “We’ve given everything that we have.”
Reporter “Are there any more resources the federal government could be giving them?”
Biden: “No.”

The expression on Biden’s face shows how proud he is of this (lack of) effort.

Hugh Wang added

And a little further east is Camp Lejune and cherry point. II MEF [Marine Expeditionary Force] with an entire Marine Air Wing, trucks, engineers, etc.

This is beyond disgusting.

There’s Always an Excuse not to Bother

Posted on by
Reply

It’s not just the European governments that stand in the way of those nations’ efforts to rearm and to supply arms to Ukraine in the face of Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine and the barbarian’s designs on the rest of Europe. True enough, those governments have bureaucratic red tape that stands in the way, along with politicians disinterested in getting that red tape out of the way.

Months after the acquisition of the [ammunition-producing] factory, a majority in the Danish parliament demanded that the government open the process to bidders, rather than settling for the presumed favorite for the job….

Too often, though, it’s those nations’ private businesses that would be important, if not critical, to the rearmament effort, local governments, and the populations themselves.

…some banks won’t lend to defense contractors, making life particularly tough for small companies in the industry’s supply chain.

And

In the German city of Troisdorf, Diehl Defence said it has struggled to get permission to expand a factory in the city center to boost production of detonators and other parts for the Iris T missile-defense system, which has formed a crucial part of Ukraine’s air defenses since the war began.
Troisdorf’s mayor, Alexander Biber, said the community was in constructive talks with Diehl, but asked whether a city center is better suited for homes or businesses than for factories producing explosives.

And

A leading European tank maker, KNDS, was planning to expand a Munich testing range, but had to pause following local complaints, including one from a man who said the work interfered with his meditation, according to a person familiar with the matter. Other residents were concerned that noise from the testing site would affect housing prices.

These are anecdotal, but they illustrate the trends.

This lack of interest in defending themselves, much less help a nation under a barbarian invasion, just further demonstrates the uselessness of NATO and the importance of standing up a replacement mutual defense arrangement involving the Three Seas Initiative, the UK, and the US.

Aww, You Poor Babies

Posted on by
Reply

Baby Boomers are at grandparenting age, but their children aren’t having so many children of their own, so the Boomers aren’t getting to be grandparents. They’re not happy about it, either.

It’s true enough that our nation’s birthrate is well below the rate necessary to maintain, much less grow, our nation’s population, and that’s having detrimental effects on our economy and our ability to support Baby Boomers and subsequent generations of retirees in their dotage. It also makes us more dependent on immigration to fill our labor gaps.

But that doesn’t make women their parents’ baby making machines for the sake of those parents’ wishes to have grandchildren.

Professor Rachel Margolis of the University of Western Ontario:

Almost everyone grew up with at least one grandparent, and when you grow up with a grandparent around, you think about that as part of family life[.]

There’s a hint there. Children no longer want their parents living with them, for a variety of reasons both good and bad. Parents no longer want to live with their children, also for a variety of reasons both good and bad. One outcome of that is 74-year-old Ann Brenoff, whose children have no plans to have children:

I want to tell family stories to my grandkids. I want them to have memories of me. I don’t think it will happen. It’s selfish, I know.

That family life was an ideal environment for passing on family lore and for creating memories that include grandparents, especially so for the grandchildren. That family life also was instrumental in providing the mutual support of adult children for (grand)parents and vice versa along with the large advantages for grandchildren from growing up in three-generation households. Now, it’s supplanted by increasing dependency on charity, or government, or nursing homes and “retirement communities” in lieu of “family” support while actual family falls by the wayside.

For future reference (particularly today’s generation of child-bearing age, and the generation just entering that age): you want the part of family life that is grandchildren, then act like you still want to be part of a family and not like you want grandchildren as your personal entertainment. Do that from the moment you have your own children and revive a sense of family responsibility, instead of inculcating, however sub rosa, an attitude of gotta get off on my own as soon as my children are out of the house, and gotta get out on my own as soon as I’ve left my parents’ house.

You bet it’s selfish to want grandkids just for your personal entertainment.

This is Backwards

Posted on by
Reply

And it’s disappointingly so, although not that surprising in the increasingly Leftist bias of The Wall Street Journal‘s news page writers.

Israel launched its war against Hamas in Gaza after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks in southern Israel, in which approximately 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage.

No. Hamas launched the war with that attack and butchery; Israel has been responding and defending itself against that terrorist instigated and continuing war, a war that Hamas leadership has repeatedly said is intended to destroy Israel utterly.

The WSJ management team needs to clarify this with the writers in the news outlet’s news room. The error is blatant enough to be closely approaching being anti-Israel and, more broadly, antisemitic.

Reparations

Posted on by
Reply

In the movement to demand reparations for past…mistreatment…of blacks, one group of Americans stands out for its absence from the collection of groups from which reparations for demands are made.

One group of Americans forced our Civil War over its demands to preserve a State’s “right” to keep slaves.

One group of Americans, in the era after our Civil War, enacted gun control laws that kept newly freed blacks and their white supporters disarmed and helpless against the depradations and atrocities inflicted on them by the Ku Klux Klan, an invention of that same group of Americans.

One group of Americans passed Jim Crow laws to deprecate, if not block outright, black Americans’ ability to vote in our elections.

One group of Americans enacted minimum wage laws explicitly to keep blacks from migrating north to compete for jobs on the basis of the wages they were willing to accept.

One group of Americans demanded an end to, and today simply seeks to ignore, our Constitution and its protections for all Americans, including blacks.

One group of Americans practices identity politics with the explicit intent of keeping black Americans separated from the rest of us Americans.

That group of Americans is the Progressive-Democratic Party and its pre-Obama administration ancestor, the Democratic Party.

I wonder why that group of Americans are exempted from demands to pay reparations.