Politics in the Zeros

The alt-right is going berserk trying to show Paddock somehow must be ISIS-linked / crazed libtard terrorist, anything but what he was – which was a secretive white gun nut from an area with lots of sovereign citizens. Some of the more reality-based people on the right are doing a credible job of digging into his background.

Paddocks’s brother made a huge deal of saying Paddock was smart enough to have done this completely on his own. The sheriff thinks otherwise. I don’t trust the brother.

I’ve never really understood our national obsession with team sports. Sure, they are fun to watch, to cheer for our teams and boo the opposition. And yes, athletes do absolutely spectacular things. But the whole hoopla about how sports builds character to me is silly self-justifying rubbish. Sure, football can build team cooperation. However, so do lots of other activities. I’ve backpacked on multi-day trips in the Sierras. It’s a team, it’s a group, everyone helps each other, in cooking, scrambling up and down steep terrain, etc. There are lots of other examples of non-sports team-building.

It is now abundantly clear that college and pro sports are awash in criminality, kickbacks, bribes. Almost any behavior can be rationalized, explained, and legal consequences made to go away if the athlete is important enough. This definitely sends a message to youth. But it’s the wrong message.

A conservative friend said of the football kneeling, I watch sports to get away from all this, can’t it all just go away? I sympathize with his feelings, but it can’t. Politics intrudes on sports regularly. So do criminal investigations like the college basketball bribe scandal, which is almost certainly going to metastasize, put many people in prison, and destroy college basketball teams.

Too many universities now treat academics as an appendage to their sports programs. The bigger and better the teams, the more the money flows in. Everyone gets rich – and of course the whole system got corrupted. There’s no way it couldn’t have.

Sports need to get back to its amateur roots and stay there.

The huge problem with helping Puerto Rico is you can’t just roll convoys of supplies in by truck. It’s an island. Everything comes in by ship or plane. FEMA, it appears, has genuinely mobilized as have multiple government agencies and resources. Thousands of personnel are on the ground. Search and rescue comes first, then getting power back on. However, the logistics are daunting and the level of destruction is horrendous. And people need food, water, medicine, and shelter now.

The National Guard Bureau (NGB) has more than 2,300 Guard members on the ground in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands taking part in security and support operations. The Air National Guard is focused on transporting food, water, and communications capabilities as well as rapidly increasing airlift into affected areas.

FEMA, working in coordination with federal partners, provided more than 1.5-million meals, 1.1-million liters of water, nearly 300 infant and toddler kits, and nearly 12,000 emergency roofing kits to the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico for distribution to the public since Hurricane Maria’s landfall.

Ports are beginning to open, shipments are coming in. A few scattered areas have electricity and cell phone service. However, destroyed roads and little power slows everything down. The mayor of San Juan says two people just died in their hospital because generators ran out of fuel. Outbreaks of diseases could happen. So could rampaging gangs in the streets, as people get hungry and desperate. Many areas have no running water. That means maybe a couple of million people will need to find alternative ways to go potty, with all the accompanying health hazards that implies.

Puerto Rico’s water authority… is running water with generators it had in stock. All of the island’s waste water and water treatment plants lack electricity. “We still haven’t received the ones that FEMA is going to give me, but they are working with us,” he said. “We need 2,500 generators for the entire system to be running on generator power. Obviously we are not going to find that.”

“Do you know what people are referring to this town as? You know ‘The Walking Dead’?” Ms. Rivera said, noting that crime was sure to rise as people grew increasingly desperate. “We are afraid for our lives.”

Health care is a huge issue.

Although there’s food provided at the shelter, there is no running water. At night, she says, with no power residents are left in the dark and are awakened sometimes by the sound of gunshots nearby. But for Rivera and many others at the shelter, their biggest worry is health care.

“My husband is a kidney transplant survivor,” Rivera says, her voice trembling with emotion. “He’s diabetic and we don’t have ice to store his insulin.”

How do grannies get refills on their meds and babies get clean diapers when the power is out, roads destroyed, and stores are empty?

Previous hurricane disasters in Puerto Rico resulted in power being out for 2-3 weeks, which is was seriously disrupting. This time though, power could be out for 6 months or more. That means commerce and business mostly stops and people don’t get paid. So how will they afford food, assuming stores actually have anything to sell?

Many there have generators. Sooner or later though, fuel for generators will run out. Then what? In New England a few years back an ice storm in early autumn took out the power for ten days. My sister and her husband live in an area there with slightly dicey power. They have a generator. After a few days, it ran out of fuel. There were fights at gas stations for gas. This happened after a week, and in an area where some places still had power. Puerto Rico has no power now and will have none anywhere for far longer than ten days.

Puerto Rico cannot afford the billions the cleanup will cost. The power company was already in dire financial condition. It doesn’t have the resources to rebuild their grid. Vulture capitalists are going to move in, buying property ultra-cheap. Maybe someone will buy the power company for pennies on the dollar. However, electrical rates are already very high there. A new owner would almost certainly make power even more expensive.

There are scattered reports of looting. If food, water, supplies, medicine aren’t shipped in fast and law enforcement doesn’t get a handle on things, looting could turn into loosely organized gangs or worse.

I was in Los Angeles when the Northridge earthquake hit. It knocked a big city with deep pockets and lots of resources to its knees. It was a blip compared to what Puerto Rico is coping with now. Let’s all help Puerto Rico. They really need it.