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With hurricane Harvey and Irma sucking up most of the cable news programs and it also being National Preparedness Month, I figured a coupla more data points might get someone’s attention that otherwise is part of that group that goes “Disaster??!?!?  Quick, get to the grocery store / gas station!”.

• Stat 1: Federal spending on disasters increased 6698% from 1953 to 2009 (1)
  Stat 2: Only 39% of individuals have a basic emergency plan (2)
• Stat 3: 75% of health care workers claim to be unprepared (2)
• Stat 4: 44% of Americans don’t have first-aid kits in their homes (3)
• Stat 5: The survival rate for CPR has been calculated at 20% (4)
• Stat 6: 42% of Americans do not know an immediate family members phone number (5)
• Stat 7: Over half of Americans do not have copies of their critical documents (3)

Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative (Print Book) by National Academies, Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy.
FEMA surveys
CDC surveys
AHA statistics
Pew Research Center

We’re lucky here in the Northeast this time around –

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…

…It’s over.

The election is finally over.

Democrats finally have accepted the results.

Trump saw this, and cashed in on Wednesday. He is playing the Democratic Party leadership against the Republican Party leadership that for nine months have blown him off.

Indeed – what has the Congressional leadership done with Trump? Gorsuch and a number of anti-regulation legislation – one biggie and a lot of little stuff.  None of it would hurt them politically. Easy-peazy.

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The biggest reason for Obamacare’s rate hikes? Two of its most popular provisions, guaranteed issue and community rating. These are the technical terms for Obamacare’s ban on insurance companies denying coverage or charging people who are sick more.

The McKinsey report found that in Georgia, these mandates added between 44 and 52 percent to premiums. In Ohio, they were responsible for 41 to 50 percent of the hikes — and in Pennsylvania, as much as 62 percent. In Tennessee, guaranteed issue and community rating accounted for between 73 and 76 percent of premium increases.

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SHOT: House Overwhelmingly Passes $7.9 Billion Harvey Aid Package

By a 419-3 vote, the House of Representatives passed an initial $7.9 billion aid package to help victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Louisiana.
The bill is now on its way to the Senate — where some have said an increase to the nation’s debt ceiling could be tacked on — before it reaches President Donald Trump’s desk for final approval.

“This is a chance to be your brother’s keeper,” Rep. Al Green (D-TX) said. “This is a chance for the unity that we express when we’re before the cameras to manifest itself in the votes that we cast here in Congress.”

CHASER: Not yours to give…Davey Crockett

One day in the House of Representatives a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:

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Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income.

*****

We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.

*****

We are convinced that socialism in the right sense will only be possible in nations and races that are Aryan, and there in the first place we hope for our own people and are convinced that socialism is inseparable from nationalism.

*****

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…haven’t gone back to “regular order”, jammed up against funding deadlines and AGAIN have to pass a crappy “Continuing Resolution”.

But they seem to be all in on Obama’s unconstitutional DACA and “making it all better” – after years of whining this was THEIR job and not his.

So WHEN are the DC Republicans going to do their job(s)?  Sure, passed a bunch of regulation busting legislation – I’ll take it.  But this is not the “why we pulled the lever” – this is failure that, I think, makes 2005 and previous look like championship work (and that gave Democrats control in a lot of places including here in NH).  I agree with the above- failure will not be rewarded.  If those losers think that the Dems in their districts roasted them in their home district townhalls, just wait.  Just wait.

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Our hearts go out to those folks that have literally lost everything (and I suggest that if you wish to make a donation to help out, go to Samaritan’s Purse) but after watching the disaster that has hit the Gulf areas of Texas for days now, one has to wonder: what DO you do to prepare for that?  Especially if you are one of the tens of thousands (millions?) that had to leave?  Well, if you can’t “hunker down / shelter in place”, it IS time to get out of Dodge.

Like the image says above “Get a Kit, Make a Plan“.  A lot of people look down on “preppers” as being kooks, freaks, extremists, and “just out there” and the National Geographic series “Doomsday Prepper” did their part to reinforce that outlook just like the liberal MSM did to the TEA Party.  However, in our harried scheduled, just-in-time purchasing lifestyle, what DO you do when all of a sudden when normal life breaks down – completely?  As the residents of a lot of the impacted areas found out, in some cases, there is no 911 to call and you quickly realize that YOU are your own first responder (irrespective of those that have chosen to outsource their basic self-responsibility to Govt, like J@Womenspeakup).  What are you gonna due?

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Reformatted, emphasis mine:

Americans on average spent more on taxes in 2016 than they did on food and clothing combined, according to data released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In 2016, according to BLS, “consumer units” (which include families, financially independent individuals, and people living in a single household who share expenses) spent more on average on federal, state and local taxes ($10,489) than they did on food ($7,203) and clothing ($1,803) combined ($9,006).

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First one:

Houston is socially resilient. Texas’s culture may strike some as atavistic macho-cowboy silliness, but, as it turns out, when the water gets high you really want to have some atavistically macho cowboys around, particularly if they are in possession of the flat-bottomed boats favored by the justly celebrated “Cajun Navy.” The now-famous Houston Chronicle photo of a stoic-looking man wading through the flood waters while carrying an exhausted woman who is herself carrying a child is an iconic expression of certain realities that are not, whatever the voguish academic nonsense claims, “socially constructed.” Whatever the culture of Texas is, it is not a culture of helplessness.

Unlike what we saw with Katrina. Second one:

But what really works about Houston — and about America — is that line of guys saying, “I have a bass boat, a raincoat, and some rope — what can I do to help?” There’s no army in the world that can replace that, and no amount of treasure that can buy it.

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About the only time I use a LOT of salt is right now – for corn on the cob.  The local farm we patronize (“Farmer Andy” as DCE over at Weekend Pundit calls him) has a great brand of butter and sugar corn.  There have been some years that I’ve remembered to go get some and realized that they’ve already closed for the day.  THIS year, we’ve reliably picked it up pretty much every other day.  Which for me has meant quite a bit of salt:

Participants in a recent study with the highest intake of sodium and potassium actually had significantly lower blood pressure, according to an analysis presented earlier this year at the American Society for Nutrition’s Scientific Sessions meeting in Chicago. The group with the lowest blood pressure averaged a daily sodium intake of 3.7 grams a day, far higher than the guidelines suggest.

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SHOT: Perfect. Hungary Sends The EU A Bill For Their Border Fence

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been something of a thorn in the side of the EU for quite a while now when it comes to the refugee crisis and questions over terrorism and illegal immigration. While most of the rest of the union has been bending over backwards to keep pace with Angela Merkel’s plans for unlimited immigration and open borders, Hungary has taken a hard line in keeping the illegal migrants out. This has led the EU to recently consider imposing penalties on Hungary for their failure to get with the program.

Orban came up with an even better response of his own. He just sent the European Union a bill for $476 million to cover half the cost of the razor wire fence he put up to keep the flow of immigrants out.

Hungary wants the European Union to pay half the bill for the razor-wired fence it erected in 2015 to keep migrants out, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s administration announced Thursday. The fence has virtually erased illegal immigration into Hungary less than two years after it was considered the primary route for migrants attempting to enter the EU. Janos Lazar, Orban’s chief of staff, claims the 400 million euro ($476 million) figure is justified since the fence is “protecting all the citizens of Europe from the flood of illegal migrants.”

CHASER: Report: White House Weighing Mexican Remittance Fee To Pay for Southern Security Wall…

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Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves?

– Tench Coxe,  The Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788

“We are our own first responders,”

–NRA instructor Bill Hodges

The fact that it has to be said, that We the People should be a priority above and are preeminent before Govt, is a sad state of affairs.  

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