Hello Screamers, hope the weekend is going well! Today we’re going to talk about the Hawaii disaster (not the fire), catch up on a few developments in older stories, and get a head start on tomorrow’s pawsitivity post. Let’s get right to it!
Maui Disaster Response Failed At All Levels
Horrifying stories and videos continue to emerge from the scene of the Lahaina wildfire, many recounting how government officials completely botched (and still are botching) the disaster response.
By blocking roads:
By sending children home to fend for themselves:
And by not activating emergency sirens:
Can you believe the attitude of this guy? He’s literally in charge of emergency response, and he justifies doing nothing because he thinks people are SO STUPID (and obedient to government) they’re going to run directly into a raging fire. He thinks it’s better for people to remain in the dark — AND he believes BECAUSE he thinks it’s better for people to remain in the dark that he has the right to force them to remain in the dark.
This attitude is common among government employees, as you’re about to see — because as horrifying the above stories are, nothing is more terrifying than a government official sitting happily at home explaining why he allowed people to burn to death: (Note: this is NOT the guy who resigned from the story above)
Even after the fires were over and the disaster relief efforts started, the response was inept. Officials set up a program for residents to gain access to supplies, but when those officials were unable to actually run the program effectively, they simply canceled it — leaving victims upset and without recourse. Other videos allege government is preventing aid from getting through to residents — forcing volunteers to bring supplies via watercraft.
By now it should be more than clear that in an emergency, you can’t rely on government, which is likely to be overwhelmed at best — and fatally incompetent at worst.
Portland Updates
Moving from one inept government to another, complaints in Portland are on the rise after the government’s latest ‘solution’ to chronic homelessness and drug use in the city:
Neighbors say they've connected the people who smoke meth and fentanyl on the curb outside their homes to the village, watching them walk back and forth down North Syracuse multiple times a day. They claim their concerns have fallen on deaf ears from day one.
"They just rammed this in. There's zero transparency. We have no one to talk to, no one to answer our questions. The community engagement office that is supposed to be in charge of that completely shuts it down," another neighbor said.
Even worse than the actions is the silence afterward. Government has no further plan — officials will likely just wait for the weather to get cold and many of the homeless to migrate south.
Until next year summer, anyway.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about the verdict in the Andy Ngo/Antifa trial, and thanks to the transcript of the trial obtained by Post Millennial, I can share this laughable statement from defense attorney Michelle Burrows:
Ms. Burrows told the jury that Ngo needs to take responsibility for his reporting since social media is not regulated by the federal government. The attorney explained that Ngo's reporting on Antifa has resulted in both the defendants and defense witnesses receiving "abuse" and "death threats."
"This is not a First Amendment case, folks. The First Amendment only protects us as against the government. It doesn't protect us in our private interaction was each other. So while Mr. Ngo has the First Amendment right to say and do what he wants on Twitter, there are no restrictions that the government has been willing to place on people on social media," Burrows explained.
Sounds like somebody needs to read the Twitter Files. Speaking of………
Credit where credit is due
I spend a lot of time ripping on Republicans here (and for good reason - like the fact they are complicit in the hiding the 1/6 tapes), but since they are only MOSTLY incompetent and not ENTIRELY incompetent, sometimes they manage to do some things correctly — and I think it’s important to highlight those moments.
This week, Jim Jordan went on an information-seeking spree, demanding ex-Twitter executive Yoel Roth appear for a meeting with the Committee on the Judiciary (the committee investigating revelations from The Twitter Files). Here’s the opening passage:
But Jordan was far from done after Roth. Also on his list was Chris Krebs, the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the runup to the 2020 election. (He was fired by Trump just after the election)
Next up on Jordan’s list was Sunil Garg, CEO of Citibank — the company that had voluntarily turned over information about its customers who were in Washington DC on January 6, 2021.
Jordan then turned to still-employed members of the government and demanded more information — much like a beat cop dragging a few suspects down the station to see how their individual stories shake out. On this particular ‘suspect list’ we have Attorney General Merrick Garland. Here, you can sense that Jordan is frustrated with Garland’s complete non-response to the censorship issue:
That same day, Jordan wrote to top FIBer……sorry, top FBIer Christopher Wray. The opening of the letter was identical to Garland’s, but deeper into the communication we find this:
Jordan seems to be determined to get to the bottom of the Censorship Industrial Complex, but will he be able to shut down a system so prevalent that it rears its head in every issue of the day — even James O’Keefe videos?
In a great (but long) Twitter thread, TexasLinday details the story of how the CEO & President of the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights got a video created by O’Keefe (then still at Project Veritas) censored for “civic misinformation”. This is interesting because that CEO was none other than Vanita Gupta, who was soon after named U.S. Associate Attorney General.
This is another great example of the revolving door and incestuous relationship between private and public tyrants, each side grinding our freedom to dust between them.
But it’s not ALL bad. While reading about the O’Keefe story, I ran across this hilarious video:
See you tomorrow, Screamers!
We don’t have to get into anything long-term. Just buy me a coffee on Ko-fi and we’ll see where it goes.
The official preliminary report on what happened on Maui is out today: https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/02/maui-police-report-reveals-locations-of-lahaina-fire-victims-and-lessons-learned/
Gotta protect those sandwiches.