Free Republic

Complete Headline: First Baltimore Riot Bill Comes Due: $20,000,000 – Baltimore City Leadership Send Bill To FEMA, Forces All Americans To Pay…. It takes some kind of nerve to intentionally “provide space for people to destroy” a city, and then ask everyone who doesn’t live in the city to pay for it. …”The $20 million estimate released by city officials does not include the cost to businesses of the unrest. The figure also does not include state or federal costs. It’s unclear when those figures will be tallied”… [Snip] The expenses — which go before the city’s spending board for...

Floods on the Rio Blanco these past few days demonstrate the link to climate change, but not in the way you think. It was a horrible Memorial Day weekend in Hays County, Texas. At least three people died from the worst flooding seen since 1922. The Rio Blanco crested at 43 feet, 30 feet over flood stage. Over 400 homes were destroyed and the interstate (I-35) was under water. The flood warning posted on the San Marcos, Texas website identifies the areas of evacuation. One area is that in the Blanco Vista neighborhood nearest to the river. Police officers and...

Formaldehyde is a simple and ubiquitous molecule, used in countless products and industrial processes. The compound is synthesized by virtually every life form, and does not accumulate in the environment. However, since formaldehyde (along with everything else) is a “chemical,” greedy fear entrepreneurs are more than willing to scare the public. In so doing, they not only extract millions of dollars in dubious donations, they routinely slander and libel dozens of perfectly fine products. Unfortunately, when industry attempts to fight back, the prevailing media narrative is nearly always rigged against it, based on the puerile notion that the fear entrepreneurs...

Republican lawmakers are criticizing a new policy at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that forces states to acknowledge climate change in order to receive some federal disaster funds. The policy, set to take effect next March, requires state governors to address the role of climate change in their disaster-mitigation plans in order to qualify for federal disaster-preparedness grant money. A group of Republican senators are questioning the change in a letter to FEMA Director Craig Fugate, arguing that the new policy will complicate the bureaucratic process of applying for mitigation assistance and force state leaders to adopt an ideological...

A friend sent me an article from Zero Hedge that I find intriguing and it raises far more questions than answers. I did not know that there was something called a PreparAthon held by FEMA on April 30th. Did you? Supposedly the nationwide drills are for – get this – the catastrophic consequences of global warming. Right. Sure it is. I suspect that propagandic line is for the rubes, when in fact what the feds fear the most is an EMP attack or a massive cyber attack. DHS was just all abuzz over this drill evidently. But what caught my...

CERT Training Session 4 This session was a practical test in which the CERT Volunteers were called to the location of a simulated disaster. In contrast to previous sessions, the practical test was held outdoors in the downtown parking lot of a metropolitan convention facility. Groups from a number of different cities participated in the event as well as teams sponsored by the national FEMA organization. The event was organized by professional staff of the participating cities. The organizers had decades-long experience with Fire and Rescue operations. There were approximately 50 CERT volunteers plus 50 role-player “disaster victim” volunteers attending...

CERT Training Session 3 As before, this session was held in a city facility and lasted for most of the day. This session went over “Unit 3” and “Unit 4” of the training materials – “Disaster Medical Operations”. The instructors reviewed information from the previous session on Triage procedures and basic First Aid. “Triage is not treatment. It is sorting”. This point was emphasized by the instructors. In a mass-casualty event the first thing the responders want to do is identify victims who are uninjured, or do not need immediate medical attention, and get them away from the incident site...

CERT Training Session 2 As before, this session was held in a city facility and lasted for most of the day. Almost all of the previous attendees from session 1 returned for session 2. There were a small number of new students as well. The morning portion went over Government responses to terrorist incidents; “Unit 8” of the training documents. This material comes straight from FEMA, and is mainly concerned with Chemical, Radiological, Biological, and Nuclear attacks. The FEMA managers seem to be obsessed with such possibilities. This is rather curious, since even the training materials mention that 80% of...

CERT Training, Session 1 A posting on another blog suggested that “preppers” should learn about the Incident Command System used by FEMA and that this might best be done by taking some of the courses offered by that agency. See your tax dollars at work, so to speak. A CERT course was available and scheduled nearby. I decided to attend. “CERT” stands for “Community Emergency Response Teams”. This program is sponsored on a national level by FEMA and is based on volunteer organizations first created about thirty years ago by the Los Angles Fire Department. CERT makes explicit use of...

I live in East Texas and our WalMart closed due to "plumbing" problems. All employees are fired. closed for at least 6 months. Come to find out, several more closed across America due to "plumbing" problems and all employees fired. Googled closed Walmart and got several different theories. One says they need to close some to pay for the huge raise they gave the rest of the workers. One says it's for holding illegals crossing the border. Another says it for American that don't want Obama's 3rd term. Second observation today,.....A military jet fuel truck came into my small East...

Warmist efforts to shut down scientific skepticism – the very heart of the scientific method – have escalated from mere rhetoric to mobilizing the financial might of the federal government to punish those who dare doubt the orthodoxy. Even though the computer models that have failed to predict actual outcomes must be continually rejiggered, they are proclaimed to be “settled science,” and doubters are to be punished. Now, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is preparing to financially punish states whose governors are regarded as heretics. Philly.com reports:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making it tougher for governors to deny man-made climate change. Starting next year, the agency will approve disaster-preparedness funds only for states whose governors approve hazard-mitigation plans that address climate change. This may put several Republican governors who maintain that the Earth isn't warming due to human activities, or prefer to take no action, in a political bind. Their position may block their states' access to hundreds of millions of dollars in FEMA funds. In the last five years, the agency has awarded an average $1 billion a year in grants to states and...

Well, there’s one way to ensure that everyone buys into the man-made global warming hoax: extortion. Starting next year the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will stop funds from going to states that refuse to believe that humans are causing climate change. This news comes straight from the leftist eco-nuts at Inside Climate News, so you can be assured that it isn’t a “paranoid” conservative interpretation of an innocuous FEMA regulation: The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making it tougher for governors to deny man-made climate change. Starting next year, the agency will approve disaster preparedness funds only for states...

The creator, director and producer of the controversial movie about the encroaching police state and FEMA camps in America, David Crowley, has been found dead with his wife and young daughter over the weekend. The police are calling it a murder-suicide incident yet not ruling out anything suspicious. The movie was currently in production and Crowley had recently received a contract of $30 million to complete the project of his dreams. While depression can have its harshest affects on people, his friends and co-workers have stated that the police story is highly unlikely.

glaringly missing from the summary was mention of $15 million in fees paid by Burkle's Yucaipa Global Opportunities Fund since 2002

With the attempt to limit the deductibility of contributions to charities by high-earners, the Obama Administration has opened a multi-front attack against the American tradition of “neighbor helping neighbor” and financially successful people turning large portions of their wealth over to charities that improve the American culture in august manners. The governmental power grab competes with the attempts to control the financial sector for its significance and may exceed it in the long-term effect upon our culture. One first has to marvel at how liberals can twist logic to rationalize a tax increase. It happens regularly from the local government...

Executive Directive 51 was signed by George W. Bush in 2007, which gives the US Federal gov’t the power to declare impose martial law in the event a ‘national emergency’, giving the White House and Homeland Security (DHS) the ability to detain millions of Americans on US soil under Rex 84 and other military programs previously planned and run as inter-agency exercise drills. A number of bloggers, patriot groups, survivalists and preppers have compiled lists of FEMA Camp locations, but much of the reporting is still isolated and anecdotal.

The residents of Belle Harbor Manor spent four miserable months in emergency shelters after Superstorm Sandy's floodwaters surged through their assisted-living center on New York City's Rockaway peninsula. Now, the home's disabled, elderly and mostly poor residents have a new headache: The Federal Emergency Management Agency has asked at least a dozen of them to pay back thousands of dollars in disaster aid. (snip) osenberg said the FEMA workers who urged him to apply for assistance during the period when residents were staying at the armory never explained that the money could only be used for housing. "Everyone asked, 'Do...

Talk about timing. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is currently in the middle of a two-year pandemic training exercise with New York City and northern New Jersey. Titled “2013-14 Pandemic Influenza Continuity Exercise Strategy,” the FEMA training simulates a global pandemic of influenza that spreads from person to person, including in the U.S.

In a story for Yahoo News, the CDC says that in the event of an Ebola outbreak in the U.S., bodies of the deceased would be required to be buried within “hermetically sealed caskets”, which would prevent the escape of microbes during funerals. An administrator of the Dallas Institute Of Funeral Service interviewed in the article states that he has never come across any such caskets in his industry, meaning, hermetically sealed coffins are NOT common in the slightest for burial. The CDC coffins in Madison, Georgia, though, ARE designed to prevent spread of infection. In fact, the patent for...