Posted on 08/14/2004 2:02:37 PM PDT by My Favorite Headache
It is with a heavy heart that I write this. I have no idea what is wrong with people today in this society and this country. My example I am going to use is a really really sad one.
I was in Plant City as of Thursday night which for those who do not know is just north east of Tampa/St.Pete. I went down there to help a friend of mine who owns a house who happens to be a single mother of a 2 yr old girl. She needed help boarding up her house and sandbags etc.
All finished by 2 am there and I decided I was going to go over to a portion of Tampa called locally "New Tampa", where another friend of mine was readying her home up with her brothers. It was only 30 mins away from Plant City and definitely in the "expected"path of Charley.
I wound up falling asleep there around 4 am and woke up around 6:30 am to see that everything was still a go and a green light for Tampa. We had a few more things to move outside and the sandbags because it is a low lying area that floods from regular storms.
We went out to grab something to eat at a local Wendy's where the wait in the drive thru was about 45 mins long considering everything local had closed already by 11 am. When we got back to the house we were watching storm coverage and then about 20 mins later noticed the shift in the storm. We saw that the storm itself was more than likely going to move into the Cape Coral area.
I decided it was time for me to make my decision and it was quick. 10 seconds. I got into my car and drove over to my friends home in Lakeland. Unfortunately by the time I got over there he had hauled it over to a friends house in Arcadia.
I knew I was racing against time on I-4 and that Charley was breathing down my neck. But was more than confident I would make it back to Melbourne in time before Charlie hit Central Florida...and I did.
With about 60 mph winds everything was ok here and we even managed to keep power the entire time. So we were spared and were lucky...our friends 30 miles to the west of us couldn't say the same.
So all of my phone calls were put into friends in Naples where I used to live up til March of this year,Fort Myers,Cape Coral,and Bonita Springs. All had no power and were trying to save cell batteries but were alive. But here is where the BARF ALERT comes in.
3 of them managed to in the span of 60 seconds say "this is Jeb Bush's storm...he really screwed this one up","your boy Jeb is going to have a lot of explaining to do with this one","I am sure Jeb and George will come play the healer for their own injuries they caused."
I was sicken to my stomach. Just not that these people were my friends and usually very educated and well spoken...BUT THEY MEANT IT!
I said listen...this storm was all over the news for a week. The hurricane warning had been issued within 36 hrs...evacuation orders were given...this is mother nature...science..you can't predict this kind of thing and we all saw it with our own eyes..the storm turned right...not Jeb Bush forcing it to the coast.
Every single person bought into the entire "the Bush's never know what to do when something is going on ala the morning of 9-11",obviously a Michael Moore style of brainwashing that people have sickingly adopted from his film.
If it was not bad enough to hear it was when I turned on local talk radio and listened to my fellow Floridians bash the national hurricane center,the national weather service,jeb bush,and the media for causing such huge errors in the state and ignoring other possible tracks. That Jeb Bush spoke with arrogance and cockiness that the storm was definitely going to hit Tampa.
Last I checked the NHC saved millions of lives by posting updates every 3 hrs...the national weather service saved millions of lives by posting tornado warnings and flood watches and warnings,and Jeb Bush was up for 3 straight days and still is down south trying to do whatever a HUMAN BEING can do.
The nerve of a reporter to ask him "you are down here and the cameras are here...but do you really mean it when you say you are going to make sure people get help? Do you mean it?"
Or CNN saying "well the president's trip with his brother will be more about not wanting to lose Florida and the 27 electoral votes than showing compassion", I have absolutely had it with this kind of crap. I really pray for humanity to come along one day and to stop blaming everyone else for their problems and for things out of all of our control...like category 4 hurricanes.
"They asked about the harm done because some Florida National Guard troops are on duty in Iraq instead of down in Florida to help save their friends and neighbors."
OK, that is just ridiculous. How could troops "save their friends and neighbors"? Are they going to throw themselves in between the hurricane and the people who are in its path?
Puh-leeze!!
LMFAO
It was the vampire thingy...lol
We are waiting for Kerry to come down here and say he is here for the people of Florida as will his wife and John Edwards with a bus load of lawyers.
NBC with Brian Williams right now...get ready for this
Oh well. She lost her home.
Somehow I don't feel sorry for the lady.
<<<
Well, I'll be sorry when I pay, via the Federal Goobermint, for the replacement...and everything else it takes to make these folks whole (since I'm sure no one carries proper insurance with Uncle Sam there to take care of it).
I don't know why they are blaming Jeb Bush. They should be blaming Pat Robertson. He's the one who called for it to happen.
Tell me when the answer is Will Rogers...
"No matter how cynical you get, you can't keep up."
Anybody know who said this?.....
I would guess - Groucho Marx? or W.C.Fields?
You know, I never looked at it in those terms, but you are exactly correct. If we had an honest press, things would be entirely different.
bingo.
In fact, their assesment of character of President Bush has pretty much become the central issue, the primary yardstick, in my assesment of anyone.
LOL!
Well, that..
I tend to burn in the sun anyway, so I end up a pale looking WITH the dark hair.
Creeps people out.
Heh....
That den of sin and homosexuality, South Beach Miami, has been left completely undamaged by three hurricanes that either were heading towards it and turned away, or that passed relatively near...Andrew, Floyd, and Charley.
Andrew wiped out a largely conservative area of family homes. Floyd destroyed Eastern North Carolina, one of the greatest centers for fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity in the country, and Charley hit an area that votes Republican and is largely comprised of retirees.
Both San Francisco and Los Angeles had a high rate of damaging earthquakes in the late 1800s, and LA had several prior to World War II. The rate of damaging quakes in both areas DROPPED right when SF became America's center for gay culture, and LA became the center of the American porn industry.
I listened to a caller on John Carlson's radio show in Seattle yesterday afternoon raging at the president for being here in Washington campaigning when he should be on TV telling the nation about the storm. He compared it to 9/11 and Bush sitting in the classroom for seven minutes, doing nothing. John tried to get him to explain exactly what he thought the president could do about it and that it was the governor's job to deal with state emergencies but this guy's voice just kept getting higher and more shrill. His hatred for Pres. Bush had caused him to completely lose control. I wouldn't be surprised if he soiled himself.
That's really sad! How long yall been friends?
I'll bet she was one of those who claimed to have accidentally voted for Buchanan when she meant to vote for gore.
Lily Tomlin said Nobody how cynical I get I can't keep up.
I'm trying to find out if she also said, "If you go around with a smile on your face all the time, you aren't paying attention."
A hurricane is a fire. The fuel is the warm tropical surface water. Storms get driven by conditions in the upper atmosphere that provide a heat dump for the fuel thus driving conversion of heat into mechanical energy, the atmospheric circulation, and the winds. Above a certain intensity level an atmospheric storm seem able to mobilize an excess of warm moist air, and to have the force to distribute the air that rises in the center of the storm radialy outwards. To hope to control the giant energy flows in a major hurricane seems unreasonable.
But the transition between an ordinary large storm and a hurricane might be delayed by a large input of refrigeration into the air at sea level. One hundred meters below the gulf surface the sea water termperature is about 12 deg C. A host of barges with pipes reaching down to this cool water and pumping at least a few cubic meters/sec and spraying it into the passing winds might do just enough to prevent the severe storm to hurricane transition. How many barges? At least several hundred. Maybe a thousand. Steering a hurricane might also be possible.
The cost is large, and the effectiveness uncertain. The cost of hurricanes is very large, and their continued occurance is pretty certain.
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