TOP STORY OF THE DAY! The labour disputes in Yemen are getting worse:
REPORTER: "Any comment on the strikes in Yemen, Mr. President!?"
BIDEN (or whatever's left of him): "I've spoken to both sides. They gotta settle the strike. I'm supporting the collective bargaining effort. I think they'll settle the strike."
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 30, 2024
Meanwhile, back in the remaining non-demented precincts of America:
It's been over 48 hours since we spoke to my parents. Reports state there continues to be massive cellular and electrical outages.
There are two ways to get to our parent's house - they have a Burnsville address.
1.Crab Tree Creek Road off of Highway 19.
— 𝗞𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝘁𝗲 (@coachkatiepate) September 29, 2024
2.7 Mile Ridge Road... pic.twitter.com/2AtjGvH9OG
Every few years, as a reminder of what a chump I can be, I re-publish a column I wrote just before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Salient bit of chumpiness:
Today in the developed world we don't 'fear' events; quite the opposite. It's not that we exactly look forward to them per se, but that we relish the opportunity to rise to the occasion.
And, on the whole, we do.
God, what was I thinking? During Katrina, federal, state and local government all sank to the occasion. But Bush was the Republican, so the media stuck it to him rather than, say, New Orleans' hack mayor, Ray Nagin, since convicted of bribery and money laundering and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. Two months after the hurricane, the Democrats took Congress, and thereby formalised Katrina as marking the end-point of the Bush presidency.
As I noted back then, it's not a healthy sign to be talking about meteorological phenomena in party-political terms. But that's the reality of America today. Significant proportions of eastern Tennessee, which has a GOP governor, and western North Carolina, which has a Dem governor, are underwater and cut off from the rest of the planet. But the national media's priority is to get Harris and Walz across the finish line in five weeks' time, and covering what the BBC calls scenes of "biblical devastation" with thousands of residents missing would not be helpful to that. So no need for Joe Biden to leave his Delaware beach house and give a press conference while wearing a butch bomber jacket, or to appoint Kamala his "hurricane czar":
Two states are underwater, Americans are stranded without food or supplies, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are completely AWOL. https://t.co/oFfRSEac1W
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) September 29, 2024
Because there's no upside to emerging from their bunkers to get mixed up in a national totally local emergency:
I feel like the victims of Helene dropped off the radar immediately. This is a Katrina-like situation with people shut off from help and dying on their rooftops. How is this only a local story? https://t.co/ty9PyXByJQ
— Emily Zanotti 🦝 (@emzanotti) September 29, 2024
If it's any consolation, Ms Harris is reported by her fellow Democrats to be "underwater" in Michigan. That's the great divide in American life: for the likes of Kamala, the scary words are now strictly metaphorical; out there in the sodden hinterland, they're literal. There will be a lot more of that in the years to come - as the political class prioritises "solutions" for problems that don't exist:
Not to be political right now, but we are completely dependent on our gas stove these last few days without power, and I can't help thinking about how Kamala has been trying to ban them and how hosed we would be without it.
— Julia E (@JuliaJuliagulia) September 29, 2024
If you're wondering why I'm citing so many Tweets, well, in the absence of any substantive "mainstream" media coverage, there is Elon Musk - for as long as he is permitted to exist. Speaking at - oh, go on, take a wild guess - yeah, that's right, Klaus Schwab's Spectre board meeting in his hollowed-out Swiss Alp, former Biden "climate czar" John Kerry suggested that, if Dems get a big-enough victory, the First Amendment will not be long for this world:
"Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win...the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you're free to be able to implement change."
No thanks.pic.twitter.com/SLGHOLVjCr
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) September 29, 2024
This is our depraved ruling class, determined to ensure that there will be no respite from their fever dreams. The same people who want to fast-track digital currency and abolish paper money are currently presiding over huge swathes of Tennessee and North Carolina in which retail outlets are only accepting cash:
Meanwhile, the Hayes' [SIC] family waited with a pretzel container filled with coins – the store was only accepting cash – hoping there would be water when they finally got inside.
Better hope those coins down the back of the couch are quarters.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going ...elsewhere. In Tennessee, on the day the hurricane blew in, 700 National Guard troops were deployed ...to Kuwait, to take part in some waste-of-time military exercise organised by a Pentagon that hasn't won anything since VJ Day and takes twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser. Ukraine matters, union disputes in Yemen matter, the millions swarming across the Rio Grande to be resettled across the fruited plain matter. But Maui, East Palestine, and rural North Carolina don't matter.
"Government of the people"? That depends who's driving the vans in the small hours of Wednesday morning in Pennsylvania, Michigan et al.
"Government by the people"? Well, setting aside the very particular biography of a high-caste Brahmin British-subject Montreal schoolgirl, our rulers seem increasingly a race apart, having more in common with the chums they meet at Davos than with the despised masses they fly over en route.
"Government for the people"? Government for everybody but the people.
Since my line about "rising to the occasion" went belly up, I have replaced it with something pithier: "Nothing works anymore." In 1944 the Allies could tow two portable harbours across the English Channel and install them on Omaha and Gold beaches. Eighty years later, the world's most lavishly funded military is incapable of securing a harbour off the Gaza shore without it breaking off and floating along the coast to wash up in pieces on an Israeli beach.
Meanwhile, here is an "exclusive" interview the Governor of North Carolina gave to a star-struck local lad, apparently from Teenbeat, who ends by saying it's been a "pleasure":
If you lived in this guy's state, would you be reassured by the above? Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse notes the passivity and evasion of the language:
Listen carefully to what Governor Cooper is saying. You will hear the words "learning", "coordinating", "facilitating", "attempting to understand" etc., intertwined in the responses.
Governor Cooper has no idea what to do and he is deferring response to the private sector, who are stuck inside the crisis region. The scale of the crisis is too large for the private sector to handle right now. People are trapped and literally exposed to deadly situations during these 15 minutes of nothing.
Western North Carolina is in a state of crisis. People are trapped. Entire small towns and communities are isolated by lost roads and bridges. Many people can only be reached by helicopter. Communication in the region is almost impossible. The outside world has no way to understand just how bad things are in specific areas because those areas are cut-off from all transit and communication.
A decade ago I wrote:
Increasingly, key levers of society are being ceded to the irredeemably stupid and mendacious, who seem to be the only ones capable of navigating the rocks and rapids of political correctness. One has the uneasy feeling that similar scenarios are playing out every day around the western world. How long before the planes start dropping out of the sky?
And that was before "DEI" was a thing, and before the "Leader of the Free World" put a bald lipsticked kleptomaniac tranny with plural pronouns in charge of nuclear waste. Eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina are cut off in part because the entirety of the western world has bet its future on the "smart" phone. And, as millions of Americans are learning, in today's world if you haven't got cell service you haven't got nuffin' - and those telephones are fragile and vulnerable not only to hurricanes but also to cyber-shutdowns and EMP attacks.
Ah, but as Politico tuts:
Trump drags Hurricane Helene into 2024 campaign
Yeah, because, unlike Katrina, this hurricane is nothing to do with whoever's running the executive branch of the United States. As to who precisely that is, all we can say for certain is that, of the more than seven billion people on earth, it's not Joe Biden, because he's focused on collective bargaining in Yemen, and Kamala Harris, because nobody would put her in charge of anything.
Well, except for half the voters in the United States.
If those numbers hold up, expect a lot more of western North Carolina in your future.
~We had a very lively weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt Secret Service's subversion of the election. Steyn's Saturday music show celebrated the multi-talented Caterina Valente and one of the all-time greatest showbiz anecdotes. For his weekend movie date Rick McGinnis picked American expats in Whit Stillman's Barcelona, while Steyn's Song of the Week opted for an unforgettable song by an unshutuppable author. Our marquee presentation was Mark's speech to Hillsdale on the politicisation of American justice.
If you were too busy spending the weekend standing in line for a plastic bottle of water, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly few months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
