Quotulatiousness

October 5, 2024

Scary words of 2024 – “Luckily, FEMA is on the case”

As I recounted a few days back, I was relieved to hear from my friend in the Asheville NC area after the region absorbed the damage from Hurricane Helene. Tom Knighton had a similar experience:

A friend of mine lives at the edge of where Helene did her worst. He just got power back on yesterday and was finally able to let me know he was OK. I was worried for obvious reasons.

In the deepest, worst parts of where the storm ripped things to shreds, they’re trying to just make it to the next day. They’re struggling to find clean drinking water, food, shelter, the works.

Luckily, FEMA is on the case.

They took to social media yesterday and posted this crap.

That’s right. People who don’t have internet, phone service, or electricity should call, download an app, or log onto the FEMA website.

I won’t ask how stupid can the federal government be, but I’m worried they’d take it as a challenge.

Back in the day, FEMA would roll into a disaster area with paper applications and facilitate all of that right there. While the internet and smartphones are glorious things, this is a prime example of when they’re a terrible option for people.

Right now, American citizens are struggling. They’re thankful to be alive and are working their butts off to keep themselves alive. They’ve paid taxes their entire lives, and now that they need some of theirs back, their federal government is telling them to do what is physically impossible for many of them.

I can’t help but see this and think that their claims of having enough money in spite of spending hundreds of billions on illegal immigrants ring a tad hollow.

If they have the money, why not put boots on the ground getting people signed up for any assistance they may be entitled to?

Honestly, while I’ve commented before about the gross incompetence of the government in disaster response — and I’ll agree that maliciousness is most definitely a possibility, if not a probability in these instances — this is just weapons-grade … whatever, be it stupidity, meanness, or a combination of both.

Heads should roll.

Update: David Warren notes that it’s not merely FEMA incompetence, it’s active deterrence for private relief efforts by all federal agencies.

From the Internet (for instance updates from Elon Musk), we note that non-governmental charitable efforts are not merely “discouraged”. The government is seizing and impounding desperately-needed local goods and services. The rest of the federal bureaucracy is also “chipping in”, to stifle relief efforts. The FAA, for instance, is restricting private aircraft with supplies, and making it almost impossible to fly drones, demanding that flights be individually approved by their slothful trolls. Those who wish to bring help to the survivors have both the wreckage of the storm, and government agents to block them.

This is how things work in this world, and have worked, since the Reformation, when the state took over welfare, hospitals, schools, and all other eleemosynary institutions. Rather than allow inspiring expressions of Christian charity, they became the means for cynical political posturing and control. And with “democracy”, we have detailed laws and policies, to prevent the people from helping themselves — as they would do, by laws of nature.

October 1, 2024

Devastation in the Carolinas

My oldest friend moved to the United States many years ago, moving around the country as his job dictated, but a few years back he and his wife found their perfect house near Asheville, NC. We had emailed to see how they were doing, but got no answer. Yesterday, I got a call from my friend’s cell phone to say that he and his wife were fine and they’d taken in an elderly neighbour until things get back to normal, but they currently don’t have electricity, land line telephone, or municipal water, but they’re otherwise fine. Their house is well above flood level, and he has sufficient camping supplies to keep them going for a while. He loaned his chainsaw to another neighbour who was trying to organize work parties to cut away fallen trees and branches and get more of the local roads open again (my friend recently had lyme disease and doesn’t want to trust his hands doing something as risky as running a chainsaw). We kept the call as short as possible, as he’ll have to manually recharge his phone until power is restored.

Virginia Postrel is originally from that same area of western North Carolina and northwestern South Carolina and reports on how her family in the area is doing in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene:

One of the many examples of the “horizontal forest” on nearly every road in Greenville, SC.
Photo by Virginia’s brother Sam M. Inman IV.

If you read my autobiographical reminiscences, you may have realized that I have family in Upstate South Carolina and western North Carolina, which have been hit hard by the unexpected ferocity of Hurricane Helene. Power has been out in Greenville, SC, for days and roads are nearly impassable because of downed trees on nearly every block.

My brother Sam, who went out in a truck on Friday to buy gasoline for his generator, said only about half the stations that had working pumps and were running out of gas quickly. “Lines of cars around the block … reminiscent of the 1970s”, he texted. He went out again today and found a stark difference between local QuikTrip stations and others. At QT, the lines were longer but flowed faster because stations had closed all but a single entrance and exit. Elsewhere, stations were chaotic traffic jams. At one point, he found himself unable to exit after fueling up because the cars behind and in front of him left no to maneuver room. (He persuaded the one behind him to ease away from his bumper.)

The assisted living place where my mother lives has a generator and at first continued to operate its kitchen and elevators. By today, however, the generator had become unreliable, the lights were flickering, few employees could get to work, and the kitchen was offering dry Cheerios for breakfast. Sam brought our mom to his house, which has no power. He later realized that he needed to return to get her medicine, which usually is delivered daily. I can only imagine how residents who don’t have local family — or who are in the memory care wing! — are managing.

Even people who were prepared with generators, many bought after a blizzard 20 years ago, needed gasoline to power them and, they soon realized, adapters to connect them to household appliances. The adapter aisle at Home Depot was quickly depleted.

The good news is that food is available. Grocery stores are operating more or less as normal, assuming you can get to them. When you sell frozen food, you apparently install large, reliable generators.

Meanwhile, my cousin in Asheville finally got weak cell signal back today. We’d been unable to communicate with her before now. With her husband, pets, and 95-year-old mother, she’s evacuating to Winston-Salem through the weekend, hoping Duke Power will live up to promises that power will be restored by Friday but preparing in case it takes a few days longer.

Although terrible in some areas, the flooding isn’t as bad as it might be, thanks to the region’s many man-made lakes. They absorbed water that otherwise would have flowed into populated towns.

May 4, 2022

Good intentions to rectify problems caused by earlier good intentions in Charleston, South Carolina

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Everyone seems to agree that affordable housing is a major need across North America … it certainly is in the Toronto area! In South Carolina, local politicians are doing what they can to make legal changes to encourage more affordable residences to come to market … even when the problem is at least partly caused by earlier attempts to encourage more affordable housing to come to market:

“A converted carriage house, Tradd Street, Charleston, SC” by Spencer Means is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The City of Charleston is considering new legislation that would deregulate accessory dwelling units in hopes of increasing the supply of affordable housing in the city. Also known as carriage houses or mother-in-law suites, accessory dwelling units are small structures that are built in the backyards of homes, and they can be a great source of affordable housing for those in need.

The initiative, which was proposed by Councilmember Ross Appel two weeks ago, would remove red tape that is currently presenting a significant barrier for building this kind of housing. The ironic part is that the regulation which is primarily to blame for stopping the creation of these units was passed specifically to make these units more accessible.

“The city is looking at taking away a rule that requires these buildings to be affordable for 30 years,” WCSC reports, “which, Appel says, has been an obstacle for developers and homeowners.”

“We don’t want people to be artificially limited in terms of what they can charge,” Appel said. “The affordability requirement was a good-intended measure, but actually, that’s been currently in effect for the past year and a half, and we haven’t had a single accessory dwelling unit permitted since that time.”

Put simply, the affordability requirement backfired big time. Its goal was to make new accessory dwelling units more affordable, but by restricting the price people could charge it actually made them so unprofitable that people just stopped building them altogether. For all practical purposes, new accessory dwelling units might as well have been banned.

The implications are not hard to tease out. With no new accessory dwelling units to live in, people have been forced to bid up other kinds of housing, which has no doubt contributed to soaring housing prices. This is why Appel is eager to repeal this rule. He knows that building more supply is the key to bringing prices down, and he knows that regulations like this have been getting in the way of that process.

There’s a maxim in economics that this story highlights: the solution to high prices is high prices. The reasoning goes as follows. When a good like housing becomes scarce, prices naturally rise. But as prices rise, producers see an opportunity for profit and begin expanding the supply. Then, as additional supply comes to market, prices begin to fall.

April 26, 2021

Was GENERAL SHERMAN a WAR CRIMINAL?!?!?!?!

Atun-Shei Films
Published 11 Aug 2020

Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the Lost Cause myths surrounding William Tecumseh Sherman during the American Civil War, including the Atlanta Campaign, the March to the Sea, and the burning of Columbia — and tackling the “slavery would have gone away on its own” thing while we’re at it. Surprisingly, Johnny Reb gets in one or two really solid points.

[Updated 8 Feb 2023: Vlogging Through History’s reaction video to Atun-Shei’s interpretation is here – https://youtu.be/CTVr4YgB5VI]
(more…)

March 4, 2021

Fallen Flag — the Seaboard Air Line Railroad

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Seaboard Air Line logos used in print advertising, circa 1900 (left) and 1916 (right).
Wikimedia Commons.

This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the Seaboard Air Line by Larry Goolsby. The railroad’s earliest antecedent was originally chartered in 1832 to build a rail line from Portsmouth, Virginia to Weldon, North Carolina, a port on the Roanoke River which flows into Albemarle Sound. The Portsmouth & Roanoke began operation in 1834 and changed its name to the Seaboard & Roanoke around 1838 after several financial reorganizations and refinancing efforts. In 1837, the first passenger fatalities in US railroad history occurred in a head-on collision between a eastbound lumber train hit the westbound passenger train from Portsmouth on 11 August. Three young women were killed in the accident, all members of the Ely family.

Along with most other railroads in the Confederate states, Virginian and North Carolinian railroads were seriously damaged physically in the fighting and became political footballs during the Reconstruction Era. In the 1880s, the Seaboard and Roanoke was one of several railroads merged to form the Seaboard Air Line Railway which extended from Virginia to Georgia. The name Seaboard Air Line was in use well before the legal merger as a marketing device to help attract traffic.

The “Air Line” name was often used by railroads of the period to denote a route supposedly “as straight as the crow flies.” It was a reasonably direct run from Portsmouth to Weldon, but the Air Line label would be more than hype when in the 1880s Seaboard acquired a line linking Hamlet and Wilmington, N.C., which included a 79-mile tangent track, longest in the U.S.

As the 19th century closed, the SAL system came under control of a group led by John Skelton Williams, who added a line from Richmond, Va., to Weldon, and acquired the Florida Central & Peninsular, transforming what had been a Portsmouth–Atlanta carrier into a north-south line. In 1900, the various SAL roads were incorporated as Seaboard Air Line Railway with its coastal main line from Richmond going through Raleigh, Columbia, and Savannah to Jacksonville and Tampa.

1896 route map of the Seaboard Air Line.
Wikimedia Commons.

While the World War II years strained SAL’s resources the railroad shouldered the load with new EMD FTs, secondhand steam engines from Western Maryland and Chicago & North Western, and installation of block signals and centralized traffic control over large portions of its main line. Wartime income helped the carrier emerge from receivership in 1946 as Seaboard Air Line Railroad.

High-profile wrecks, several involving passenger trains, spurred quick postwar completion of the signaling and modernization campaign. SAL’s earliest CTC installation had started south from Richmond in 1941. By the early 1950s, signals covered most mainline mileage, keeping the operation competitive with its double-tracked neighbor Atlantic Coast Line.

Seaboard added more streamlined cars from Budd in 1947 and lightweight sleepers from several builders beginning in 1949. The Silver Star name was given to what had been a second section of the Meteor, and the two “Silver Fleet” members held down the first-class New York–Florida trade. The Silver Comet was added to the New York–Birmingham route. Seaboard continued to maintain its premier trains to high standards into the 1960s, proudly calling itself “The Route of Courteous Service.” The Meteor and Star names survive on Amtrak’s New York–Miami route.

As with so many North American railways after World War II, the Seaboard faced stiff competition not only from direct competitors like the Atlantic Coast Line, but also from trucks diverting freight onto the interstate highway system but also from airlines whisking its passengers more rapidly to holiday destinations in Florida. The economic situation was clear in the mid-1950s and Seaboard applied for government approval to merge operations with rival Atlantic Coast in 1958, but did not get through the legal obstacle course until 1967 when the merger was formalized as the new Seaboard Coast Line Railroad.

March 5, 2020

Fallen flag — The Clinchfield Railroad

This month’s fallen flag article in Classic Trains magazine recounts the story of the Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio, later known as the Clinchfield Railroad:

Clinchfield Railroad SD40 locomotive number 3002 at Spartanburg, SC in February 1968.
Roger Puta photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The Clinchfield was different. It was conceived by men who had the vision and resources to do things right. It was built to the highest engineering standards of the early 20th century. It never went through a financial failure or reorganization. Indeed, the Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio Railway was the antithesis of traditional railroad evolution.

In 1902, a wealthy regional businessman, George L. Carter, began stitching together an integrated industrial enterprise to develop vast coal deposits in the Clinch (River) Fields of southwest Virginia and to deliver the coal across the southern Appalachian mountains to markets in the Carolinas and to ships calling at Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville. Carter, from whom Howard Hughes could have learned a thing to two about secrecy, operated using the South & Western Railway banner. The name said everything … and nothing. The S&W was chartered from any point on the Atlantic Ocean to any point on the Great Lakes. Carter agents seized by legal means and/or physical occupation key terrain features through the mountains in competition with the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Southern Railway.

Clinchfield Railroad map. The Clinchfield’s 277-mile, 5-state line stretched from Elkhorn City, Kentucky, to Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Map via Classic Trains.

Within that generous charter was the idea of building a railroad to haul coal south and merchandise in both directions between the Midwest and the Southeast. The plans also incorporated development of several on-line cities to consume coal and make products from regional resources to diversify and grow the freight business. Finally, a steamship line was organized to move coal beyond the ports to customers in the Caribbean.

By 1905, Carter realized he needed far more capital than he could personally provide. Reluctantly, he managed to convince Blair & Co., a big Wall Street investment house, to finance the project. M. J. Caples, an engineer with mining and railroad experience, laid out and then built a magnificent low-grade, high-capacity railroad. Tunnels, steel viaducts, generous fills, and rocky cuts appeared as needed. More than 4 percent (almost 10 miles) of the line was underground in 55 tunnels. With construction of the 277-mile railroad well advanced, its name was changed to Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio Railway in 1908.

Coal began flowing across the 242 miles from Dante, Va., to Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1909 while the owners and engineers debated how to cross the Cumberland mountains into the Ohio River valley. Between 1912 and 1915, a 35-mile extension including what was then the 10th-longest tunnel in the U.S. created a through route connecting Chesapeake & Ohio at Elkhorn City, Kentucky, with the three major southeastern carriers (Seaboard at Bostic, North Carolina; Atlantic Coast Line and Southern at Spartanburg). In constant-value dollars, the five-state CC&O was the most expensive railroad ever built in the U.S.

August 22, 2019

No Wheat? Rice Bread – Gluten Free Recipe

Filed under: Food, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Townsends
Published on 18 Jun 2018

Today’s featured cookbook ➧ https://amzn.to/2MCOF6A ➧➧

Visit Our Website! ➧ http://www.townsends.us/ ➧➧

Help support the channel with Patreon ➧ https://www.patreon.com/townsend ➧➧

August 25, 2017

Solving the mystery of the fate of H.L. Hunley‘s crew

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley was found, the bodies of the crew were still in their duty positions within the vessel, as if they’d been unaware or unable to do anything to save the situation. Sarah Knapton reports on what is now believed to have killed the crew almost instantaneously:

“Submarine Torpedo Boat H.L. Hunley, Dec. 6, 1863″ by Conrad Wise Chapman.
“The inventor of this boat, a man named Hunley, can be seen; also a sentinel. This boat, it was at first thought would be very effective; twice it went out on its mission of destruction, but on both occasions returned with all the crew dead. After this had happened the second time, someone painted on it the word ‘coffin.’ There was just room enough in it for eight men, one in front of the other, with no possibility of anyone sitting straight. The third time it started out, it never came back, nor was anything ever heard from it, but as one of the United States men-of-war in the harbor (USS Housatonic) was sunk at about the same time, the supposition was that they both went to the bottom together. Other objects to be seen in the picture are, Sullivan’s Island, and a Dispatch boat.” – Conrad Wise Chapman, 1898 (via Wikimedia)

The mystery of how the crew of one of the world’s first submarines died has finally been solved – they accidentally killed themselves.

The H.L. Hunley sank on February 17 1864 after torpedoing the USS Housatonic outside Charleston Harbour, South Carolina, during American Civil War.

She was one of the first submarines ever to be used in conflict, and the first to sink a battleship [Housatonic was actually a sloop-of-war, not a battleship].

It was assumed the blast had ruptured the sub, drowning its occupants, but when the Hunley was raised in 2000, salvage experts were amazed to find the eight-man crew poised as if they had been caught completely unawares by the tragedy. All were still sitting in their posts and there was no evidence that they had attempted to flee the foundering vessel.

Now researchers at Duke University believe they have the answer. Three years of experiments on a mini-test sub have shown that the torpedo blast would have created a shockwave great enough to instantly rupture the blood vessels in the lungs and brains of the submariners.

“This is the characteristic trauma of blast victims, they call it ‘blast lung,'” Dr Rachel Lance.

“You have an instant fatality that leaves no marks on the skeletal remains. Unfortunately, the soft tissues that would show us what happened have decomposed in the past hundred years.”

The Hunley‘s torpedo was not a self-propelled bomb, but a copper keg of 135 pounds of gunpowder held ahead and slightly below the Hunley‘s bow on a 16-foot pole called a spar

The sub rammed this spar into the enemy ship’s hull and the bomb exploded. The furthest any of the crew was from the blast was about 42 feet. The shockwave of the blast travelled about 1500 meters per second in water, and 340 m/sec in air, the researchers calculate.

May 8, 2013

Mark Sanford is back in politics, despite his past mistakes

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

I really didn’t expect former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford to win his bid for a seat in congress, but he not only won, he won convincingly:

‘Excuse me, do you know what’s going on here that it’s so crowded?”

I’m walking through a Publix parking lot in Mount Pleasant, S.C., to the Liberty Tap Room, and it’s 7:55 p.m. on Tuesday, May 7 — Election Day in the state’s first congressional district. A middle-aged woman is leaning out of her Suburban, frowning in the direction of the bar, trying to ascertain the reason for the plethora of TV news trucks and camera equipment.

“It’s Mark Sanford’s victory party,” I tell her.

She gapes at me, confused.

“Did he win?

Less than an hour later, the AP declares that the answer to that question is yes — and not just a yes, but a definite yes, by nine points, despite being outspent 4–1 and abandoned for all practical purposes by the national fundraising arm of his party. There will be lots of analysis in the days to come about what this election means, but one thing isn’t up for debate: Mark Sanford knows how to campaign, and his win here is due at least in part to his tireless canvassing and cheerful willingness to ask for the vote of anyone who would listen to him.

April 6, 2010

Boatin’

Filed under: Administrivia, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

A few photos taken on our boat tour out into Charleston harbour, including a stop at Fort Sumter:


The (remains of) the fort, from the inner harbour, approaching the dock


Some of the recovered cannon from the Civil War sieges


The USS Yorktown, taken from the Aquarium on the other side of the river.

April 5, 2010

Still tourin’

Filed under: Administrivia, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:29

With yesterday being Easter Sunday, we had no idea how busy things might be, or even what might be open. On the way into Charleston, we stopped at Middleton Place, which I expected to be an hour or so side-trip, but turned into the main activity of the day. It’s a huge property (6500 acres) that had been a rice plantation until the Civil War, when the property was destroyed by Union troops in 1865. The family could only afford to re-build one of the three main buildings, the south “flanker”. The unreconstructed remains of the other two buildings were thrown down in the 1886 earthquake.


The rebuilt south flanker, from the river side


The remains of the main house, after war and earthquake damage.

Powered by WordPress