So…

All the commentators on the ground in Puerto Rico are digging up the most pathetic sob stories they can find, playing it for all it’s worth, and pointing the blame at the administration for the ‘failure’ to support the poor disenfranchised people of Puerto Rico, cause they’re not white… (gee, where have I heard ‘that’ line of BS before… Um… Lemme think… Oh yeah, Katrina)

Really?

There ARE real problems, no question. And it’s questionable if the island can be rebuilt in anything approaching a timely fashion, much less actually start the process, due to the lack of planning and current state of the infrastructure. But they are not of the administration’s doing.

Puerto Rico isn’t a few hundred miles drive  to fix… It’s about 1300 miles from Jax to San Juan! That’s three hours flying time, or 100+ hours by ship. And it’s a protectorate that has SERIOUS problems before the first hurricane hit. $70B in debt, people leaving the island in droves, infrastructure marginal at best, ever since the military pulled out in 2004, and rampant corruption. There appears to have been no real plan by the governor or service entities to actually prepare, or plans for handling the situation, they knew was coming. It’s not like this is the first time a hurricane has hit there!

As of the earlier in the week, there were already 10,000 military boots on the ground, with helicopters and trucks being flown in by C-17s in a steady stream. As of yesterday, there were over 10,000 CONEX boxes sitting on the piers at San Juan, because there is no power, and no cleared road structure to actually move the goods to where they need to go, and no truck drivers to actually drive the trucks. The Army Corps of Engineers has been authorized to do what they can to get infrastructure back online, but even with all them working, it’s NOT an overnight fix…

But the administration isn’t responding fast enough…

They tried to find issues in the response to Houston, and didn’t; Florida, no luck there either. But now… Oh boy… Licking their chops, “We’re going to nail them on this one! We got them this time! Front page, lead story on every news cast! This… This is the screwup that will get the president impeached!”

Yeah, they really want to do that. Don’t remember which congresscritter said it, but this administration can’t be allowed to succeed. If it does, it makes all those career politicians look like the buffoons they really are!

In other news, it appears the NFL’s past weekend and Thursday games were down 11% and 13% respectively from last year, and the networks are purposely NOT showing the empty seats or any posters in the crowd.

One behind-the-scenes TV staffer at another stadium told Sporting News that camera operators were ordered to avoid crowd shots in case they showed fans counterprotesting the protests.

Full article HERE, at Sporting News.

NFL fans could be heard booing as hundreds of players protested during the national anthem over Week 3, but the spectators’ presence was conspicuously absent from television coverage.

Full article HERE, from the Daily Mail. It’s pretty bad when a foreign newspaper has more honest coverage than the MSM…

One other thing I find kinda humorous in all this, is that taking a knee is considered part of the oath of fealty to someone… So by taking a knee, effectively these players are swearing fealty to the United States. I wonder if they even realize that…

History, HERE.

Comments

So… — 12 Comments

  1. I hate to frame it like this, but having the storm flatten the island is possibly the best thing that could have happened to Puerto Rico. Now we’ll fix things that the Puerto Ricans were unable to fix. I’m sorry for the people in distress. I truly am. But the island was essentially a turd on the ocean.

    As to the NFL, those multi-millionaire players are screwing up a sweet gig.

  2. Life imitates science, because the last month mirrored some of the infrastructure study and surveys I had underway. The key point was the set of hidden interactions among infrastructure segments generally included transport, power and communications. Restoring power means repairing lines, restarting plants, and then re-tuning the grid to handle what the plants put out. Also means tuning all the power plants to the same output parameters. Also involves getting the resistor stacks on the main power lines replaced or reconfigured, and then readjusting voltage to what the mains can now handle. Mobile networks are the same – refuel generators and restart the remote towers. Repair or replace equipment and software at the network processing and control centers, if damaged by rain/wind. Restart and begin reloading the network a piece at a time, with channels and access restricted until you know there’s no overload or bottleneck. Transport network (roads) is somewhat easier, in terms of physical clearing, until you need to repair or replace bridges, repair embankments, clear debris fields from mudslides and avalanches. Then you need power and communications to reset the traffic signals and controls.

    This process is neither easy, fast, nor cheap. Hand the Bouffant Brigade a set of pencils and notebooks, and let them report WITHOUT their custom helos, flown-in cameras, commo and power links. Follow the grunts on the ground and see what it takes to fix the same problem again.

    It takes planning and forethought to overcome disasters, but if you’re in a known periodic disaster zone like a tropic island, this should be right up there with breathing. But if the culture reserves this initiative only to El Jefe, and EL Jefe farms response (not planning and stocking) out to the Norteamericano because he couldn’t be bothered, you get the same bad answer every time. You want to remove someone from office? Start with El Jefe and his minions, and the fools in this country who enabled this attitude to perpetuate.

  3. a) Puerto Rico is the District of Columbia without Congressional help.
    b) The NFL players on their knees clearly have NO idea what they’re doing, nor what they’re protesting: no two of them claim the same protest. And since no one is taught history, they don’t know what an oath of fealty is, nor would I expect them to honor it.

  4. LL/Ed- Agree with you!

    Psycho- Thank you! I knew there was a LOT more detail than I had available!

    WSF- Oh yes!

    Rev- GREAT analogy!

  5. Well, let’s see. Hey, PR, ya want cash, well, we want our gunnery range back. Money for guns, so to speak. And the Navy will bring in a consistent amount of cash afterwards. Until then… but that would never happen, because we as a nation are fundamentally incapable of being assholes to foreign nations, which PR basically is (they don’t think like us, talk like us, do things like us. Pretty much the definition of foreign to me. Hey, that def applies to Detroit, parts of Chicago and most of New Orleans, too. Hmmmm.)

    And, yes, the truck drivers are/were on strike. Along with other trades/unions.

    Also, regarding helping themselves by helping others, it is the third world mentality: disaster means the people stay home and hide from responsibility. Only in strong first-world locations (not Detroit or New Orleans) do the citizens go forth to fix their world after a disaster.

    As to MSM, I found that the Daily Mail was pretty much the only newspaper that would actually report the truth once the Anointed One, Ziz Supreme Magesty, was fast-tracked as the DNC candidate back in 2006ish. Of course, the Brits have to look at our newspapers to get the truth about what is happening in Londonistan, so there’s that.

  6. So Puerto Rico, an island (note to liberals – you can’t send in semis) that was already in deep 3rd world kimchi, has a weed whacker taken to it. And people who sit up here in the continental US (note that WaPo doesn’t even realize that Puerto Ricans are Americans, having lamented about Americans being stranded there), all fat, dumb, and happy, know EXACTLY how to fix it. From their comfy arm chairs. Yeah, yeah, I know – they donated $20 to recovery so they’re good. I would be made very happy if each one of them had to physically serve there for at least the next couple weeks. They know best how to fix the problem – they can go there and do so.

    And let’s see – about 900 black men are murdered each year. By black men. There’s maybe, what, 4 iffy cop shoots over the last few years? But a whole bunch of dead cops. And suddenly jocks who are paid millions to play a flippin GAME in the only majority white country in the world to elect a black president decide there’s inequity in the country and it’s their place to put their employers (the fans) in their places? Sorry, I don’t pay my plumber to lecture me on anything other than the kitchen sink trap. Give me grief about other things and you are off my property and I’ll find another plumber. If I pay you to play a game, play a game. If I pay you to play music, play music. No different than if I pay you to suck poop out of my septic tank. Outside of that, I don’t pay you. Period.

    And in a world where “liberals are ignorant idiots” takes less than 5 seconds to prove, the whole thing in England is an INSTANT proof of my point. Every history buff has read the original draft of the Declaration of Independance. So we all know that one of the issues that Jefferson attacked England on was the introduction of the evil of slavery to the colonies. He wasn’t completely correct – native Americans practiced it (and cannabalism) before Europeans got here – but oh well. (Have I mentioned that I’m tired of stupid liberals?) But a-hole idiots in London took a knee during our anthem but stood during “God Save The Queen.” I could write for the next 24 hours on how ignorant and dishonest this all is without taking a break.

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  8. The problem with Puerto Rico is that it is full of Puerto Rican’s.

    Apart from maximizing welfare benefits they have zero skills or motivation.

    I say this having lived among them for the entirety of my formative years.

    The only reason they have not been cast away is that they are a reliable Democratic voting block.

  9. The Teamsters are on strike; the PR Natl Guard has a 50% AWOL rate for disaster muster right now; there are over 10,000 full containers of relief supplies sitting right where they’ve been dropped off in San Juan for over a week, and the roads to the rest of the island work well enough that mayors from distant towns were able to come to San Juan to ask WTF is the hold up?

    But it’s Trump’s fault, because the Hillary-supporting San Juan mayorette has time, money, and electricity to have a whiny hat and T-shirt printed fresh, but none to round up drivers for the half a million tons of cargo sitting on the dock.