Last Call For Shelter

Apparently the folks in Moore, Oklahoma have basically the same problem as West, Texas does.

The Web site for the City of Moore, Okla., recommends “that every residence have a storm safe room or an underground cellar.” It says below-ground shelters are the best protection against tornadoes. 

But no local ordinance or building code requires such shelters, either in houses, schools or businesses, and only about 10 percent of homes in Moore have them. 

Nor does the rest of Oklahoma, one of the states in the storm belt called Tornado Alley, require them — despite the annual onslaught of deadly and destructive twisters like the one on Monday, which killed at least 24 people, injured hundreds and eliminated entire neighborhoods. 

This is a town that has seen two 200+ MPH tornadoes rip through it in 14 years, and a state that sees tornadoes every year.  But there's no building codes to include shelters because DON'T TREAD ON ME.

Construction standards in Moore have been studied extensively. In a 2002 study published in the journal of the American Meteorological Society, Timothy P. Marshal, an engineer in Dallas, suggested that “the quality of new home construction generally was no better than homes built prior to the tornado” in 1999. 

Few homes built in the town after the storm were secured to their foundations with bolted plates, which greatly increase resistance to storms; instead, most were secured with the same kinds of nails and pins that failed in 1999. Just 6 of 40 new homes had closet-size safe rooms. 

Mayor Glenn Lewis of Moore said that since then, the town had strengthened building codes, including a requirement that new homes incorporate hurricane braces. The city has also aggressively promoted the construction of safe rooms and other measures, with more than $12 million from state and federal emergency management funds to subsidize safe-room construction by offering a $2,000 rebate, said Albert Ashwood, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. Still, he said, it has been several years since Moore has received new financing for the program. 

I'm trying to figure out how a shelter makes a $200,000 home suddenly unaffordable.  Does the safe room double the cost of the house somehow?  You live in Tornado Alley in the era of climate change and super storms.  Guess what?  You have to adapt, folks.  Most of all, those federal taxes you pay actually go to something when disasters happen.

Because believe me, Moore will be hit by another tornado someday.  It's most likely going to not take 14 years for it to happen, either.

Well This Really Blows

When I say President Barack Obama faces unprecedented criticism from his opponents, this is exactly what I mean.  Bob Cesca catches this:

Did you know the government has “weather weapons” capable of not only creating tornadoes but moving them around? It’s also possible that these so-called weapons were used in Oklahoma to deliberately murder dozens of citizens — you know, with a tornado. If the government wanted to annihilate a population of citizens, there are easier and more subtle ways to do it than literally creating a massive tornado. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This is what Alex Jones said on his radio show yesterday when a caller asked him whether the tornado was “artificial” and “man-made” due to “technology.” Just as this caller, who’s obviously suffering from severe paranoid delusions, ended her rant, Jones launched into a paranoid rant of his own which included, as it always does, a random string of official names of organizations potentially involved. Bill Gates Weather Modification, Geo-Engineering, AP, Reuters, Department of Energy. (Other frequently blurted names include IBM, Raytheon, Bechtel, FEMA and The Illuminati.) Then, totally unrelated to the tornado, he tossed in a bit about the U.S. Code relating to biological and chemical warfare, and the apparent ability of the government to kill us with chemicals agents under the guise of experiments and law enforcement. In fact, he named a U.S. Code title by number, chapter number, subsection number — all the way down to the paragraph letter. Because it sounds official and therefore authentic. 

I like how President Obama is supposedly naive, aloof, trapped in the Beltway bubble, incapable of getting his White House advisers under control, not that bright, lazy, arrogant, angry, leading from behind, etc. and at the very same exact time, he's a ruthless, cold, emotionless, too smart for his own good evil genius mastermind of a James Bond villain, killing people with tornado machines.

To recap, Obama can create tornadoes, but the notion that man-made global warming exists is a massive hoax.  It's all ridiculous and I still don't know how he copes with the blind hatred.

We Always Get The Government We Deserve

Gosh, hoocuddanode that Southern red states overwhelming support Medicaid expansion, health insurance exchanges, and subsidies to help pay for health care, all things rejected by the Republicans those states elected?

 

But the five states in the poll, all led by Republican governors, have decided not to participate. Ironically, Mississippi and Louisiana rank dead last among all states in the overall health of their residents, according to America’s Health Ranking, an annual report by the United Health Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the insurer UnitedHealth Group. The other three states in the poll – South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia – rank 46th, 45th and 36th, respectively.

Not surprisingly, the law’s least popular provision is the federal tax penalty that will be levied, beginning next year, against people who don’t have coverage. Nearly two-thirds of poll respondents, or 64.5 percent, disliked the penalty, while just 31 percent viewed it favorably.

Well now.  How did you think this was going to be paid for, folks?   And the unhealthiest states in the union just might need the help.  I'm betting once the stories start coming in about how Obamacare is working, these states will be made to join in.

Count on it.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/05/21/191889/public-in-deep-south-supports.html#storylink=cpy

StupidiNews!

• The death toll in Monday's deadly tornado in Moore, Oklahoma has been revised downward to 24, but the storm itself was confirmed a powerful EF5 with winds well over 200 MPH.
• Controversy continues to surround the life of composer Richard Wagner as the 200th anniversary of his birth is celebrated this week in Germany.
• Alaska Republicans are pitching more drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but Senate observers say the plan is going nowhere.
• Apple's not the only country playing tax avoidance games as offshore tax shelters are costing the US and EU as much as $100 billion a year in lost revenue.
• NASA is very interested in 3-D printed food for astronauts as the "perfect" source of nutrition in space.