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Social media is today filled with leftists claiming that Republicans asking for disaster relief are all of a sudden supporters of socialism. Not everything done by the government is socialism.

Let’s start with a couple of definitions.

The purpose of government is to provide for mutual defense, settle disputes between citizens, and protect citizens from being victimized by others. Socialism is where a government goes beyond that and tells businesses what goods and services they must produce. Socialism isn’t a synonym for “anything that a government does.”

There was a time when the fire department was a private business. Fire companies would contract with insurance companies to provide fire protection to the properties insured by those insurers. Fire companies would mark their territory with “fire brands” so arriving fire companies would know who had the contract for that particular building.

Fire companies did outrageous things like engage in fistfights to for the right to put out the fire and the right to bill for extinguishing it. Engine crews, knowing that whoever controlled the water would extinguish the fire, would send the meanest, toughest goons they had ahead of the pumper to guard the plug. Anyone from another crew who came near it would have to fight him.

So it was obvious that system didn’t work. Governments began assuming responsibility for fire protection. Fire departments, facing budget cuts due to better building codes reducing the number of fires, began looking for other things that they could do to remain relevant. So they began doing things like EMS, hazardous materials, and other disaster response.

Just because the government is providing a service doesn’t make that service socialism.

It looks like we are not going to get anything close to what they were predicting. It appears as though the storm went in about 60 miles further south than originally predicted. That means that it is crossing the state that much further away than they were telling us. The local news is forecasting our peak winds to be in about an hour, and it just isn’t happening.

The strongest gust so far has been 27 mph. It hasn’t even rained in this area for about 2 hours. My Internet is even back up. The winds have gradually shifted from easterly to northeasterly, meaning that we are now on the left side of the storm. That is, since the winds of a hurricane rotate around the center in a counter clockwise direction, we are now on the western semicircle of the storm.

At its peak, Ian’s hurricane force winds extended out 40 miles from the center. A 60 mile miss makes for a huge difference. I also don’t think that the 155 mile per hour thing is very accurate. It looks like sustained winds of 100 miles per hour or so is what was actually felt by real people on the ground, with gusts a bit higher.

Combine those two factors and we will escape this with a breezy, rainy night.

My sister, who lives in Apopka, says her power is out. My mother in Altamonte tells me the weather there is just light rain, with my daughter and grandchildren in Winter Garden reporting the same.

The people down there in Port Charlotte and Naples are getting hammered, and I wish them the best. I have some friends down there, and I hope they dodge much of the damage.

Just remember: prep for the worst that you will probably face, and anything less is a walk in the park. If you do your preps correctly, things should be boring. If things are exciting, you didn’t properly prepare.

I have long suspected that the strength of hurricanes has been overstated by the powers that be to generate scary headlines. Look at this picture of Ian making landfall.

Not a single personal weather station is reporting a wind speed of more than 50 miles per hour. Now in all fairness, large areas are without internet and power, so some reports may be missing.

My guess is that we won’t have winds over 40.

So far here, our highest wind speed has been 22 miles per hour and we have gotten right at 2 inches of rain. So far, so good.

EDITED TO ADD: I just found a station reporting 94 miles per hour.

Also, our entire area lost hardwire internet and cable television connectivity at 1547. I am making this update by cell phone.

Weather has been dreary, but no bad. Then again, we aren’t forecast for much until early tomorrow morning. It started raining yesterday at around 1415, and we wound up with 1.4 inches of rain for the day. Since midnight, it’s been a steady drizzle that barely registers on the rain gauge, 0.13 inches.

Since there was a question about that, my weather station is mounted almost 10 meters off the ground, on the peak of the roof. I measure it at almost exactly 30 feet. So call it 9 meters. No real wind yet to speak of, though.

I am working today until the hurricane crew relieves us at about 1500, if all goes to plan. If not, I have my BOB and a handgun locked in the vehicle safe. Worse comes to worse, I could walk home in just an hour or two, even if the streets are impassible to my 4WD pickup because of debris. I seriously doubt it gets that bad.

On a side note, there are those who don’t think that hurricanes like this can be destructive. I used to deploy to hurricanes and other disasters for a living. I have deployed to over a dozen disasters, including hurricane Katrina and Ivan. I rode out Charley, Frances, Jean, and others. There was an F4 tornado that I worked as well. Yes, most of the damage is within a mile or two of the coast with these storms, but there are pockets where it gets ugly, even far inland.

When I have more time, I will post some pictures from my time on the Mississippi coast. They are on the NAS that I shutdown for the storm, so later.

Democrats are now blaming DeSantis because it is taking so long to evacuate Tampa, a city of 3 million people, in the face of Hurricane Ian, because Republicans think that a train costing $3 billion or perhaps even $7 billion between Orlando and Tampa is a waste of money.

You know what would’ve helped Tampa Bay evacuate eastbound without hours of traffic? A train…

Somewhere the person responsible for not making that happen is looking for his blue Navy cap to get airtime after this hurricane wrecks havoc.

— Maya Brown (@MsMayaBrown) September 27, 2022

Let’s look at the facts and do the math, because that is what we do here. Normally, Interstate 4 carries 150,000 people per day. The evacuation has more than 2.5 million under evacuation orders, many trying to leave the city along I-4 and I-75 within a 24 hour time frame.

So let’s say we add a train to the mix. A train carries a maximum of 1,000 people. The distance between the two cities is about 70 miles. The train ride would take just over an hour on a high speed train. One hour there, one back. That works out to 12 trips per day at 1,000 passengers per trip- the MOST that a train would do is move 0.5% of the evacuation traffic, and that ignores the problem of congestion at both ends, the difficulty of where you park a million cars on the Tampa end, and what you do with 12,000 people milling around outside of the Orlando train station.

As of this morning, I am in the path of the storm. I need to get my 24 hour and preevent checklist completed today. Complicating things is that I am working some today and 12 hours tomorrow. The ride home from work tomorrow evening should be interesting.

I’m typing this post on my phone. My laptop is a Dell that I bought in April of 2020. I started having problems with it about 2 weeks ago. The battery charge level was falling even though it was plugged in. I got a low battery warning and the “unrecognized charger” warning.

I ordered a new charger and that seemed to fix it.

For about a week. Then it began again. The battery level would drop even when plugged in. Eventually it said 0%(plugged in) even after charging all night.

The computer finally died and won’t restart. I ordered a new battery. It is supposed to be here today. I hope that fixes it. There were some files on there that I hadn’t saved to the home server that I don’t want to lose.

At any rate, blogging will resume when I have a computer.

Didn’t post this weekend because the wife wanted to take a bit of a trip. She overruled me when it comes to safety, calling me paranoid. She wanted to see Kevin Hart at Amway Arena in Orlando, and wasn’t taking no for an answer.

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The area between the separators is an edit to add: Because there was a comment of “my wife can’t override me” I am adding this. She was going to see Kevin Hart whether I wanted to or not. If I didn’t want to go, I could stay home. She isn’t my slave or my property. We are a partnership.

As far as it goes, she can make you feel like a pussy. Whenever I balk about having to go unarmed, she points out that before we met, she drove from Orlando to LA by herself with no problems. “Surely a manly guy like yourself can make do with pepper spray and a knife for one evening without being more scared than a woman traveling alone across the country for a week. Or perhaps remember the time I drove by myself from New York to Detroit, then down to Atlanta by myself.” She says that we can’t be so afraid to live our lives that we spend them living in a prison of our own making. Understand the risk and mitigate it as much as you can, but take a few risks and live life.

She is, of course, correct. What is the point of freedom if you are afraid to use it. So I figure out ways to make it work. End of Edit.

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The entire trip had me on the verge of a panic attack. Let me explain:

She booked a hotel for us in Orlando for the weekend. Now I normally hate going to Orlando, especially since it has become the woke left wing hive of scum and villainy that it has morphed into over the past three years. Even worse, we would be spending the weekend directly across the street from Universal Studios. You know, the site of recent gang shootings.

In fact, the Double Tree where we were staying was less than 1,000 feet from a Walgreens where I missed an armed robbery by less than a minute back in 2013. The neighborhood is even less safe than it was then.

On top of this, we went to Amway Arena. To enter this locale, all weapons are prohibited. We periodically do this, and I don’t like it every time we go. Being that the building is owned by the city, I don’t event think it’s legal for them to ban weapons and search those entering, but Florida Carry doesn’t seem to care as long as fishing isn’t involved. One of the reasons why I dropped my membership in that particular group. At any rate, I still bring pepper spray and a small dagger into the venue, as they don’t trip magnetometers, and are better than nothing. I left my firearm locked in a vehicle safe (you DO have one, don’t you?)

To make matters worse, the venue confiscates your cell phone and watch, puts them in a locked bag, then returns them to you in the bag. You have to stop on the way out to retrieve your phone and watch. I’m sure that it’s to keep you from recording the show, but would deny you the ability to call 911 if needed. It’s OK, my plan was to cut the bag open if I needed the phone.

On Saturday night, she wanted to dine at Mama Della’s, which is a restaurant located in one of Universal’s Resort Hotels. Now I am going to tell you that the food was superb. We had Calamari and Pasta Fajioli as appetizers. My main course was Chicken Parmesan, and Dessert was Lemon and Raspberry Sorbetto. It was outstanding. There were singers who were singing in Italian, and the food was great. She wanted to go to Universal’s City Walk after dinner, but in order to do that you have to submit to a search, so I was again disarmed for the evening. That meant pepper spray and a dagger was again the rule of the night. My firearm had to remain in the hotel room’s safe.

Look, I recognize that the odds of being a victim of violent crime on any given night are very long odds indeed. It still makes me nervous to be in rough neighborhoods without being armed.

Find ways to be armed that can make it through security. If you DO need to use them, remember that being armed against a company’s policy isn’t a crime in Florida, unless they specifically tell you to leave and you refuse. A sign saying “weapons prohibited” doesn’t count for a thing in Florida. So the important thing here is to avoid being told to leave. That means making sure that they don’t know you are armed.

In the case of this weekend, the people within the perimeter were unlikely to have firearms, meaning that the largest threats were:

• Being attacked by more than one person, or
• Being attacked while in transit between their ad hoc security zone and your cache of firearms.

You limit the first by carrying something to slow down one or more of the group. This allows you to incapacitate one attacker at a time, rather than having to face all of them at once. Pepper spray is useful for that. The dagger then allows you do rapidly incapacitate the one you are facing.

You limit the second by shortening the distance between the perimeter and your cache. Leave your cache securely locked in the vehicle, and then park the vehicle as close as possible to the security perimeter. Even if it costs more, pay to park in the garage right next to the checkpoint.

I know that the chances of being attacked and needing a weapon are slim indeed. It isn’t the chances, it is the stakes.

The left keeps telling us to “follow the science” without actually knowing what science is, other than the subject that they received Cs in while in school. Science is a way of learning how things work. We observe a phenomenon, collect data on that phenomenon, then formulate ideas and rules on how that phenomenon works. We continuously test our ideas against data to see if our ideas are correct. So in a nutshell, science is a way of using data to prove how the world works.

For example, we know that the Y chromosome in humans has 30 genes contained in it. One of those 30 genes is called the SRY gene. It only works once in a lifetime, about 42 days after conception. That gene causes cells in a developing fetus to produce the SRY protein. This protein contains a string of of 79 amino acids that binds to specific regions of DNA, causing the DNA molecule to bend. This bending in turn causes the production in certain cells of some organs that produces other proteins, including one called SOX9 (sex-determining region-box 9) an autosomal gene regulated by the SRY protein. The presence of this protein (among others) causes a fetus to develop testes and a penis. Bam, the fetus is male. Science. You can’t wish your way into being male or female, you can’t change this because you feel like it. It just is.

The evidence and the data led science to that point. The facts don’t change. What can change is the scientists themselves. People who claim to be scientists allow their biases and preformed opinions to change or reinterpret the data to be what they wish it to be, thus placing their thumbs squarely on the scales.

This is squarely related to something I was talking about with regards to crime, sociology, and criminology. Science is what it is, even when some people want to wish away the facts as they are.

Sometimes people are wrong. Perhaps this is done because of personal bias or opinion, sometimes it is done for profit. Sometimes it is simple human error.

This lays the groundwork for a future post. Keep an eye out for it in the future.

Like the famed color changing lizard, Biden changed his pitch when in the Mid West. He can’t keep the gun and Bible clinging rubes in the dark if he is ranting at them like some old man who’s pissed at the kids on his lawn.