Rap superstar and Senegal transplant, Akon gave a proposal to the US government to restore power to Puerto Rico in just 30 days. They turned him down and many people are still without power five months later.
The post Akon Offered to Restore Power to Puerto Rico in 30 Days But US Gov’t Refused to Let Him appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
This report was originally published by Daisy Luther at The Organic Prepper
Last night, an explosion at a San Juan power plant regressed Puerto Rico’s efforts to restore power to the island five months after Hurricane Maria struck a massive blow. Much of Northern Puerto Rico has suffered another blackout, including the capital city.
The island’s Electric Power Authority said several municipalities were without power, including parts of the capital, San Juan, but they were optimistic it could be restored within a day as they worked to repair a substation that controls voltage…
…It was not immediately known what caused Sunday’s fire, which was quickly extinguished. Officials said the explosion knocked two other substations offline and caused a total loss of 400 megawatts worth of generation. (source)
And we aren’t getting the whole story about these outages. A reader named Jennifer from Manati told me:
What the news ain’t saying is that we actually had three power grids down. The first one was the Cambalache power station in Arecibo. This left the whole north area without power. Then Palo Second station went down. This second power station connects power from the north to the capital. Afterwards, we had an explosion in Monacillos. This one effected mayor hospitals, airport and capital. For some reason the government and news want people to believe that everything is well and running that things are almost back to normal when that ain’t the truth. All you have to do is visit cities outside from the metropolitan area to see the reality we are living.
And even worse, before this explosion, more than a million people were still without power from the Category 4 hurricane that struck the island on Sept. 20, 2017. They’ve been thrown back in time by a hundred years, with no power, no running water, and damaged homes.
This is a prime example of how disasters aren’t just one-time occurrences. They’re very often followed by subsequent disasters.
Think about it. Fires are often followed by floods which are followed by mudslides and sinkholes. (See California for reference.) The tsunami in Japan was followed by a nuclear plant disaster. Hurricane Harvey in Texas had storm surges and floods that caused a chemical plant to explode a few days later. Now, this already-stressed infrastructure has crumbled again under it’s increasing demand.
Power has been restored to a few critical locations.
This is one situation in which living in a more populated area can benefit you. After last night’s explosion, workers were quick to restore power to specific locations.
By late Sunday, electricity workers had been able to restore power to key locations, including the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in Carolina, as well as the Medical Center. (source)
As well, after Hurricane Maria, the first areas to resume some form of normalcy were the ones with higher population. San Juan saw it’s power restored immediately but people in more remote areas are still waiting. And not just a few people.
Vox estimated that 1.36 million Americans are still without electricity. You’ll see other numbers that say 400,000, but that is counting households, not individuals.
The US Army Corps of Engineers… estimated that Puerto Rico would need 50,000 utility poles and 6,500 miles of cable to restore its power system…
…When an electrical circuit is open or broken, the power doesn’t flow, whether that’s a flashlight or a phone.
It’s a simple concept, but when it happens in the electricity grid — what engineers say is the largest, most complex machine ever built — it quickly becomes a byzantine problem.
With thousands of miles of transmission lines, gigawatts of generation, computers that route power, frequency regulators, and transformers that all serve the constantly fluctuating needs of millions of people, lots of things can go wrong. Generators can shut down. Transformers can explode. Power demand and supply can fall out of balance.
By far the most common cause of blackouts is damage to power lines, which are the most vulnerable part of the electrical grid to storms.
“In a disruption like this, it’s transmission and distribution,” Marsters said. “Damage does occur to generation assets, but those are point specific and you can get those back online in a reasonable time.”
…Puerto Ricans are now desperately trying to connect the main power arteries to individual homes, and some have resorted to their own makeshift repairs, mounting their own utility poles and stringing up low-voltage transmission lines. (source)
But even before Hurricane Maria made landfall, things with the infrastructure were dire.
The power grid in Puerto Rico was in rough shape BEFORE Maria
Even before the hurricane devastated the island, the infrastructure was in terrible shape, a fact underlined by last night’s explosion.
The blast illustrated the challenges of restoring a power grid that was already crumbling before it was devastated by the Category 4 hurricane.
In many cases, power workers are repairing equipment that should have long been replaced but remained online due to the power authority’s yearslong financial crisis. PREPA is worth roughly $4 billion, carries $9 billion in debt and has long been criticized for political patronage and inefficiency. It also struggled with frequent blackouts, including an island-wide outage in September 2016. (source)
Before Maria made landfall, I wrote an article that predicted a long haul to get power restored.
It’s entirely possible that Hurricane Maria will put the island in the dark for quite some time to come, completely changing their way of life. 70,000 people are still without power from their bout with Irma, and much more damage to the utility system is expected. Gov. Rossello said:
“We will not have sustainable electric infrastructure in the near future. We will be bringing in crews from outside of Puerto Rico to attend to these measures.” (source)
Philipe Schoene Roura, the editor of a San Juan, Puerto Rico-based newspaper, Caribbean Business, wrote:
Prepa Executive Director Ricardo Ramos Rodríguez recently said the powerlines carrying electricity in the public corporation’s system are in such a deteriorated state that a strong storm could leave the island without power for weeks.
“To give you a number, if during Hurricane Georges 100 lines went down in 1998, today the same [kind of ] hurricane would bring down 1,000,” the official candidly told Caribbean Business when asked about the possibility of Prepa’s system effectively withstanding the onslaught of a similar storm.
“The lifespan of most of Prepa’s equipment has expired. There is a risk that in light of this dismal infrastructure situation, a large atmospheric event hitting Puerto Rico could wreak havoc because we are talking about a very vulnerable and fragile system at the moment,” Ramos added…
…Francisco Guerrero (a fictitious name to protect his identity), a Prepa field worker for 23 years, said it would take months for Prepa to bring up Puerto Rico’s power system should a hurricane like Harvey strike the island.
The lack of linemen and other technical personnel, as well as a lack of equipment—including replacement utility poles for powerlines and replacement parts—are the issues of greatest concern among public corporation employees, who say they risk their lives working with equipment in poor condition that provides them with little safety.
Guerrero said that today only 580 linemen remain out of the 1,300 who were part of the workforce in previous years—and that’s not counting the upcoming retirement of another 90 linemen. Likewise, he said there are only 300 electrical line testers to serve the entire island.
The source also said that much of Prepa’s equipment dates back to the 1950s—and the more “modern” equipment that is still functional dates from the 1990s; in other words, it’s from the past century.
“If a hurricane like this one [Harvey] hits us, the system is not going to come online, I’d say, in over six months. Right now, the warehouses don’t even have materials. I’m talking about utility poles and other stuff,” Guerrero explained.
“How can you say that you have equipment that dates back to the 1950s and you are not buying parts to repair them? When it’s time for maintenance work, you don’t have the part and you leave things as they are, but there is an entry in the log saying maintenance was done. And yes, it was done, but the most important thing was not done, which was to replace that part,” he added.
Although he did not assign the debacle to former Prepa Chief Restructuring Officer Lisa Donahue’s order to stop buying supplies as the main cause for the lack of materials, he is certain the order was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” (source)
Many people thought it was a ridiculous premise and that power would be up and running within a couple of weeks. But it turns out, that was cognitive dissonance. This situation is all the proof you need to see that things can change overnight.
Go watch this video to see what everyday life is like in Puerto Rico for nearly half a million people.
Do you think things will ever be the same in Puerto Rico?
Have the residents of the island been permanently thrown back into Third World status? Will the power ever be fully restored? And considering they’re Americans too, isn’t it rather embarrassing that we aren’t doing more to aid in the recovery?
Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
More information about the Puerto Rican crisis:
Please feel free to share any information from this article in part or in full, giving credit to the author and including a link to The Organic Prepper and the following bio.
Daisy Luther is the author of The Pantry Primer: A Prepper’s Guide To Whole Food on a Half Price Budget. Her website, The Organic Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca
The mission for the Federal Emergency Management Agency was clear: Hurricane Maria had torn through Puerto Rico, and hungry people needed food. Thirty million meals needed to be delivered as soon as possible.
For this huge task, FEMA tapped Tiffany Brown, an Atlanta entrepreneur with no experience in large-scale disaster relief and at least five canceled government contracts in her past. FEMA awarded her $156 million for the job, and Ms. Brown, who is the sole owner and employee of her company, Tribute Contracting LLC, set out to find some help.
Ms. Brown, who is adept at navigating the federal contracting system, hired a wedding caterer in Atlanta with a staff of 11 to freeze-dry wild mushrooms and rice, chicken and rice, and vegetable soup. She found a nonprofit in Texas that had shipped food aid overseas and domestically, including to a Houston food bank after Hurricane Harvey.
By the time 18.5 million meals were due, Tribute had delivered only 50,000. And FEMA inspectors discovered a problem: The food had been packaged separately from the pouches used to heat them. FEMA’s solicitation required “self-heating meals.”
“Do not ship another meal. Your contract is terminated,” Carolyn Ward, the FEMA contracting officer who handled Tribute’s agreement, wrote to Ms. Brown in an email dated Oct. 19 that Ms. Brown provided to The New York Times. “This is a logistical nightmare.”
Four months after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, a picture is emerging of the contracts awarded in the earliest days of the crisis. And examples like the Tribute contract are causing lawmakers to raise questions about FEMA’s handling of the disaster and whether the agency was adequately prepared to respond.
On Tuesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, which has been investigating the contract, asked Representative Trey Gowdy, the committee chairman, to subpoena FEMA for all documents relating to the agreement. Lawmakers fear the agency is not lining up potential contractors in advance of natural disasters, leading it to scramble to award multimillion-dollar agreements in the middle of a crisis.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a bipartisan congressional investigation found that a failure to secure advance contracts led to chaos and potential for waste and fraud. Democrats asserted that FEMA was similarly inept preparing for this storm.
“It appears that the Trump Administration’s response to the hurricanes in Puerto Rico in 2017 suffered from the same flaws as the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005,” wrote Representatives Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland and Stacey E. Plaskett, the nonvoting delegate from the United States Virgin Islands.
A box of food from the Federal Emergency Management Agency distributed to residents of San Isidro.
CreditErika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
Amanda Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gowdy, said FEMA has given the Oversight Committee regular briefings since lawmakers asked for them in October, and at no point had Democrats mentioned the Tribute contract. Sending a subpoena to an agency cooperating with Congress “is premature,” Ms. Gonzalez said in a statement.
In November, The Associated Press found that after Hurricane Maria, FEMA awarded more than $30 million in contracts for emergency tarps and plastic sheeting to a company that never delivered the needed supplies.
FEMA insists no Puerto Ricans missed a meal as a result of the failed agreement with Tribute. FEMA relied on other suppliers that provided “ample” food and water for distribution, said William Booher, an agency spokesman.
But there is little doubt that in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans struggled with access to food. The storm shut down ports on an island that imports about 85 percent of its food supply. Farms were flattened. Supermarkets lost electricity and could not find diesel to run their generators. The stores that opened using generator power could not offer much from their understocked shelves.
Puerto Ricans depended heavily on emergency aid dispatched by FEMA. The Department of Homeland Security has doled out more than $1 billion in contracts related to Hurricane Maria, which made landfall in Puerto Rico on Sept. 20.
Read more at the NY Times
PHOTO: Residents of San Isidro, P.R., waited for food and water in October. Credit Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
NOTE AND LINKS FROM OATH KEEPERS:
Oath Keepers volunteers were very effective at delivering food, water, and other supplies to hurricane victims who needed help. They came from as far away as Montana, Arizona, Mississippi, and Florida. The photo of the red truck below was taken in Texas, but the owner drove it from Florida. Our Oath Keepers volunteers also participated in rescues, security, opening blocked roads, downed tree removal, loading and unloading trucks, medical checkups, etc. Oath Keepers did all of this after the disastrous 2017 hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico.
The post FEMA Contract Called for 30 Million Meals for Puerto Ricans. 50,000 Were Delivered. appeared first on Oath Keepers.
Screen capture: 12News.com
More than one-fourth of Puerto Rico still lacks electricity four months after Hurricane Maria struck the island.
Around 45 percent of the neighborhoods on the island still have no electric service, CBS correspondent David Begnaud tweeted on Wednesday. The current electric grid only serves 55 percent of the island even though 81 percent of the power generation has been resorted., he reported.
Electricity has been out so long that students at the Academia Bautista de Puerto Nuevo in San Juan jumped for joy when the lights came back on, ABC News reported. The school was without power for 112 days after Maria struck on Sept. 20, 2017.
Are You Prepared For A Downed Grid? Get Backup Electricity Today!
The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and the federal government might be making the situation worse by hoarding materials needed to rebuild power lines, The Intercept alleged.
Federal agents raided a PREPA warehouse and seized building materials on Jan. 6, The Intercept said.
“Lying about not having the parts to cover the inefficiency of PREPA is outrageous and those responsible must be taken before state and federal authorities to be criminally processed immediately,” Eduardo Bhatia, the minority leader in Puerto Rico’s Senate, told the media.
More than 329,000 Puerto Ricans have flown to Florida since Oct. 3, Begnaud tweeted. Puerto Rico’s population in 2016 was 3.411 million.
What is your reaction? Share it in the section below:
This report was originally published by Daisy Luther at The Organic Prepper
In Puerto Rico, everything has changed since Hurricane Maria struck nearly 3 months ago.
Many people have no running water. And if they do, it can’t be consumed without boiling.
There’s no electricity in many regions.
Supplies are scarce.
I’ve written about the SHTF aftermath in Puerto Rico, both the day after the storm, a week after, and a couple of months later. But while there is a lot of good information in all those articles, it’s just words on a page.
The video below brings it to life. This is what life looks like for people who have just watched everything be turned upside down by Mother Nature.
Please feel free to share any information from this article in part or in full, giving credit to the author and including a link to The Organic Prepper and the following bio.
Daisy Luther is the author of The Pantry Primer: A Prepper’s Guide To Whole Food on a Half Price Budget. Her website, The Organic Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca
Muddy Waters" founder Carson Block unveiled his latest short play Wednesday morning. And instead of being another obviously fraudulent Chinese company, Block"s target is OSI Systems, an American firm that manufactures security equipment x-ray machines and metal detectors. The company is best known as the owner of Rapiscan Systems - a division that manufacturers scanning machines used at airports.
In a 13-minute video, Block lays out his research, explaining how he suspects OSI’s executives are guilty of multiple violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for paying kickbacks to local officials who in turn rewarded it lucrative contracts. But as if corruption weren"t enough, Block explains how roughly half of the company’s EBITDA is tied to turnkey contract in Mexico that could disappear as soon as next month.
The company is "rotten to the core" warns Block, "we have smoking gun evidence" as the importance of the contract to the company’s bottom line has been obscured by the fact that it represents only 15% of total revenues.
Tracing the threads of corruption led Block to Albania, Mexico and Puerto Rico, three locations where OSI has won lucrative concessions by offering kickbacks to local government officials - kickbacks that were readily accepted.
“I know this will sound crazy - but Albania is a pretty corrupt place," Block says, before explaining that it was practically "an open secret" that OSI benefited from bribing local officials.
For one of OSI’s concessions in Albania, the company turned over half of the contract to a local shell company for roughly $4.50, according to official documents.
As is typical when Block announces a short, OSI - which has a market cap of about $1.3 billion - was down about 15%.
In a statement provided to Zero Hedge, Block said he’s short OSI because he feels it’s “rotten to the core."
“We are short OSI Systems, Inc. because we think it is rotten to the core. We believe it obtained a major turnkey contract in Albania through corruption. It is likely that OSIS’s accounts are misstated as a result.
We believe the pricing of its Mexico turnkey contract does not stand up to scrutiny. This contract is up for renewal in 2018, and we estimate that it accounted for more than 50% of OSIS’s FY2017 EBITDA.
Non-renewal or a material reduction in pricing of the Mexico contract would seemingly have a significant impact on OSIS’s profits. Former employees’ statements support our view that OSIS is rotting from the inside."
Block’s latest bet comes on the heels of a stunning victory for his firm. Last month, Huishan Dairy entered provisional liquidation, validating Block’s call - made about 10 months earlier - that the company’s shares would go to zero.
Now, the question is: Will he do it again?
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
On October 3, 1913, US President Woodrow Wilson signed the Underwood-Simmons Act into law, creating what would become the first modern US income tax.
The legislation (at least, the income tax portion) was only 16 pages and imposed a base tax rate of just 1%.
The highest tax rate was set at 7%– and it only applied to individuals earning more than $500,000 per year, which is about $12.6 million today according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And individuals earning less than $3,000 (about $75,000 today) were exempt from paying tax.
Tax rates moved up and down over the years– the government raised rates to fund World War I, then lowered them in peacetime.
In fact, taxes were cut at least four separate times during the 1920s alone, reaching a low in 1929 of just 0.375% for the bottom tax bracket.
Back then, making major changes to tax law was pretty simple. Today, thanks to heavily vested interests on all sides, it takes a miracle to make any serious modifications to the tax code.
That’s why there hasn’t been any significant tax reform in the Land of the Free since Crocodile Dundee was the #1 movie in America (that’s 1986, by the way).
There are now two versions of legislation that will make major changes to the US tax code– one in the Senate and one in the House of Representatives.
I spent most of the nearly 30 hours of travel time during flights over the past week from Santiago to Sydney, Sydney to Bangkok, and Bangkok to Singapore, reading the proposals’ 400+ pages.
The media is touting these bills as a ‘major overhaul’ and ‘comprehensive reform,’ and financial markets have been treating this legislation as if the second coming of capitalism is walking across the water.
It’s not.
Sure, there are a few significant changes.
They’re scrapping the idiotic Alternative Minimum Tax, which ensnares more and more people each year.
Tax rates on certain business profits are going down substantially.
And they’re making tax reporting a lot simpler, saving countless hours of senseless paperwork.
Undoubtedly there are plenty of positive changes in this proposed tax code.
There are also plenty of negative changes.
Some people will benefit. Others will see their tax bills grow.
But for the most part the tax code will stay the same– they’re essentially just rearranging the pieces on the board rather than coming up with an entirely different game.
The existing tax code is built on a legal framework that goes back to the 1950s… a time when manufacturing and agriculture were economic mainstays.
Businesses rarely outsourced their production back then or even thought about selling their products overseas.
Entrepreneurship was uncommon. Employees often remained with the same company for decades. And few women were in the labor force.
Today it’s completely different. The digital economy has displaced manufacturing; business is now dominated by ideas, not factories.
And it’s easier than ever before in human history to start a business, sell products and services worldwide, and even hire employees who live on the other side of the planet.
It seems ludicrous to govern the digital, global businesses of the 21st century with such an antiquated, industrial-era tax code.
True reform would have started by throwing all of it in the garbage, right where it belongs.
You wouldn’t even have to reinvent the wheel; there are plenty of great examples in the world of tax systems that work extremely well– like right here in Singapore.
Singapore’s government is awash with cash.
They almost always run a small budget surplus, yet they’re able to provide ample public services, world class health care, high quality education, strong national defense, pristine infrastructure, and a substantial reserve fund.
But at the same time they encourage people to become wealthy, ensuring that they keep the vast majority of what they earn.
Tax rates in Singapore are quite low and incredibly competitive. Whereas the US corporate tax rate may drop to as low as 20%, in Singapore a company pays no more than 17%, and typically less than 10%.
Right now I’m in the process of negotiating the sale of an asset we purchased here a couple of years ago which will likely produce several million dollars in net realized gains once the deal is closed.
But we won’t pay a dime of tax here on any of it… because Singapore does not tax capital gains.
It’s a model that works: Singaporeans have one of the highest standards of living in the world… plus there are more millionaires per capita here than in any other country.
And this country is just one example. There are plenty more.
Point is, while it’s nice that they’re trying, it’s going to be very difficult for the US government to achieve anything meaningful or truly revolutionary when they’re essentially just making some changes to the pitifully outdated, existing tax code.
But the good news is that, even though the euphoria and expectations about this new proposal are totally overblown, there are still plenty of gems from the current tax code that aren’t going anywhere.
For example– if you’re a self-employed professional and you’re worried that the new tax code will probably increase your tax bill, you still have some excellent options.
There’s nothing in the proposed law that changes, for example, the substantial tax benefits you can realize from establishing a solo 401(k) or SEP IRA plan.
Nor did I see anything changing the enormous benefits from setting up a captive insurance company (in which you effectively insure yourself against certain risks, shielding up to $2 million per year from taxation).
Those are still fully intact.
So is the US federal tax exemption for certain legal residents of US territories. Which means that you can still qualify for Puerto Rico’s ultra-generous 0%/4% tax incentive programs.
There are dozens of other great tax strategies from the old tax code which will remain.
To continue learning how to legitimately reduce your taxes, I encourage you to download our free Perfect Plan B Guide.
Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
In prepper lore, there is a theory about how badly desperate people are likely to behave.
Many folks outside the community scoff at this theory. They believe that we have become more civilized than to utilize violent measures when hunger strikes.
But an incident in Morocco the other day showed us exactly how hungry people behave.
And it isn’t pretty.
Food was being distributed in a rural market in Sidi Boulaalam, a poor village. Women had come to the market with baskets to get food for their families, when suddenly, what could only be described as a stampede erupted.
At least 15 women died and five were wounded in a stampede during a food distribution operation on Sunday morning in rural Morocco, government officials said.
The victims were crushed as hundreds of people, mostly women, gathered to collect baskets of food at the market…
…In the aftermath of the stampede, clothes and other personal items were left scattered across the ground. (source)
That number was later updated to 40 people who were injured in the crush.
Witnesses told local media that this year’s annual food aid distribution at a local market in Sidi Boulaalam, an impoverished town with just over 8,000 inhabitants, attracted a larger crowd than usual.
“This year there were lots of people, several hundred people,” a witness who asked to remain anonymous told AFP news agency.
“People shoved, they broke down the barriers,” he said, adding that the injured had been evacuated to a hospital in Marrakesh. (source)
Here’s a video of the aftermath in this Tweet. (If it won’t play for you, go here.)
Food delivery was supposed to bring relief. Instead, it caused a deadly stampede in drought-stricken Morocco. pic.twitter.com/QslXgLZEfu
— AJ+ (@ajplus) November 21, 2017
The value of the food being handed out? $16
15 families were left without mothers over $16 of food. To be fair, villagers in that part of the world live on about $3 per day, but still – this shows what desperation can do.
It happens somewhere in the world every day. Here are some acts of desperation that have happened just in recent months.
When you are desperate, the normal rules do not apply.
Every year, on “Black Friday” we get a glimpse of the kind of behavior that causes people to be crushed to death and assaulted. The day after Thanksgiving (ironically) people get up before daylight, stand in line, and shove their way through a crowd to get the best deals. (Stay tuned this weekend for the 2017 Black Friday Hall of Shame.)
And they aren’t even hungry.
People climb all over each other for cheap electronics. Fistfights erupt over vegetable steamers. People are ready to throw down and do battle for sale priced bath towels and televisions.
I’d hazard a guess that folks who spend time and money fighting over electronics are not the kind of people who prep. That means that these are the people who will be hungry in a long-term disaster. Look at those people, stampeding to get to a sale on things that they don’t actually need to survive. Their inhibitions are loosened because those around them are behaving in the same way.
You have to look at the psychology of this.
People can justify pretty much anything when they or their children are starving. And I can understand that to a large degree – who could stand to watch their babies suffering? But if someone can devolve to the above degree just to because everyone else is doing it, the chaos we saw above is only a tiny sample of what could come if people were truly hungry.
The line between civilization and THIS is very thin.
We need to be prepared by having the essential supplies on hand to keep us from becoming one of those desperate people in the middle of a stampede for a few days’ worth of food, but what’s more, we need to be prepared for the prospect of those desperate people. Keeping a low profile is the best defense but sometimes it’s not enough.
In a desperate situation, you have to be ready for desperate people to behave in a desperate manner. It happens in real life all the time. Somewhere on this planet, someone is desperate and they will do anything to meet their needs.
It only takes one person to start the charge in a tense scenario, and when that happens, the others will follow.
Don’t count on the rules of “civilization” to save you.
The woman made infamous for flipping off president Donald Trump’s motorcade says she was fired from her job for her childish behavior. Juli Briskman said the marketing company bosses called her in and gave her the boot.
But, nonetheless, the 50-year-old says she has no regrets about flipping off the president’s motorcade. Briskman was cycling in Virginia last month when she offered the gesture in what she described as a “gut reaction” to Donald Trump’s policies. “He was passing by and my blood just started to boil,” she told the Huffington Post. “I’m thinking, DACA (aka, “dreamers,” children of illegal immigrants who were allowed to stay in the United States) recipients are getting kicked out. He pulled ads for open enrollment in Obamacare. Only one-third of Puerto Rico has power. I’m thinking, he’s at the damn golf course again.”
A photographer traveling with the presidential motorcade snapped Briskman’s picture and the image quickly spread across news outlets and social media. Many hailed Briskman as a hero, with some saying she should run in the 2020 election; while others called her disrespectful, emotionally driven, and childish.
“I flipped off the motorcade a number of times,” Briskman added. But her bosses didn’t find her little stunt all that entertaining, or in accordance with how the company perceives the manner in which an employee should conduct themselves in or out of the workplace.
Briskman had been working as a marketing and communications specialist for a Virginia-based federal contractor, Akima, for six months. She thought it best detail to the human resources department that she was now infamous for being emotionally unstable and flipping off the president. With all of the online fuss around her actions, the company would have likely found out about her antics anyway.
Bosses called her into a meeting after she ratted herself out, she said. “They said, ‘We’re separating from you,’” Briskman told the Huffington Post. “‘Basically, you cannot have lewd or obscene things in your social media.’ So they were calling flipping him off obscene.” Unfortunately for Briskman, that’s fairly common among companies. Most want their employees to behave in a manner befitting the company (including on social media), and flipping off the president probably didn’t make Akima look all that great. One would expect the exact same reaction from a boss should a person have been fired for flipping off President Obama’s motorcade.
She said the company was displeased she had used the image as her profile picture on Twitter and Facebook and the bosses told her that using the image violated social media policy and could hurt the company’s reputation as a government contractor. Briskman said she pointed out that her social media pages do not mention her employer. She also tried to shift blame when she said another employee had written a profane insult about someone on Facebook, but had been allowed to keep his job after deleting the post and being reprimanded. Unfortunately, Briskman cannot simply “delete” what she did considering the photo went viral; but it’s oddly amusing she tried to throw a fellow employee under the bus for her misdeeds.
Virginia, however, has “at will” employment laws, meaning private-sector employers can fire anyone for any reason. Suddenly, the emotionally unstable 50-year-old mother of two found herself looking for a new job. Briskman, who votes Democratic (big surprise), said she planned to look for a new job with an advocacy group she believes in, such as Planned Parenthood or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
That seems about right for a Democrat. Advocate for the slaughter of innocent human beings while saving all the animals.
Remember that old saying “don’t bite the hand that feeds you?” Well, in case you’ve somehow forgotten, here’s a timely reminder.
Juli Briskman, a 50-year-old Virginia woman who was captured in a viral photograph flipping off the president’s motorcade as it left the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, has been fired from her employer, a government contractor called, for allegedly violating the company’s social-media policy, the Huffington Post reported.
Briskman’s employer, Akima LLC, a construction firm that reportedly relies on government contracts for much of its revenue, was less than pleased with her newfound notoriety: They fired her for “violating their social media policy”, saying her presence at the firm could jeopardize future business with the federal government.
The picture, snapped by a White House photographer traveling with the president as he left his golf course in Sterling, Va., went viral almost immediately. News outlets picked up the story when it appeared in a White House pool report. Late-night talk show hosts told jokes about the encounter and people on social media began hailing the unidentified woman as a “she-ro,” using the hashtag #Her2020.
Taken aback by the sudden publicity, Briskman briefly set the photo as her profile picture, before deciding that - given the nature of her work - she would do the right thing and inform her employer of the phenomenon. Since the photo contained no hints about her association with the company, she figured she had nothing to hide, and nothing to fear.
Unfortunately, that’s not quite how things turned out.
A day later, she was summoned to her company’s HR department, where she was given the bad news.
“They said, ‘We’re separating from you,"” Briskman said. “Basically, you cannot have ‘lewd’ or ‘obscene’ things in your social media. So they were calling flipping him off ‘obscene.’"
Briskman, who worked in marketing and communications for the company for a little more than six months, said she pointed out to the executives that the incident didn’t happen when she was on the clock and that the social media posts didn’t mention her employer.
At a meeting Tuesday, her bosses told her she violated the company’s media policy by posting the photo as her profile picture on Twitter and Facebook.
Briskman criticized her former employer for firing her while declining to punish a male employee who called somebody a “fucking Libtard asshole” on Facebook. Displaying a shocking lack of self-awareness (typically of libtards everywhere), Briskman implored her former employer to justify exactly how her colleague’s Facebook comment was less obscene than her decision to personally disrespect the leader of the free world.
Briskman, a Democrat, said as the motorcade began to pass her on Oct. 28 as it returned to the White House from the Trump National Golf Course in Sterling, Va., she had a gut reaction to flip it off.
“He was passing by and my blood just started to boil,” she said. “I’m thinking, DACA recipients are getting kicked out,” she said. “He pulled ads for open enrollment in ObamaCare. Only one-third of Puerto Rico has power. I’m thinking, he’s at the damn golf course again."
Despite being fired, she said, Briskman says she has no regrets.
By the SRSrocco Report,
If you are investing in either Bitcoin or Gold, it"s important to understand which asset is behaving more like a bubble than the other. While it"s impossible to understand how the market will value these two very different assets in the future, we can provide some logical analysis that might remove some of the mystery associated with the market price of Bitcoin versus Gold.
I"ve read some analysis on Bitcoin profitability and energy consumption that seemed unreliable, so I thought I would put my two cents in on the subject.
For example, many sites are using the Digiconomist"s work on Bitcoin energy consumption. However, I believe this analysis has overstated Bitcoin"s energy consumption by a large degree. According to the Digiconomist, Bitcoin"s annual electric use is approximately 24 TerraWatts per year (TWh/yr):
In a recent article that was forwarded to me by one of my readers, How Many Barrels Of Oil Are Needed To Mine One Bitcoin, the author used the information in the chart above to calculate the energy cost to produce each Bitcoin. He stated that the average energy cost for each Bitcoin equals 20 barrels of oil equivalent. Unfortunately, that data is grossly overstated.
If we look at another website, the author explains in great detail the actual energy cost to produce each Bitcoin. According to Marc Bevand, he calculated on July 28th, that the average electric consumption of Bitcoin was 7.7 TWh/yr, one-third of the Digiconomist"s figure. Here is a chart and table from Marc Bevand"s site showing how he arrived at the figures:
This graph shows the increase in Bitcoin"s hash rate and the efficiency of the Bitcoin Miners at the bottom. If you want to read more detail of the analysis, I suggest you click on the link (Marc Bevand: Electricity consumption of Bitcoin: a market-based and technical analysis)
The table above shows the Bitcoin energy consumption analysis on Feb 26th at a Best Guess (average) of 4.12-4.73 TWh/yr. However, Marc updated the data again on July 28th, as the hash rate increased, to show total Bitcoin energy consumption rose to 7.15-8.27 TWh/yr. I took the average of his range to be 7.7 TWh/yr.
Nonetheless, I had to update the number once again because it has been three months since Marc calculated his figures. I decided to increase the 7.7 TWh/yr rate by 45% to account for the past three months. I arrived at the 45% figure by using the 75% increase in Marc"s energy consumption figures from Feb to July. His energy consumption figures increased approximately 15% per month. Thus, three months equals 45%.
Okay, after taking all these estimates into consideration, I arrived at a total of 11.2 TWh/yr for Bitcoin mining. As you can see, this is much less than the 24 TWh/yr by the Digiconomist. Now, if we compare the annual amount of Bitcoin energy consumption to other countries total electric consumption, Bitcoin uses more electricity than Uraguay, Kyrgyzstan, and Paraguay:
I would recommend those who want to understand the differing opinions on the Bitcoin energy consumption figures by these two analysts to go to the link I provided at Marc"s blog. If you go to that page, you will see a long debate between Marc and the Digiconomist on why they disagree.
Regardless, I believe Marc Bevand did a much better job at crunching the numbers and details of the Bitcoin Miners and their efficiencies to arrive at a much more accurate figure than the Digiconomist. Either way, Bitcoin does consume one hell of a lot of electricity to produce each digital coin.
Now that we have a more realistic figure for Bitcoin"s energy consumption, we can compare it to gold. According to the statistics published by the top two gold mining companies in the world, Barrick and Newmont, they consumed approximately 8.5 Gigajoules of energy to produce each ounce of gold in 2016. Yes, I realize these energy metrics are a bit difficult to understand, but these are the figures used by the industry. If we convert all these energy figures from Bitcoin mining and the Gold Industry to barrels of oil equivalent, we end up with the following results:
While it only takes 1.4 barrels of oil equivalent to produce an ounce of gold, it takes 10.1 barrels of oil equivalent to produce one Bitcoin. Thus, Bitcoin consumes seven times more energy to produce each digital coin than it does for each gold oz. Even though it takes a lot more energy to produce each Bitcoin, the Gold Mining Industry consumes one hell of a lot more energy overall.
If we assume that 85% of total global gold production comes from primary gold mining only, then the 88 million oz (Moz) produced in 2016 consumed the energy value of an estimated 123.2 million barrels of oil equivalent versus 6.6 million barrels of oil equivalent for all Bitcoin production.
Now, the reason Bitcoin consumes less overall energy than the global primary gold mining industry is due to the much small annual number of Bitcoins produced versus gold. In 2016, the primary gold mining industry produced 88 Moz versus an estimated 650,000 Bitcoins in 2017 (based on data showing 1,800 Bitcoins mined each day). Which means, the primary gold mining industry is currently producing approximately 135 times more gold than the Bitcoin mining industry.
While some precious metals analysts have switched over to investing more in Bitcoin (and cryptos) than gold, I don"t belong to that group. Unfortunately, these analysts seem to have forgotten about energy and the Falling EROI - Energy Returned On Invested. One of these analysts recently put out a video suggesting that silver only had about ten years to be removed from the shackles of Central Bank manipulation before new high-technology would produce silver for next to nothing. I believe this analyst used the Star Trek replicator as an example.
I can assure you, the world isn"t anywhere near to producing silver for pennies on the dollar. On the contrary, the world economy is much closer to collapsing under the weight of the Falling EROI than heading into a new JETSON"s high-tech age:
I will be publishing detailed information in the future why I believe Gold and Silver will still be the GO TO ASSETS to own versus Bitcoin and the Cryptocurrencies.
So, the big question on the minds of many investors is... which asset is more of a bubble, Bitcoin or Gold? If we use the cost of production as a guide, my answer is Bitcoin. Again, according to the data put out by Marc Bevand, he estimated that the total cost to produce Bitcoin on May 31st, 2017 was approximately $1,010:
Actually, the text above came from Marc as he was replying to my question on his blog. However, this Bitcoin break-even cost is now outdated. So, I sent Marc an email back at the beginning of August to see what his new estimate for the cost to produce Bitcoin. He replied on August 8th stating his best estimate was about $1,500. By adjusting for the increased cost to produce Bitcoin over the past two months, I came up with a figure of $1,800. Yes, it"s a ball-park figure, but it"s the best estimate we can go by.
Now, if we compare the estimated Bitcoin cost and profit versus the same for gold, Bitcoin is the clear BUBBLE WINNER:
Currently, Bitcoin is fetching an estimated $4,700 profit per coin versus $136 for gold. Here"s how I arrived at those figures:
Bitcoin vs. Gold Cost & Profit
Top 2 Gold Miners"s Total Cost of Production 2016 = $1,115
Gold Average Annual Price 2016 = $1,251
Estimated Gold Profit = $136
Bitcoin Current Cost 2017 = $1,800
Bitcoin Current Market Price = $6,500 (based on previous trading data)
Estimated Bitcoin Profit = $4,700
If we compare the estimated profit margin in these two assets, we can clearly see that Bitcoin has a great deal more FROTH than gold. Yes, I realize I took some liberties in providing the Bitcoin production cost, but I believe it"s a pretty accurate figure. While other articles have stated that Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable, I disagree. I believe it is exceedingly profitable to produce Bitcoin if you have purchased the most recent mining equipment and have set up the operation in an area that provides low electric utility rates.
Alright, I imagine there are some (maybe many.. LOL) that don"t agree with my analysis. First, many people in the precious metals industry still do not agree with the overriding factor that determines the price of gold is its cost of production. Second, while supply and demand forces do impact the gold price over the short-term, the cost of production has always been the number one factor over the longer-term.
This last chart shows the estimated Bitcoin production cost versus the market price:
If we go back to the end of 2013, we can see a spike up and then consolidation lower in 2014. The present Bitcoin price spike in 2017 has lasted longer than the one at the end of 2013, but we can clearly see a pattern. Who knows how long Bitcoin will continue higher before it consolidates lower. Some precious metals analysts now turned Bitcoin specialists are suggesting that Bitcoin will reach $13,000 by the first half of 2018. Hell, I don"t know if that will happen. Maybe it will; perhaps it won"t. I really don"t care.
I have nothing against Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin needs a very high-tech electronic system to function. On the other hand, any poor slob in the country owning some gold can walk into town and use it as money. Now, when I say, "poor slob," I am using that term in jest. Actually, I am a poor slob just like the next person. Regardless, Bitcoin functions as an electronic asset if the machines keep working. Now, go down to Puerto Rico and see how many people will take Bitcoin. However, if you have cash, gold, and silver... you are ready to do some business.
If a person wants to own and speculate in Bitcoin... that"s fine. But, it is much more prudent to hold most of one"s wealth in physical gold and silver rather than Bitcoin.
Check back for new articles and updates at the SRSrocco Report.
DoD photo by Air Force Master Sgt. Joshua L. DeMotts
Most Puerto Ricans will be without electricity for the foreseeable future after a controversial contract to rebuild the island’s power grid was cancelled.
The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) on Sunday cancelled a $300 million contract to rebuild the grid after officials discovered that the contractor, Whitefish Energy, lacked the resources to do the job. It was hoped that Whitefish would quickly get the power grid back up and running. But now PREPA is back to square one.
It has been more than a month – 41 days exactly — since Hurricane Maria hit the island on Sept. 20.
“Some stores, medical centers, restaurants and a fortunate few private residences are running on generators, but most of the island’s 3.4 million people are plunged into darkness after sunset,” The New York Times reported.
Get Free Backup Electricity — That Works Even During Blackouts!
PREPA is running at only 30 percent capacity, but it isn’t known how many of the island’s citizens are without power. Estimates range as high as 80 percent or more. The contract was hurriedly signed as Maria was heading toward the island.
“Nestled down a long gravel driveway in Whitefish is a one-story wooden house that is the home of Whitefish Energy,” CBS News reported from the small town of Whitefish, Mont. on Friday. “This tiny energy company has only two full-time employees. … Whitefish has never worked on a project of this size.”
A major critic of Whitefish is journalist Ken Klippenstein, who obtained a copy of the contract and noted a number of unusual provisions, CNBC reported. One clause actually barred the government from auditing Whitefish.
Also not amused by the contract was President Trump, who was drawn into the mess because Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke’s home is Whitefish, Mont. CNBC reported that Zinke’s son had a summer job working for Whitefish CEO Andy Techmanski.
“I had absolutely nothing to do with Whitefish Energy receiving a contract in Puerto Rico. I welcome all investigations into the allegations,” Zinke tweeted on Friday.
Do you think your state is prepared for such a crisis? Share your thoughts in the section below:
Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
[Published before Mueller"s charges were released]
I’m obliged to file this blog before Robert Mueller’s office releases the name of the first winner in the Russian Election Meddling tribunal indictment lottery. Most of the betting is on Paul Manafort, the Swamp-creature-fixer-lobbyist-grifter who spent his summer vacation of 2016 managing Donald Trump’s election campaign.
Before that unfortunate summer internship, Manafort was just a shadier-than-average influence-peddler. It happened that many of his clients were bigshots in foreign lands - Mobuto Sese Seko (Congo), Jonas Savimbi (Angola), and Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), as well as interests in Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ukraine, and other world beauty spots. Also, most notably, Russia where the wicked Mr. Putin dwells and incessantly plots evil against our shining city of a republic.
Over the years, Manafort took large sums of money to the DC laundry room and then distributed bales of it around town to other lobbyist subcontractors, but he left quite a trail. And he overlooked the requirement to register as an agent for foreign interests. So, indicting him looks like a no-brainer. An entry-level US Attorney could, figuratively speaking, hitch him up to the rear bumper of a Chevy Yukon and drag him over five miles of broken Coke bottles.
If I am right, his indictment will provoke a five-column headline in The New York Times, Don Lemon will have a multiple orgasm on CNN tonight, and by Halloween the whole Manafort matter will be as forgotten as Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Las Vegas Country Music Massacre.
That’s how we roll in Attention Deficit Nation. I suppose Mueller’s team next will want to charge fired National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn for failing to register as a foreign agent prior to a having conversation with the Russian ambassador - but mightn’t it be a little absurd to outlaw dialogue between incoming White House officials and foreign ambassadors who, after all, are here to have conversations with our people? That’ll be an interesting precedent. Why would other countries even bother to send an ambassador here if that’s our policy?
It’s hard to see where it goes from there. The standard plot-line is to net these smaller fish and use them as bait to harpoon the Big White Whale. Give them immunity and let them sing their hearts out to avoid getting sent to ping-pong camp in the Poconos for a five-year stretch. Or else these two schnooks go bankrupt paying hotshot DC lawyers to get them off the hook. Does Mueller go after Donny Junior for having a conversation with a Russian lawyer? Or son-in-law Jared Kushner for flying to Russia and having meetings with Russians? Hey, does anyone remember that A) We’re not at war with Russia, and B) the soviet regime there folded up twenty-five years ago?
The casual observer can’t avoid dragging Hillary into this.
It appears that, among other things, the Clinton Foundation received over a $100 million in “charitable donations” from various Russian companies and individuals over the years. Gosh, they’re a big-hearted people! Maybe it’s all the vodka they guzzle. No doubt, the newly-converted Russian capitalists were yearning to support “impact entrepreneurs” who are creating “new enterprises to generate both social impact and financial returns” by addressing market gaps in developing countries, or to “strengthen the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence” - as the Clinton Foundation described their activities.
More likely they wanted to grease their access to the sure-thing It’s-My-Turn Madam President. Except then she went and lost the election... all because of Russian meddling.
Just a day after Puerto Rico"s cash-strapped power authority on Sunday canceled its controversial $300 million contract with Whitefish Energy, a small Montana company tasked with rebuilding the island"s power grid after it was completely destroyed by Hurricanes Maria and Irma, the WSJ is reporting that the FBI is looking into the circumstances surrounding the contract.
The contract was canceled on orders from Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello, who pointed to the burgeoning controversy surrounding the company - including its relationship with Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, who is from the same small Montana town where Whitefish is based.
Zinke issued a statement last week denying any involvement in the deal. Zinke is reportedly friends with Whitefish CEO Andy Techmanski.
The company has been criticized for moving too slowly in its efforts to restore power to the island. To date, only 30% of power customers on the island have had electricity restored, more than a month after Maria first made landfall along the island"s southeastern coast.
As WSJ explains, the firm had more than 350 workers and 2,500 tons of heavy equipment on the ground for rebuilding electrical lines destroyed in Hurricane Maria. But the firm’s small size and limited track record, as well as the terms of the contract, ignited concerns around Puerto Rico’s management of the flow of federal disaster-relief dollars to the island.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, multiple congressional committees and local auditors also have raised concerns and begun requesting documents about the deal. Ricardo Ramos, the executive director of Prepa, had defended the selection of Whitefish and said the contracting process was done according to the utility’s regulations for handling emergency situations.
Puerto Rico is struggling under a desperate need for medical help, that in some cases is not happening. We spoke with a disaster relief worker who explained some of the issues that are creating havoc…they were described to us as “humanitarian crimes.”
An example: a veteran and his son – who had serious medical issues – were in area that had flooding and no communication. Relief workers were trying to find a way to help the son, and it became extremely difficult. The son was so sick he could not communicate.
“He was wasting away in front of my eyes.”
They did manage to get 2 doctors out to him, but they advised the the relief workers that there was “no way” the man would get better in that environment. Hence, evacuation was necessary.
They got an ambulance to take him to a field hospital, where they hoped he could get assistance to allow him intake on the USNS Comfort. (Patients must have the approval of a hospital and proper paperwork to board the hospital ship). Aid workers were able to finally get him that approval.
By then the man had spent several hours in an ambulance. Officials directed him to a MASH unit that was only open from 9 a.m.- 9 p.m. – by the time he got there they were closed.
Members of the military volunteered to watch him overnight. When morning came, the process did not work as originally communicated, and the intake to the USNS Comfort was cancelled.
Amateur civilian ham radio operators had created a network of communication between hospitals for about 3 weeks. By this time, they had left, which made a difficult situation even worse.
Relief workers have involved a variety of federal agencies, NGOs,and legislators to work on this case. Disaster relief flights are difficult to obtain, in part because they are expensive. His situation is not totally resolved as of this writing. The man has been to no less than 5 hospitals, only the last of which has made a solid effort to help him – they are thoroughly overwhelmed. But he still needs to be taken to a hospital on the mainland, which is something the relief workers are attempting to handle at this time.
Many of the relief workers receive calls incessantly from people stranded in the mountains, children who are acutely ill, water purification issues, the need for gas to power generators, veterans that need supplies, even the need for more body bags at the morgue [Note: we have information that the death toll from various issues from landslides to Leptospirosis is far higher than is being reported], and many other critical situations too numerous to count. Then there are the accusations that FEMA is stockpiling food and water and not releasing it.
It never ends. Relief workers are exhausted both emotionally and physically. In Part III some revelations about the reasons Puerto Rico is still in the throes of desperation.
#UnitedforPuertoRico raises 12.5M dollars, & questions about the organizations effectiveness
More with Governor: https://www.facebook.com/108679513654/videos/10155266589328655/ …
As of tonight, the U.S. Naval Ship “Comfort” has:
*31 registered patients onboard *85% of the beds are empty
*169 beds are available
Medical examiner in Puerto Rico has authorized 911 cremations
of “natural deaths” since Hurricane Maria https://www.buzzfeed.com/nidhiprakash/puerto-rico-cremations …
Puerto Rico death toll: 51
3 of the 51 died from Leptospirosis
76 other cases of Lepto are suspected (most are alive & being treated)
Puerto Death toll now 51
2 most recent deaths are from Leptospirosis, there 74 other “suspected” cases which need @CDCgov confirmation
“OFF THE GRID NOW!!” was the text message I just received from an engineer standing in front of the generators https://twitter.com/davidbegnaud/status/922301158667960320 …
Two Navy ships used for helicopter support are leaving Puerto Rico: USS WASP & USS OAK HILL; “assets no longer needed” says @USNavy
Maria disrupted production at Puerto Rican factories making drugs; hospitals are seeing shortages @DrLaPook reports https://www.cbsnews.com/videos/hurricane-maria-disrupted-production-of-medical-supplies/ …
Hurricane Maria disrupted production of medical supplies
Hurricane Maria disrupted production at Puerto Rican factories that make critical drugs and medical supplies. Dr. Jon LaPook found that hospitals on the U.S. mainland are already seeing shortages.
cbsnews.com
This is the second in a series of articles by Faye Higbee on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
The post PUERTO RICO PART II – MEDICAL ISSUES appeared first on Oath Keepers.
