Tuesday, July 15, 2025
It’s hard to know where to begin, because this is a screed about false illusions and broken dreams. I was under the illusion that beneath it all we were working for the same goal – to make our country better. I might have disagreed with the way to do that, but I thought we, and by we I mean everybody in the United States, were interested in such basic things as making life better for everyone. After years of seeing “I got mine” and then the super charging of conspiracies and false narratives I have to conclude that my underlying premise no longer holds.
So now we are seeing the fruits of these labors come to fruition. False narratives typically give way to the truth and people operating on incorrect assumptions are replaced by people who know what they are doing. But this is not happening anymore.
We have seen, read, heard about the 27 little girls swept away in the flood waters in Texas. It seems this was worse flooding than they had had before, but it was not unprecedented. There are videos of the same kind of flooding from a few years before. What changed? Why were these girls and some 170 killed and another 160 unaccounted for?
Reading the accounts of what happened at the camp where the girls were, they were used to rain and the river rising. This was not unusual. What was different was these folks were counting on being warned if it was going to get worse. The warning never came. Why not? The person at the Weather Service whose job it was to take the Weather Service warnings and tell local officials had left because of the DOGE cuts. Or was it harassment? I don’t know. Does it matter? He left and he wasn’t replaced.
The local officials were counting on getting warnings from the Weather Service. The Weather Service issued them, but no one was there to let people know. This area had had various warning systems in the past, but they had been shut off. Apparently, they had asked for a new warning system. It would cost one million dollars. Their governor offered to pay 5% of the cost. Nice fifty grand for a system that cost a million.
There was a system that would alert cell phones in the area. It never went off. Why? I don’t recall the excuse, but it might not have helped the campers because part of the charm of the camp was a no cell phone policy, and service was spotty anyway. This was no slouch camp. Jenna Bush reminisced about going there.
Then there was the FEMA response effort. Typically, when a disaster such as this strikes there’s an order to get rescue boats in the water immediately. We are talking middle of the night, no matter what, wake people up and go. Didn’t happen. It took 72 hours, three days for the order to be signed by Kristi Noem, head of Homeland Security. She has a policy that anything costing more than 100 grand has to come to her. And it took her three days to get around to it. As a former disaster head in Florida said three days made them useless.
Now it’s coming out that calls to FEMA went unanswered, like 80% of them. Why? Kristi hadn’t signed off on the contractors that do that job. So on July 5th there contracts terminated. 16,419 calls went unanswered, 2,613 did get answered.
Now I’ve learned that the head of FEMA wasn’t seen until nine days after those children were swept away in the flood waters. And, you’ll be surprised (NOT!) to learn he has not disaster management or emergency preparedness experience. This is the guy who told the FEMA staff he didn’t know there was a hurricane season.
His boss, Kristi Noem, has said that they wanted to cut back on FEMA and push the money out to the states, because the states are closer to the action and know better how to handle such things. This is a typical Republican response – push it out to the states. This allows them, the Republicans in Congress, to cut back on the total amount of money they give a state. In this case what old killer puppy Kristi doesn’t seem to know, care(?), or understand is that the states local response organizations get their money from FEMA already. If she shuts off Federal money the states emergency response is no longer there.
And it didn’t take long, like a few hours, for a governor to point out that the reason we have a Federal response is that not every state gets hit with a disaster every year. So it makes sense to centralize the response and have people there who know what they are doing. Huh? Who knew? Certainly, not Kristi.
Now in some cases, like say a river warning system in an area that people know floods would be a good idea and either the local communities, or the state, or the Federal government could provide it. But in this case they didn’t. They had in the past, but the river hadn’t flooded badly in a few years and so they let it go.
Oh well.
The head of the House what’s his name issued a “thoughts and prayers” statement that was met immediately with a “we aren’t paying you to pray. We are paying you to fix the problems.”
But fixing problems is boring and drudgery. It’s what the deep state is all about. Cogs in the wheels of government doing things you don’t understand, but boy howdy are you glad they are there when disaster strikes. Or you can take the other tact: “I don’t understand it and I don’t care, let’s get rid of it.” which was Elon’s way of cutting nothing in government costs. Make America Shittier and More Expensive.
Moving on. We see another hilarious attempt by certain Kool-Aide drunk officials to enact policies based on their mistaken beliefs that has been reinforced by decades of being lied to or lying about it. In this case it is the Secretary of Agriculture. She wants all those able bodied people who are not working that are on Medicare to get in the fields and start picking. Okay, here are a few facts that get in the way of that idea: 1) most people on Medicare (or Medicaid) that can, are working. 2) many people are disabled and that’s why they are on those programs. Oh, and here’s a little tidbit for ya Brooke (that’s her name Brooke Rollins) they tried this before. Yeah. Turns out back in the 60s a similar theme was bubbling in the same sort of circles – get rid of the migrant pickers and – get this – put high school kids to work! Great idea, right?
They lasted two weeks. The problem(s): the pay was crappy, the hours long, and the work hard. The students either left, or went on strike. Well, this won’t happen this time. We’ll have someone in a wheel chair sucking oxygen doing the picking. Yeah. That’ll work.
So we are seeing, on multiple fronts, reality hitting BS repeated echoes of propaganda.
Lemme just go off on waste, fraud, corruption , and abuse for a sec… That’s what Elon said he was after. Yet, he never ventured into areas where it was really going on. I mean there’s Rick Scott who faced how many charges of defrauding the government over Medicare abuse? Or the couple Trump pardoned who stole millions in the largest Medicare fraud in history. The price to get off was $16 mill I think. Then there’s the documented international gangs that are ripping off the government and defrauding us to the tune of millions even billions. What to do about it? Why eliminate the group looking into all that.
But then we get to Pam Bondi. I always wondered why Pam sold out so cheaply to Trump. It only took a $20,000 donation to her campaign for her to stop her investigation into Trump University and all those Florida folks who signed up were left holding the bag, but then I’ve learned that it wasn’t just Trump. She was open for bizness. Yup, make a contribution and your troubles go away. A recent article outlined how time after time she took the money and dropped the investigation. She’s the perfect AG for Trump. She’s his AG, not ours.
And finally, Jeffery, ah yes. This is the most hysterical one of all. After years of right wing Republican podcasters and the like going on about Epstein and how it was all Democrats who were on his plane, going to an island where they were “entertained” by young girls now they were eager for the list of “clients” of Epstein to be released. They seemed to have forgotten that at that time Trump was a Democrat. And shockingly he was shown in pictures and video to be right beside old Jeff, at a party with 15 year olds. (Okay, maybe they were older like 16 or 17.) And now after being promised over and over by Trump and then Bondi that the list would be released it vanished. Wait? What? Turns out there was no list. Well, there had been a list because Pammi Poh had said it was on her desk. Then – poof! – it was gone.
This raises the question: if there was no list what is Jeffery’s assistant, Gizelle Maxwell, doing in jail? Wasn’t her whole case based on helping him procure girls and clients? Now there aren’t any? So, people are asking, “Why is she in jail?” Reality and illusion – funny stuff.
One last thing, I saw a picture of David Richardson. He’s the head of FEMA that was famous before the drownings in Texas of saying he didn’t know there was a hurricane season. That and having no experience in emergency preparedness or disaster management. As soon as I saw the picture I thought, “He looks like the guy in the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue.” How do I know this? As a yud (that’s youth) I remember my aunt getting the Frederick’s catalogue and I would steal glances at the bras with the holes cut out so the nipples could poke through and the crotchless panties. But what got me most was the drawing of the founder, named Frederick – who could have guessed? – He was featured on the upper corner of each left hand page. His hair was slicked back, his shirt was open and he seemed to be slobbering over the photos on the page. I always thought it was weird. Who wants to buy sexy stuff from a pervert?
In searching for that iconic image I learned a lot about Frederick Mellinger. WWII he was in a barracks and the most popular pin-up was Betty Grable. This gave him the idea to start a lingerie business. Starting in New York, he moved to California and had a mail order business out of a PO box in Hollywood. He started selling bikinis when they were outlawed in some places. A photo of a young lady being given a ticket on a beach in California helped sell out his inventory.
He mainly sold to women in the mid-west. He photographed stars in fashionable attire and put them in his catalog. Oftentimes the photospread of items for sale included a picture of him. Kind of bland. But he was selling lingerie women couldn’t get at the downtown department stores. His stuff was sexy. He invented the padded bra and the push up bra. Also the blow-up bra, filled with air or water – not very successful. He morphed into more risqué stuff and crossed the line into raunchy. Not a good move as the Women’s Movement was taking off, and Victoria’s Secret was starting up. They stumbled along, tried to move back to more sophisticated looks. He died. Business went bankrupt. Yadda yadda yadda. It survives today as a kind of Victoria’s Secret type place.
Unsurprisingly Megan Fox has partial ownership. It’s perfect. There was a hot for a season women who crossed over into weird, slightly raunchy looks. I mean what was all that with the fully tattooed Machine Gun Kelly?
Surprisingly Brooke Burke got her start as a model for Frederick’s. And unsurprisingly, Madonna got her leather gun sticking out bra from Frederick’s (okay maybe they weren’t guns. But something was sticking out and they weren’t nipples.)
But after endless searching – I’ll probably pay for that with lots of ads for, I dunno, push up bras? – I could not find one image of Frederick Mellinger slobbering from the corner of his catalog.
So, you’ll just have to settle for the head of FEMA David Richardson.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Here’s David!
