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October 16, 2024 16 mins
Preston had concerns about the claimed wind ferocity of Hurricane Helene (and subsequently Milton) and a report from the National Weather Service proved his concerns to be valid and on-target. Scott Beekin, the Beeline Blogger, released an in-depth report on the subject of hurriacnes and what the record tells us. 
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Funny how things work out. Morning friends, Welcome to the
Morning Show with Preston Scott. He's Osea. I'm Preston and ruminators.
Good to be with you, Wednesday, October ninth. A lot
of you from central Florida are up in the listening area,
and of course we have folks listening across the country
on iHeartRadio, and we thank you for that. But it's funny.

(00:31):
I started following this gentleman's work back a few years ago,
and lo and behold, a listener of this show new
personally Scott Beacon, the b Line Blogger, and the website
where you can find his work is bline Blogger dot
blogspot dot com. And now Scott is a friend of

(00:51):
the program. Scott, how are you?

Speaker 2 (00:54):
I'm doing great. How you doing this morning in.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
Preston, I'm doing well. A couple of weeks ago, we
were not well. We were worried about what was coming
our way. I'm curious you wrote about the aftermath of
Hurricane Helene, But I'm curious why what caused you to
want to do some digging as you normally do and write.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Well. I became a little curious and interested because I
well remember all the media coverage and the things that
went on in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And if
you recall back to those days, it was just wall
to wall media coverage, the cable news. It was twenty
four to seven New York Times, I think went a

(01:42):
week and almost every story on the front page was Katrina, Katrina,
Katrina and the response. And as you recall, there was
a lot of criticism of FEMA and President Bush as
to how that response was managed. And it just was
kind of interesting when you look at the destruction and
the devastation to the people, especially in the Appalachian area

(02:05):
of western North Carolina eastern Tennessee. It was a very
muted response, and I found that very curious in looking
at what was going on and trying to figure out
why is that. I mean, you know, part of it
could be that, you know, New Orleans was an urban
area easier to get coverage in there you have a
mountainous region. Was that the reason or was it a

(02:28):
reason that the media was really trying to cover for
the Biden administration and the muted response. I mean, we
went through a period of time here. You know, I
saw one summary It was probably a good five or
six days that there was very little with regard to
a federal response, you know, Biden, that did not mobilize,

(02:51):
even though they got the troops there at Fort Bragg
that could easily come over there with equipment, et cetera,
and none of that was done. Didn't seem to happen
until Donald Trump went down to Valdosa, Georgia, kind of
near you, and all of a sudden it kind of
got ramped up. It was just kind of been interesting.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Then Alejandro Mayorcis, Homeland Security Director, announced that there just
won't be enough money should another storm hit. They might
be able to cover everything for this storm, but future
storms are out of money. I think a lot of
people Scott were surprised that FEMA was underneath the auspices
of Homeland Security.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Exactly. And you know, when you look at that, and
that's something I looked in as well. You know, FEMA,
I mean, FEMA has a budget of about thirty billion
dollars a year. You know, put that in context. If
it was a Fortune five hundred company, it would be
bigger than McDonald's. They've got fourteen thousand full time equivalent

(03:53):
employees on the payroll of FEMA. And then to say
you don't have enough money, and then you find out,
as the revelations continue, that they funded one point four
billion dollars with regard to illegal immigration, settling, transportation, housing,

(04:14):
shelter and grants over the last couple of years. And
it just makes your head scratch. You're saying, we're spending
this kind of money on illegal immigration, which in some respect,
the open border policy is a man made disaster, and
you have a natural disaster, which really what was FEMA

(04:35):
was created to handle, and there's no money left. It
really is almost unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
Get it off your mind, get it off your chest.
You have a story you want to share, Write him
at Preston at iHeartRadio dot com. Welcome to the Morning
Show with Preston Scott. All Right, eleven past the Hour
with Scott Beacon and again his work can be found
at Bline Blogger dot blogspot dot com and you will

(05:04):
get some great data driven information and analysis and some
opinion from Scott. Scott. I want to I want to
expand a little bit because we've talked about over the
last few days the money misappropriated by Homeland Security to
shelter illegals that have broken into this country. But you

(05:26):
dug into releases by FEMA, actual releases that delineate where
some of this money is gone in bits and pieces
share some of that.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Well, there's a long list of headlines that I put
in my blog, you know, with regard to you know,
grants that were given to you to New York City
or this place or that. I mean, it's it's been
parceled out in a lot of different grants for communities
who are receiving the vigrants. I think if you go
back in the history, it started out normally, let's say

(05:59):
in twenty one twenty two. It started primarily in the
border states, who are really taking most of the pressure
early on with the open border situation, and then it
started moving to some of the Blue States as New
York City, Chicago, et cetera, as a lot of the
migrants or illegal immigrants ended up there. So it's a

(06:20):
tremendous amount of money when you look at it, and
you know, I could see where the citizens of these
areas affected by Helene are upset because they're sitting there
in dire straits and to find out that illegal immigration
has really stolen that money in some respects, and this
really goes to a point that I'd made in my
blog before. You know, when you look at the topic

(06:42):
of illegal immigration, there's the initial effect, but then there's
a compound effect that goes with that, right that we're
going to look with for years. And this is certainly
a great example of a compound effect because you know,
one point four billion dollars and in the defense of
Biden illustration, Well, that was in a separate account. You
know that really wasn't taken away from the FEMA efforts. Well,

(07:05):
yes it is. I mean, if you have a thirty
billion dollar budget and you've siphoned off money to go
to an illegal immigrant problem, that's money that should be
there to help US citizens deal with the natural disasters.
And the fact that it's not is a compound effect.
And we see the same thing, you know, with our hospitals,
with our schools, with the sustainability issues that legal immigration

(07:29):
just don't get talked about enough. It's affecting every phase
of our life here in the United States.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
Scott, we documented that in the wake of Michael, which
was impacting not just us a little bit, but certainly
our listeners in the Panama City area directly. There were
no concerts there were no fundraisers, there was nothing made
of it. Many of us believe that it was because
it's a conservative, Republican part of the state that's even

(07:56):
more conservative than the rest of the state. You look
at the area to our east that has been hit
three times in sixteen months. No concerts, no fundraisers, no benefits.
And so we've grown accustomed to certain areas not getting
the favor of the Hollywood and the concert crowds and
the muckety MUCKs because they frankly have overtly said they're

(08:19):
not giving money because those are Republican areas. You pointed
to that in your blog about a lot of these
areas in North Carolina being Trump strongholds.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, exactly, that western North Carolina area in particular. I
think you look at the numbers from twenty twenty of
the twenty five counties that were declared the federal disaster,
all but two voted for Trump, and they actually provided
him about a twenty five percent margin, So that translates
into about two hundred and thirty four thousand votes, and
he only won the state by seventy four thousand, So

(08:53):
you know, that's a real concern. And when this initially
hurt was Heleian initially hit, And a lot of media
coverage was of assvill Oh. I've been to Asshl a
number of times, AshEL is a very liberal city, yep.
And and I thought that maybe that would turn the
tide a little bit here because that was kind of
an epicenter. But it appears not. And you really see

(09:16):
very little of people from Hollywood or anyplace else that say, hey,
let's have a fundraiser for these people because they're you know,
there are a lot of dire straits there.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
But Scott, it's one thing for the Hollywood to thumb
their nose at it. We're like, yeah, whatever. But when
the federal government is not delivering aid and you can
start to see the possibilities that it might be to
somehow suppress the vote, that's alarming.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
Well, it is alarming. And and you look at the
way FEMA is being managed. I mean, I saw a
story this morning that's just as a head scratcher. Uh,
But FEMA delivered to one community there three palettes of
electric chainsaws. Okay, so electric chainsaws at a place that
has no electricity? What does that do? And obviously you've

(10:06):
got to know that why do they have electric chainsaws? Well,
that's green right. We can't have a gas power chain saw.
We're going to deliver electric power chain sauce. It's the
height of idiots.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
Lumla on your phone with the iHeart Radio app and
on hundreds of devices like Alexa, Google Home, Xbox and Sonos.
This is and Ihearts radio station. Back with Scott Beacon,
the Beeline blogger, and he took on the topic of

(10:39):
Hurricane Helene talked about the response or the lack thereof
by the federal government, misappropriation of funding. But Scott, you
also broadened out a little bit. You went to the macro,
which I loved because a constant theme around here is
you always hear the expression we haven't had a storm
like this since, and then there's an and we haven't

(11:01):
had temperatures like this since, and there's a number. And
those numbers are often numbers that go back to long
before the industrial age of this country, long before we
heard about global warming. Tell me what your data showed you.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
Well, you're right, Preston. I mean you typically when you
see storms like this, it's always unprecedented. We haven't seen
anything like this in so many years, and it's all
due to climate change. But if you look at the
area that we're talking about here with Helene, that's those
directly affected up around the Ashville, North Carolina area. You know,
the evidence is they had similar flooding in In fact,

(11:40):
some say it was stronger in nineteen sixteen and again
in nineteen forty. Now I understand, you know people, not
many of us were around in those years and so
people don't have that history. But the reality is they
had just as a severe a situations at that point
in time as we're seeing today. So this really isn't unprecedented.

(12:01):
And you looked back to nineteen sixteen and what were
the global carbon emissions at that point in time, I mean,
what caused that flood? I mean, what caused the hurricane
that dropped that amount of rain back in that time. So,
you know, we keep hearing this that's unprecedented. And if
you have you look at the data, which I've got
a chart in my blog on this topic. It goes

(12:24):
back and shows the hurricanes by decade. There is no
real discernible change in the number of hurricanes by decade.
In fact, you know, I think, as you alluded to before,
you know, you went how many years in Florida without
a major hurricane over a decade? Now you're getting hit.
But you know that's you know, that's the weather. In fact,

(12:45):
if you look at major hurricanes, the data seems to
indicate in the trend since the eighteen fifties, at least
since the nineteen thirties, the trend is actually down. There
were many more severe hurricanes in the early part of
the twentieth centre than we've seen in the twenty first century.
So unfortunately, you know, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, which we're seeing

(13:08):
out in Wyoming and Idaho right now, it's a part
of life. We're not capable of controlling the forces of nature.
I mean, that's been proven over and over again. The
thing that is controllable or man made disasters like illegal immigration,
and you know, that's really what we ought to be
focusing on, is what we can really control, and forget

(13:30):
about things we can't control, like the climate.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
You know, my worry, Scott, is that the decision to
I guess politicize weather is going to at some point
cost lives because people are going to disregard forecasts if
they keep saying that there's going to be this, that
or the other type of storm Category four, category five.

(13:54):
It's like they continue to say that Helene was a
Cat for storm. It just wasn't. There's no days that
indicates it was a Cat three storm, and there's limited
data to show that it might have been a Cat
two storm. But people will start to disregard these forecasts
down the road if they find them to be false,
and they will eventually disregard, and then there's going to
be a bad storm at some point and people are

(14:15):
going to die because they will not believe what they're
being told exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
And the same thing we're spending. They want to spend
trillions of dollars to fight climate change, and that's taking
away the amount of money that we might need to
actually deal with van the deal with natural disasters that
we would help people, and we're spending on frivolous things
that really aren't going to make a bunch of difference

(14:42):
in the long run anyway.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
Scott Beacon with us. Scott is a prolific writer, and
I'll call them a researcher. You just love to crunch
numbers man, You love to dig into data. Tell us
about the latest blog.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
Well, I like truth. I mean, that's what I really wanted.

Speaker 1 (14:58):
How dare you, sir, bring that word into my show?

Speaker 2 (15:03):
And the truth is usually the data. Yeah. My lightest
blog is up this morning is on the whole question
of you know, taxes and the truth about taxes. And
we hear so much about from Kamala Harris, for example,
how she's going to solve all the problems by raising
taxes on billionaires, and I really have the numbers there
that kind of puts that in context and perspective that

(15:26):
it's it's really just a lie. I mean to put
it bluntly, it's a lie. It's not possible to zoo
what she's trying to do.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
I can't believe you would say that there are people
that would lie to us that are running for office. Scott,
You're you're dipping to loads that frankly, sir, are not
becoming Hey, thank you, my friend. I appreciate the time
this morning.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Okay, keep up the good work for us, and thanks.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
I appreciate it. Scott Beacon the b line blogger. You
can read about Scott. You can read all of his
work just go to be line blogger all one word
dot blogspot dot com. MHM
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