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And has been since she made landfall at Dominica. You can cross check, here and here.
It's pissing me off because every single news outlet is crapping their pants about her 175mph sustained winds. If they are not outright lying, they are measuring somewhere not on the ground. All three links here are ground level measurements... which, you will agree, is where it counts.
Jose is a tropical storm, but much bigger and where the winds are as high as 50mph it's still off the coast quite a way. Maria's western eye wall isn't even hurricane force, mostly, but the eastern one is just inside the specs for CAT1.
The damage may be great, depending a lot on the storm surge and the quality of construction at the places hit. Right this very now, the eastern end of Puerto Rico is hosting Maria's eye.
I started concentrating on this to take my mind off the feds' horse shit about the wildfires here. And now it's their horse shit there. Playing down the wildfires and playing UP the hurricanes. Of course, they're doing it much more sedately than the media, but they do make it difficult to find the information more like actual on the ground conditions, just like they've done with the wildfire information... because... because we're cattle and if the media doesn't terrify us about what could happen to us, we might get decapitated by a flying street sign and blame them for not warning us.
We might not strip the grocery shelves. We might not clog every road out and drain every gas station. Our sailboats might or might not land on our roofs... but... "better safe than sorry"... except how sorry are you to let yourself be jacked to the rafters in fear of everything you've worked for just to find out they were hyping it to "keep you safe".
Horse shit.
They give zero fucks about you. They maybe even respect cows more.
They want you terrified and too taken up with worry and fear and hoops to jump through to have the time and serenity to get in touch with your better sense. Anyone with better sense is a threat to their ability to stay in control. The whole problem is that they stay in control.
...
A slide show... that first picture, sans palm trees, looks just like the view out the new restaurant at the Northwoods in Crescent City... from this last winter's storms.
pipe up any time....
