Friday, September 13, 2019



Why everyone's talking about emergency `grab bags'



British police forces have tweeted that we need to be prepared for an emergency. What do they know that we don't, asks Damian Whitworth. Plus, what Bear Grylls has in his bag

Quick! Get out! Tin hats on. Now, where's your emergency grab bag? What, you don't have one? Where have you been? Not on Twitter that's for sure.

On Sunday night a new viral hashtag began sweeping social media, started by, of all people, the British police. A number of forces put out messages and videos urging people to gather the contents for an emergency "grab bag". In a tweet hashtagged BePrepared, Police Scotland urged us to get packing. "September is preparedness month. Emergencies can happen at any time and it's recommended to have a #GrabBag ready containing essential items including medication, copies of important documents, food/water, torch, radio and other personal items." An accompanying diagram of a backpack included, among other things, a whistle, a radio and a first aid kit. Other forces put out videos.

The tweets sparked an immediate reaction, ranging from panic and puzzlement to satire and outright mockery. Did the police know something the rest of us didn't - were we just preparing for a War of the Worlds-style apocalypse? And did any of this have anything to do with Brexit?

Soon on social media the bag was being re-packed with small dogs, bows and arrows, Mo‰t & Chandon champagne, positive thoughts and sunlit uplands. Brexit emergency grab bags tended to be empty. A Rees-Mogg bag was stuffed with a top hat, a Victorian writing bureau and a piece of the True Cross. Some would-be survivalists contended that they could tackle whatever Armageddon threw their way as long as they had Tom Hardy stowed in their knapsack. Some just tweeted an image of a bag of crisps.

The tweets from police forces were in fact part of a month-long campaign on emergency preparedness - hashtagged 30Days30WaysUK - apparently inspired by similar campaigns in America. "The messaging is part of a general resilience-awareness campaign that runs each year during September which emergency services and partners across Britain are taking part in," Police Scotland said in a subsequent statement, but the damage was done.

There were complaints that the campaign was scaremongering and some inevitably suspected a conspiracy; that the authorities knew something catastrophic was about to occur and weren't telling us the full story. Mostly, though, the response came in memes.

Despite the humour, not everyone thinks that serious grab-baggers are sad sacks. "I have both a grab bag and a contingency of where I will go with my family," says Ben Fogle, the explorer and TV presenter. "I don't think it's over-the-top at all. On the contrary, I think it's rather sensible. You have a grab bag on a boat. You have one if you are mountaineering. Why not have one at home? I won't reveal the full contents, but it includes a battery-powered radio. A spare phone and battery pack. An EPIRB. Cash."

An EPIRB is an emergency position-indicating radiobeacon, useful for Fogle in the sort of wild places where he spends half his life (he is emailing from Iceland), but the rest of us could probably safely fill that spot in the bag with a couple of packets of digestives.

Not all explorers have a bag packed and ready to go. "I think it's bollocks," says David Hempleman-Adams, the polar adventurer, mountaineer and record-breaking balloonist. "If you are on a sailing boat it's common sense to have a grab bag so you've got all the stuff if you hit a whale or you are in a storm. You always take emergency stuff if you are on a mountain.

"But you see a `grab bag for Brexit' and you think: `This is just a money-making thing.' " He believes there are consequences to promoting such precautions. "I think people are going to go raiding shops. And some of these things [in emergency packs] have a six-month life. You don't want to drink water in a plastic bottle after six months. I think it's a marketing gimmick."

He even suggests that a grab bag could create exactly the sort of complication it is intended to prevent. "It's a frickin' nonsense. You know, when you need it you forget where it is. If it's that urgent to get out of an emergency situation like that, you have got to get out quick. If you are hunting around for a grab bag that can probably be more dangerous than having one."

The 30Days30Ways campaign, it transpires, originated in the US state of Washington, a part of the world that sits pretty low on the disaster-league table. Then again, in Clark County, where the emergency services started this 11 years ago, there were tornado warnings yesterday, so they do seem to have cast-iron excuses for packing grab-and-go bags there.

It is understandable that this was born in the USA, where many regard stockpiling as a national pastime and some see a looming disaster as an excellent excuse to buy assault rifles, dig their own well and fantasise about the feds knocking on the door. Silicon Valley billionaires have funded a bunker-building boom in remote corners of New Zealand. Perhaps with our love of Bear Grylls survival shows and pre-Brexit wine stockpiling there's a little bit of us too that loves a touch of disaster planning. At festivals this summer teenagers were all diving into the mosh pit wearing fanny packs - I'm pretty sure they weren't that well-prepared at Woodstock.

On its website 30Days30WaysUK doesn't discuss the importance of fannypack prepping for Glastonbury, but it does asks us to think beyond the headlines of terror attacks, storms and flooding, and global natural disasters and focus on the things most likely to affect us: power cuts, gas leaks, fires, transport strikes and road closures.

It's something that we are generally quite bad at, reckons Andrew Gissing, a disaster-management expert with Risk Frontiers, a global research company. About a quarter of us make contingency plans for the biggest risks he says we face, which in Britain are a pandemic or flooding.

The most confusing thing about the grab-bag graphic that went viral was the "emergency plan", which was inaccessibly stashed at the bottom of the pack. Dip into local-emergency responder websites and you find - once you get past the dismaying realisation that you don't store your important documents above flood level in a fireproof box - that there are a lot of "do you have a plan?" questions. These put me in mind of antenatal classes and their earnest talk of creating a "birthing plan" (after some thought we devised a birthing plan: "have the baby").

"An emergency plan is what you are going to do if something bad happens - a flood, or a bad storm or a fire. How you are going to prepare in advance and how you are going to recover," Gissing says. And yes a grab bag should be part of that plan.

If you want one but can't be bothered to prepare it yourself, you can always buy one from Bushcraft Lab, a Cambridge company that offers a Two-Person SHTF (shit hits the fan) emergency bag for œ219.99. This includes rations, water, a 15m rope, survival shelter, bivouac bags and a condom (for carrying water. There will be no time for any of the other when the SHTF).

"There's a certain type of person that gets into this," says Gareth Macfarlane, who owns the outfitter. "Wargamers, that type of guy, who lives with their parents. They tend to be into the prepper kind of thing."

Although his bags have been steady sellers, in the past six months demand has dried up and he hasn't flogged a single grab bag. Perhaps all this grab-bag talk will be a boon for his business. "I'm waiting for it to implode on Brexit and I will be laughing," he says.

He's laughing when he says this. It's a joke. Repeat, joke. He is not part of a prepper Brexit conspiracy.


GRAB BAG ESSENTIALS
By Bear Grylls

"You can do this quietly and effectively without a big fuss but the words `just in case' have saved many a survivor. And it is the small things that can make a huge difference. Above all survival is always about a determined and resourceful spirit. NGU: Never give up."

What you need

 *  Water - one gallon of water per person per day for at least three days, for drinking and sanitation
 *  Food - at least a three-day supply of non-perishable food
 *  Battery-powered or hand crank radio and an NOAA Weather Radio with tone alert
 *  Flashlight
 *  First aid kit
 *  Extra batteries
 *  Whistle
 *  Dust mask
 *  Plastic sheeting
 *  Duct tape
 *  Moist towelettes, garbage bags and plastic ties for personal sanitation
 *  Wrench or pliers to turn off utilities
 *  Manual can opener for food
 *  Local maps
 *  Cell phone with chargers and a back-up battery
 *  Pet food (for your pet)

SOURCE 
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-everyones-talking-about-emergency-grab-bags-cdkvtkrx5






San Antonio to Face the Music for Chick-fil-A Airport Ban

On Thursday, five Texans who frequent the San Antonio airport and wish to eat Chick-fil-A there filed a lawsuit against the City of San Antonio under S.B. 1978, a new Texas law dubbed the "Save Chick-fil-A Bill." The new law forbids government actors from discriminating against religious groups or those associated with them, and removes government legal immunity from agencies that do so. The law's passage followed the San Antonio airport's ban on Chick-fil-A, citing "a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior" and calling the fast-food chain "a symbol of hate."

"The city's continued exclusion of Chick-fil-A is based 'wholly or partly' on Chick-fil-A's past and present contributions, donations, and support for certain religious organizations, including the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which it provides through WinShape, its charitable foundation," the lawsuit explains, citing the new law directly.

In the suit, the plaintiffs ask the court: to declare that San Antonio violated the law and continues to do so; to issue an injunction to prevent the city and the company Paradies LagardŠre from excluding Chick-fil-A from the airport; to issue another injunction compelling the city to install a Chick-fil-A in the airport; to issue a third injunction preventing the city from "taking any adverse action against Chick-fil-A or any other person or entity, which is based wholly or partly on that person or entity's support for religious organizations that oppose homosexual behavior;" and to order the city to pay attorneys' fees and other appropriate relief.

"If you thought we were bluffing, now you know we're not," Jonathan Saenz, Esq., president of the Texas Values Coalition, said in a statement on the lawsuit. "This is just one of many lawsuits that we expect to be filed against the San Antonio City Council for their illegal ban of Chick-fil-A. The continued religious ban on Chick-fil-A by the San Antonio City Council has by left citizens with no choice but to take this case to court.  Any other vendor that tries to replace Chick-fil-A at the airport will be doing so under a major cloud of long and costly litigation with the city."

The lawsuit presents the entire story of liberal outrage at Chick-fil-A. In 2010, the restaurant company gave over $8 million to the WinShape Foundation, a charitable organization run by the family of late Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy. WinShape donated some of that money to Bible-believing Christian organizations such as the Family Research Council (FRC), Exodus International, Alliance Defense Fund (now Alliance Defending Freedom), the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and more.

In 2011, Equality Matters published a report about these donations. Liberal outlets seized on it. In 2012, Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy said, "I think we are inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, 'We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.' I pray God's mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about."

After this, liberal mayors of Boston and San Francisco said that their cities had no room for Chick-fil-A. Chicago alderman Joe Moreno said he would block Chick-fil-A from entering that city, and then-mayor Rahm Emanuel supported him, saying, "Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values." WinShape caved, dropping its support for FRC, Focus on the Family, Exodus International, and others.

Yet liberals continued to demonize Chick-fil-A over WinShape's donations to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army. These organizations hold to Christian teaching on sexuality, but activists acted as though any organization holding to the Bible on LGBT issues must be alienated and blacklisted.

This lawsuit is welcome news, and it should encourage WinShape to reconsider its decision not to fund more controversial Christian organizations. FRC and Alliance Defending Freedom are wrongly accused of being "hate groups" by the corrupt Southern Poverty Law Center. WinShape should take a stand by choosing to support them once again.

SOURCE 






Nurse Testifies Infants Surviving Abortion Left to Die in Hospital ‘Soiled Utility Room’

Registered nurse Jill Stanek testified before a House committee that she cared for an infant with Down syndrome who had survived an abortion and was left to die in the hospital’s “soiled utility room.”

In her prepared testimony on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, Stanek, who now serves as national campaign chair at the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, described an incident 20 years ago when she worked at Christ Hospital in Illinois.

Stanek said she became aware Christ Hospital “committed abortions into the second and third trimesters,” a procedure known as induced labor abortion, which sometimes resulted in babies born alive.

“In the event a baby was aborted alive, he or she received no medical assessments or care but was only given what my hospital called ‘comfort care,’” Stanek continued.

Calling attention to the fact that babies do, indeed, survive abortions, Stanek described a significant incident:

One night, a nursing co-worker was transporting a baby who had been aborted because he had Down syndrome to our Soiled Utility Room to die – because that’s where survivors were taken.

I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone, so I rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about 1/2 pound, and was about the size of my hand. He was too weak to move very much, expending all his energy attempting to breathe. Toward the end he was so quiet I couldn’t tell if he was still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his heart was still beating through his chest wall.

After he was pronounced dead, I folded his little arms across his chest, wrapped him in a tiny shroud, and carried him to the hospital morgue where we took all our dead patients.

Stanek said Christ Hospital “readily admitted babies there survived abortions.”

As she wrote in a column at LifeSiteNews, a spokesman told the Chicago Sun-Times “between 10 percent and 20 percent” of aborted babies with genetic defects “survive for short periods outside the womb.”

“From what I observed, it was not uncommon for a live aborted baby to linger for an hour or two or even longer,” Stanek testified. “One abortion survivor I was aware of lived for almost eight hours.”

She added:

Of 16 babies Christ Hospital aborted during the year 2000, four that I knew of were aborted alive. Each of those babies – two boys and two girls – lived between 1-1/2 and 3 hours. One baby was 28 weeks’ gestation – 7 months old – and weighed two pounds, seven ounces.

Stanek used this incident to refer back to the words of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who said during an interview in January that an abortion bill introduced in his state’s House of Delegates would permit an “infant” to be “delivered” and “resuscitated, if that’s what the mother and the family desired,” until the physicians and mother discussed whether the baby should be allowed to live or die.

“If a mother is in labor...the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians & mother"

“When I heard Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, describe during an interview the process by which doctors determine to shelve unwanted newborns to die, it hit painfully home to me,” Stanek told committee members during the hearing. “He said, quoting, ‘If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired.’”

“Gov. Northam was right,” she said. “That is exactly what happens.”

House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (LA) and his colleagues Reps. Ann Wagner (MO) and pro-life caucus chair Chris Smith (NJ) announced a hearing on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act legislation, which would protect babies born alive after abortion from infanticide.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other Democrat leaders have blocked a vote on the bill more than 80 times.

Scalise and Wagner filed a discharge petition on the legislation in April. All 197 House Republicans, but only three Democrats, have signed onto the petition. In order to bypass Pelosi and force a vote on the Born-Alive Act, House Republicans need 17 more signatures — which they hope to obtain after the hearing presents the facts to Americans, provided by experts on abortion.

SOURCE 






‘Anti-semitism’ driving far-Leftist challenge to Australian treasurer

NSW Senator Andrew Bragg has attacked the “disgraceful challenge” against Josh Frydenberg’s eligibility to sit in parliament and said it was underpinned by “anti-semitism”.

Speaking in the Senate this afternoon under parliamentary privilege, Senator Bragg described the Section 44 legal challenge against the Treasurer as “illegitimate” and driven by “people who have an obsession with the Holocaust”.

Senator Bragg said Michael Staindl, who has launched a High Court challenge testing Mr Frydenberg’s re-election, failed Kooyong candidate Oliver Yates and lawyer Trevor Poulton — who has written a book called The Holocaust Denier — should “be ashamed of themselves for their appalling behaviour”.

“They are band together in the shadows to try and unseat the son of a Holocaust survivor,” Senator Bragg told parliament. “They are pretending that they are not working together when they clearly are. The basis for this challenge is anti-semitism.”

Senator Bragg, who said he studied genocide at university, also warned of a “rising tide of anti-semitism in Australia”.  “I believe anti-semitism is a rising problem in NSW and across Australia. Anti-semitic incidents have increased by 60 per cent in the past year. There has been extraordinarily large increases on email threats, telephone based threats, and vandalism,” he said.

Senator Bragg accused Mr Staindl, Mr Poulton and Mr Yates of being involved with an “outrageous attempt” to challenge Mr Frydenberg’s citizenship. “His mother Erica Straus fled the Holocaust and arrived in Australia from Hungary in 1950.”

Senator Bragg, who referenced the case of Jewish Liberal MP Julian Leeser who has been subject to “anti-semitic behaviour”, said Mr Yates — who claimed only 8.98 per cent of the Kooyong vote at the May 18 election — was “involved in this outrage”.

“We are proud of Jewish Australians. They have risen to the highest offices in the land. We are proud of Josh Frydenberg, he is a great Australian, and a great friend who is well regarded across this parliament. The Liberals will always call out racism.

“I call on our education sector to keep teaching the truth about the Holocaust. We cannot afford to forget. What begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews. I call on all Australia’s community and political leaders to never walk past anti-semitism or racism in any form. “Racism is a sickness of the heart and the mind, it should never be tolerated.”

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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