A good friend of PolicySphere is raising money to help a Christian parish in East Tennessee provide support for locals. If you can, please contribute. We guarantee the money will be well spent.

Since the disastrous floods in west North Carolina and East Tennessee we have been trying to ascertain the level of quality of the government response.

Part of the problem is intrinsic: every disaster is different, and so it's difficult to rate how FEMA and other government bodies are doing against past performance, especially minute-per-minute.

But part of the problem is our hyperpartisan, poorly-funded media. Legacy media outlets want you to believe everything is fine, because they know that the other scenario would reflect poorly on Kamala Harris and her election bid. Of course, right-wing media want you to believe it's a disaster.

And part of the problem is due to benchmarking. Should we benchmark FEMA's response against what it would look like if FEMA was run by the secret love child of Eisenhower and Jeff Bezos? As we wrote earlier, how do you distinguish between "normal" government lethargy, incompetence and, as so many on the right believe, actual malice?

Still, we do what we do for a living, sift through information and try to extract what's true and important and meaningful.

So here's what we can report, tentatively at this point.

What's undeniable is that FEMA has deployed many resources locally: 55 search and rescue teams from North Carolina and other states, consisting of over 1,600 personnel, are conducting operations. 10 federal search and rescue teams are working on the ground in North Carolina. Over 900 personnel have searched 675 areas and rescued 127 survivors. FEMA has shipped over 8.5 million meals, 7 million liters of water, 150 generators, and 220,000 tarps to aid response efforts. 25 shelters have been opened, housing 1,163 people.

The North Carolina National Guard has also delivered over 100,000 pounds of food, water, and critical supplies using C-17 Globemaster III aircraft. Contrary to many anguished xeets at the time, we have not been able to find any verified report that the National Guard of North Carolina, Tennessee, and other affected or neighboring states, was not deployed as soon as possible to the affected areas.

While FEMA's official embrace of DEI is shameful and un-American, we don't see any evidence that it is using "equity" to prioritize efforts on the ground in this current situation.

The biggest problem seems to be what it was two days ago, which is that this is the heart of Appalachia with very bad terrain and many roads have been destroyed or made unusable. Some areas are still difficult to contact due to severed roads and broken communications infrastructure.

At this moment, to us, the bottomline seems to be this: FEMA and other government bodies may or may not be acting slower than they could be in a perfect world, but it doesn't seem like there is a deliberate effort to hamper aid or prioritize it along "equity" lines. Of course we'll know more as the situation unfolds.

What about the policy? We have surveyed the main center and center-right think tanks and their recommended reforms to FEMA, and they have a consistent theme: less Federal government, more local. We're sure there's many ways in which FEMA is bloated and inefficient, but a national disaster of this scale, as well as the many national disasters that the US encounters, require a Federal response. This seems to be a blind spot by too many conservatives: one way to make FEMA more effective is to run it more competently. And the way to run it more competently is to develop a better class of bureaucrats. Which is an even bigger challenge.

Policy News You Need To Know

#AI #BigTech — It's been rumored for a long time, and now it's official: OpenAI has raised $6.6 billion in a funding round that "values" OpenAI at $157 billion. Led by previous investor Thrive Capital, Joshua Kushner's firm, the new cash brings OpenAI’s total raised to $17.9 billion. Thrive invested around $1.3 billion, with an exclusive option to invest up to $1 billion more at the same valuation through 2025. Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity, and MGX also participated in the fundraising. (It should be noted that "valuations" reported in the press are pretty meaningless: they represent paper value and in case do not take into account for the fact that investors invest in preferred stock which is different than common classes of stock.) OpenAI and its investors have spent a lot of time in DC lobbying against open-source AI under the guise of "safety," but really in order to undermine competitors.

#ILAStrike — "Port employers represented by the United States Maritime Alliance late Wednesday said they are open to resuming negotiations with the International Longshoremen’s Association, but not under pre-conditions set by the union," Freight Waves reports. President Biden is backing the union, which is demanding a more than 50% salary increase and a promise of no automation at all in US ports. If you haven't done so before, you should read our article on how to fix this situation.

#Education #DEI — Terrifying, maddening story out of Connecticut. There's a young woman in Connecticut, Aleysha Ortiz, who graduated from Hartford Public High School and attends the University of Connecticut, who does not know how to read. Because she was never taught, CT Mirror reports. Why? In a word: DEI. In two words: victimhood culture. It's tragic. Attorney Ted Frank summarizes the situation: "Ortiz got special education because she asserted disabilities. As part of that, every year, she and her mother negotiated an individualized education program tailored to her disability under the federal IDE Act. Ortiz negotiated for special recording and talk-to-text privileges to help her grades (which she apparently needed because she couldn’t read or write), but never demanded to actually learn anything. If the school had tried to flunk her for being an ignoramus, they would’ve been sued, so the school district went along with the negotiated IEP of waving her through as a pretend honor student. Now that she’s in college (!), she’s complaining that she got exactly the education she demanded. And none of the press coverage holds her accountable. The school offered an intensive remedial reading program and a delayed graduation and Ortiz demanded to graduate on time. Ortiz repeatedly chose the illusion of success over actual learning. If you delve several dozen paragraphs into the story, one learns that Ortiz was monstrously disruptive her first several years in class, regularly screaming in and expelled from classrooms. This surely hurt the education of her classmates in addition to making it impossible to teach her." Tragic. Infuriating. And connects with something we reported on yesterday, which is that disability (real or fake or in-between) is the new front of DEI.

#Education — Meanwhile, RAND has a study on something called "deeper learning," which "involves cultivating the critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills that students need to be successful in their college, career, and civic life. It also involves encouraging students to be active participants in their learning." This is all well and good, but what about reading and math?

#Education — While the tragic case of Aleysha Ortiz may be extreme, the problem of lowered standards seems to be across the board, according to a much-discussed article in The Atlantic which asserts that nowadays students at elite colleges find it too challenging to read an entire book cover-to-cover.

#Immigration — "Studies in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands now all find the same thing --low skill, low wage immigration from outside Europe […] is a net fiscal cost, not benefit, to Western economies," author Matt Goodwin writes.

#Immigration — The floor to the loyal opposition: new report from the American Immigration Council finds that a mass deportation operation would cost the US government an estimated $315 billion, and reduce GDP by 4.2-6.8%.

#Immigration — We try not to write too much about immigration but it is a key issue, and American Moment President Saurabh Sharma had an outstanding xeet explaining the mechanics of how illegal immigration drives up the cost of housing: "What happens is 24 illegal aliens will hole up in 2x2 apartments in high-density areas. Slumlords like it because they will never ask to have anything fixed/cleaned. That forces entry-level homebuyers like young married couples into a higher home price bracket. There’s not a lot of new stock because our senile president and yaaas kween BIPOC brat girlboss veep have destroyed the American economy so everything is more expensive. So suddenly everyone from recent grads to millionaires are competing for the same narrow band of starter homes."

#Debt — By the end of his term in office, Joe Biden will have added $8 trillion to the national debt. (Via Preston Brashers)