Nader Akhlaghy is not a household name by any stretch of the imagination. An Iranian immigrant, Mr. Akhlaghy has recently availed himself to be considered in two elections that I am aware of. The first, back in 2022, was a run for US Congress under the Peace and Freedom Party banner in New York’s 5th District. He withdrew before the election was held.

More recently, he ran as a Republican for President of the United States.

Nader Akhlaghy (not Ralph)

But just today, the FEC is in receipt of three Form 99s from the now former presidential candidate. Form 99 is a form for “miscellaneous” filings. It is there, through his son, Amirhossein Akhlaghy, the campaign Treasurer, that Nader (not to be confused with Ralph, another 3rd party candidate) has again dropped out of the running.

This is Ralph

And not a moment too soon. Unlike the other Nader, this one knows that his name on the ballot might foul things up with unintentional consequences like getting another Republican elected when that would be a bad, bad thing.

So, in his own words, as shown on FEC Form 99, Nader Akhlaghy believes “Mrs. Harris is a more suitable person for this presidential term, and…will withdraw from the election in her favor…”.

America needs more responsible presidential candidates like Nader Akhlaghy.

One of the many headlines about Donald Trump over the last 24 hours was his response to a question from Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago yesterday.  Asked if it was true that he had spoken to Vladimir Putin at least seven times since leaving office, Trump said he wouldn’t comment on that subject, but claimed if he did, “it would be a smart thing.”

He knows that we know.  He even knows that his MAGA base knows.  And he is using that fact over and over as we enter the last three weeks of the presidential campaign. 

Just have a look at these headlines taken from the excellent news aggregator Taegan Goddard’s “Political Wire.”  We’ll begin with one from early this morning: “Trump has spent millions on anti-trans ads.”  He knows that we know that he doesn’t give a shit about trans people, and he knows that this non-issue pisses off the libs, and that is at least in part why he’s running the ads.  The other part is, of course, that he has polled his base and knows the ads work.

“Trump will work the ‘fry cooker’ at McDonald’s.”  He knows that we know what a non-issue his trolling of Kamala Harris is; he knows that Kamala knows it as well.  That’s why he’s doing it.

“Trump brags about his math skills and Economic Plans.”  He knows what a disaster his performance was yesterday in Chicago in front of a bunch of business executives who have made their millions knowing the truth about stuff like tariffs.  He doesn’t care, because he knows that the lies he tells don’t matter, whether they’re about tariffs or inflation or how reducing taxes balloons the deficit, because he knows they know it’s all a Trumpian heads-I-win-tails-you-lose game.

“Prisons offered gender affirming care under Trump.”  He knows that we know it happened, but it doesn’t matter, because his base doesn’t know, and if the subject comes up, he’ll just deny it.

“Amarosa says Trump dictated letters for doctors.”  He knows that we know this.  His so-called medical history has been a joke since he had the wild-haired doctor in New York City take dictation while Trump phoned from outside on the street in his limo.  Remember that one?  He does.

“Trump refuses to back off claims that Migrants eat pets.”  He knows what a crock that story is.  His own running mate admitted as much when he told an interviewer it was okay if he “made up stories” because the mainstream media wouldn’t pay attention to the issue of immigration.  He knows that we know; he knows that his MAGA base probably knows it’s a made-up story.  That’s why he delights in sticking with it.

“Trump lied 19 times in town hall event.”  He knows that we know.  He comes up with the lies and tells them because a lot of the time he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and has to lie – see also economy – and because it pisses off the libs and delights the MAGA base.

“Trump calls himself the ‘father of IVF’.” Even the New York Times called this one “an eyebrow-raising nickname,” a line that must have had to be run by A.G. Sulzberger himself it’s so out of character for the “Newspaper of Record.”  See?  Even the New York Times knows what a gigantic lie that one was.  He knows that we know, which is why he drilled down even further, claiming at his Fox all-female town hall, “We really are the party for IVF. We want fertilization, and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF, even more than them.”

“Trump abruptly cancels another mainstream TV interview.”  He knows that we know he is in decline and is scared shitless of coming apart at the seams during a Q&A over which he has less control than he does at his own rallies.  See also:  his jaw-dropping performance at the rally with Kristi Noem, which he called to a halt and began doing his puppet-on-a-string version of rocking out to everything from the Village People’s “YMCA” to Pavarotti singing “Ave Maria,” of all things. 

In her Substack column yesterday, his niece, Mary L. Trump, said that Trump is “decompensating before our eyes.” He knows it.  He knows that we know it.  The only thing missing from his campaign at this point is a laugh-track.  He knows that his base is in on the joke, and he knows that we know it, and there is nothing we can do but point it out and pray that a few “undecideds” take notice and go to the polls.  He knows that we know, even if the “undecideds” don’t.

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Trump Abortion Laws Restrict My Choice of Colleges

As a young woman not quite old enough to vote this November, the prospect of Donald Trump being my “protector” terrifies me.

 By taking away the national right to abortions and leaving it up to each state to make policy, I now must acutely consider each state’s abortion laws in considering which colleges I may attend next Fall.

It should benefit Gen Z men to know that their girlfriends can have access to abortion care, should she need it.

I don’t want Trump to be my protector. After hearing him brag about assaulting women in a resurfaced 2005 interview—saying, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”— I’m understandably scared.

His “success” in appointing Supreme Court justices who would go on to overturn Roe is something he is trying to distance himself from. He knows that to win, he must go more “liberal” when it comes to abortion. He has said he wants abortion to be a state right rather than an all-out abortion ban he supported in 2020.

Worries Aplenty

I worry for myself and the women around me because many states won’t stop at abortions, going after emergency contraceptives and attempting to shut down Planned Parenthood, a crucial source of women’s health care for poor women and many college students. These clinics, after decades of protestors screaming at women, “baby killers!” provide breast cancer screenings and other women-specific care.

Additionally, sexual assaults are common on and around college campuses. According to the National Institute of Justice, in 85% to 90% of sexual assaults reported by college women, they knew their attackers.

It terrifies me that I could go off to college and have friends, or myself,  be the victim of a crime and not have access to the healthcare I might need.

Alex Cooper, the host of the podcast Call Her Daddy, had presidential nominee Kamala Harris on her show Earlier in October. Cooper, who is known as the “founding father” to her audience, discussed women’s reproductive rights in response to the Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade and the restrictive policies proposed by Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who thinks women with cats instead of children are inferior and that parents, like himself, should get extra votes in elections.

Punishment, Trump Says

Trump, we should never forget, said during the 2016 presidential campaign that women who get abortions must be punished, something the misnamed “right to life” movement had not included in its menacing rhetoric.

The female host built a huge following by speaking out for women on sexual liberation, abortion rights, and how to deal with bad romantic relationships. “Call Her Daddy” refers to women acting like “the man”—confident and unafraid to speak their minds—unlike the submissive role for women promoted by many men, including Vance. Another aspect of her celebrity interviews and solo episodes is her raunchy sex advice, which shocked many Harris supporters.

Cooper’s audience is more than 90% female, with 75% viewers under 35. Globally, her podcast is #2, behind only the conservative podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.

Trump Flip-Flops On Abortion

While Trump bragged about appointing the three right-wing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe the first time, a suitable case came before then. He seeks now to distance himself from his awful choices. Just last month, Trump argued the Floridian six-week abortion ban was too short, not that we know for sure whether the former president understands that most women have no idea that they are pregnant at six weeks.

Vice President Harris responded to his words, seeking to show that what he says at the moment cannot be trusted if he gets back to the White House surrounded by people who want to pass a federal law banning abortion, most contraceptives, and in vitro fertilization (IVF), which many couples need to create a family.

Harris, mockingly, said, “This is the same guy who said that women should be punished for having abortions… who, as president, hand-selected three United States Supreme Court members with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe V. Wade, and they did just as he intended. There are now 20 states with Trump Abortion bans,  including bans that make no exception for rape or incest.”

More to Harris’ point, in 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, after defending a no-exception abortion ban, said he would aim to “eliminate all rapists from the streets.”

Abbott is vowing to take on the impossible. While I agree that there are ways to minimize the power of rapists and improve women’s safety, there is no 100% removal of any form of crime.

How are government officials going to police college parties? Dating on campus? Half of college-aged women reporting aggravated sexual assault were on a date with the perpetrator.

Harris Takes Action

Harris talked about her upbringing, being the older sister of a divorced mom. She shared an anecdote about her teenage friend, who confided that her stepfather was sexually abusing her.

Though herself just a teenager, like me, Harris swung into action. The future prosecutor brought her friend to the Harris household, giving her refuge. Then Harris and her mother encouraged the young victim to come forward: “It upset me so that someone, where they should feel safe and protected, was being so horribly abused and violated,” Harris now tells campaign rallies.

Helping that sexual assault victim set the trajectory of Harris’s career. “I decided at a young age that I wanted to do the work of protecting vulnerable people,”  Harris tells audiences. She went on to get a law degree and become a local prosecutor right out of law school.

Harris wants to create a country that empowers women who are victims of sexual assault to come forward and seek justice. In America, one in three women will be sexually assaulted. The victims are females of all kinds—married adults, college students, and even children.

The millions of women who watch or listen to Call Her Daddy find hope in Harris’s promise that she will act for them as president, just as she did for her high school classmate – whether as a protector against sexual assault or of abortion rights.

Harris’s childhood stories, trials and tribulations, and hopes for America on the Call Her Daddy podcast have greatly humanized her to young audiences—many of whom have adopted the “lesser of two evils” mentality, meaning they planned to vote for Harris only because they considered her less awful than Trump. Overcoming that attitude is crucial to Harris’s chances of becoming president in a nation where hardly anyone knew who she was just a few months ago.

Shocked, They Say

Many Americans, or at least many of the conservative pundits who support Trump,  expressed shock that Harris would appear on the Call Her Daddy podcast due to the raunchy topics that Cooper asks her celebrity guests. One X user wrote, “Let me get this straight. Hurricane victims in North Carolina and Georgia are pleading for help from the government after losing their loved ones, and their homes. At the same time, Kamala Harris is doing a sex podcast called ‘Call her Daddy.’ Talk about priorities.”

Harris addressed viewers as the “daddy gang” and shared her love for Alex’s podcasts. Harris clearly believes that going on that show may be crucial to her winning re-election. I also think it is key for voters to understand her policies based on her driving factor: helping everyday people.

At about the same time, Trump has also appeared on several men’s podcasts with large Gen-Z male viewership to tap into the “Manosphere.” Trump aims to persuade young men that his policies will benefit them.

That matters for Trump because the Harvard Youth Poll found that only 23% of Americans aged 18 to 29 plan to vote for Trump. When only young men are counted, 53% support Harris, while only 36% favor Trump.

Abortion, however, is not an issue that only the female viewers of Call Her Daddy should care about. After all, every child has a biological father and mother. It should benefit Gen Z men to know that their girlfriends can have access to abortion care, should they need it.

Let’s hope that young men ponder that, especially considering the proposals by likely Trump appointees to seek ways to make contraceptives unavailable and, they hope, illegal.

IF YOU ENJOYED KATHERINE’S ARTICLE, PLEASE DONATE TO HELP EMPOWER US TO MENTOR AND SHOWCASE MORE YOUNG WRITERS LIKE HER.

The post How Trump Forces Me to Consider State Laws in Choosing a College appeared first on DCReport.org.

If you haven’t yet listened to it, this interview between Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times and vice presidential candidate JD Vance is well worth hearing in full. It is at once disarming and terrifying. Vance, unlike the man at the top of his ticket, speaks like a competent, intelligent person. He comes across as smart and thoughtful. He appears to have moments of real empathy and humanity.

And then you tune into what he’s actually saying (and refusing to say).

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One of the more revealing moments of the conversation was in what initially sounds like a nice story. Vance talks about his conversion to Catholicism, and he gives a thoughtful answer about what drew him to the church. And he said his wife Usha, who grew up Hindu but fairly secular, was incredibly supportive: “she was, like, really into it,” Vance said. “Meaning, she thought that thinking about the question of converting and getting baptized and becoming a Christian, she thought that they were good for me, in sort of a good-for-your-soul kind of way. And I don’t think I would have ever done it without her support, because I felt kind of bad about it, right? Like, you didn’t sign up for a weekly churchgoer. I feel terrible for my wife because we go to church almost every Sunday, unless we’re on the road.”

That’s a really lovely answer! And it illustrates what sounds like a pretty lovely marriage between two considerate people who want the other to be happy; they compromise, and they also recognize when they are asking a lot of their partner.

Then Garcia-Navarro asks if Usha has converted as well, and Vance says this:

No she hasn’t. That’s why I feel bad about it. She’s got three kids. Obviously I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church. And I just felt kind of bad. Like, oh, you didn’t sign up to marry a weekly churchgoer. Are you OK with this? And she was more than OK with it, and that was a big part of the confirmation that this was the right thing for me.

Did you miss it?

She’s got three kids. Obviously I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church.

I actually hit pause and replayed this section because it was so bizarre. To be clear, Usha’s three kids are JD Vance’s three kids. He did not marry a single mom. These are his own children. And yet he describes them as his wife’s. He says he “helps” with them (have you ever heard a mother say she “helps” with her own offspring?). And my head really spun at the “she feels more responsibility” comment, which just makes no sense. He’s the one who wants to go to church, and to whom this community is important. She’s there to support him. Why would she feel more responsibility to keep the kids quiet? Wouldn’t he want to repay the favor she’s doing him by doing more to make the whole experience easier for everyone?

The answer is that she’s the woman, and so of course the kids are her job.

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This is fundamental to understand about JD Vance: He is obsessed with the idea of the traditional family, which means couples absolutely must have children, but those children are the mother’s responsibility to raise. The father’s role is one of authority and provision, but not real engagement or anything resembling equal care.

Garcia-Navarro also asks Vance about his “childless cat ladies” comment, and his clarification is certainly clarifying. He didn’t mean to insult people who couldn’t have children, he said. But he definitely did mean to insult people who don’t have children for reasons he thinks are dumb, like concerns about climate change. He claims — bizarrely — that political leaders are telling people not to have children because of climate change, which isn’t something I have ever heard a politician say. He calls that view sociopathic and deranged.

There is very little in the way of actual evidence that significant numbers of young people are forgoing children because of climate change; it honestly seems to be one of those justifications people give because it sounds more selfless than “I just don’t want children” (which gets you judged by people like JD Vance). Climate change isn’t a non-issue in childbearing decisions, but it is at most a distant star in a galaxy of much more salient reasons. I sincerely doubt that there are more than a tiny, tiny number of people who actually really want children, but deny themselves that pleasure primarily because of climate fears.

Surely JD Vance knows that. But that’s not the point. The point is that JD Vance thinks something is wrong with you if you just don’t want kids. He wasn’t going to say that on a New York Times podcast because he doesn’t want to further alienate young women. So he picked a reason for forgoing childbearing that we hear floating about, but that doesn’t really describe the vast majority of child-free people’s decisions. He could refuse to fully walk back his comments and continue to claim that intentionally forgoing children is sociopathic, but put a cover of plausible deniability on it.

When Vance talks about abortion, it closes this intellectual loop that ties “kids are a mother’s responsibility” to “women who don’t want kids are deranged” to “we must force women to have children.” Perhaps the darkest thing about Vance is that he actually does understand why many women choose to terminate pregnancies — he just doesn’t care, the same way he doesn’t care that women may not desire kids. “I knew a lot of young women who had abortions,” he told Garcia-Navarro, and “almost always, it was motivated by this view that that was the only choice really available to them. That if they had had the baby, it would have destroyed their relationships, their family, their education, their career.”

Does Vance then pivot to talking about how he might help to ameliorate any of these very real penalties that so many women experience when they have unplanned (and sometimes even planned) pregnancies? No. He says that “we want to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word” and “promote more people choosing life,” which means… letting states set their own abortion laws. But also a national ban after 15 weeks, which he supported, and also a wholesale national ban, which he supported in 2022 but maybe no longer does now that we’re in a “different world” (one in which Republicans are losing and JD Vance wants to win, I guess).

The answer was nonsense; Vance simply dodged the question of what he actually believes the law should be. But that first part — that many women have abortions because they correctly assess that they have much to lose if they become mothers or have additional children before they’re ready — tells us a lot about Vance. He knows these women are right when they assess their own lives; there is plenty of research at this point about the ways in which unplanned pregnancies can be profoundly disruptive, and the ways in which women who are able to get abortions wind up significantly better off than women who are denied them. He wants to deny women abortions anyway. The same way he doesn’t believe there is any good excuse for a woman not having children, he doesn’t believe that a woman’s other aspirations — her relationships, her education, her career, her existing family, her life — matter all that much.

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You’ll note that Vance, for all of his obsession with children and families, did not quit his job to raise his own children (he relied on his mother-in-law for that). He did not have as many children as God gave him; he seems to have carefully planned the family he desired. He did not sacrifice his career or his education or his political ambitions; only his wife has done that. He is obsessed with having children, but he doesn’t see even his own children as primarily his responsibility. Children are an idea to him, part of an ideal society he wants to build — one in which men are, like Vance, not actually equally responsible for the raising of children. Raising children is women’s work — and it’s not labor we can justify forgoing.

None of this comes out of ignorance. It comes out of seeing and understanding just how difficult JD Vance’s ideal world would be for women, and wanting to impose those difficulties anyway.

The tone of the interview, though, hardly sounded his harsh. And that’s what was so jarring about it: It sounded like a nice, normal conversation unless you really paid attention to the content. But sometimes, the mask slipped.

Early in the interview, Vance talks about his law school friend Sophia, who shared some of their old emails with the Times. He says he was hurt by her decision to share private correspondence but he still loves her and misses her friendship. But when he starts talking about the issue over which they split — gender-affirming care for minors — it’s almost like he remembers he’s speaking to an audience instead of a fellow human being, and his voice turns hard and flinty. You should listen to it yourself, but here’s the relevant part:

I am very sad about what happened between me and Sofia. Going back to 2013, 2014, she’s my friend, she’s transgender. I didn’t fully understand it, I just thought: I love this person, and I care about her, and I don’t have to sort of agree with every medical decision that she makes or even understand it to say, well, I love you, I care about you. I’m still going to hang out with you, we’re still going to talk about football and be friends. And we had this conversation — can’t remember when it was, maybe around the time of my Senate campaign, maybe before. But I had children at that point, and we were talking about gender-affirming care for minors. I think a more honest way to say it is not “gender-affirming care” but “chemical experimentation on minors.” And my affection for her didn’t mean that I thought this was a reasonable thing to do to 11-year-old children who are confused.

The bolding is mine, and that is the moment when you can hear Vance’s Trump campaign brain click on, and he shifts from one part of the plan — come across as human and empathetic — to the other, which is to use right-wing phraseology and not say anything that will challenge his base’s view of him as a tough opponent of transgender healthcare. He knows he needs to sound empathetic to trans people for a New York Times audience; he also knows he needs to sound judgmental of and disgusted by them for his own voters. Hearing him shift between these two selves — the human self and the Trump-lite self — is chilling.

This is who JD Vance is: A chameleon. He’s a man who has had to make himself into many different people, and in many ways that’s an admirable skill. But he seems to have ceded a moral core for a hard-right philosophical one. Where there perhaps used to be real empathy there is now the practiced miming of empathy. Where there were once hard moral lines — Trump is America’s Hitler, to use Vance’s own words — there are now porous borders. And as Vance’s moral center became more malleable, his very specific philosophy around family, children, and female obligation seems to have hardened.

xx Jill

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From Financial Constraints to Health Concerns and Risk Perception, Multiple Factors Influence Why Many Choose To Stay Behind During Life-Threatening Storms.

As Hurricane Milton roared ashore near Sarasota, Florida, tens of thousands of people were in evacuation shelters. Hundreds of thousands more had fled coastal regions ahead of the storm, crowding highways headed north and south as their counties issued evacuation orders.

But not everyone left, despite dire warnings about a hurricane that had been one of the strongest on record two days earlier.

As Milton’s rain and storm surge flooded neighborhoods late on Oct. 9, 2024, 911 calls poured in. In Tampa’s Hillsborough County, more than 500 people had to be rescued, including residents of an assisted living community and families trapped in a flooding home after a tree crashed though the roof at the height of the storm.

In Plant City, 20 miles inland from Tampa, at least 35 people had been rescued by dawn, City Manager Bill McDaniel said. While the storm wasn’t as extreme as feared, McDaniel said his city had flooded in places and to levels he had never seen. Traffic signals were out. Power lines and trees were down. The sewage plant had been inundated, affecting the public water supply.

Evacuating might seem like the obvious move when a major hurricane is bearing down on your region, but that choice is not always as easy as it may seem.

Evacuating from a hurricane requires money, planning, the ability to leave and, importantly, a belief that evacuating is better than staying put.

I recently examined years of research on what motivates people to leave or seek shelter during hurricanes as part of a project with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Natural Hazards Center. I found three main reasons that people didn’t leave.

Evacuating Can Be Expensive

Evacuating requires transportation, money, a place to stay, the ability to take off work days ahead of a storm and other resources that many people do not have.

With 1 in 9 Americans facing poverty today, many have limited evacuation options. During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, many residents did not own vehicles and couldn’t reach evacuation buses. That left them stranded in the face of a deadly hurricane. Nearly 1,400 people died in the storm, many of them in flooded homes.

When millions of people are under evacuation orders, logistical issues also arise.

Gas shortages and traffic jams can leave people stranded on highways and unable to find shelter before the storm hits. This happened during Hurricane Floyd in 1999 as 2 million Floridians tried to evacuate.

People who experienced past evacuations or saw news video of congested highways ahead of Hurricane Milton might not leave for fear of getting stuck.

Health, Pets and Being Physically Able To Leave

The logistics of evacuating are even more challenging for people who are disabled or in nursing homes. Additionally, people who are incarcerated may have no choice in the matter – and the justice system may have few options for moving them.

Evacuating nursing homes, people with disabilities or prison populations is complex. Many shelters are not set up to accommodate their needs. In one example during Hurricane Floyd, a disabled person arrived at a shelter, but the hallways were too narrow for their wheelchair, so they were restricted to a cot for the duration of their stay. Moving people whose health is fragile, and doing so under stressful conditions, can also worsen health problems, leaving nursing home staff to make difficult decisions.

But failing to evacuate can also be deadly. During Hurricane Irma in 2017, seven nursing home residents died in the rising heat after their facility lost power near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In some cases, public water systems are shut down or become contaminated. And flooding can create several health hazards, including the risk of infectious diseases.

In a study of 291 long-term care facilities in Florida, 81% sheltered residents in place during the 2004 hurricane season because they had limited transportation options and faced issues finding places for residents to go.

People with pets face another difficult choice – some choose to stay at home for fear of leaving their pet behind. Studies have found that pet owners are significantly less likely to evacuate than others because of difficulties transporting pets and finding shelters that will take them. In destructive storms, it can be days to weeks before people can return home.

Risk Perception Can Also Get in the Way

People’s perceptions of risk can also prevent them from leaving.

A series of studies show that women and minorities take hurricane risks more seriously than other groups and are more likely to evacuate or go to shelters. One study found that women are almost twice as likely than men to evacuate when given a mandatory evacuation order.

If people have experienced a hurricane before that didn’t do significant damage, they may perceive the risks of a coming storm to be lower and not leave.

In my review of research, I found that many people who didn’t evacuate had reservations about going to shelters and preferred to stay home or with family or friends. Shelter conditions were sometimes poor, overcrowded or lacked privacy.

People had fears about safety and whether shelter environments could meet their needs. For example, religious minorities were not sure whether shelters would be clean, safe, have private places for religious practice, and food options consistent with faith practices. Diabetics and people with young children also had concerns about finding appropriate food in shelters.

How To Improve Evacuations for the Future

There are ways leaders can reduce the barriers to evacuation and shelter use. For example:

• Building more shelters able to withstand hurricane force winds can create safe havens for people without transportation or who are unable to leave their jobs in time to evacuate.
• Arranging more shelters and transportation able to accommodate people with disabilities and those with special needs, such as nursing home residents, can help protect vulnerable populations.
• Opening shelters to accommodate pets with their owners can also increase the likelihood that pet owners will evacuate.
• Public education can be improved so people know their options. Clearer risk communication on how these storms are different than past ones and what people are likely to experience can also help people make informed decisions.
• Being prepared saves lives. Many areas would benefit from better advance planning that takes into account the needs of large, diverse populations and can ensure populations have ways to evacuate to safety.

This article has been updated with additional details about Hurricane Milton’s damage.

Carson MacPherson-Krutsky, Research Associate, Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The post Evacuating in Disasters Like Hurricane Milton Isn’t Simple – There Are Reasons People Stay in Harm’s Way, and It’s Not Just Stubbornness appeared first on DCReport.org.

I wonder if readers of the Salon not-a-blog recall my obsession with the Temecula Valley Unified School District Board of Education. Last year saw a skirmish between three MAGA-leaning school board members and the freedom-loving world when the board voted to reject a “controversial” state-mandated social studies curriculum and associated textbooks. This was all because of one paragraph in an ancillary text where the mention of former San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk’s existence caused a hue and cry from MAGAs who viewed him as a pedophile.

Temeculans got so irritated with this blatant injection of religiosity in a government body that they voted one of the three, their leader, Dr. Joseph Komrosky, out last June.

Not to be deterred, it seems Dr. Komrosky has thrown his hat into the three ring circus once more. He wants to be “re-elected.”

Here is a campaign video. I absolutely adore his choice in musical accompaniment.

You can’t keep a good homophobic nationalist dominionist down.