When senseless tragedy occurs, we want someone to blame, some to take responsibility…. somewhere to focus and direct our anger.
From Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrows) by John Prine
For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter You'll become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there Wrapped up in a trap of your very own Chain of sorrow
But our highest ideal must be truth. We look to our poets and prophets to help find this truth. One voice we respect, our seeress, for her compassion, insight, and for her fierce sense of justice, is Eliza Gilkyson. She posted this to her Facebook page:
There is a story going around that the National Weather Service failed to raise the alarm about this terrible flood in Texas. That story serves the function of blaming the Trump Administration for sabotaging the NWS and NOAA, which indeed it has, and that is a very bad thing. But the NWS didn’t fail, so far as I can tell and this story says. Local and state authorities failed to do their job, which is to take the warnings the rest of the way to the people.
Beware the story that is convenient for ideological reasons but isn’t actually true–and in fact, Texas officials would like to blame the NWS rather than themselves so it’s not actually that convenient.
The Washington Post reports, “The Weather Service issued a flash flood warning that initiated cellphone-based alerts across Kerr and Bandera counties at 1:14 a.m. Agency officials said that was more than three hours before water was reported on low road crossings in Kerr County.”
Wired: And meteorologists say that the NWS did send out adequate warnings as it got updated information. By Thursday afternoon, it had issued a flood watch for the area, and a flash flood warning was in effect by 1am Friday. The agency had issued a flash flood emergency alert by 4:30am.
“The Weather Service was on the ball,” Vagasky says. “They were getting the message out.”
But as local outlet KXAN first reported, it appears that the first flood warnings posted from safety officials to the public were sent out on Facebook at 5am, hours after the NWS issued its warning.
Wired links to this report on the four-hour delay from KXAN: “While the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning at 1:14 a.m. for portions of that area, it would be hours before the city and county’s Facebook pages posted their initial urgent directions for residents from local authorities. The first came from the Kerrville Police Department, reposting an NWS alert at 5:16 a.m., adding: “Anyone near the Guadalupe River needs to move to higher ground now. Local streets are flooded in town and low water crossings are impassable. Do not drive into water.”
Of course, the cosplay cowboys that run our state immediately try to shift the blame.
As catastrophic flooding left scores of people dead and missing in Texas Hill Country and President Donald Trump celebrated signing legislation that will eviscerate every aspect of federal efforts to address the climate emergency, officials in the Lone Star State blasted the National Weather Service—one of many agencies gutted by the Department of Government Efficiency—for issuing what they said were faulty forecasts that some observers blamed for the flood’s high death toll.
Although the National Weather Service on Thursday issued a broad flood watch for the area, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd—noting that the NWS predicted 3-6 inches of rain for the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches for the Hill Country—told reporters during a press conference earlier Friday that “the amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts.”
“When President Trump took office… he said he wanted to fix [that], and is currently upgrading the technology. And the National Weather Service has indicated that with that and NOAA, that we needed to renew this ancient system that has been left in place with the federal government for many, many years, and that is the reforms that are ongoing,” Noem explained, seemingly shifting the blame onto previous administrations that failed to upgrade the technology. Trump was previously president from 2017 to 2021.
When asked about the impact of cuts and closures made to weather research labs as part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Noem once again defended the current administration, telling reporters that she would relay their concerns to the president.
A May report from NPR detailed how the NWS was left reeling by the cuts, with eight of the 122 NWS offices across the U.S. falling below the level of staffing that enables them to operate 24 hours a day, with a former NWS meteorologist telling host Scott Simon that the current situation was not sustainable.
I know very little about the author of this facebook page, but they offer thoughtful and well reasoned articles that highlight the discrepancies between many secular aspects of our society and a compassionate, moral path.
AN ACT OF MAN: In legal usage in the English-speaking world, an act of God, act of nature, or damnum fatale (“loss arising from inevitable accident”) is an event caused by no direct human action (e.g. severe or extreme weather and other natural disasters) for which individual persons are not responsible and cannot be held legally liable for loss of life, injury, or property damage.
Under normal circumstances an act of God would apply to the terrible tragedy that devastated parts of central Texas, killing dozens of people, including a number of young children. Yet we don’t live in normal times, we live in a time of biblically inspired ignorance. Texas is the epicenter of this religious quackery, and even though most of the dead and missing children attended a Christian summer camp for young girls, no one will take responsibility for the inaction.
Because ultimately, it was an act of man that led to the inaction of the weather service. People on the ground were not sufficiently warned of the impending disaster due to the work of Elon Musk and DOGE. Musk gutted the National Weather Service, NOAA, and FEMA. Why, because climate change is a hoax. Just look at the ridiculous bill Trump just signed. Drill baby drill, oil, coal, gas, fracking, you name it. Trump has pulled all funding for Green energy projects, including solar, wind, and Electric Vehicles, one of Musk’s own complaints about the bill.
[…]
Can you see that this is not a game? Are you starting to understand how dangerous the current theocracy ruling America really is, as in life threatening on a global scale. They hate science, and built a concentration camp in the middle of a swamp. Hurricane season is barely underway and AA has already flooded. What will happen if a hurricane hits this area? FEMA is supposed to help during disasters, yet Kristi Noem boasted about how she dismantled the agency in service of ICE. Everything is orientated towards removing millions of immigrants at the expense of protecting Americans.
It doesn’t make any sense, like zero. Arrest farm workers and then have no one to harvest the produce, hurting not only farm workers and farmers, but the consumer. Are Americans seriously this, what is a politically correct word, STUPID? Do they hate gays and queers that much that they’d consciously harm themselves? It is one thing to scoff at the MAGA base as not being very intelligent and prone to cultic behavior, but how does this account for Senators and members of the House?
They just signed off on a bill that will harm America, and more than likely contribute to them losing their jobs in the Midterms, yet they did it. And guess what’s even more disturbing, they whooped, hollered, clapped, cheered and danced as they sold America for 30 pieces of silver.
MODERATE STORMS: – The agency under fire over a delayed warning ahead of the floods that have killed at least 50 people in Texas had gone through massive job cuts in the months prior to the disaster. At least 50 people – including 15 children – have died after the Guadalupe River surged nearly 30 feet above its normal height, devastating a children’s summer camp and ripping apart families.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was brutally grilled over the delayed warning alerts Texas residents received before the monster flash flood was about to devastate the state. Residents were not warned until 1:18pm on July 3, the day they began, and were told it was ‘moderate’ storms.
Many Texans have blamed the slow updates as part of the reason at least 50 have lost their lives and 27 are still missing. Finger pointing has landed on the National Weather Service which had recently begun the process of hiring 100 new employees.
However, this came months after around 600 people were fired from the agency in recent months as part of massive cuts to the federal government under Trump, according to NPR. By April, nearly half of NWS forecast offices had 20 percent vacancy rates.
Noem joined Governor Greg Abbott and other state personnel for a press conference on Saturday, Noem did not bring up how the Trump Administration had proposed cuts for FEMA and NOAA, both of which help during natural disasters.
The proposal includes cutting NOAA’s weather laboratories that research severe storms, as well as, its hub for climate science coordination and research. The cuts led to a Florida meteorologist to sound the alarm on what a decimated NWS would do just a month ago.
NBC 6 hurricane specialist John Morales used a June 3 segment to warn about cuts to both the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). With the Atlantic hurricane season kicking off on Sunday, Morales warned the budget cuts will impact his ability to predict and track storms.
[…] Georgia-based Republican Congressional candidate Kandiss Taylor has claimed the floods were ‘fake’ in a bizarre social media post.
‘Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake,’ Taylor wrote on X on Saturday, the day after the floods deluged central Texas.
The Texas Governor
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has three priorities:
own the libs
never, ever take responsibility for any problem what so ever
never, ever accidentally get the wrong shirt
[Thanks to Elder JA for sharing this article]
In a scathing social media post, Seth Abramson, biographer of President Donald Trump, directly blamed Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk for the deaths of more than 50 Texans in recent catastrophic flooding — arguing their politically driven decisions led to avoidable tragedy.
“I have no difficulty saying that Trump and Musk caused some of the 50+ flood deaths in Texas,” Abramson wrote in a widely shared thread on the social platform X.
“And here’s why: these two men with no expertise in disaster preparedness were told not to cut the positions they cut, and were told people would die if they did. And then people died,” he said.
