Monday thoughts: Texas flooding & conspiracy theories

The horror in Texas made it more difficult for us to enjoy the most American of holidays

I apologize for starting the week with a rather heavy note:

There’s something (and that something is obvious) about becoming a parent that changes how one “processes” news about the death of children.

It’s been a long long time since I’ve heard of anything as horrific, when it comes to the death of children, as the flooding in central Texas.

This video shows how far the river rose in just two minutes, and the peak, maybe 40 minutes later, was MUCH higher:

As I write this, it looks like there are 28 children confirmed dead from Kerr County with others, currently listed as missing, likely to add to that today. And I don’t know how many of the lost lives in other counties were children.

There’s a conversation to be had — but I won’t engage in it now — about how the loss of a child seems so much worse than the loss of an adult, even a relatively young adult. But it does seem worse.

At some point soon, this will turn fully from a rescue effort into a recovery effort; it’s probably really already the case but if I were an official involved in the process I wouldn’t want to say that out loud. I don’t mean because it sounds bad, but because I just wouldn’t want to believe there couldn’t be more children found.

UPDATE: I was going to share this with you as an example of a glimmer of light in this gloom but it turns out the story is NOT true: Miracle rescue of 2 girls from Texas floods after they were found clinging 30-feet up in a tree

And the death toll overall is now over 80 and likely to reach 100 or more. From a day that is supposed to be one of America’s most joyous and truly American holidays.

There is a lot of finger-pointing going on right now with the left attacking the Trump administration for firing workers who might be involved in weather and warnings, but it’s far from clear that this part of rural Texas had any sort of real early-warning infrastructure no matter what more the federal government had tried to do. The federal weather forecasters had been saying for many hours that heavy rains and flash floods were possible. But unlike around the big cities in Texas, rural Kerr County just seemed not to have systems for disseminating warnings.

Still, some folks did heed the warnings from the National Weather Service:

How one Texas summer camp successfully evacuated from the floods | AP News

Another small bit of sunshine in the gloom: Exclusive | Coast Guard 'American hero' Scott Ruskan helps save Texas flood victims

You also have people like a mindless NY Times reporter blaming the floods on climate change, a claim for which there is ZERO basis in science or data: Texas Flood Tragedy - by Dr. Matthew Wielicki

And finally, you have lunatics and idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene who seems intent on reminding us weekly that she’s the most stupid Republican in Congress. She is following the brain-dead rants of ultra-MAGA “influencers” on social media who are pointing fingers at — wait for it — Bill Gates. Gates has made some comments in the past about cloud seeding or sunlight mitigation (very different things) and now MTG, always willing to troll for dollars and the support of fellow morons, is proposing legislation to make any such efforts federal felonies. (Cloud seeding is a very interesting and promising technology, though more to increase rainfall when there already is some as compared to ending droughts because it only works if there are clouds with moisture to seed.) She’s as anti-science as ever. (For the record, I’m not saying that all that stuff is good; there are some serious issues with the sunlight mitigation stuff. But that doesn’t mean we need federal legislation.)

I don’t know what it is about MAGA that makes them love conspiracy theories so much. I think some of them figured out that it’s a great grift because there are so many people who will follow the most ridiculous X accounts. It’s not a new phenomenon but has been exacerbated massively by social media: people who flock together for a feeling of group-membership and being those who really “do their own research” and know stuff that other people don’t know. There are obvious liars and grifters with hundreds of thousands of confirmation-bias-seeking followers; it says nothing good about this country.

Of course, if you’re going to earn a living by making a group think that they know things others don’t know you almost certainly have to say stuff that isn’t true because the stuff that is true is stuff that, usually, plenty of other people know. So in their effort to grift off of intentionally gullible people, MAGA influencers (and there are equivalents on the left but I have less exposure to them) tend to make MAGA followers dumber, not smarter. Sadly, our president is a big part of making people dumber…not on everything but on a lot of things.

Here’s one conspiracy theory that MAGA is utterly distraught is falling apart: The death of Jeffrey Epstein. Two of the leaders of the baseless claim that it was a suicide, or at least ridiculous in the certainty they claimed it, were Kash Patel, now director of the FBI, and Dan Bongino, now deputy director of the FBI. And now they are telling the public that after looking through all the evidence, they believe that Epstein killed himself and that there was no client list and bribery/influence scandal. That was always the most likely case, even if not the only possible case.

Online MAGA is beside themselves, soooo sure that now Patel and Bongino have become part of the deep state and are hiding or ignoring evidence. It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous to have such politically active people so desperately WANTING to believe something that they’re willing to jettison their own champions, willing to stick with nonsense beliefs that violate Occam’s Razor and for which there’s no evidence.

Jeffrey Epstein documents: DOJ, FBI conclude no "client list," death was suicide (Axios.com)

Trump’s DOJ: There Is No Jeffrey Epstein ‘Client List’ | National Review

All that said, it’s hard to care a lot about our many stupid people when Texas is still looking for bodies of dead children.

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Quick note: I’m filling in for the great Guy Benson today on his national Fox News Radio show. http://guybensonshow.com