Trump And Elon Musk’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre

When I saw the news on the Fourth of July about all the little girls swept away in Texas — there were 27 of them missing then though some have since been found, not alive — the first thing I thought was that all those little girls were my daughter Donna Rose’s age (10) or my granddaughter Lu’s (8). A split second later I was mad about climate change and how we’ve determined to ignore the increasingly frenzied weather — a “hoax,” please give oil companies $17 billion more in subsidies to keep pumping their particles out in the air just to troll the libs. And three seconds after that I remembered there’s an even more recent villain endangering our children, our little girls: Hadn’t Trump and Elon Musk just taken a chainsaw to NOAA and the NWS?

Was it vulgar of me to look to blame anybody while the bodies were — some are — still missing? Was I trying to score political points? Maybe the drastic cuts to the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency hadn’t actually been responsible for this terrible tragedy. Maybe it was just one of those things.

I had Journalistically Contemptible Thoughts about screaming about it anyway, accuracy and truth be damned, because fuck it, they would. Just like they blamed Barack Obama for Hurricane Katrina (true story!) and Joe Biden for letting in the criminal illegal aliens that, actually, Donald Trump had declined to prosecute and deport.

And they’re — hold on to your hats — doing just so. Marjorie Taylor Greene and some other loser are blaming “weather manipulation”; here’s some lunatic Jeff Tiedrich found, being a fucking idiot and also a liar or maybe just delusionally psychotic:

“The propagandists are making baseless claims with a very suspicious orchestrated narrative. I have my own questions. I smell a rat. There needs to be a full out investigation. Perhaps a Biden holdover NOAA insider could have sabotaged weather forecasts to not give adequate warning, in order for media and Democrats, including propaganda shills on X to blame budget cuts and the Trump administration. They can claim it’s due to ‘low resources’. This could be a sneaky way to make Trump look bad for DOGE trimming the fat from NOAA’s funds. A Deep-State politically motivated hit job that cost the lives of these innocent children?”

Trimming the fat? Those little girls didn’t have an ounce of fat on them.

Meanwhile, the Fucking News reads this Kristi Noem statement, via the AP, as obliquely blaming Joe Biden:

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Saturday it was difficult for forecasters to predict just how much rain would fall. She said the Trump administration would make it a priority to upgrade National Weather Service technology used to deliver warnings.

“We know that everyone wants more warning time, and that’s why we’re working to upgrade the technology that’s been neglected for far too long to make sure families have as much advance notice as possible,” Noem said during a press conference with state and federal leaders.

I don’t read it that way though; it’s not like she’s ever been subtle about it before, and certainly wouldn’t have kept Biden’s name out of her mouth this time. I think it’s more likely that “new technology” is just going to be “paying one of his techbros for AI hallucinating some shit.” So that’s bad enough.

Why, here’s the AI hallucinating some shit right now!

Ah, but here comes the reporting, which Large Marge and others tried to get ahead of. And it says that actually, and get ready because I am about to blockquote the shit out of the New York Times, at whom I will yell later for some different journalism that was Journalistically Contemptible:

The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.

The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.

That office’s warning coordination meteorologist left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure. […]

[A]t both offices, the vacancy rate is roughly double what it was when Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January, according to Mr. Fahy. […]

Under the Trump administration, the Weather Service, like other federal agencies, has been pushed to reduce its number of employees. By this spring, through layoffs and retirements, the Weather Service had lost nearly 600 people from a work force that until recently was as large as 4,000.

Some forecasting offices began to close down at night, and others launched fewer weather balloons, which send back crucial data to feed forecasts. The Weather Service said it was preparing for “degraded operations,” with fewer meteorologists available to fine-tune forecasts.

Last month, despite a government hiring freeze, the Weather Service announced a plan to hire 126 people in positions around the country, in what Ms. Cei, the agency’s spokeswoman, described as an effort to “stabilize” the department. As of this week, those jobs had not been posted in the federal government’s hiring portal.

That’s some good journalism, New York Times: You noticed a thing, and remembered another thing, and asked people whether they had one to do with the other, and it sure looks like they did.

The way I read that is that Trump and Elon Musk just killed 27 little girls in Texas with Elon Musk’s chainsaw.

We’re a month into hurricane season, and Trump’s promised to dismantle FEMA too. Texas will be fine — FEMA-wise, anyway; Gov. Greg Abbott is among the Chosen. It’s the rest of us who’ll need to worry when the frenzied weather comes for our insufficiently MAGA town. Those little girls’ families won’t be fine though, and I am sorry in my heart for them. Not for a long long time.