“All we can do is pray.” The reaction of Mike Johnson, House Speaker and the man rumored to have the smallest penis in Congress,* to death-dealing floods that swept through central Texas.
He’s not alone on the prayer front. The floods were particularly devastating along an area of the Kerr River that housed Camp Mystic, a Bible-infused summer camp for privileged young Christian white girls. There’s many a pious meme on Facebook today, saying that the girls who died at the camp are in the arms of Jesus now. There are none that point out that Jesus has arms that closely resemble a wall of water churning with bone-crushing debris. Even I don't want to do that.
I am not criticizing these kids for being young, privileged and Christian, or saying in any way that they deserved their ends for being such. I am sure they were like young girls at any camp anywhere, mostly concerned about which of the privileged young Christian boys they knew were the cutest, and no more deserving of being swept out of their bunk beds in the darkness by twenty feet of floodwater than any other group of innocents.
Nor am I criticizing their parents’ politics, although they are probably overwhelmingly Republican and were firm supporters of the government spending cuts that led to some short-staffing overnight in the National Weather Service’s office responsible for the area that flooded. I’m not even bothered by the federal government’s immediate response to the threat to Republican lives, and won’t even go on here about how it might have been quite a bit more sluggish if the tragedy had occurred where Democrats make the rules.
I’m not concerned here about their prayers, even. They can pray all they want. If they want to think that Jesus power-washed their children off the face of Texas like He was spritzing the dust off His driveway in Heaven because of His special plan for them, go ahead. It doesn’t strike me as likely, though.
There's no need to point out that no atheist summer camp children were drowned in the flood, because there are no atheist summer camps, especially in Texas, where if you post a sign for an "Atheist Summer Camp," you might as well post one underneath that says "Come Vandalize Us in the Off-Season." Summer camps for rationalist kids disguise themselves with names like Science Camp or Space Camp.
What I am thinking is that tragedy once again revealed that many prominent Republicans have half-eaten corn dogs for brains. Marjorie Taylor Green immediately introduced a measure that would prohibit weather modification efforts, as if some Space Lasery force had caused Texas to flood. Greene also insinuated, not for the first time, that “chemtrails” were the force behind brutish weather events.
People that actually try to make weather, through cloud-seeding, generally try to make it rain in deserts, especially deserts that support resort golf courses. They don’t work in areas like Kerr County, where flooding is so common that politicians have wrangled for years over whether to install an emergency flood warning system there, or just encourage people to build detachable decks that float.
Still, the introduction of this bill may soon cause all the geoengineers of the world to say to themselves, “Shit! I could be out of a job soon. I’d better join ICE while they’re hiring.”
A Chemtrail Hot Line is not part of the bill yet, but it well could be. We could be looking at a future where every time a Southwest jet passes over Coon Neck County, it will inspire a raft of calls to the Chemtrail Hotline, once the locals find their teeth and put them in.
Kandiss Taylor, who wants to legislate alongside Greene in Congress, at first Twittered “Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake,” as her first reaction to the floods, and even insinuated that the victims were “crisis actors,” like the kind Alex Jones claimed staged the Sandy Hook shootings, although she later backed off from that charge when she realized that these were the kids of Republicans, instead of the victims at Sandy Hook, who would have grown up to be New England liberals, probably, and whose lives therefore meant nothing to the likes of Kandiss.
And in Oklahoma City, a weather warning station was attacked by a numbnuts drooler associated with Veterans on Patrol, a group that has taken right-wing crackpotism to a near-orbital level, by claiming that the early warning systems for violent weather are actually the cause of violent weather, and need to be destroyed by raving vigilantes who drink way too much Monster, wrapped in the flag of service to their country.
In the meantime, global warming marches on, despite the shrill efforts to deny it, assuring us of a future where, for every idyllic picture of a child jumping in a lake, there will be a matching photo of a lake jumping on a child.
*Okay, I admit, I started that rumor.
He’s not alone on the prayer front. The floods were particularly devastating along an area of the Kerr River that housed Camp Mystic, a Bible-infused summer camp for privileged young Christian white girls. There’s many a pious meme on Facebook today, saying that the girls who died at the camp are in the arms of Jesus now. There are none that point out that Jesus has arms that closely resemble a wall of water churning with bone-crushing debris. Even I don't want to do that.
I am not criticizing these kids for being young, privileged and Christian, or saying in any way that they deserved their ends for being such. I am sure they were like young girls at any camp anywhere, mostly concerned about which of the privileged young Christian boys they knew were the cutest, and no more deserving of being swept out of their bunk beds in the darkness by twenty feet of floodwater than any other group of innocents.
Nor am I criticizing their parents’ politics, although they are probably overwhelmingly Republican and were firm supporters of the government spending cuts that led to some short-staffing overnight in the National Weather Service’s office responsible for the area that flooded. I’m not even bothered by the federal government’s immediate response to the threat to Republican lives, and won’t even go on here about how it might have been quite a bit more sluggish if the tragedy had occurred where Democrats make the rules.
I’m not concerned here about their prayers, even. They can pray all they want. If they want to think that Jesus power-washed their children off the face of Texas like He was spritzing the dust off His driveway in Heaven because of His special plan for them, go ahead. It doesn’t strike me as likely, though.
There's no need to point out that no atheist summer camp children were drowned in the flood, because there are no atheist summer camps, especially in Texas, where if you post a sign for an "Atheist Summer Camp," you might as well post one underneath that says "Come Vandalize Us in the Off-Season." Summer camps for rationalist kids disguise themselves with names like Science Camp or Space Camp.
What I am thinking is that tragedy once again revealed that many prominent Republicans have half-eaten corn dogs for brains. Marjorie Taylor Green immediately introduced a measure that would prohibit weather modification efforts, as if some Space Lasery force had caused Texas to flood. Greene also insinuated, not for the first time, that “chemtrails” were the force behind brutish weather events.
People that actually try to make weather, through cloud-seeding, generally try to make it rain in deserts, especially deserts that support resort golf courses. They don’t work in areas like Kerr County, where flooding is so common that politicians have wrangled for years over whether to install an emergency flood warning system there, or just encourage people to build detachable decks that float.
Still, the introduction of this bill may soon cause all the geoengineers of the world to say to themselves, “Shit! I could be out of a job soon. I’d better join ICE while they’re hiring.”
A Chemtrail Hot Line is not part of the bill yet, but it well could be. We could be looking at a future where every time a Southwest jet passes over Coon Neck County, it will inspire a raft of calls to the Chemtrail Hotline, once the locals find their teeth and put them in.
Kandiss Taylor, who wants to legislate alongside Greene in Congress, at first Twittered “Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake,” as her first reaction to the floods, and even insinuated that the victims were “crisis actors,” like the kind Alex Jones claimed staged the Sandy Hook shootings, although she later backed off from that charge when she realized that these were the kids of Republicans, instead of the victims at Sandy Hook, who would have grown up to be New England liberals, probably, and whose lives therefore meant nothing to the likes of Kandiss.
And in Oklahoma City, a weather warning station was attacked by a numbnuts drooler associated with Veterans on Patrol, a group that has taken right-wing crackpotism to a near-orbital level, by claiming that the early warning systems for violent weather are actually the cause of violent weather, and need to be destroyed by raving vigilantes who drink way too much Monster, wrapped in the flag of service to their country.
In the meantime, global warming marches on, despite the shrill efforts to deny it, assuring us of a future where, for every idyllic picture of a child jumping in a lake, there will be a matching photo of a lake jumping on a child.
*Okay, I admit, I started that rumor.
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