Trae Crowder: A Hurricane of Lies

The Liberal Redneck recaps the lastest rightwing lies about weather, money, and politics:

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Tracking Hurricane Idalia

Live coverage from the ABC station in Tampa:

And from the NBC station in Jacksonville:

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Hurricane Harvey

Embed from Getty Images

We are okay here, no problems from that terrible hurricane, which is hundreds of miles away; but of course the news of all the devastation is distressing. We heard today that M.P.'s nephew and family in Houston have 20 inches of water in the house, and the cars flooded too - awful.

Here's a little vid I found on the link between hurricanes and climate change - I do not say it is accurate or inaccurate, as I am not a scientist, and all that business is just too big and too technical for my ethereal mind to fathom. And I am certain that nothing I do or say here in my small, hemmed-in world will make the slightest difference, anyway.

I don't doubt the fact of man-made climate change - I well recall a biology professor telling us back in 1973 or so that the newly discovered greenhouse effect would be causing climatic changes, and it only makes sense that it would.  But how and where to deal with it is beyond me.  So I present this as a conversation starter only, and what you do with it is up to you.

After the Storm

From the New York Post, earlier today; click to enlarge.

My thoughts and prayers go out to all the many people who were in the path of Hurricane Sandy, and are now dealing with the effects of it. As of 7 pm Texas time today, I'm hearing that fewer than fifty people have died in the U.S., and of course every death is a tragedy; but considering the intensity of the storm and the density of the population in the Northeast, such a low figure seems nearly miraculous, and says good things about preparations that were made in the affected areas.

Some folks lost their homes or cars, but for several millions, the worst thing is having to live without electricity, cell phones, TV, public transport, or internet for some days or weeks to come. Which will be pretty fucking miserable, certainly; but I'm not hearing that thousands of people are dead, injured, or homeless and starving - such as happened in the Haiti earthquake a few years ago - and it kind of grates on the nerves to hear hysterical broadcasters and bloggers carrying on as if the End of the World had arrived.  As bad as they are, things could still be much, much worse.

In much of New York City, some extra fallen leaves on the ground are the only sign that there was any storm last night. So even in the midst of disaster, a little balance is necessary. The other 90 percent of the country is still in good shape, the damage will be repaired, people will pick up the pieces, and life will go right on along, as is always the case after hurricanes - of which we have had beaucoup down here in the South in my lifetime.

However, other kinds of commenters are definitely unbalanced, and were long before the storm struck. As witness the following vid:



On the other hand, the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, heretofore "one of Mitt Romney's most aggressive surrogates," had nothing but grateful praise this morning for all that federal help and for President Obama's close support through the crisis:



Oh and by the way - of course you do realize, don't you, that just as with every other fucking disaster in the whole entire world . . . IT'S ALL TEH GAYZ' FAULT! God hates us so much, he is "systematically destroying America" as punishment. Now aren't you ashamed of your bad self?

Talking to Meteorologists

Via Towleroad, which reports on a brand-new Tumblr dedicated to this sort of thing: Talking to Doctors.


Update: Republicans Move Convention to Seventeenth Century.

Mr. Dorrinson added that despite recent controversy involving the U.S. Senate candidate Representative Todd Akin (R., Mo.), there would be no modification of the Party’s official platform: “After we ban abortion in cases of rape and incest, we’re going to focus on America’s spiralling witch problem.”

Pre-emptive Paranoia

An excerpt of what Adam Gopnik writes today at the New Yorker News Desk:

Obviously, this was a big storm with a lot of water and wind in it; if things broke the wrong way, it could do a great deal of harm to a lot of people—and, just as obviously, the politicians had made an intelligent decision not to get caught with their raincoats down this time. (See Katrina.) But the relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios—the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about—was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. “It hasn’t even started, and the city is already Atlantis,” one of the back seat riders announced.

That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia. The real purpose not to get you to do anything, but to get you so scared that all you can do is keep the television, or radio, on. This is obvious, and yet there is something truly helpful, really instructive, about experiencing it again after a month of absence and silence. Two things that ought to be apparent all the time become briefly clear to you again. First, that the media, television particularly, are amplifying devices in which tiny kernels of information become vast, terrifying structures of speculation. The news business is one in which a minimum of news is really given the business.

And second, that the reasons for this are essentially non-ideological; frightened people need news for reassurance, and want to get a more heightened experience by being frightened still more, and the business the people supplying the fright are in (which we’re in too, of course) is not really that of dispensing information but of assembling enough listeners or readers, preferably still caught in that same spirit of credulous attentiveness, to offer to advertisers or keep subscribing. Sirius radio makes this clear in a backward way because it “blacks out” the commercials on the TV stuff they broadcast, not having been paid for them. Right in the middle of being terrified, everything stops and you’re bored stiff for a few minutes—and it occurs to you, as if for the first time, that those few minutes, when a commercial is being shown on CNN or MSNBC, are actually the whole point of the exercise. . . .

Screw the Feds, Let the Locals Deal with Irene?

That's the message libertarian fucktard Ron Paul put out yesterday, saying "We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960."

Dude has his head so far up his doctrinaire ass, he doesn't even have the facts of history right.  Here's a video I found over at David Mixner's site, detailing the much-needed federal response to the horrific 1938 hurricane that slammed the Northeast, later jocularly called the "Long Island Express."  Judge for yourselves, boys, whether the federal involvement was worth it for the survivors or not:




Hope you fellas up there in the target zone have plenty of cold beer and candles on hand.  Don't forget to fill the bathtub - for flushing - and all the ice chests too.  God bless.


Bonus: This headline from Americablog requires no comment from your Head Trucker --

Boehner and Cantor unsure about emergency aid for hurricane without budget cuts

Ike Strikes

A shout out to all my queer brothers and sisters in South Texas and Louisiana: stay inside, be safe, good luck to ya.