A flash flood in Texas has become a political issue the same way hurricanes sometimes do. (1 Viewer)

Optimus Prime said:

A Texas pediatrician was just fired for saying just that
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Cancel Culture. Am I right?

Optimus Prime said:

A pediatrician for a chain of clinics affiliated with a prominent Houston hospital system is “no longer employed” there, according to officials, after a social media account associated with her published a post wishing voters in a Donald Trump-supporting county of Texas “get what they voted for” amid flash flooding that killed more than 100 people, including many children.

“We were made aware of a social media comment from one of our physicians,” read a statement from Blue Fish Pediatrics circulated late Sunday. “The individual is no longer employed by Blue Fish Pediatrics.”

The statement also said: “We strongly condemn the comments that were made in that post. That post does not reflect the values, standards or mission of Blue Fish Pediatrics. We do not support or condone any statement that politicizes tragedy, diminishes human dignity, or fails to clearly uphold compassion for every child and family, regardless of background or beliefs.”

Blue Fish Pediatrics’ statement neither named the physician in question nor specified whether she had resigned or was dismissed. But multiple publicly accessible social media posts identified her as Dr Christina Propst.

A Guardian source familiar with the situation confirmed the accuracy of the posts naming Propst. And, at the time it issued the statement, Blue Fish Pediatrics had recently unpublished Propst’s biographical page from its website.……

In the post that preceded the end of her time at Blue Fish Pediatrics, Propst alluded to how Kerr county had – like Texas as a whole – voted in favor of Trump as he defeated former vice-president Kamala Harris in November’s White House election.

Trump’s administration has since eliminated mentions of the ongoing climate crisis and its consequences, one of which is downpours like the one that devastated Kerr becoming more common.

He has also mused about “phasing out” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), in part so that the president’s office could be in charge of distributing disaster relief funds and ultimately “give out less money”.

“May all visitors, children, non-Maga voters and pets be safe and dry,” said the post, which invoked an acronym for Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan. “Kerr county Maga voted to gut Fema. They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for.”

The post concluded with the phrase: “Bless their hearts,” which in the US south is often used as a condescending insult.…….

Texas pediatrician ‘no longer employed’ after post about pro-Trump flood victims

Physician made a post wishing that Maga supporters in Kerr county ‘get what they voted for’ amid flash flooding

www.theguardian.com

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SamAndreas said:

Oh' my pinky is pointing toward the feds a bit, but that's my smallest finger. My big finger points toward the Texas government, especially their local government.

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Trying to decide "who has more fingers pointed at them" is impossible to objectively determine and is a waste of time and energy. It's as absurd as you've written it. It's petty finger pointing that's heavily influenced by each persons biases and it does very little to help find solutions to try to prevent if from happening again.

Bad decisions and policies, at every level of government, lead to mistakes that contributed to this avoidable loss of life. They all failed, so it doesn't matter who should have more fingers pointing at them. The cuts and changes to the NWS contributed to the avoidable loss of life. There's no reason to try to give the false cover of, "but what the state and county did was worse." That's irrelevant and is only about trying to shift focus away from the NWS's failure, which is some part a result of the decisions and actions of Trump and his Republicans.

The converse is also true.

faceman said:

Totally off topic,but Hoyt Axton died at the age of 61 from a heart attack. I don't consider 61 being old.

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As someone soon turning 60, I second your motion.

Disasters and tragedies have long been the source of American conspiracies, old and new. So when devastating flash floods hit Texas over the Fourth of July weekend, and as the death toll continues to rise, far-right conspiracists online saw their opportunity to come out in full force, blurring the lines of what’s true and untrue.

Some people, emerging from the same vectors associated with the longstanding QAnon conspiracy theory, which essentially holds that a shadowy “deep state” is acting against president Donald Trump, spread on X that the devastating weather was being controlled by the government.

“I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS,” posted Pete Chambers, a former special forces commander and frequent fixture on the far right who once organized an armed convoy to the Texas border, along with documents he claimed to show government weather operations. “WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?”

The same chain of posts on the social media platform X singled out a California-based “precipitation enhancement” company as a potential culprit.


It didn’t take long for one of the most integral figures in the QAnon movement to repost Chambers, which received millions of views on the Elon Musk owned-app.

“Anyone able to answer this?” wrote retired general Mike Flynn, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration and who helped legitimize QAnon after pledging allegiance to the movement in 2020, reposting Chambers.

Conspiracists and grifters on other platforms joined in. One YouTuber with hundreds of thousands of subscribers posted breathless coverage of what he called: “The TRUTH of WEATHER MANIPULATION” in a segment which earned him close to 200,000 views alone.……..

Optimus Prime said:

Disasters and tragedies have long been the source of American conspiracies, old and new. So when devastating flash floods hit Texas over the Fourth of July weekend, and as the death toll continues to rise, far-right conspiracists online saw their opportunity to come out in full force, blurring the lines of what’s true and untrue.

Some people, emerging from the same vectors associated with the longstanding QAnon conspiracy theory, which essentially holds that a shadowy “deep state” is acting against president Donald Trump, spread on X that the devastating weather was being controlled by the government.

“I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS,” posted Pete Chambers, a former special forces commander and frequent fixture on the far right who once organized an armed convoy to the Texas border, along with documents he claimed to show government weather operations. “WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?”

The same chain of posts on the social media platform X singled out a California-based “precipitation enhancement” company as a potential culprit.


It didn’t take long for one of the most integral figures in the QAnon movement to repost Chambers, which received millions of views on the Elon Musk owned-app.

“Anyone able to answer this?” wrote retired general Mike Flynn, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration and who helped legitimize QAnon after pledging allegiance to the movement in 2020, reposting Chambers.

Conspiracists and grifters on other platforms joined in. One YouTuber with hundreds of thousands of subscribers posted breathless coverage of what he called: “The TRUTH of WEATHER MANIPULATION” in a segment which earned him close to 200,000 views alone.……..

Far-right conspiracy theories spread online in aftermath of the Texas floods

Some social media users falsely claimed that the extreme weather was being controlled by the US government

www.theguardian.com

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Sigh. These dumb motherforkers have no clue about weather.

LA 2 L.A. said:

As someone soon turning 60, I second your motion.

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As someone who is turning 61 and visiting the Darby area in Sept I find this development unsettling?

SFIDC3 said:

As someone who is turning 61 and visiting the Darby area in Sept I find this development unsettling?

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It's been 20 some years since I've been to Darby so this might not be the way it is now. But when I was there one thing to know back then was to watchout for their town marshal, he was bloody awful about picking on people up who had some pot.

He his deputies even arrested Hoyt Axton over that. That might have been a contributing factor in Axton's death at 61. They went out of their way to make an extreme example of Axton, it was quite a saga.

SamAndreas said:

It's been 20 some years since I've been to Darby so this might not be the way it is now. But when I was there one thing to know back then was to watchout for their town marshal, he was bloody awful about picking on people up who had some pot.

He his deputies even arrested Hoyt Axton over that. That might have been a contributing factor in Axton's death at 61. They went out of their way to make an extreme example of Axton, it was quite a saga.

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That sucks, never run into him but we've talked to a few cops and forest rangers, they were all very chill....the local saloon (Sawmill) there also has really good food....

Don't know if you are aware, but they filmed Yellowstone at one of the local ranches just a mile or so from town.....

SFIDC3 said:

That sucks, never run into him but we've talked to a few cops and forest rangers, they were all very chill....the local saloon (Sawmill) there also has really good food....

Don't know if you are aware, but they filmed Yellowstone at one of the local ranches just a mile or so from town.....

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I didn't know that, and I haven't seen that movie.

It's been 25 years now since The Fire! How well have the burn scars grown over since?

At that point in time that fire was amoung the largest forest fires in history. The smoke plume from it made it all the way around the globe to England. I was in my cabin it that fires path and each day for over a month it got closer and closer. It never did make it to my place, but it sure looked like it was going to for a long while.

This photo is famous, it's called Elk Bath. It was taken during that fire. It was in the river near Sula Montana which is fairly close to Darby.

That must be the new GOP talking point. Well, Abbott heaven forbid we should study such a horrible deadly failure of emergency management in order to learn how to avoid the next one.

These people no longer give a tinker’s damn about their constituents do they? Just CYA and everyone is on their own.



Edited to add: if you just lost over 100 citizens to a natural disaster with inadequate warning and response, you are by definition losing at governing. The butt crevasse is on a losing team right now.

MT15 said:

That must be the new GOP talking point. Well, Abbott heaven forbid we should study such a horrible deadly failure of emergency management in order to learn how to avoid the next one.

These people no longer give a tinker’s damn about their constituents do they? Just CYA and everyone is on their own.

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What the fork does he think football teams do in the film room, then on the practice field???

Analyze what went right, what went wrong, why it went wrong, what needs to be done so it goes right next time

There are good reasons not to publicly blame anybody at this point in time, before any investigation is completed. But his comment seems to imply there will be nothing done to discover what went wrong. After all, when you figure out what went wrong, there will be responsible parties identified.

Taken together with the other TX officials response to a similar query, it looks like shirking of their responsibility to the citizens of TX.

Speaking of shirking responsibility :

bird said:

Sigh. These dumb motherforkers have no clue about weather.

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Not just weather. They don't have a clue about anything.

SFIDC3 said:

As someone who is turning 61 and visiting the Darby area in Sept I find this development unsettling?

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Should I chuckle or cross my fingers for you?

Augustus Doricko knew when he founded a cloud-seeding start-up in 2023 that he’d have to contend with misunderstandings and conspiracy theories surrounding the technology. Still, he wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer volume of online fury he has faced in the wake of the catastrophic Texas floods that have killed more than 100 people and nearly twice that many missing.

“It has been nonstop pandemonium,” Doricko said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Doricko and his company, Rainmaker, have become a focal point of posts spiraling across social media that suggest the floods in Kerr County were a human-made disaster. An array of influencers, media personalities, elected officials and other prominent figures — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) and former Trump adviser Michael Flynn — have publicly raised the possibility that cloud-seeding operations like Rainmaker’s might have caused or at least exacerbated the historic deluge.

That’s impossible, atmospheric scientists say. Cloud seeding, in which planes scatter dust particles through clouds to trigger rain and snow, remains a fledgling technology, the effects of which are too limited and localized to produce anything remotely like the 15 inches of rain that drowned swaths of South Central Texas over the Fourth of July weekend.

“The amount of energy involved in making storms like that is astronomical compared to anything you can do with cloud seeding,” said Bob Rauber, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign atmospheric science emeritus professor who has studied the technology. “We’re talking about a very small increase on a natural process at best.”

That hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from latching onto cloud seeding as an incendiary explanation for natural disasters. The search for a scapegoat has turned a spotlight on a controversial technology that has drawn interest from drought-stricken Western states and dozens of countries looking to replenish water reservoirs, despite limited evidence that it works and broader social and environmental concerns about altering the weather. And it underscores how conspiracy theories can flourish in the aftermath of natural disasters as people seek information — and the clout that can come from providing sensational answers.

This much is true: On the afternoon of July 2, a single-engine plane operated by the El Segundo, California-based start-up Rainmaker flew on a cloud-seeding job over Runge, Texas, more than 100 miles southeast of Kerr County. Over the course of about 20 minutes, it released about 70 grams of silver iodide into a pair of clouds; the mission was followed by a modest drizzle that dropped less than half a centimeter of rain over the parched farms below, Doricko said.

The run was part of a contract that Rainmaker had inked this spring with the South Texas Weather Modification Association, a nonprofit funded by local water management districts to refill water reservoirs and boost rainfall over cropland.

Soon after, Doricko said, his company’s meteorologists saw a storm front approaching and called off their operations in the area. By the morning of July 4, the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry had dumped up to 15 inches of rain over parts of Kerr County.

But online sleuths steeped in conspiracy theories seized upon the coincidence..............

He seeded clouds over Texas. Then came the conspiracy theories.​

SamAndreas said:

I didn't know that, and I haven't seen that movie.

It's been 25 years now since The Fire! How well have the burn scars grown over since?

At that point in time that fire was amoung the largest forest fires in history. The smoke plume from it made it all the way around the globe to England. I was in my cabin it that fires path and each day for over a month it got closer and closer. It never did make it to my place, but it sure looked like it was going to for a long while.

This photo is famous, it's called Elk Bath. It was taken during that fire. It was in the river near Sula Montana which is fairly close to Darby.

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I've fished that section of the East Fork through there all in and around Sula, so I'm pretty sure I've waded through the water in your picture.....just wow.....

MT15 said:

That must be the new GOP talking point. Well, Abbott heaven forbid we should study such a horrible deadly failure of emergency management in order to learn how to avoid the next one.

These people no longer give a tinker’s damn about their constituents do they? Just CYA and everyone is on their own.

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They think they are untouchable.....it would be nice if there were enough constituents in TX that actually cared because they keep electing R's.....