Sinking Beneath Our Wisdom Like A Stone

Everyone keeps asking, “who is they?”

Well some of them are listed on NOAA, as well as most of the ways weather can be modified, because they are required to report it to the Secretary of Commerce by the Weather Modification Act of 1972.

The NOAA government website has a… pic.twitter.com/UaNZCiZ8es

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) October 9, 2024

MTG is shriveling into irrelevance the same way Trump is. In fact, they are going down the same way: seeking attention through more and more outlandish claims about natural disasters.  Green insists someone somewhere is responsible for hurricanes (are there no “acts of God” in her world?), while Trump insists someone, somewhere is responsible for the suffering of victims of an “act of God.”

I use the legal term for a reason:

Cool. Identify one of "them" who did these things to cause Milton, publicize the details and people can then seek compensation through administrative and civil proceedings.

We're waiting.

And don't think we missed the reference to lasers, Queen Qanon. https://t.co/IuifO6Q0PN

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) October 10, 2024

Force majeur absolves any individual from responsibility (tort law is much harder on property owners, especially, than many people realize. Natural disasters largely affect property, and then people. Always more property damage than lives lost. Almost always.). Trump, of course, deals in absolute bullshit , just like Green, but his is aimed at people suffering the aftermath of a disaster. She wants to blame someone for the disaster.

From my experience, though, the victims of disaster are, largely, grateful for whatever help they get, and are more interested in recovery than in assigning blame. The enormity of the recovery (it can take years) slowly sinks in, and frustration can rear its ugly head, but especially in the immediate aftermath, victims are focused on help and hope, not on blame and recrimination. Nor are they huddled with their cellphones reading Twitter obsessively. The people sending death threats and complaining about the response (which, in the ground, can often seem like not enough; that’s the enormity of the loss, though. And the psychic toll of an “act if God”) on Twitter are probably not even in the states affected.

Trump appeals to those people.  MTG needs those people just to verify her existence, her influence, her importance. So does Trump. They both need the same reassurances. Which marks them both as unfit for public service; at the very least.

The suffering is wrought by the disaster. Hope and help are all we can offer. The people who can’t do that much don’t deserve our attention, much less our concern. They are squawking because they want to be the victims, they want the attention they feel should go only to them. The best response we can give such people is to push them aside and turn their noises off, and get back to the important work of taking care of each other. 

People like Trump and MTG self-isolate, if the rest of us focus on what matters.