I'm So Old?

 I'm so old that I remember when in 2022 Hakeem Jeffries described the filibuster as “Dripping in racist history, in defense of slavery and Jim Crow.” After he prattled on for almost nine hours on Thursday in the House chamber, he has either changed his mind or he is a racist defending slavery. I am going with the latter.

I'm so old that I lived in a time before Federal district court judges would issue nationwide injunctions. I miss the old "Impeach Earl Warren" signs.

I am so old that I remember when everything wasn't Donald Trump's fault. 

I am so old that I have never considered buying an electric car to get some kind of government subsidy. As long as I am beating that bush, why is it that every snake oil salesman pushing solar panels starts by telling you about tax credits? Did your wife ever mention a family of tax-deduction worthy children before you got married? Who knew that love was so attached to government tax credits?

I am so old that I remember when Black Democrats renounced slavery. They are okay with it now as long as the slaves are Mexicans or Asians. Most of the people in the states that fought against slavery in 1861 think that slavery is a career field now for Hispanics and Asians.

I'm so old that I still remember why I hate liberals. The only thing that liberals know is that everything that happens on, around or near this planet is someone else's fault. 

There has been a tragedy in Texas over the last few days. More than 80 people have been lost in a flash flood that swept through the Guadalupe River valley early Friday morning. Several camps for children are in that area. Sunday afternoon, two girls were found thirty feet up and clinging to a tree. Democrats and other people who hate America are claiming that this is a result of Trump reducing staffing in the National Weather Service. Other brain-dead liberal bastards are blaming this flood on DOGE. 

Let's set aside everything Trump-related from the libs and look at some facts. This incident happened in the middle of the night. The river rose twenty to thirty feet in about an hour. This was a once in a hundred-year occurrence. Liberals claim that if the National Weather Service had been "properly" staffed, they would have known this was going to happen and we could have saved all of those lives. Let's take a moment and make a quick trip to the reality of that claim.

First, this happened in the middle of the night at around 2:00 AM. How many of those campers had their cellphones on and responded to an alert? Here's a news flash for you smartphone jockeys. Not all of us live with our cellphones poised to take directions from the cellular gods. 

Second, leftists and loons are claiming that job cuts that Trump made in the National Weather Service caused this disaster. Would it have not rained in Texas except for a reduction in force at the Weather Service? How much does the weather service actually know what is happening on the ground from their base? In my area, we get big weather bulletins from the National Weather Service in Blacksburg, Virginia. That's 150 miles away. You can't get all of the information from a radar screen.

Do we all depend on the National Weather Service for our weather information? Most people turn on the television news for a weather report. Almost every television station has a staff of meteorologists. Look at all of the ads that television stations run telling us to watch them for the "most accurate" weather forecasts. How many television stations put out a forecast for those floods? Were there even any television meteorologists on the job at 2:00 AM?

Third and maybe most important is this question. Do we all react promptly to warnings from the National Weather Service? In 2005, the National Weather Service warned people that Hurricane Katrina was going to strike.the Gulf Coast area of Louisiana and Mississippi. Authorities urged people to evacuate to the inland areas. Some did evacuate, thousands did not. More than 1800 people died in Hurricane Katrina. We had a fully staffed National Weather Service. We had government officials urging people to evacuate. Yet we lost at least 1800 people in that storm. Given the homeless population in New Orleans, we probably lost hundreds more. So, in reality it doesn't matter what the Weather Service tells us, we are going to do what we want. There's a price for the freedom of choice.

Let's go to the Situation Simulator. It is 2:00 AM. You are awakened by an alarm from your cellphone. There is a weather bulletin warning you of high rain and possible flooding in your area. You are a female college student serving as a counselor for 15 or 20 eight- or nine-year-old girls. You are about one hundred yards away from the river and about ten feet above the river water level. Here are your choices. You can wake everyone up and have them get dressed. Then you decide whether to walk out into a driving rain in the dark to seek higher ground or remain inside your present shelter and wait to see what develops. Do you really believe that a bunch of nine-tear-old girls want to walk out into a storm at 2:30 AM? If you take them outside, how are you going to keep them all together? If you stay inside, do you know how fast the water is going to rise? Bear in mind, this turns out to be a once in a century event. If you decide to take them outside, where are you going to take them? Are you communicating with other people from the same camp? Has there been a history of catastrophic flooding in this camp? Does everyone have a flashlight? Can everyone swim? 

I am sorry, but bad things happen to good people. Not everything is someone else's fault. Remember that when the legal vultures start swarming all over this situation a few hours from now. No amount of money will bring your kids back.