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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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EDIT: I no longer endorse this post. USA Today and NPR for Northern, Central and Eastern Kentucky have both run stories that confirm that the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office was staffed the night of the tornado:

Fahy said Jackson workers were called in May 16 work the overnight shift to coordinate with emergency management personnel and issue warnings throughout the night. The Jackson office had a full staff that he described as an “all-hands-on-deck” situation due to the extreme storm.

“The deaths were not attributable to the staffing cuts,” he said. “Everybody was there last night. We had a full team.”

In a statement, the weather service said the Jackson office had additional staffing and support from neighboring offices through the weekend.

As USA TODAY reported before the Kentucky storms, the weather service has had to scramble to cover vital shifts. For the first time in decades, not all forecast offices have “24/7” staffing, according to the weather service union.

I still believe it is irresponsible to leave offices unstaffed, even if there is some ability to move neighboring employees around when they're expecting storms, but this is much less bad than I initially believed. I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.

On May 15th, the New York Times ran a story about how DOGE cuts had left parts of Eastern Kentucky vulnerable while it was under moderate threats for extreme weather:

Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees, said the office in Jackson, Ky., was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that is reshaping the federal bureaucracy. (emphasis mine)

This morning, May 17th, it became apparent that eastern Kentucky had been hit by an overnight tornado that killed dozens.

I was honestly speechless when I read that.

This is what London, Kentucky looks like after the tornado. To quote someone who put it much more eloquently than I can:

Of all the disasters I’ve studied, tornadoes scare me the most.

They come with little warning and can erase entire communities in minutes — even seconds.

There’s no four-day lead-up to prepare like we often have with major hurricanes, and the winds of these storms can far exceed the most violent tropical cyclones.

In those few moments before one hits, especially if you’re sleeping, you’re at the mercy of your local weather station.

If someone is watching, they can issue a warning in those critical minutes before it’s too late.

Those few minutes after an emergency alert is issued are the difference between life and death.

[...]

Tornado warnings were delayed because of reduced staff. Those critical moments — a midnight warning to your phone waking you up, giving you precious seconds to find shelter — came too late for some.

My political stance has been evolving, but I'd describe myself as a state capacity libertarian.

To me disaster preparedness and relief are obvious, bread and butter, parts of the federal government. Sure we do stupid, wasteful things like give people flood insurance that lets them build and rebuild houses in the same vulnerable spot over and over again, when we should probably just heavily incentivize them to rebuild in a less risky area. Sure, with any given disaster there's going to be criticisms about how Biden did this or Bush did that. But I've always felt mostly positive about my tax dollars that go to disaster relief and preparedness.

I've had a growing sense of unease over the last few months as I saw reports of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announcing Trump administration plans to end FEMA, and reports about National Weather Service cuts back in April. I'm gutted that the easy predictions of these moves leading to unnecessary deaths has come true.

A part of me had hoped that Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would cut a lot of genuinely unnecessary spending from the government. When it was drag shows in Ecuador, even I as a rather Trump-skeptical person could admit that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But it was also clear to me that they were cutting with a chainsaw, not a scalpel. The images of Elon waving a chainsaw at CPAC feel a lot more hollow now. The man has blood on his hands. 27 people are dead in Kentucky because DOGE and Trump thought that it was "more efficient" to just let people die, instead of keeping overnight forecasters on staff.

Back in 2020, FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at $7,500,000. By that standard, when doing the cost-benefit analysis the government bean counters are supposed to value 27 deaths as a loss of $202.5 million. I wonder how much it costs the government to staff permanent overnight forecasters in eastern Kentucky?

To be clear, I do applaud you for writing this. It takes some genuinely uncommon courage to admit to a mistake, and it speaks well of your character to do so. No one's immune to being mislead or making error, and I've personally made worse (and dumber) mistakes, including in this forum.

So to the extent I'm making commentary, this is to comment on the Mescales News et all, with an emphasis on the et all. This isn't even the first time people have accused DOGE of killing people via tornado, falsely. Lest I be called out for nutpicking, today, a sitting federal senator accused Trump and DOGE of killing at least two sailors; accusations that DOGE cuts and the Shelton Snowlikes were the real cause of AA5342 or MedJets 056 were endemic even as it became clearer and clearer that it wasn't and couldn't have been. Nor is this specific to Trump: Abbott murdered migrants [even if]https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/13/us/us-mexico-border-drowned-migrants) he needed a time machine to do it, and that's just the one that's been discussed here.

It's clear that they don't really 'believe' it, to the extent someone who worked for Vox can be said to 'believe' anything, but I think that's besides the point. They don't believe the truth, either! That's not what their job is, and even if they're lying because their mouths are moving, you can't assume that anything bad is literally always wrong.

((Going back to the question of Being Wrong, I nearly started writing a bit on the Qatar AF1 donation, and while some of the initial reporting was wrong, not enough of it was for what I wrote to be worth posting.))

There's a bigger question of how we got here, to this. I'm tempted, as always, to point to Palin, where between actions and lawsuits the punchline was written years before Very Rarely Lies was -- Trump or DOGE might well try to sue here, but everyone and their dog (and insurance company) knows that they won't and can't win. Maybe I'm just drawing too big a contrast from previous variants, either on the right or left, where there was at least some motion around hyperbole or figure of speech or schizophrenia, maybe I just missed some of the more clear examples back then.

((Something something USS Maine?))

But this should matter! It's a problem for people like you or I that we have to dig twenty layers deep to find any discussion of Noem's quote that doesn't bury the actual lead -- that the Trump admin is considering whether FEMA's cause could be better served by state-operated grants, rather than just burning the entire concept of disaster response like an ostrich. It's not our fault if we can't tell a hundred percent of the time when facing off against an entire industry that has optimized itself to be persuasive.

But fault's got nothing to do with it.

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