Hurricane Harvey and the flood of A-holes....

I am not going to belabor the news stories- either you know what is happening in Texas, or you don't care.  Now here, we follow these things pretty closely.  People need prayers, need help, and we have done both to the best of our abilities, 'nuff said.  And it has been heartwarming to see people around the nation- especially the courageous citizens of the Houston area themselves- coming together to do what they can to help.  Hopefully, a lot of them will still be doing so when the water goes down and the hard part begins.


I have taken advantage of several bits of social media to stay informed.  During the landfall itself, I followed the Category 6 blog on Weather Underground, which boasts a lot of really knowledgeable people who go out of their way to educate people who are in harm's way.  After a while, I decided to hop off and go to bed- and a funny thing happened, as I found out.

There was a storm chaser who was live streaming in Rockport- which was the jaws of the beast.  It was fascinating to watch, but the site he was streaming over had two very annoying features.  On the right, an continuous stream of hearts rising up like bubbles in a soda glass for a yet-unknown reason.  On the left, it was posting live comments.  Here was the problem, as most of the comments seemed to be from adolescent pervos making sexual innuendo and foul-mouthed comments about anything and everything.  I might have stayed on it, had this site given me the option to turn them off, but no such luck.  Unable to handle the torrent of utter stupidity, I got off.


A darn shame that, as I saw the next day a compilation video of the stream- without the BS- and it was exciting, amazing, and damn scary.  I also learned that the "comment stream" from this was bleeding over into the comments on WU (which is where I found the link in the first place), and that it had gotten so bad that the well-educated and intentioned regulars threw up their hands at the inability of the moderators to stop the flow of verbal sewage and just signed off till the next morning.  Indeed, much of the first little while I was on WU Saturday was spent on post-mortems of what they described as a debacle.


But by that point, I had already stumbled onto another debacle  brought about by the sheer stupidity of a minority of people.  Twitter was being used to relay info on people in trouble through the hashtag #Houstonflood.  But when I arrived, they were being hit by an ever-increasing amount of bot-spam.  95% of it was advertising for the night before's Mayweather fight, being directed through peoples' accounts by our friends from China, Baidu.com.  The other five were evenly split between a recurring, pair of blatantly porn posts and one that promised lots of examples of Katy Perry "exposing herself".

In between these, there were dozens of idiots that were finding every way possible to blame President Trump for the disaster- from his dropping out of the Paris Accords, to some disaster thing that Obama started that he dropped, to the heinous crime of tweeting about a book by Sheriff Dave Clark, to the fact the "climate change caused the whole thing, and probably another couple dozen nitwit things that I missed.

One person genuinely trying to save the hashtag for good things, begged anyone not in the middle of the tragedy to "report the hell out of the spam."  I spent about a half-hour reporting the same six spam posts over and over, blocking political agendists that felt that lives in danger was a great time to preach about how evil Trump is and that climate change deniers are inbred fools, and occasionally getting to read something pertinent- until somebody using their brains informed everybody to switch to #Houstonflood1 to get away, at least from the spam.

For a while, then, things improved.  I followed the KHOU live stream until they got flooded out of their building and got KFAA Dallas to cover for them, then switched to KRIV.  As the afternoon started, the Twitterites abandoned that hashtag as well, while plenty more brain challenged individuals were trying to follow the talk of the town- #HurricaneHarvery.  Yes, "Harvery".  That was apparently after two other hashtags that couldn't spell "hurricane" right fell by the wayside.


Then as evening settled in, the climate changers returned to WU.  These people weren't even smart enough to remember that 12 years ago, their predecessors were telling us that because of global warming, Katrina was a harbinger of what was going to "happen more and more often"- and yet, this was the first major hurricane to hit SINCE Wilma that same year.  And here they were, telling us that climate change was going to make "Harveys" the norm.  Thankfully, for the most part they were shouted down by the regulars, who told them to take their climate warming and political crap elsewhere.

Was it all leftist talking points?  No, there was a little rightside rhetoric, but the vast majority of that was responding to the people that were struggling with 12-year amnesia.

And today, I see a CNN reporter was all upset because one of the rescue boats had a confederate flag on the back.  "I would have accepted the ride, but I would have torn the flag off when we landed," this reporter said.  I said, " I don't know as I would do that so close to a big, spinning propeller."  And I am also told that MSNBC asked the Governor of Texas if he was doing all he could to rescue illegals along with everyone else.  I will go on record right now as saying to the left, I don't see how you expect me to take your claims of being inclusive and willing to work with others at ANY level when you can interject this manner of utter trash into a disaster situation.  To me, this is telling me that YOU would probably let a community of white Christians drown if you had the chance- at least those of you so willing to show your online courage.

Thankfully, there are a lot of lefts and rights who realize at times like these, politics is even more stupid than it is normally.  And a lot of them are gathering in Texas, or sending money and supplies that way.  To you, I don't apply the above remarks.  But if you are one of those who interspersed your climate change BS in between people's pleas for rescue, the mirror is yours.


Oh, and one more dreg of humanity I wanted to mention. Some prince wrote up a whole deal about calling the National Guard for rescues, giving a phone number that went to some out of state insurance company.  I hope you have a good explanation for your "clever marketing scheme" to give before your Final Judge.

Oh, and that reminds me of another dishonorable mention:  The same old tired atheist troll getting on a "#Prayfor.." hashtag to tell everyone to send money and stop wasting time with fantasy.  I would have nailed him, but he got shouted down by a fellow atheist.  Sometimes there IS a justice of sorts...