Thoughts and prayers, etc.

Facts Over Feelings

Over the weekend, flash floods in Kerr County, Texas, killed over 60 people, including 27 children at a Christian summer camp. Ten campers are still missing.

Kerr County had looked into modernizing their flood warning system in 2017, but ultimately decided not to because it was “too expensive.” And Republican state lawmakers killed a bill that would have funded a better emergency system, including warning sirens for floods. The county, instead, relied on Facebook updates which according to local media would have absolutely not been seen by the campers or their counselors, who were not allowed to bring their phones with them.

There are claims that the National Weather Service (NWS) did not accurately predict the amount of rain that hit Kerr County. Though the NWS is saying it was more complicated that that. But the confusion shouldn’t be surprising, as one of the core goals of Project 2025 and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was the gutting the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) and the NWS so that national weather data could be sold to private companies. Project 2025’s main architects also wanted to limit the NOAA’s and the NWS’ ability to forecast climate change, obviously.

Conservatives spent the weekend trying to create a narrative for the floods that, you know, excused them of any fault. Which was difficult, seeing as how even X’s anti-woke AI bot Grok said it was Republican funding cuts that led to this weekend’s flooding deaths. It literally told users, “facts over feelings.” Ouch. But that’s ok. When reality doesn’t fit your ideology, it’s time to change reality.

“I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how the flooding in Texas became so devastating so quickly. Why not evacuate?? Then I saw this: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in just 45 minutes,” former Fox News producer Kylie Jane Kremer posted on X over the weekend. “That doesn’t even seem natural,” alluding to a common climate change explanation among America’s most unhinged, that, actually, there is some kind of nefarious group manipulating the weather to target conservatives.

Kremer’s post went viral and led to an epic crash out, as she fought with liberals and leftists pulling up old posts of hers where she said that climate change was a hoax. “I STAND BY MY WORDS,” she wrote. “This also has nothing to do with the tragedy unfolding in Texas with 11 children still missing!”

And more extreme users on X took the weather manipulation conspiracy theory further, with one writing, “Texas flood hit the whitest part of Texas and killed white children. Convince me this isn’t targeted weather warfare.” Another user, going by, uh @hustlebitch_, wrote, “🚨 WAS TEXAS HIT BY WEATHER WEAPONS? Geoengineering. Cloud seeding. Weather manipulation.” I could go on and on, but, trust me, there’s a ton of this stuff flying around right now. And this has led to some pretty grim reactions on the left.

“A common progressive fantasy is that once conservatives see the consequences of climate change, they will have some sort of come to Jesus moment,” X user @KrangTNelson wrote. “But it was always pretty obvious to people paying attention that they were just gonna blame it on Deep State Flooding Tech and learn nothing.”

Or as @wb_baskerville put more bluntly, “I don’t know how you share a democratic society with millions of people who are just pervasively unwilling to occupy reality in the most basic terms.”

There has been a little bit of soul-searching from at least some Texas Republicans following the flood. The Texas Tribune interviewed state Rep. Wes Virdell, who did express some regret about being part of the vote to kill the grant program that would have funded better emergency services in the state. “I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” Virdell said. But there are plenty of Republicans who will not be nearly so introspective when the next climate disaster hits their constituency. I mean, Sen. Ted Cruz, this morning, basically dismissed the idea that DOGE cuts affected the state’s emergency response.

And so, we know how this is going to work: Republicans are going to keep cutting, keep destroying basic services, dismantling the social safety net, and things will inevitably go wrong. Floods, hurricanes, pandemics, food contamination, industrial accidents, you name it. And they’ll shriek and moan that you’re politicizing a tragedy if you point out that their policies led directly to the American carnage unfurling before us. All while their base dreams up new conspiracy theories that conveniently put the blame on someone else, the Democrats, migrants, the Jews, trans people, anyone but their own party. And though they’ll seethe at the idea that these calamities could be political, they’ll also be more than happy to lean into the chaos. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced a bill over the weekend that would make “weather manipulation” a felony. Sure. What the fuck, why not? Who cares. Anything to keep their deranged supporters from wondering why the flood waters continue to rise. Thoughts and prayers, etc.

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Here’s Ralph

A little context here, the poster of the video explained in a follow-up post that Ralph comes by every few nights, but the night he shot the video above one of his dogs scared Ralph so he pulled him up into his lap to calm him down a bit before sending him on his way. Godspeed, Ralph. I love you.

Trump, Musk, And Epstein

After Elon Musk’s big beautiful breakup with President Donald Trump over his administration’s Big Beautiful Bill, Musk has finally done exactly what we all knew he would do eventually. He announced he’s starting a new political party called The America Party. I’m sure Andrew Yang is going to figure out some way of getting involved. That guy is literally addicted to losing as a third party candidate.

Trump is clearly pretty annoyed by all of this, writing in a very long Truth Social post, “I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks. He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States.”

While Musk spent most of Sunday firing back at Trump over the announcement via Axios that the Department of Justice and the FBI have both concluded that, actually, Jeffrey Epstein didn’t have a client list, wasn’t blackmailing anyone, and did kill himself. I have to imagine there’s a little baggy of white powder in Musk’s office staring at him like the Green Goblin mask right now, telling him to grab a key and call Trump a pedophile again.

Anyways, at this point, I think I’ve become a complete accelerationist about the American political establishment, so I think this is all good actually. Divide the vote in every direction. Blow up the center. Don’t you want to see what happens lol.

Orc City Is So Hot Right Now

—by Adam Bumas

July 4th wasn’t just Independence Day, it also was the day X turned into Orc City. The age of the Orc lasted most of the holiday weekend, as Orc City-posting completely engulfed X before spreading across most other (text-based) social media.

The meme grew out of the discourse about Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding 2. X user John A. Douglas tried to mock Kojima’s writing and revealed himself to be a forsworn reply guy when he got pushback.  Eventually, podcaster Esther Rosenfeld tried to move the conversation along by posting the first page of Douglas’ fantasy novel, which begins with the phrase “The Orc city.”

I’ve seen a lot of comparisons to posts about the ice war on Europa from a couple months ago, but I don’t quite agree. There, the emphasis was on the Goncharov-style roleplay, leaning into the fiction. Here, the whole point was how silly and shallow that fiction is — at least until the meme got big enough it just became a funny phrase.

Jet2Holidays Are Also So Hot Right Now

A few months ago we noticed that TikTok content wasn’t really popping like it used to and our theory has been that it was thanks to a combination of the platform possibly algorithmically throttling itself to avoid any kind of political scrutiny and, also, a lot of casual users may have actually taken a break. Well, it took about six months for us to finally get a new, genuinely viral TikTok meme after the not-quite-ban back in January.

@frances_t99

No one held my hand😭#nothingbeatsajet2holiday #chattoogariver #whitewater #fyp

The big new meme on TikTok right now is taking the audio from an advertisement for UK travel agency Jet2Holidays and putting it underneath clips of people hurting themselves or fighting on planes or just vacations going really wrong somehow. Here’s another good video.

When Horniness Becomes A Storage Issue

—by Adam Bumas

Last week, the internet’s most popular fan fiction site, Archive of Our Own (AO3), went offline and stayed that way for days. Readers and writers alike were so devastated, at least one ended up literally touching grass. And fittingly, the problem seems to be that it just got too popular. 

When the site returned over the weekend, they warned readers that bookmarks would take some extra time. Since AO3 is a non-profit and open source, its code is entirely public, and so the problem could be diagnosed immediately. It turns out that the site crashed because someone logged the 2.1-billionth bookmark, which exceeded the limit of what the site’s architecture was designed to store.

So what was the bookmarked fic that brought down the whole website? As far as anyone can tell, it was an Omegaverse breeding fic (long story) starring Louis and Harry from One Direction (also a long story). Excellent work, everyone.

The Velvet Sundown’s Spokesperson Is Fake Too

Last week, I wrote about the AI-generated psychedelic rock band The Velvet Sundown that was climbing the Spotify charts, racking up millions of listens from users who, ostensibly, did not know they were listening to AI-generated content.

A spokesperson for The Velvet Sundown named Andrew Frelon appeared and did an interview with Rolling Stone. It has since come out that Frelon is not associated with the project at all actually. Frelon has since tried to spin this whole thing into an art project exposing the dire state of the media right now. Bro, we know it’s not good. You don’t have to stage an elaborate stunt to show that newsrooms are struggling. Just, like, open any major publication’s website and wait for it to crash your browser.

Anyways, this all opens up a very interesting thought experiment. According to the US Copyright Office, if you don’t meaningfully alter AI content you can’t trademark it. But music is extremely easy to replicate, both recorded and, crucially, live. So what’s stopping a human-led band — or a bunch of bands — from capitalizing on The Velvet Sundown’s newfound success and touring as the band? Whoever comes up with a profitable answer to this question, I assume, will determine the future of commercial music.

A Real Good Mariachi Cover

@ezband

Replying to @blizzard3366 Casi le atinas… pero no es mariachi — ¡es una banda Norteña! 🖤 Aquí les va Welcome to the Black Parade de My Che... See more

Some Stray Links

• The New York Times published their Zohran Mamdani story because they wanted to beat Christopher Rufo to the scoop

• “Stop making me log in to everything”

• “Trump Media launches TV streaming platform with Newsmax channel globally”

P.S. here’s a really good TikTok. (Also, read the top comment lol.)

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***