FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors

FEMA has "Emergency" in the name. Traditionally, it's supposed to come in when the normal rescue infrastructure has failed, due to earthquake, weather, etc. You're not optimizing for cost here. You're optimizing for reliable emergency management -- and that's going to cost money.

If you wanted a different agency, like one that prioritized "recovery after 6 months", well, it would help to inform the nation that FEMA is no longer the nationwide emergency management agency. It's up to the local and state governments.

And Texas voters overwhelmingly voted for politicians who caused this and still make excuses for these same politicians. I am tired of caring for people who vote for people that harm them.

I thought that there was a bar somewhere, a line that would not be crossed, but there isn't, it's just straight up identity politics, or owning the libs, whatever you want to call it.

Please remember to take the statements posters make in the best possible light.

My interpretation of such is that they're sick of voters who expect a double standard. Don't do something ''I'' don't like when it helps other people, but when ''I'' need help godspeed.

Kristi Noem is a DEI hire because her only qualification is that the first four letters of her gender are "FEMA".

That, and she's an expert at killing puppies and bragging about it by writing a book.

In her next book she'll brag about all the little girls she killed in Texas, reminiscing about her experience directing FEMA: "It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done."

Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/26/trump-kristi-n...

>“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

>“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”

>Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.

>“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

Which directly led to her current unpleasant job at FEMA.

And they are going to vote for them again. Next November is a million years from now. Though for that matter this will be forgotten by the November.

The best possible light is that he cares about the lives of the little girls and many others that Trump and Musk and Noem and DOGE killed more than owning the libs and canceling NOAA.

Not every person in the state voted for this. The dead children didn’t vote for anyone. Have an ounce of compassion or empathy.

Putting this out in the world doesn’t help.

The town that was flooded rejected _free funds_ from the federal government during Covid because they were choking on a red pill of conspiranoia. Destiny (the streamer) did a recent streaming session where he watched the video of the town feedback regarding accepting / rejecting federal government funds from the American Recovery Act (for sirens and standardized first responder comms systems). The short version of the plot is the people were propagandized to distrust the Biden Admin, so they rejected the free upgrades. The voters pressured the town council (one was an actual threat of violence, followed by threats of “consequences”) if the town council accepted the federal funds.

There are consequences to voters and representatives who no longer believe in our shared objective reality.

I don’t blame the little girls, but with freedom comes responsibility. Their parents were responsible for choosing the camp they went to. The camp owner and staff made the risk evaluations of allowing them to sleep in a flood plain during a storm. The local town voted for their representatives and those representatives rejected federal funds which would have given them a chance to survive without cell coverage.

Ultimately your parent comment wasn’t necessarily assigning individual blame. In a democratic republic, the voters / citizens / residents (in aggregate) are ultimately responsible for the actions that elected representatives take in their name.

The people deserving of compassion and sympathy are dead. The people who killed them are busy explaining why despite the repeated warnings and tax payer funding, this actually wasn't their fault.

I think the political spectrum is dangerous because people expect the Paradox of Tolerance and similar correlations to silence the left in places where the right will happily speak.

Noem is the head of DHS.

The (acting) head of FEMA, David Richardson [1], hasn’t visited the disaster area and apparently hasn’t made any public appearances for months [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Richardson_(government_o...

2. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/10/fema-leader-texas-f...

There is only one thing that might help: making it clear that this is going to keep happening. There are a lot of people who could help, but haven't in the past. If a small fraction of them realize that this is a problem that they can help fix with very little effort, then maybe it might get better.

Having said that, here's the really unhelpful part: I don't think this will work, either. I believe that the overwhelming majority of people vote the same every time, including choosing not to vote. The only thing that changes is a microscopic minority, and they choose randomly. I believe that if we re-ran the 2024 election again right now, the result would be identical.

I point that out only to say the my original comment is me being optimistic. I actually think it's even worse.