Texas flooding

[sock puppet]

The Bible instructs that God killed the wicked on the earth via a flood, with the only "righteous" ones (Noah and his family) being saved on an ark.

Mormon scripture (D&C 59:21): “And in nothing doth man offend God, or against none is his wrath kindled, save those who confess not his hand in all things, and obey not his commandments.”

Are Mormons confessing God's hand in this past weekend's floods in Texas?

Did God save the righteous in that area, and only the wicked died?

[Everybody Wang Chung]

I'm sure glad Nelson was able to warn everyone. Just think how many lives were saved.

[sock puppet]

I'm sure glad Nelson was able to warn everyone. Just think how many lives were saved.

And that, Everybody Wang Chung, is a great example of following D&C 59:21 by confessing God's hand in all things, via his prophet, seer and revelator. Just how many lives did God/Nelson save? Indeed.

[drumdude]

We have a prophet on earth to tell young women not to show their arms. They hold the line until some moderate social pressure forces them to change.

That’s what modern prophets are for.

[Marcus]

We also have a Weather Service with funding cut by Trump, and a warning published months ago in Scientific American:

How Trump’s National Weather Service Cuts Could Cost Lives
May 13, 2025

Just more than 100 years ago, on March 18, 1925, a tornado slashed across the U.S. Midwest with no warning at all and killed 695 people—a massive number for a single outbreak. Today those in a twister’s path get a take-cover notice eight to 18 minutes before a strike on average. And as recently as 1992, what looked like a minor tropical disturbance intensified with shocking speed into Hurricane Andrew. There was little time to prepare for the storm, and much of the resulting property damage in South Florida was massive. But by last year, forecasters could give several days’ warning that the then approaching storms Helene and Milton were likely to abruptly morph into monsters.

Such improvements have cumulatively saved thousands of lives and likely hundreds of billions of dollars across the U.S. And they happened only through concerted federal government investment in studying weather events, improving computer forecast models, and making continent- and ocean-spanning efforts to collect the data that make those forecasts possible. Now meteorology experts are urgently warning that the Trump administration’s staff firings and funding cuts at the National Weather Service (and its parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) threaten to disrupt these crucial operations and turn back the clock on forecasting.

“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life,” wrote five former NWS directors from both Democratic and Republican administrations in an open letter on May 2.

Ultimately, storm experts say, disruption caused by existing and proposed cuts will hit multiple fronts. An understaffed and underfunded NWS could mean that a tornado warning doesn’t come in time, that a hurricane forecast is off just enough so that the wrong coastal areas are evacuated or that flights are less likely to be routed around turbulence. “The net result is going to be massive economic harm,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain during one of his regular talks hosted on YouTube. “As we break these things, eventually it will become painfully and unignorably obvious what we’ve broken and how important it was. And it’s going to be unbelievably expensive in the scramble to try and get it back—and we might not be able to get it back.”

The NWS’s budget pays for weather services that benefit industry

For the past 20 years, a little more than 4,000 NWS staff members have put together 24-7 forecasts for the country’s approximately 300 million people every day of the year. “We have [a more] efficient level of [staff compared] to the number of people we’re serving than any other country in the world by two orders of magnitude,” says Louis Uccellini, who was NWS director from 2013 to 2022 and signed the open letter.

The NWS punches above its economic weight, too: it costs the average American about $4 per year. “It’s a cup of coffee,” says JoAnn Becker, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union that represents the NWS and several NOAA offices. With one third of the U.S. economy—from farming to trucking to tourism—being sensitive to weather and climate, the NWS provides an overall benefit of $100 billion to the economy. This is roughly 10 times what the service costs to run, according to an American Meteorological Society white paper. Recent improvements to hurricane forecasts alone have saved up to $5 billion for each hurricane that hit the U.S. since 2007, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research—a nonpartisan, nonprofit economic research organization. In comparison, the NWS’s entire budget for 2024 was less than $1.4 billion.

...After the NWS’s first wave of firings and early retirements under the Trump administration, staffing at the service’s 122 field offices across the country has dropped to a 19 percent vacancy rate. Fifty-two offices are now considered “critically understaffed,” meaning a shortage of more than 20 percent. Some branches are down by more than 40 percent. “We’re small offices,” Becker says. Each weather forecast office has about 25 to 30 people. “When you’re down four people, it starts to hurt,” she adds. “There comes a point where you don’t have enough people to cover everything.”

The lack of noticeable degradations in forecast quality so far is “because of the valiant efforts of the people who remain in these now critically understaffed roles in field offices,” Swain said in his recent video. “But the cracks are really now starting to show.”

...People across the vast weather community, from individual meteorologists to professional societies such as the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association, have all expressed alarm about the cuts to NOAA and the NWS and have urged the Trump administration to reverse course. Industries that depend on weather and climate data, such as the insurance industry, have also spoken out. The Union of Concerned Scientists has also sent congressional leaders an open letter to urge them to reinstate NOAA’s staffing and funding that has been signed by more than 3,300 scientists and other experts.

Morale is extremely low in offices across the NWS, according to Swain’s video and to Uccellini and many others who know current employees at the agency. Funding cuts are forcing many employees to bring in their own toilet paper and soap. There is also “an extreme culture of fear” Swain said in his video, with “threatening and demeaning communications” from agency leaders that have called employees “lazy” and “low productivity.”

“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life." —Five former NWS directors in a May 2 open letter

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ost-lives/

[Everybody Wang Chung]

We also have a Weather Service with funding cut by Trump, and a warning published months ago in Scientific American:

How Trump’s National Weather Service Cuts Could Cost Lives
May 13, 2025

Just more than 100 years ago, on March 18, 1925, a tornado slashed across the U.S. Midwest with no warning at all and killed 695 people—a massive number for a single outbreak. Today those in a twister’s path get a take-cover notice eight to 18 minutes before a strike on average. And as recently as 1992, what looked like a minor tropical disturbance intensified with shocking speed into Hurricane Andrew. There was little time to prepare for the storm, and much of the resulting property damage in South Florida was massive. But by last year, forecasters could give several days’ warning that the then approaching storms Helene and Milton were likely to abruptly morph into monsters.

Such improvements have cumulatively saved thousands of lives and likely hundreds of billions of dollars across the U.S. And they happened only through concerted federal government investment in studying weather events, improving computer forecast models, and making continent- and ocean-spanning efforts to collect the data that make those forecasts possible. Now meteorology experts are urgently warning that the Trump administration’s staff firings and funding cuts at the National Weather Service (and its parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) threaten to disrupt these crucial operations and turn back the clock on forecasting.

“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life,” wrote five former NWS directors from both Democratic and Republican administrations in an open letter on May 2.

Ultimately, storm experts say, disruption caused by existing and proposed cuts will hit multiple fronts. An understaffed and underfunded NWS could mean that a tornado warning doesn’t come in time, that a hurricane forecast is off just enough so that the wrong coastal areas are evacuated or that flights are less likely to be routed around turbulence. “The net result is going to be massive economic harm,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain during one of his regular talks hosted on YouTube. “As we break these things, eventually it will become painfully and unignorably obvious what we’ve broken and how important it was. And it’s going to be unbelievably expensive in the scramble to try and get it back—and we might not be able to get it back.”

The NWS’s budget pays for weather services that benefit industry

For the past 20 years, a little more than 4,000 NWS staff members have put together 24-7 forecasts for the country’s approximately 300 million people every day of the year. “We have [a more] efficient level of [staff compared] to the number of people we’re serving than any other country in the world by two orders of magnitude,” says Louis Uccellini, who was NWS director from 2013 to 2022 and signed the open letter.

The NWS punches above its economic weight, too: it costs the average American about $4 per year. “It’s a cup of coffee,” says JoAnn Becker, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union that represents the NWS and several NOAA offices. With one third of the U.S. economy—from farming to trucking to tourism—being sensitive to weather and climate, the NWS provides an overall benefit of $100 billion to the economy. This is roughly 10 times what the service costs to run, according to an American Meteorological Society white paper. Recent improvements to hurricane forecasts alone have saved up to $5 billion for each hurricane that hit the U.S. since 2007, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research—a nonpartisan, nonprofit economic research organization. In comparison, the NWS’s entire budget for 2024 was less than $1.4 billion.

...After the NWS’s first wave of firings and early retirements under the Trump administration, staffing at the service’s 122 field offices across the country has dropped to a 19 percent vacancy rate. Fifty-two offices are now considered “critically understaffed,” meaning a shortage of more than 20 percent. Some branches are down by more than 40 percent. “We’re small offices,” Becker says. Each weather forecast office has about 25 to 30 people. “When you’re down four people, it starts to hurt,” she adds. “There comes a point where you don’t have enough people to cover everything.”

The lack of noticeable degradations in forecast quality so far is “because of the valiant efforts of the people who remain in these now critically understaffed roles in field offices,” Swain said in his recent video. “But the cracks are really now starting to show.”

...People across the vast weather community, from individual meteorologists to professional societies such as the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association, have all expressed alarm about the cuts to NOAA and the NWS and have urged the Trump administration to reverse course. Industries that depend on weather and climate data, such as the insurance industry, have also spoken out. The Union of Concerned Scientists has also sent congressional leaders an open letter to urge them to reinstate NOAA’s staffing and funding that has been signed by more than 3,300 scientists and other experts.

Morale is extremely low in offices across the NWS, according to Swain’s video and to Uccellini and many others who know current employees at the agency. Funding cuts are forcing many employees to bring in their own toilet paper and soap. There is also “an extreme culture of fear” Swain said in his video, with “threatening and demeaning communications” from agency leaders that have called employees “lazy” and “low productivity.”

“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life." —Five former NWS directors in a May 2 open letter

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ost-lives/

Unbelievable!