The Idiots Are Yelling About Weather Machines Again

Climate, healthcare, and ancient philosophy.

Photo by Dan Barrett on Unsplash

Hello there, let’s talk about idiots for a few minutes.

They’re yelling about weather machines again.

This weekend, another historic flood ruined another holiday. Instead of watching fireworks, dozens of Texas kids drowned. Driven by torrential rains, the Guadalupe River rose to record highs “in a matter of minutes” in the middle of the night, 26 feet in less than one hour. Flash flood warnings hit at 1 am. Nobody had a chance to prepare. Touring the death and destruction, a Texas lawmaker regrets his decision to vote against a plan that would’ve improved the state’s disaster response. If you wanted a textbook example of social murder, the kind of murder that results from policies that subject citizens to grave dangers, there you go.

Despite their shortcomings, ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle understood something that escapes most of humanity today:

There’s no such thing as compassion.

Self-interest doesn’t exist.

For the philosophers, these ideas didn’t stand on their own. Truly intelligent, mature human beings realized the intersection between their own self-interest and everyone else’s. When you helped others, you helped yourself.

Idiots ignored all that.

In the true classical sense, philosophers didn’t call someone an idiot for not knowing something. They reserved that term for someone who shrugged off the world’s problems to pursue their own prosperity. Idiots believed ignorance was bliss. Today, idiots run the world. They think they can ignore the awful things happening now because none of it will affect them. They think they can insulate themselves, even if they’re just turning off their phones and avoiding “negative news.” They don’t understand: everything is going to affect them.

It’s just a matter of when…

There’s a lot of things you and I don’t know. That doesn’t make us idiots. You’re only an idiot if you assume something without checking your facts first, like so many supporters of this recent ugly bill, and like so many MAGA conspiracy nuts out there blaming these floods on weather machines.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who used this tragic flood as an opportunity to introduce a “weather modification bill” to outlaw such nonexistent weather machines, plays a fool on the internet. She’s more than happy to dine out on the idiocy of her base. She puts her own wealth and prosperity ahead of everyone else’s every day. In the classical sense, that makes her one of the biggest idiots.

So it goes with this big, ugly bill and cuts to Medicaid. It’s going to screw over everyone, just like defunding FEMA, dismantling renewable energy, and voting against disaster response plans. It’s all connected. All of us live in a world now where record floods can happen overnight in less than one hour. Collapse means nothing if not more emergency medical bills, and this budget bill not only accelerates climate collapse, but makes living through it all the more unbearable.

I know it sounds weird to talk about weather machines and healthcare in the same article, but it’s all going to come together.

I promise.

We’re going to focus a little on Medicaid, because it’s a great example of how taking something away from one group hurts everyone.

First off, Medicaid covers about 20 percent of all healthcare costs in the U.S. According to analysis by Kaiser, that’s “$1 out of every $5 spent on healthcare,” and it’s “the major source of financing for states to provide health coverage.” As you’ve heard, the cuts under this bill will kick 17 million people off their insurance. Many of these people already have jobs. If they don’t, it’s because they’re retired, in school, providing care for someone else, or they can’t work.

They’re not freeloaders.

You don’t deprive that many working Americans of healthcare without wide-reaching consequences. Only an idiot would think so.

It’s going to close hundreds if not thousands of nursing homes and rural hospitals over the next few years, exactly the places that need to remain open when storms and floods rage through the country.

The federal government kicks in at least half of Medicaid costs across the country. States cover the rest. Ironically, red states rely the most on this federal funding—between 65 and 76 percent. That includes states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

Even the experts are still trying to wrap their heads around the consequences of these devastating cuts, but one report by The Commonwealth Fund spells it out pretty well. Cutting hundreds of billions from Medicaid doesn’t just hurt low-income families and the disabled.

These cuts do vast economic damage.

How so?

For starters, cutting these programs will drive up healthcare costs across the board, including for private insurance companies. There’s a term for these indirect increases called “cost shifting.” Basically, healthcare providers are going to lose a ton of money when 17 million Americans are dropped from insurance. They’re not going to just “get jobs,” as MAGA podcast jockeys proclaim. About two thirds of Medicaid recipients already have jobs. Their employers find ways to push them onto public health insurance, to save money at the expense of taxpayers.

Companies like Amazon, McDonald’s, and Walmart routinely deny benefits to their employees, forcing them to apply for food stamps and Medicaid. In a single state like Nevada, 8,000 Amazon employees rely on public assistance for basic needs. So, these cuts simply punish people working their butts off to serve Americans—cooking their food, stocking their shelves, and delivering their packages. Jeff Bezos rips off taxpayers so he can drop $50 million on a wedding in Venice, and the mainstream media celebrates him for it.

That’s the real scam.

Take away coverage from these hardworking Americans, and they’ll have to give up routine checkups and preventative care. They’ll be forced to wait until they wind up in the emergency room. That’s a huge cost and a loss of revenue. Healthcare providers will choose to raise prices for everyone to offset that loss, i.e. “shift” their costs onto the rest of us. In turn, insurance companies will offset their losses by raising their premiums, deductibles, and co-payments.

Everyone will pay more.

An analysis by the American Center for Progress explains just how much the big ugly bill raises everyone’s insurance. If you get health insurance through your employer, your family will pay $900 more out of pocket. If you’re self-employed and get your health insurance through the marketplace, your premiums will go up at least $1,500 and you’ll face $6,000 more in total costs, including higher deductibles and copays. If you’re 60 or older, that hike goes up to $15,400 in premium costs. Even if you’re in your 30s, you’ll pay $3,500 more for insurance.

This bill will also crush hundreds of rural hospitals, nursing homes, and longterm care facilities. Even if they’re not facing immediate danger, the ones that don’t close within the next few years will deal with revenue loss by laying off staff and turning away patients. It’s going to accelerate a vicious cycle that already exists in our broken healthcare system. More sick people delaying care for longer ultimately drives up costs for everyone. The numbers prove it.

Cutting Medicaid creates other spillover effects called “economic multipliers.” Republicans and their base forget that healthcare creates jobs. All combined, these cuts will kill 321,000-448,000 jobs in the U.S. by next year and cost somewhere between $42 and $60 billion in GDP. The job losses won’t stop at healthcare. They’ll ripple out to “other business sectors, such as retail, construction, food production, and other fields.” In the worst case scenario, we lose at least 240,000 jobs next year outside of healthcare. Even states that don’t participate in Medicaid expansion, like Texas, will still lose anywhere from 2,800 to 3,900 jobs “because of the spillover effect” and “related supply chain disruptions.”

Texas alone will lose hundreds of millions in revenue.

The nationwide fallout from these cuts also means up to $4.4 billion less in local and state tax revenue next year. So the cuts will impact us, even if we’re not on these programs. That’s the spillover.

And yet, that’s how the real world works. Nobody’s safety and prosperity exist in a vacuum. Whether it’s Medicaid cuts, demolishing big chunks of the government, or voting against disaster relief bills, the vast majority of our problems derive from one simple, idiotic assumption about reality:

“Bad things won’t happen to me.”

Karma exists, in a real way. You don’t get to screw someone without consequences. Idiots can delay the consequences or try to insulate themselves from their actions, but they can’t avoid them forever. Eventually, they come. Unfortunately, a lot of people suffer and die first. Consequences are nice, but I’d rather live in a world where we didn’t screw each other in the first place.

Idiots aren’t thinking about any of this. They’re not thinking about the ways their selfishness screws them almost as much.

They’re busy yelling about weather machines. It’s getting worse as climate deniers seek out increasingly ridiculous conspiracy theories to avoid reckoning with the truth, that decades of reckless fossil fuel consumption are driving monster hurricanes and epic floods like the one we saw in Texas.

Here’s where it all comes together:

Idiots would rather believe they’re being attacked by enemies with secret weapons that control the weather than believe their own self-interest aligns with Amazon workers they want to screw out of healthcare.

How’s that for a dose of humanity?

The MAGA crew and their counterparts across the political spectrum are looking anywhere and everywhere for beliefs, ideologies, and distractions from the very basic thing that ancient philosophers figured out thousands of years ago. Even Aristotle, who regarded women as inferior creatures, recognized that someone’s health and happiness depended on others. There was no such thing as pure compassion, because every “selfless” act does, in fact, benefit you.

So when MAGA Christians turn their nose up at empathy, when they reject the teachings of their own religion, they’re literally condemning themselves to a life of pain and misery. They’re just too shortsighted to see it.

So, in that sense, selfishness is nothing more than a failure of critical thinking. Selfish people can’t see all the connections.

That’s what makes them idiots.

If we had weather machines, wouldn’t we be using them to end the climate crisis and deliver the endless growth economies of everyone’s dreams? Apparently, idiots can’t wrap their heads around that. They can only conceive of weather machines they would use against their enemies, at their own expense.

So as our weather unravels and we see more and more tragedy, the idiots are going to keep yelling about weather machines.

That’s idiots for you.