Under the Weather

As I recall, the US daytime soap General Hospital once had a storyline in which the local mega-villain held the world to ransom by using his weather control machine to freeze the city it was set in with blizzards and sub-zero temperatures, threatening to do the same to the rest of the planet.  (There was also, in the early seventies, also a UK soap called General Hospital which aired in a daytime slot, but nothing that exciting ever happened in it).  It seems that in the US right now, there are people in positions of influence who seem to believe that storyline was real.  Well, Republican Congresswoman, pro-Trump fanatic and generally raving lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene, (you know, the one who thought UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron should 'go fuck himself' and told journalist Emily Maitlis to 'just fuck off', when he challenged Greene on one of her other pet conspiracy theories about 'Jewish space lasers'), seems to think that.  Perhaps she saw those episodes as a child and thought that she was watching a documentary.  Whatever the reason, she seems to think that the recent hurricane in the US was man made, saying that 'they' control the weather.  Who this mysterious 'they' are, she didn't specify, but I think that we might hazard a guess based on her aforementioned belief in the existence of 'Jewish space lasers', which, she claimed, were being used to start wild fires in the US.  

US daytime soaps can have some pretty bizarre storylines, (General Hospital itself has also featured aliens, dead characters being reanimated and all manner of murders, spies and ghosts), some, like Dark Shadows, even end up going full on supernatural with vampires and werewolves, so I suppose that we should think ourselves lucky that Greene so far only believes in the weather control thing.  I do find it genuinely disturbing when people who are patently insane get elected as representatives at the highest level.  (The US has a particularly bad record here - not only did they elect Trump as president once but, having subsequently rejected him, now seem as if they might elect him again, despite his lunacy becoming even more obvious).  Not only does it speak poorly of the selection process that allows them to become candidates in the first place, but it also calls into question the intelligence of the electorate who voted for them, (thereby giving credence to calls from some quarters to restrict voting rights to an 'elite').  Not that we in UK have much to crow about here: the likes of Boris Johnson, (not so much a lunatic as an utterly venal and corrupt moral degenerate) and Liz Truss (definitely crazy), spring to mind.  But to get back to the original point, if 'they' really can control the weather, then I wish they'd send some better weather my way - I'm still traumatised by the abrupt ending to Summer this year.