Which Past Was Hers,  42nd Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): My heart breaks reading about the 78-and-counting deaths in Texas from flooding on the Guadalupe River. I can't imagine the anguish of the parents who learn their children were swept away from a summer camp by the floodwaters. It's beyond comprehension and well beyond tragic. 

But in these times we live in, everything becomes political and everything is about finger-pointing and blaming others. The left is blaming climate change and government budget cuts, the right is blaming the National Weather Service. As a hydrogeologist, I can't let this incident pass without my own two cents (spoiler alert: I don't blame either side). 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared today a “day of prayer” for the victims, both surviving and deceased. If prayer helps you get through this, then fine, go ahead and pray, but don't expect it to change anything.

The director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management has faulted the NWS for not predicting “the amount of rain we saw,” even though alerts were issued beforehand and as it became clear the region was facing an emergency.  A flash-flood watch was issued Thursday afternoon that noted Kerr County, where much of the flooding began early Friday morning, was a particularly vulnerable area, along with more urgent flash-flood emergency alerts in the overnight hours as the disaster unfolded. The Emergency Management director should be asking why his agency didn't do more to heed the NWS' warnings and advisories, and work proactively to mitigate the situation by evacuating people in the flood zone while it was still possible.  

Also, the NWS was one of several federal agencies targeted by the Stable Genius' DOGE boys, which had laid off nearly 600 employees, around the same amount of staffers the service lost in the 15 previous years.

But the staffing shortage wasn't the issue, and Monday-morning quarterbacking Emergency Management's decisions isn't the solution. It's not the cause, but the underlaying issue here is climate change, as little as some people want to hear that. To be clear, the flood wasn't "caused" by climate change. This morning, I heard Chris Christie say on This Week that no one will ever convince him that Hurricane Sandy was caused by climate change. Governor, I agree. If someone tells you it was caused by climate change, they don't know what they're talking about and you can safely ignore them.   

Climate change doesn't cause rain, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, or droughts. They're caused by meteorological and atmospheric processes, but climate change does increase the severity and frequency of storms, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and droughts. And it also impedes scientists' ability to forecast extreme weather events.

Flood forecasting is basically a statistical exercise. The USGS has been monitoring the Guadalupe River since October 1941, and has developed statistics on the frequency and intensity of flood events based on the 84-year record. Based on the monitoring history, scientists can calculate the average flow rate (53 ft³/sec) and the maximum flow rate (599 ft³/sec, recorded in 2002). As a 599 ft³/sec flood occurred once in 84 years, one can state that the chance for a flood of that magnitude happening in any given year is 1-in-84, or a 1.2% chance. FYI, the 100-year flood is the flood that has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.

Today, the river is flowing at 872 ft³/sec, shattering the 23-year-old record of 599 ft³/sec. To give you an idea of the volume, today's flow would fill an Olympic-size swimming pool every 90 seconds. 

The available, online data shows the river has flooded eight times between October 2007 and June 2025, meaning the gage level was above 10 feet, and two of those floods were "moderate," with the gage over 18 feet. A flood is considered "major" if the gage exceeds 22 feet, and today the river level topped 37.5 feet, another record. 

From the monitoring data, one can calculate a "flood frequency," i.e., the river floods x number of times per year, and extreme floods occur once every x years. Of course, the frequency alone can't predict when the flood will actually occur, but coupled with rainfall and meteorological data, there is sufficient information to issue flood watches and flood warnings when appropriate.

Climate change, however, throws a monkey wrench into the calculations. With conditions changing so rapidly, the past is no longer a useful indicator of the future, or even of the present. The x number of years extreme floods occur is increasing and increasing rapidly, and if we only consider, say, the last 10 years to calculate flood frequencies, well, that's not enough data to be meaningful. Statistically, the data-point population isn't significant enough for the calculated frequencies to be meaningful. Nowadays, we have so-called "100-year floods" occurring annually or every few years, with each flood more severe than the one before.  

Computer models can simulate the "new normal" and can provide useful statistics of the expected flood frequencies and flood levels in our new climate, but due to climate skepticism and denial, the results aren't trusted and the effort is being rapidly defunded by the government. So the old tools don't work, the new tools aren't trusted, half the country's underwater, and the other half is on fire.

But Gov. Abbott's gonna pray the flood away, so I guess we'll be alright.

Apparent Doorways, 41st Day of Summer, 525 ME (Atlas): I'm old. I'm so old that I've been collecting Social Security for five years now. My communications with the SSA are generally minimal - usually just an annual notice about the cost-of-living adjustment and an occasional warning to be on lookout for fraud and scams.

Thursday, I received an unusual message from them with the heading, Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors. It sounded like propaganda, and in fact that's exactly what it was. The email read:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, a landmark piece of legislation that delivers long-awaited tax relief to millions of older Americans.

The bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits, providing meaningful and immediate relief to seniors who have spent a lifetime contributing to our nation's economy.

The email falsely claimed the big, bad budget bill includes "a provision that eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries . . . ensuring that retirees can keep more of what they have earned."

However, the Stable Genius' budget bill does not actually eliminate federal taxes on Social Security like the email claimed. The rule, passed through the reconciliation process to avoid a Democratic filibuster, provides a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for people over 65, and $12,000 for married seniors. These benefits will start to phase out for those with incomes of more than $75,000 and married couples of more than $150,000 a year.

Need I point out that a temporary tax deduction is not the same thing as eliminating federal tax on benefits?  

The big, bad budget bill also includes provisions that will strip many people of their health insurance, cut food assistance for the poor, kill off clean-energy development, and raise the national debt by trillions of dollars, but the email doesn't mention that. Further, the bill imposes a new limit on all itemized deductions and makes permanent the termination of most miscellaneous itemized deductions. So whatever savings and gained from the over-65 deduction may disappear due to the limit on all deductions. 

New Jersey congressman Frank Pallone wrote on X that “every word” of the email is a lie. “It’s disturbing to see Trump hijack a public institution to push blatant misinformation,” he wrote. Kathleen Romig, a former senior adviser at the SSA during the Biden administration, told CNN the email “doesn’t sound like normal government communications, official communications. It sounds like – you know – partisan.”  Jeff Nesbit, who served as a top SSA official under Republican and Democratic presidents, went further, posting on X, “The agency has never issued such a blatant political statement. The fact that Trump and his minion running SSA has [sic] done this is unconscionable.”

Vibrant Threshold, 40th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): On this Interdependence Day, I give you the MAGA Prayer, inspired and adapted from a passage I read today in James Joyce's Ulysses:

I believe in ICE, the scourge almighty, creators of hell upon earth, and in the musky DOGE, those sons of a gun, who were conceived of unholy boasts, bored of their Bloody Marys, suffered under Trump and Vance, were calcified, dread, and curried. On the third day, they arose again from their beds, descended to Mar-a-Lago, sitteth on their butt-ends until further ordered, whence they shall ask for a living but shall not get paid. And to the Republicans, if you can stand them, one nation, under guard, with liberties and justice for one.

On this, the 249th anniversary of the founding of this nation, I would wish it well but the joke's on us: amerika's already over, the man who sold the world has exchanged the country for syphilisation (another Joyce-ism).

 

Each Note Felt, 39th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Electra): Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Stable Genius' big, bad budget bill. They made no changes and passed it just as the Senate had sent it over to them. They voted to close rural hospitals, to throw millions off of Medicaid, to kneecap alternative energy, and to add trillions to the national debt. I won't go into all the negative impacts the bill will have on our lives - I haven't read the entire, nearly 1,000-page document, and others describe it in far better detail elsewhere. Do your own homework and read up on it yourself.

I will say this - some of the worst parts, like the Medicaid cuts, deliberately won't kick in until after the 2026 mid-term elections, so we won't have experience the full impact of this awful legislation until after the Republicans have a chance to try and get reelected. But don't fall for it: it's too late to negate all the ill effects this will have on this nation, but the sooner we begin the long, protracted healing process the better. 

Vote the bastards out of office. In Georgia, this includes Marjorie Taylor Greene (naturally), Rick Allen, Buddy Carter (at what age does a grown man stop calling himself "Buddy"?), Andrew (Day of Peaceful Tourists) Clyde, Barry Loudermilk, Richard McCormick, Austin Scott, Brian Jack and his cheesy siblings, Monterey and Pepper, and Mike Collins and his brother, Tom Collins (just kidding - that one's a cocktail, but I need one after this vote).

So here we go, amerika, the longest I-told-you-so in recorded history. 

 

Pacing and the Unshed, 38th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): I hate to jinx it by saying it out loud, but it's nearly 9:00 pm here in Georgia and the House Republicans in Washington still can't seem to find the numbers to pass the Stable Genius' big, bad budget bill.

They're really in a quandary: if they oppose it, the Stable Genius promises they will lose their House seats to a primary challenger. If they support it, the will lose their seats to a Democrat in the General Election. They lose either way: it's a lose-lose choice. Heads, I win; tails, you lose.

Since they're on their way out either way, may I suggest they vote not to close rural hospitals, throw millions off of Medicaid, kneecap alternative energy, and add trillions to the national debt? Just winging out ideas here.   

Day of Fallacies, 37th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): The Senate approved the Stable Genius' budget bill today. Three Republican senators - Susan Collins (Maine), Rand Paul (Kentucky), and Tom Tillis (North Carolina) - voted against it, and it took a tie-breaking vote by the VP JD  to pass it. It now goes back to the House for reconciliation, where it's expected to pass. 

On top of recent Supreme Court rulings, this is another win for the Stable Genius. "You're going to get sick of winning," the SG predicted on the 2016 campaign trail, and he was right (at least the part about getting sick). The bill will add at least $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next 10 years, making it among the most expensive bills in a generation, and will also reduce the amount of tax revenue the country collects for decades. Such a shortfall could begin a seismic shift in the nation’s fiscal trajectory and raise the risk of a debt crisis.

To be blunt about it, it destroys this country. But to the oligarchs and billionaires who'll benefit, that's a price worth paying. Who needs America when you can own a second megayacht? 

The rest of us will have to scrape by, tooth and nail, among the increased heat, the police oppression, the pervasive hunger, and the endemic sickness, to survive as best we can. On the positive side, it's been noted that the arts and spirituality tend to flourish during difficult times. 

I think we're in for a veritable renaissance in the arts and spirituality.

 

The Iron Keeled Pentecost, 36th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): These modern times in a nutshell (What's your opinion of the times?):

The Stable Genius has released Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, 38, in order to testify against Kilmar Abrego Garcia. In case you've been blissfully living in a news vacuum, Garcia was wrongfully deported to a notoriously brutal prison El Salvador. The Administration admitted the deportation was a mistake but argued there was nothing they could do about it, what's done is done, and initially refused to bring him back, despite court orders and public outcry. They finally agreed to bring him back, but only in order to face trial for a host of charges from human trafficking to child pornography, charges which had nothing to do with his initial deportation.

The government intends to use Reyes' testimony in their case against Garcia. Reyes has been deported but returned five times, has been convicted of smuggling migrants, and has pleaded guilty to deadly conduct for drunkenly firing a gun in Texas. I have to admit I didn't know that drunkenly firing a gun was illegal in Texas - I thought it was a state tradition, something you had to do in order to get a driver's license. I guess it's illegal when Latinos do it. 

So in order to justify his own mistake, the Stable Genius is releasing a violent felon with five deportations so he can testify against a person with no criminal record they mistakenly deported.

Idiocracy.

 

The Shouts from the Sea, 35th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Atlas): Let's take a look, shall we?, at what's going on in the world today:

Israeli forces are urging people to evacuate eastern areas of Gaza City before planned military operations  there escalate and intensify, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians in this one offensive alone. Meanwhile, "post-apocalyptic" violence and anarchy among militants, clans, Hamas, and criminal gangs rise as they vie for power amid Israeli strikes and fights over aid and supplies.

Almost forgotten among all the other news items, Russia is continuing its unprovoked war against Ukraine and last night pounded the country with hundreds of drones and missiles in one of the war’s largest assaults. Strikes on infrastructure were reported across the country, including in western Ukraine, which Russia had until now hit less frequently.

Analysis by the NY Times claims that the Republican budget reconciliation, the Stable Genius' "big beautiful bill," will cause 11.8 million people of lose their health insurance, and separately could cripple wind and solar power.

An "explosive increase’ in the number of unusually aggressive lone-star ticks is due to climate change. The ticks, which can cause meat allergies, were common here in the South, but are new spreading to areas previously too cold for them. Also, the Earth is trapping much more heat than climate models had forecast, and the rate has doubled in the past 20 years. Positive feedback loops are leading to the exponential growth.

The University of Virginia has received explicit warning from the Stable Genius that the school will suffer cuts to jobs, research funding, student aid, and visas unless the university's president resigns over his DEI policies. Also, the Stable Genius is threatening to cut off funds to New York City if the presumptive Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani doesn’t "behave." The Stable Genius has accused Mamdani, a self-described "democratic socialist," of being a communist over his campaign pledge to tax the very wealthy.

May we live in interesting times.

 

Eighth Ocean, 34th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): Today is the 15-dozenth day of the year, so even if it wasn't Eighth Ocean in Angus MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar, it ought to be something. So I moved Eighth Ocean from the 22nd day of Summer in the original USC to the 34th in my New Revised USC.. 

Depressingly, Mike Allen of Axios has catalogued all the new precedents conceded to The Stable Genius by Congress this year:

• Presidents can limit the classified information they share with the House and Senate after bombing a foreign country without Congressional approval.


• Presidents can usurp Congress's power to levy tariffs, provided they declare a national emergency.


• Presidents can unilaterally freeze spending approved by Congress, and dismantle or fire the heads of independent agencies established by law.


• Presidents can take control of a state's National Guard, even if the governor opposes it, and occupy the state for as long as the president wants.


• Presidents can accept gifts from foreign nations, as large as a $200 million plane, even if it's unclear whether the president gets to keep the plane at the end of the term.


• Presidents can actively profit from their time in office, including creating new currencies structured to allow foreign nationals to invest anonymously, benefiting the president.


• Presidents can try to browbeat the Federal Reserve into cutting interest rates, including floating replacements for the Fed chair before their term is up.


• Presidents can direct the Justice Department to prosecute their political opponents and punish critics. These punishments can include stripping Secret Service protections, suing them, and threatening imprisonment.


• Presidents can punish media companies, law firms, and universities that don't share their viewpoints or values.


• Presidents can aggressively pardon supporters, including those who made large political donations as part of their bid for freedom. The strength of the case against the pardoned supporters is irrelevant.

The American government sure is a different thing than what I grew up with, and my old grade-school civics teachers' heads would probably explode if they saw what was happening now.

Republicans had better hope that a Democrat never becomes president. Imagine what an Ocasio-Cortez or a Jasmine Crockett could do with those kinds of powers. Of course, the Republicans will use those new powers, plus whatever else they could come up with, to make sure that never happens, and in the remote possibility that it does somehow, all those new precedents will, poof!, suddenly vanish, like Moscow Mitch McConnel's precedent that a Supreme Court justice can't be nominated in a president's final year in office.

Dream Oven, 33rd Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Elektra): Today, on this very day, the Supreme Court, which can always be counted on to make horrendous decisions, just gave the Stable Genius another gift. Federal courts are now weaker, and the Constitutional checks and balances fade even further.

Of the 100 or so executive orders the Stable Genius signed since January 2025, lower courts have issued 25 injunctions to temporarily stay ("pause") the orders if they were deemed to cause immediate and irreparable harm to individuals. Today, the Supremes (Keg-Stand Cavanaugh, Amy Boney Carrot, Samuel Vergogna, et al) ruled that the injunctions should only apply to the jurisdiction of that particular court, not the entire country. They further stated that this will apply only when the injunction is "too broad," meaning the ruling is highly open to interpretation. Since the case was about birthright citizenship, the ruling will also allow the possibility of a person being a legal U.S. citizen in one state, say Massachusetts, and not in another, say Texas. 

Centralization of power is a common strategy for authoritarian governments, especially if the institutional change is done in the context of nationalist viewpoints where ethnic groups are painted as the root of societal problems. They are also often implemented when the public is distracted by alarming or controversial topics, such a international conflict or polarizing social issues.

If you're looking for Biblical portents of the end of the world, and last month's earthquake in tectonically-stable, trailing-edge Georgia wasn't enough, consider yesterday's meteor in the Atlanta sky. A loud, rolling rumble (I mistook it for thunder), a sudden flash, and a white streak in the sky. It was confirmed by NASA to be a meteor entering the Earth's atmosphere around 12:30 pm nearly 50 miles above Oxford, Georgia, east of Atlanta.

The fireball traveled southwest at roughly 30,000 mph before disintegrating and unleashing energy equivalent to about 20 tons of TNT, possibly leaving scattered fragments in South Carolina. The Guardian reports that a possible fragment pierced a house's roof in Henry County, south of Atlanta, all the way through and cracked through the laminate flooring to the concrete.

Imagine that homeowner having to convince his insurance company that he and he alone was the sole victim in the entire universe of this meteor. Imagine the meteor, after traveling through the infinite vastness of space for hundreds of millions of years, to have the incredible good luck, the one-in-a-trillion chance, of landing somewhere it was noticed by a sentient being. How happy it must have been! Somebody noticed!

Day of the Sickness, 32nd of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): The Guardian ran an article today on the subreddit r/collapse. "The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat," The Guardian wrote. "Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we’re lucky to get hours." But instead of ignoring the distressing events, the redditors of r/collapse look the disasters in the eye and unflinchingly document and discuss the End Times. 

Posts from r/collapse would occasionally pop up in my Reddit feed, but I never officially followed the sub. But after the Guardian article, I popped in and almost immediately saw this:

I don’t think collapse will look like some sudden disaster. It’s already happening, quietly, gradually. Every day, life gets a little harder. Rent rises, wages shrink, apartments get smaller, work hours get longer. I see my friends and family less, and I care less, too.

I’ve started lowering my standards for everything. Jobs, food, relationships. Job security barely exists anymore. People hold onto worn-out clothes, fewer get married, even fewer have kids. Most of us are just buried in our phones, numbing ourselves with distractions, disconnected from reality.

The dreams I once had for my life feel distant now, like echoes. What’s left is debt, exhaustion, and the constant pressure to survive. And yet, every day, we’re told we’re free, safe, and prosperous.

But this is what collapse really looks like. Not fire or chaos, just the slow erosion of meaning, until we forget what it felt like to hope for something better.

We see our lives becoming worse. We see more people dying from violence and drugs. The number of homeless people keeps increasing and we start worrying that if we lose our job or the Social Security program ends, we will be the next ones. Fisheries are disappearing, the corals are bleached, species extinction is a daily event. The worst president to ever occupy the White House got reelected, and this time the Senate and media just follow along with whatever he says.

Another word for collapse is entropy. Another word for entropy is impermanence, and impermanence, if anything, is swift. Our natural environment is crumbling, the social safety net is weakening, and most of us struggle to maintain mental and physical health. To simultaneously heal individuals, society, and nature, these interconnected challenges should be addressed together. There's nothing that can be done about the physical realities of entropy and impermanence, but all things and experiences are interconnected and arise in dependence on other factors. The key to coping with impermanence is interconnectedness.

 

Strand of Names, 31st Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): One year ago today, according to Facebook's Memories, I reposted a quote by the Stable Genius:

And the fake news they go, "he told this crazy story with electric." It's actually not crazy. It's sort of a smart story, right? Sort of like, you know, it's like the snake, it's a smart when you, you figure what you're leaving in, right? You're bringing it in the, you know, the snake, right? The snake and the snake. I tell that and they do the same thing. - June 23, 2004   

I'll offer a quantum of sympathy here, as someone who has read transcripts of my expert testimony in environmental litigations. We all think we're speaking perfectly structured sentences all the time with correct grammar, but the humbling truth is that when we read back the carefully recorded, word-for-word transcript of our testimony, we discover that it's actually full of incomplete sentences hanging in mid-thought, interjections of "you know" and "like" and slang, and occasionally the wrong words, sometimes complete non sequiturs. When we read the questions and comments of the cross-examining attorneys, they're perfectly formed and articulate, because they're used to being transcribed and have considerable practice at structuring well-formed, perfect sentences on the fly.

I'll excuse a person for a "you know" or the occasional incomplete sentence, but a politician, certainly the President of the United States of America, should have had enough experience giving speeches and talking to the press not to utter the nonsensical word salad above. But that was a whole year ago. Certainly the Stable Genius has gotten better by now, right?

“I want to buy icebreakers, you are very good at icebreakers,” he said today in response to an unrelated question from Finland during a press conference at the NATO Summit in The Hague. ”You're the King of Icebreakers, you make ‘em good, really good, that particular country, and they know what they're doing." 

"I actually made 'em an offer," he continued,

I didn't go to Congress, they'll try and impeach me for this, but there's an old, it's not old, it's fairly new, but it's used icebreaker, and I offered them about one third of what he asked for, but we're negotiating.

We need icebreakers in the US and if we can get some inexpensively, I'd like to do that actually. They'll fix it up, make it good. . . And so we're negotiating with them for about 15 different icebreakers, but one of them is available now. It's old and it's old. It's five, six years old now. We're trying to buy it. I'm trying to make a good deal. All I do, my whole life, that's all I do is make deals. Yeah."

Assuming he wasn't inebriated while speaking, the words suggest a shocking level of cognitive decline. But where is the Jake "I Dated Monica Lewinsky" Tapper coverage of the SG's senility, his garbled speech, his incoherent thought?    

Just as alarming, during the same icebreaker conference, the SG admitted that he gave Iran permission to launch its missile attack on the US base in Qatar. “They said, ‘We're going to shoot them. Is 1 pm okay?’” he claimed. The fact the the U.S. Commander in Chief gave a foreign nation permission to launch missiles at one of our overseas bases should be reported much more widely in the news than the scant coverage it's getting.