Month: July 2025

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The Kerr County Flood — A tragedy, and a warning

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 6th, 2025

 

First, my heart goes out to the friends and family of all those who perished in the horrible flash flood along the Guadalupe River in Texas yesterday. That so many were young children only adds to the grief that we all feel.

In two hours, the river flow rose from about 500 cubic feet per second to over 100,000, a staggering increase. Even in the flood-prone Texas hills, this was extraordinary.

Even as they continue to search for twenty-seven missing young girls, the finger-pointing and blaming has also reached flood stage levels. Some of it, course, is idiotic on the face of it. Yes, the flood and resultant tragedy really did happen. No, cloud seeding wasn’t involved. And if you think God did it to punish people who bother you, you need to get a new god. That one’s worthless.

But the more I read about this event, the less blame there seems to be to be meted out. Let’s start with the camp: yes, it was in an area that was prone to flooding. Indeed, in the century that the camp had been there, it had flooded several times, although resulting only in minor property damage and no loss of life.

A lot of people have been blaming the National Weather Service, citing either lack of competence or staff shortages. A local report indicates that the NWS did do the sort of forecasting and warning that could be reasonably expected of it.

According to KXAN in Kerr County:

“[T]he NWS provided additional details on its notification timeline for the Kerr County flood, including:

  • The National Water Center Flood Hazard Outlook issued on Thursday morning indicated an expansion of flash flood potential to include Kerrville and surrounding areas.
  • A flood watch was issued by the NWS Austin/San Antonio office at 1:18 p.m. on Thursday, in effect through Friday morning.
  • The Weather Prediction Center issued three Mesoscale Precipitation Discussions for the excessive rainfall event as early as 6:10 p.m. Thursday indicating the potential for flash flooding.
  • The National Water Center Area Hydrologic Discussion #144 at 6:22 p.m. on Thursday messaged locally considerable flood wording for areas north and west of San Antonio, including Kerrville.
  • At 1:14 a.m. Friday, a flash flood warning with a considerable tag (which denotes high-damage threats and will automatically trigger Wireless Emergency Alerts on enabled mobile devices and over NOAA Weather Radio) was issued for Kerr County.
  • The flash flood warning was upgraded to a flash flood emergency for southcentral Kerr County as early as 4:03 a.m. Friday.
  • The 5:00 a.m. National Water Center Area Hydrologic Discussion #146 on Friday included concern for widespread considerable flooding through the day. The Flood Hazard Outlook was also upgraded to considerable and catastrophic.
  • A flash flood emergency was issued for the Guadalupe River at 5:34 a.m.”

KXAN also reported “For instance, directly under Vesper at the local NWS office is a key position – warning coordination meteorologist (WCM) – that has remained vacant since April. The role was most recently held by longtime employee Paul Yura, who took an early retirement package offered to agency workers as the administration worked to reduce the budget and personnel number at the NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.” They noted that there were 5 other vacancies in the 21-person staff, including the Senior Hydrologist who took early retirement. The hydrologist is the person you want to speak to when you want to know how MUCH it’s going to rain.

It’s impossible to say how much the absence of those two positions factored into seeing the danger and warning against it, but they did get the word out and in a timely manner.

There’s hardly a place on Earth that is immune to natural disaster. I live in a place that many consider idyllic, but wildfire is a constant worry, ten foot snowstorms are an occasional problem, it reached 109F a year ago today, oh, and did I mention the volcano? No place is completely immune.

Living in hilly country, I know how difficult specific forecasting can be. Microclimates are a major bugger factor in any forecast, and my county has more climate zones than Canada. All of Canada. One time I couldn’t get in to my office, eight miles away and at the same altitude, puzzling clients who couldn’t figure out why three inches of snow could be a serious problem. Only it was five feet here, and the highway was still closed. Supercell storms are tricky as well: on flat ground, one spot may remain bone dry while a mile away they get three inches of rain in ten minutes.

I can’t speak to the timeliness of local emergency response authorities, but I will note there wasn’t much time, and I doubt a single one of them thought, “Oh, let’s let a bunch of seven-year-old girls drown. It will look great on the town’s tourism flyers!”

So quit blaming, people. This is just one of those fucking awful things that happen, and all the preparation in the world can’t insure you’ll be safe. As the saying goes, “Nature always bats last.”

That said, a warning: The ongoing depletion of scientific, response and forecast facilities is going to whip around and bite us on the ass. We’ll miss a Cat 5 hurricane, assuming it’s still just a tropical storm and not have the facilities to spot the bombogenesis or the last minute veer that smashes a major city. Second, the climate is changing, and at an accelerating rate, and ‘once-in-a-century’ events are going to happen with increasing frequency and with increasing severity. Storms, including snow storms, will get worse. Temperatures will fluctuate more wildly, especially on the high end. Many massive weather-related disasters await.

And in places like Texas, where people hate gummint red tape, usually motivated by profit, people will build where they shouldn’t, in areas more prone to flood, fire, earthquake or tornadoes than others.

These things will happen, many will die, and if we want to cast blame, we will need to start by looking in the mirror first.

And remember—Nature always bats last.

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After July 3rd, 2025 — Comes the independence movement

After July 3rd, 2025

Comes the independence movement

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 4th, 2025

Between the infiltration of fascists on the Supreme Court (name the traitors: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney-Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh) and in Congress (too many to name, but almost unanimously Republicans, and willingness to either commit or bow to treason almost unanimous amongst those Republicans), there was only one result possible. The United States of America never stood a chance.

The passage of the hideous, ironically named “One Big Beautiful Bill” is the capstone to the collapse of America. Yes, it is cruel, vicious, and designed to punish the poor and weaken the middle class into insolvency. It increases the already hideously disproportionate disparity of wealth and power of the top 1% to levels that far exceed those of pre-revolutionary France or Russia. That comes at the cost of a trillion for health care for the people, hundreds of billions more to feed the poor, and education. It will make the US a scientific, intellectual and educational backwater. It will, in time, eliminate accessible health care for most of the population, and weaken and degrade public, secular schools into irrelevance.

But the very worst part is that it erects the most efficient and oppressive police state in the history of the world. It provides more funding for the hated and vicious ICE secret police force than the US Marines get. Coupled with Elon Musk’s vast, comprehensive data theft of virtually every government record on everyone in America, it makes for a vast and omnipresent police state that would make Josef Stalin groan with envy.

Even now, I see people, mostly Democrats, chirping that the Republicans have really fucked up this time, and how we’ll make them pay in the off-terms next year. These people are fools: the Republicans have absolutely no intention of holding free and fair elections. None.

Some people take hope that the bill just signed into law delays some of the worst, most rapacious elements of the shredding of the social safety net until after November 2026, and point to that as a sign the Republicans are nervous about those elections.

Nonsense. They just want to hold what will be utterly fraudulent and meaningless elections to make sure their apparatus of control is rock solid and that they need never worry about any election going forward.

Oh, there will be an election. It will even look fairly convincing, in that Republicans will at least lackadaisically campaign, and if the people controlling the vote count are even half-way competent, the results will all fall into a convincing 10 point range for most of the Republicans. There may come a time when they can run unopposed and win 99% of the vote, like in the Soviet Union, but for now they have to pretend there’s still a United States and it is still a democracy of the people. As long as people can PRETEND the country is still theirs, they are less likely to rise up, you see. To that end, Republicans will wave many flags and pound a few Bibles in order to keep their believers glassy-eyed.

But they don’t intend to allow the people to have a meaningful voice. The bill Trump just signed had an approval rating of just 29% during the final hours of debate. No bill still pending before Congress was ever more unpopular. Ever. And when you have people like Joni Ernst sneering “We all have to die sometime” to people complaining that their children can’t get necessary medical care, or the psychotically racist Laura Loomer talking about deporting all 65 million native Latinos with a grin from the president, you know they have stopped pretending. Trump spent yesterday complaining about how farmers were at the mercy of “Shylock” bankers and crowing that he was going to throw a trashy UFC bloodfest on the White House lawn. They’ve quit pretending. They can’t be arsed giving a shit. They’ve won, and they know it.

But they still fear us. They know that if the people withdraw consent, and simply and peacefully refuse to cooperate, they cannot maintain power. The Soviet Union, the most efficiently oppressive regime in history, fell with hardly a shot being fired simply because the citizenry of the USSR withheld their support and peacefully resisted.

I’ve said before that once-a-month demonstrations aren’t going to cut it. People are going to have to go out every day and protest, and there’s certainly no shortage of things people can protest. The worthless corporate media will largely ignore it, but the internet is building its own fourth estate. Corporate news is rapidly falling into the same niche as Pravda and Izvestiya did in the Soviet Union and RT does today.

The government will make it harder and harder to defy. They may make demonstrating illegal, and even defiance of any sort. Who’s gonna stop them? Clarence Thomas? Mike Johnson? The law will be what they say it is, and it won’t be there to protect you.

But there are hundreds of ways to resist. They still need you, and even though they’ll never admit it, they need the support of the people in general.

Make Trump supporters feel unloved. Don’t miss an opportunity to discuss the failings and deceptions of the Trump regime. Make Trump supporters doubters, and eventually adversaries. When dealing with officials, drag your feet in every way possible. Do it legally, do it peacefully, but do it. And if they try to outlaw resistance, find less obvious ways of resisting, but never stop resisting. The apparatchiks of the Trump regime are human, and will slowly succumb to social pressure. Make them feel unloved.

Trump is a dying man. He isn’t plausible as the face of the fascist revolution now, and it’s only going to get more and more strained as his mind, never much to begin with, erodes. While we don’t know who will replace him, he won’t have whatever cult following Trump still retains at that point, so keep the pressure on, and make it unceasing. Most of Trump’s closest clique are weak and amazingly stupid opportunists, and they will make a lot of mistakes. Make them pay.

This regime can be brought down in ways in which the founders of the United States would approve. But be prepared to be stubborn and unyielding. Make them feel unloved.

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