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Children Died to Own the Libs

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Children died to own the libs.

Or children died because something-something-taxes-property-freedom.

Perhaps both – it could depend on your interpretation of the decisions made in Kerr County, Texas leading up to the inarguable, preventable deaths of children due to flash flooding last week.

Never tell me the GOP is the party of life because they refuse to govern in a way that protects life.

They would rather kill children to make a point that liberalism and democracy aren’t acceptable to them.

Others have expressed rage about Kerr County’s child sacrifices far more eloquently; Charlotte Clymer tells the thoughts-and-prayers crowd Do Not Put This On God because none of this was God’s plan.

Journalists in major news outlets have reported on the flash flood in Kerr County without being blunt about the immoral choices national, state, and local GOP elected or aligned government personnel made leading to child deaths. No one will be held accountable based on the wide swags they’ve made as to fault.

What really galls me is the public relations campaign slowly mounting to put down the complaints born of anger, grief, and frustration, using these deaths as yet another sacrifice on the altar of fascism.

Charlie Kirk takes a note out of Chris Rufo’s playbook blaming an Austin TX fire chief for fire and emergency response leading to mass child death, claiming the chief was a DEI hire.

Oh no, honey, no. Don’t go looking to blame DEI for the deaths, because the root cause was much earlier and DEI wasn’t the problem.

There are receipts.

Snapshot of top post at https://mstdn.social/@[email protected]/114812383563824176

The replies beneath the post above share the 2016 engineering report on the installation of a flood warning system in Kerr County.

But further in replies utterly damning bits are shared. They were laid out in a Reddit post which I’ll share here (thanks to Reddit contributor timubce in r/Texas).

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 06/27/16

COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: You know we had a baby flood a couple weeks ago, a month or so, whatever it was. And I keep hearing these reports of the old, old system, and I know we’re not going to deal with that though. Expect that to be gone where the Jones call the Smiths, and the Smiths call Camp Rio Vista, and Rio Vista blah, blah, blah, along down the line. But it’s still there and it still works. The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.

COMMISSIONER MOSER: I think — I think this and that’s what the committee is going to look at and how to do it. I think the going in position is that we don’t need to change anything, and is there a need to improve what we have. And if there’s a need to improve how much is improved. And what the options for doing that and what it would cost. And I think the first thing to do is say why change anything. It worked this long and maybe we don’t need to do a thing. And then it gets into the thing we talk about earlier today, and that’s risk mitigation. And you know there’s still people drowned and you know —
COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: And I hope you ask the question like who are we notifying, or who are we trying to get the message to? Are they these crazy people from Houston that build homes right down on the water?
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Well, I think the thing is you say it’s for the general public and the crazy people from wherever they are, from Houston, okay, and then the camps, and then how do you get the message out to those, that’s all part of it, so it’s a pretty complex project.
COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: I’m sure it is.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: And the question is do we need to do anything. And what do we want to do and what can we afford.
MRS. STEBBINS: Commissioner Moser, will you put it on the next agenda for discussion after you have this meeting on Thursday?
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Oh, absolutely, right.
MRS. STEBBINS: Okay, thank you.
JUDGE POLLARD: I would comment that we don’t hardly have any crazy people that live here. The few that we do have we handle them through CSU.
COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: Or they serve on this board.
JUDGE POLLARD: I’m just trying to keep us out of trouble here, okay. The media’s still here. All right. Any other reports?

************ /end edit

In 2016 Kerr County contracted for an engineering study on their current warning system and were told it was antiquated and inadequate.

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 8/22/16

COMMISSIONER MOSER: We had at our steering committee meeting we invited also TxDOT to participate in that. So the original engineer, and both of them as a matter of fact showed up at that meeting. Their assessment was what existed today, and the Sheriff may want to comment on it, is antiquated and it’s not reliable. So we said okay with that, you know, not just that, but we thought that there was a pretty ill-defined system that we have. So the engineering study we thought would be appropriate. If the result of the engineering study says that — recommends that we enhance the system, okay, buying additional sensors, kind of like Comal County did. Comal County spent a little over three hundred thousand dollars, where they had add 8 locations to monitor the rate of rise of the river and streams.

COMMISSIONER REEVES: And while I agree with Commissioner Letz, that if we have a system that’s not working, we need to certainly look at that, technology is great, but still one of the best things, and you may disagree with me is the people up river calling. Because you’re probably going to get a call. I’ve received just this year from calls before it’s even had time for a warning to go off, I’m getting texts from Divide Fire Chief, and I think — where’d the Sheriff go? I sent you a text the other night, you may have got it too from him, but we’re knowing probably before, and I know with one flood that we had earlier in the year, by the time you got the warnings going off, it had been too late. Because it was coming out of just some draws that took too long to get downstream.

COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: I have one. I’m going to vote no because of numerous reasons. I think this whole thing is a little extravagant for Kerr County, and I see the word sirens and all that stuff in here. And of course, you say that these are steps that will be taken through the years. But that’s where you’re headed, there’s no question in my mind that’s where you’re headed. And you’re determined to do that. But step one of taking these funds out of special projects, out of Road and Bridge, that ticks me off a little bit.

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 10/24/16

Mr. Hewitt: Sirens did not seem to get very much support. The thought was that sirens are better for tourists than local residents. The sirens would only be beneficial for someone that’s not familiar with the area, and wouldn’t know what to do.

The second part of the study contained recommendations for updating the system and sirens were purposely left out even though other areas had implemented them.

Regular Commissioners’ Court Agenda 01/09/17

Comal County has implemented a river guage and siren system that includes New Braunfels, Guadalupe County and the Water-Oriented Recreation District (WORD) as funding partners. When gauge heights reach a certain level, emergency management personnel are notified and the siren is automatically activated. Emergency personnel can also activiate the sirens remotely if they know flood water is headed downstream. The data from each gauge, including river height and rainfall, is avaiable online for anyone, including residents, to access.
The filed for federal assistance via a Hazard Mitigation Grant for 976k.

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 01/09/17 Discussing the recommended warning system

COMMISSIONER MOSER: The cost of that whole thing is going to be like 976 thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money. All of it, and the reason we’re here today and moving so quickly is that there is a FEMA grant that’s available until as long as we apply by January the 20th.
JUDGE POLLARD: Which is when President Obama goes out of office.
(Laughter.)
JUDGE POLLARD: Well, the reason I mention that is because he authorized this particular thing, and it’s going to —
MS. KIRBY: It’s a coincidence.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Going on the record with that it’s a coincidence. And so there has to be a presidential declaration of disaster to be able to have these kinds of funds available. So it goes away just so happens to be when he leaves office.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: So we’ve talked about, you know one of the things we said sirens and we said we don’t want sirens, too many many people said they did not want sirens when they had these — when we had these gatherings. Code Red, and I don’t know if Dub wants to chime in on this, but Code Red is the same that’s going to get information to a lot of people; not to everybody, okay. One of the things that we’ll do is identify a point of contact in all of the camps, we won’t communicate with everybody in the camp, but we have a point of contact at the camp so that they can disseminate people within — to people within the camp, like during the summer when kids are there, or to RV parks. Now, if the RV parks want to have a siren themself when something goes up that’s up to them. That’s not part of our thing. So getting the information to the public is the end item of this whole thing. The first thing is sense a flood, then communicate that information to the local authorities, to the right authorities, and then for them to have a system by with which to disseminate the information to the public.

SHERIFF HIERHOLZER: The only thing I have to remind people, unfortunately, I guess I’m one of the ones that – Harley maybe has been around here to see some very devastating floods and quite a bit of loss of life. No matter what we do it’s going to be up to the public, okay. The notification is great. I think the — just the markers, the posts at the crossing is one thing, but it actually oughta state that at that level that your car may wash off, get people’s attention at that crossing. The only other thing is, and as Bob can attest to, most of the time it has been informal where we call people. Unfortunately, the time we had the most devastating one down on the east end of the County down at the camps, I was working that night, spent 72 hours pulling kids out of fences. But we call people, we called camps, they made the decision that they thought they could beat that ride, and then that no matter what we do and no matter what we install there’s going to be loss of life. It’s educating people.

COMMISSIONER REEVES: And I will say and, Sheriff, you can correct me if I’m off base on this, the camps have had a very good system of letting down river if there’s a rise, they’re phoning their competitors or colleagues down river and letting them know what happened. It’s informal as you said, but it’s been a very good system to let them know over time.
SHERIFF HIERHOLZER: Right. The camps and they do, they notify each other, we notify them, they notify — there’s a lot of informal things that really do work real well. It’s not totally those unless they try to get them out too quick in trying to beat it. Because this river can come up in a instant, we all know that with the drainage. But it will go down just as quick if they just hold tight with what they’ve got. But the whole key is just getting people that are traveling up here from somewhere —
COMMISSIONER REEVES: That’s my concern is ones that don’t live here.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: That’s everybody’s concern.
JUDGE POLLARD: So this is kind of an offer, or to see if it’s accepted by and also agreed to by UGRA and the City.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Correct.
JUDGE POLLARD: And if they don’t then where are we with this?
COMMISSIONER MOSER: If they don’t then we just forget the whole project.
JUDGE POLLARD: Just dead in the water.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Dead in the water, right. It’s dead in the water.
COMMISSIONER REEVES: Question —
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Or the pun for the Flood Warning System.
JUDGE POLLARD: Dead in the water.
After failing to secure a grant, they continued to kick the can down the road.
2021 rolls around and they have over 5 mil in ARPA funds in their bank and wind up with a grand total of over 10 mil.

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 10/25/21 discussion of communication systems

COMMISSIONER LETZ: Well, I think that’s good. I just think that — you know, I’d like to get an idea of what the Sheriff’s radar systems are going to cost. I mean I just don’t want to send — go out and get public input on something and then us just not be able to follow up because we have a priority that’s different and we have additional information.
JUDGE KELLY: Well, but let me just explain. What all of these are intentioned to do is to initiate the education system. We need to get the Court educated. We need to get the public educated. Everybody knows that we have over $5 million sitting in our bank account that the Federal Government sent us for these ARPA funds. And they’re not really grants, they’re funds.
…
MRS. LAVENDER: And as the Judge said, there’s a huge category. There’s a bunch of things that you can spend the money or — or secure the money to spend. And when we use the term grant, grant is not really what this is. It’s just funding that’s been made available through this American Rescue Plan Act. It doesn’t require a match. It doesn’t require, you know, that kind of structure. But it does have strings attached. It’s not free money.
…
COMMISSIONER LETZ: And that’s my concern, Judge. My concern is that from my understanding what the — well, I won’t say LCRA because I know what their number is. The number from the Sheriff’s Department, the number from internal communications, we’re already over 5 million dollars, so I don’t want to go out to the public requesting — we have no money to do it.
COMMISSIONER BELEW: Well, at least we make the determination that that’s the first —
COMMISSIONER LETZ: Right. But —
COMMISSIONER BELEW: Then it’s done. But we haven’t made that determination.
COMMISSIONER LETZ: That’s why I think we need to get discuss that phase. We need to get those numbers — I mean, my opinion is law enforcement and the internal communications are the number one and two. I’m not sure which order. Probably law enforcement first. And — and I haven’t heard the rest of the Court say what their top two priorities are but —
COMMISSIONER HARRIS: Well, that’s mine. Because not only does it cover that, it — the Sheriff’s office, communications, getting it up to speed, and also the Volunteer Fire Departments and making sure that we can communicate with other counties. As we saw last winter, I mean, communications is one of our biggest weaknesses and there’s the Sheriff up. I’m sure he’ll back me up on that. Communications was a problem. Go ahead, Sheriff.
SHERIFF LEITHA: Yeah, I kind of agree with Jonathan, if you go that direction. Now, we had a meeting, did attend with LCRA, a very good meeting, just preliminary. Preliminary, I’m looking at $3 million for just me. That’s just us and — the Sheriff’s Office. That’s not including we have the constables, we have Animal Control, we have the fire department. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that needs to be checked into. Are we going to provide radios or not. But I can tell you, I mean, it kind of shocked me. But that was three million right off the bat. And — and that’s not even going into all the other agencies. Are we going to supply those radios, they’re very expensive, to all the fire departments or not. So this is something we really need to look into, if we want to go that direction with the new infrastructure. Also, visiting with the Chief on a daily basis, you know, that’s kind of the direction they’re going. I’ve requested to be on the same radio system they are. Only because the fire department dispatch is out of the County. But the radio system will be very expensive.

COMMISSIONER BELEW: And — but if we upgrade, we will also be able to communicate with the surrounding counties.
SHERIFF LEITHA: Yes. We will be. And it’s a very big project. You know, something that’s going to take some time. Very costly. And there’s a lot of questions, you know. We’re opening a can of worms, you know. We discussed we really need the volunteer fire department input. We’ve already gotten some kickback –I mean some — some — you know, and that’s why I didn’t open this can of worms. It’s going to be a long, drawn out process, you know, to do this. It can be done. But like I said, it’s very costly. Something I can say like Don asked me, I mean, in the long run in the five year we can save money. We pay over $300,000 a year in tower leases. So there is going to be some savings down the line, just to let you know.
And they still don’t update their flood warning system.

The people also didn’t want to spend any of the ARPA money because it was tied to the Biden administration. Even the Judge suggests just holding on to the money so that it can’t be sent to states that don’t share their same values. And now we have 10s of people who have died and many might have lived if the county had updated their flood warning system and installed flood sirens along the river like the multiple counties/towns around them did.

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 11/08/21

Resident: Are you accountable to anyone for how you spend it? Or is it a, kind of, a reward and shows your support for this particular program? It’s not free money. Being present as we talk. How do we know this? Immediately. Unless you want it on the COVID lies and vaccination pressure, you have to send it back. Those are heavy strings. And those are strings. The deep state harangue and vilified President Trump for calling COVID for what it was and then suggest responses that were non-draconian, and then when Biden took office, the leftist government took its gloves off. It has lied and lied more about this COVID — about COVID.
The temptation is great, you’re accountable, and we would like to know where your allegiance is.
Resident 2: And I’m here to ask this Court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House. And Kerr County should not be accepting anything from these people. They’re currently facilitating an invasion of our border, and we’re going to support these people? So that’s what I have to say. Thank you.
Resident: I happen to know that there is no such thing as free money. It’s never government-funded; it’s tax-payer funded. So they’re taking our money and they’re putting strings attached to it and then they’re giving it back to us. And they’re going to get their foot in the door in this county. We don’t want their money. I feel like the people have spoken and I stand with the people. Thank you for your time.
COMMISSIONER BELEW: We have money in the bank, $5.1 million, that was sent to Kerr County.
JUDGE KELLY: We didn’t ask for it. They sent it.
COMMISSIONER BELEW: They sent it.
MS. DEWELL: Exactly.
COMMISSIONER BELEW: The money is in the bank right now. Hasn’t been spent. In the event that you don’t spend it, you send it back. That’s part of the Treasury’s rules on it. If you do spend it, whatever percentage, there would be no expense to the taxpayers in Kerr County. It would all come out of that account, no matter what you do with it.
JUDGE KELLY: And GrantWorks has been very helpful in — in getting us focused on what colors between the lines and what doesn’t. As of last Thursday, when I got a call from Bonnie White telling me about this — the problem that y’all were going to present at the meeting, I went and got on the telephone to their Senior Vice President from GrantWorks. And there — there are discussions that they want to have with us and so we want to sit down and listen to them. And we want — we want you to hear them, too. Because you’re the public. But we — we need to know and get very comfortable with where we are with this grant before we start taking that money. And the claw back was the first thing. As far as where that money sits for the next year or two, my old law partner John Cornyn tells me that if we send it back it’s going to New Jersey or it’s going to New York or it’s going to —
MRS. LAVENDER: Or California.
JUDGE KELLY: — or California. And so I don’t know if I’d rather be the custodian of the money until we decide what we have to do with it rather than giving it back to the government to spend it on values that we in Kerr County don’t agree with. So —
COMMISSIONER BELEW: And any spending of it would have to be done in Commissioners’ Court so you’ll be able to see it and know it.
They eventually signed a 7.5 mil contract with Motorola in 2022 for a county emergency communications system. The system would provide 95% radio coverage to firefighters, EMS and law enforcement.
But hey at least the UGRA has had developing a flood warning system on their Strategic Plan doc since 2022 which they kept rolling to the next year plan.

UGRA Strategic Plan 2025

B-2. Work with local partners to develop Kerr County flood warning system
• In January 2017, UGRA partnered with Kerr County in a FEMA flood warning implementation grant request for $980,000. The project was not selected for funding and most of the funds went to communities impacted by Hurricane Harvey.
• In FY18 the USGS installed a high intensity precipitation gauge at the streamflow site on the Guadalupe in Hunt included in the agreement with UGRA.
• During the previous reporting period, a pre application for a county wide flood warning system was submitted to the Texas Water Development Board Flood Infrastructure Fund. The project was invited to submit a complete application, but UGRA declined due to the low (5%) match offered through the grant.
• UGRA participated in the update to the Kerr County Hazard Mitigation Action Plan which addresses hazards including flooding. The final plan was submitted to FEMA in April 2025.
• During this reporting period, UGRA requested bids for a flood warning dashboard that combines multiple sources of data into one tool. The project will also recommend future improvements to monitoring equipment related to flood warning. Information from this dashboard will be used by UGRA staff and local emergency coordinators and decision makers. A contractor for this project was selected in April 2025.

Breathtaking.

They didn’t want to be inconvenienced by alarms going off in the middle of the night.

They didn’t want to spend the money available because it came from Democratic administrations.

They willfully chose to put children in harm’s way because it was convenient and didn’t cost them local tax dollars, in a wealthy county in Texas.

They willfully chose to kill children by outright neglect to own the libs.

They can’t blame a lack of local funding when the county has been home to so many wealthy individuals:

Another retirement destination, Kerrville turns out to have a similar concentration of the comfortably well off, ranking second in Texas for millionaires per capita, with 1,244 among its 20,749 residents, or 6 percent.

Source: San Antonio Express-News

Kerrville is the county seat and likely where all the meeting minutes above were recorded.

And there is not a lick of DEI involved here as far as I can tell. When FEMA created and published flood maps including Kerr County, they hadn’t yet been under attack by DOGE and Trump’s anti-DEI initiatives. The maps clearly showed a risk the county commissioners didn’t want to address.

Kerr County’s demographics also make it highly unlikely any brown people were involved in critical decision making – according to the 2024 census the county is 92.9% white – but I’ll leave that to journalists to vet because it’s nauseating me on the face of it without additional digging.

Imagine public officials joking on the record in a public meeting that a flood alert system is “dead in the water.”

But sure, Charlie Kirk, attack Austin’s Black fire chief in Travis County, holding him to a higher level of responsibility than the nice, wealthy, nearly all white people in Kerr County who chose not to be inconvenienced. Blame the Black man and DEI for children’s deaths in Kerr County while that fire chief’s core duties are two counties away, responsible for fire and emergency response to over 1.3 million people in Austin.

Children’s deaths caused by nice white people who refused to protect the public because it was more important not to be inconvenienced by alarms, not to pay more local taxes, and not to take Democratic administrations’ funding to own the libs.

~ ~ ~

EDIT — 5:46 PM ET —

The Tennessee Holler @[email protected]
WATCH: “More could’ve been done.”

KERR COUNTY folks didn’t want to take money from “The Biden Regime” that could’ve been used for a flood warning system 👇🏽

Jul 11, 2025, 05:08 PM

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A World We Built to Burn

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Smoke from the Camp Fire settles on San Francisco, 2018

It’s the windy end of a hot summer in California right now, and everything wants to burn. This year, like every year, fall winds jostle and tug a dry landscape of golden grasses and scrubland up against forests whose floors are piled with dry litterfall. Old powerlines hang from poles all over a landscape that has been changed by the human suppression of the fires that were always a part of the ecosystem.

More houses are closer to this tinderbox, as we’ve pushed the wildland-urban interface further into the interior of the southwestern states than it has ever been. The power lines are owned by a bankrupt utility, PG&E, and in a lot of places, they were turned off last week, to prevent the utility company from burning down more towns like Paradise, CA, which burned with a kind of biblical rage this time last year.

And then, on top of all this, there’s climate change, making the hot and dry and windy just a bit hotter and drier and windier.

The reasons PG&E cut off power to millions of people in California are myriad and complicated and go back the better part of a century.

This is a story of climate change, but it’s also a story of messed-up political priorities that date to when our great-grandparents were still getting used to the idea of electricity. It’s a story of disrespect and exploitation of the land, of failures in capitalism, regulation, and political will, of people who don’t want to live with the consequences of their decisions, and people who have to live with the consequences of other people’s decisions.

There isn’t a right answer here, there isn’t a single responsible party, and there’s not a clear, safe, and easy path forward. In the words of Paradise’s mayor, Jody Jones: “It’s really kind of a no-win situation.”

Camp Fire, 2018, NASA

In California those who wanted to blame PG&E for the power shutdowns called this an infrastructure problem, and PG&E deflected by saying it was a climate change problem. But climate change, and more generally, the wider range of the planetary stress we’re living through now, is an infrastructure problem.

I’m not just talking about the 2 degrees centigrade we hear about all the time. Everything from fires to CO2 to biodiversity loss and plastic pollution have come from how we have managed our built environment and currently maintain our infrastructure, and our infrastructure touches every part of life and culture, from forests cleared to create agricultural land for beef and palm oil, to travel-related carbon emissions and heat waves, to the houses built in what was once the California wilds. The issue at the heart of all of these things is how we manage the planet, now that we know that’s what we’re doing.

None of our old infrastructure was built with planetary management in mind, and very little is even now. What we’re dealing with is hundreds of years of something that software world calls technical debt. Technical debt is the shortcuts and trade-offs engineers use to get something done either cheaper or in less time, which inevitably creates the need to fix systems later, often at great cost or difficulty.

Some technical debt is understood up front, some comes from builders being ignorant  of the system they are working in. Most of our planet’s infrastructure is mired in huge amounts of technical debt, most of which we didn’t know we were signing up for at the time, some of which we’re just incurring recklessly as we go along, unable to face the scale of the problem and pushing it off on the next generation.

California is a perfect microcosm of this. The infrastructure is failing, and political priorities are just elsewhere. In the case of energy policy, there’s a huge push to switch from fossil fuels to renewables, which is much more politically sexy than fixing transmission lines. With housing, it’s approving building deeper and deeper into wildlands, often while local policies, old laws, and zoning keep city and suburban density low and property prices unsustainably high.

So here we are: Keeping the lines on will probably kill people. Turning them off will probably kill people. Our political system is facing a real-life trolley problem created by our ever-expanding technical debt. It can’t have been easy for the people making the decisions.

I’ve known people who worked for PG&E in technical roles. I’ve known plenty of people who work on, and care about, infrastructure. They’re not bad people on the whole, and I’m sure part of the aggressive de-energizing came from a rank and file traumatized by last year’s fires and acutely terrified of having a hand in killing people. There’s almost never as many people cackling in dark rooms while chomping on expensive cigars as people think there are.

There just aren’t enough bad guys for all the problems we have right now, leaving us with the hard work fixing problems and not enough of the satisfaction of blaming people.

This past week those who lived in the blackout areas were told to prepare as best they could.

This enraged many, including California Governor Newsom, who is in charge of the government that would in theory be taking care of this kind of thing. The angry people, from Newsom down, felt somebody, somewhere, was supposed to be responsible for all of this, that there simply weren’t supposed to be problems like choosing between fires and blackouts.

But much of the next century is going to be problems like this, not just for California, but for the whole world, as we deal with several generation’s worth of technical debt around infrastructure and learning to really manage our planet. There’s a lot we can learn from the California case, both about how to fix it, and how to cope in the mean time, like: have a plan.

People often get very angry when they hear that they have to have a plan. During the European heatwave and evacuations ahead of storm surges on the East Coast over the summer, and then California’s fall fire-and-blackout season, those living in threatened areas were told to have a plan to take care of their people and themselves.

Sometimes they were told it was time to take care of themselves without much notice. The anger in the case of every disaster is palpable, even though these days the disasters come one after another. Sometimes it seems like we live on a planet slowly traversing the old metaphorical stages of grief — most caught somewhere between denial and anger, with a few out on the scientific frontier starting the process of bargaining.

One of our jobs in this century is to accept that we don’t live on the planet we thought we lived on, and our societies aren’t doing what we thought they were. Even if we were able to change our politics overnight, which is probably impossible without some planetary level disaster wake up call, it would still take many decades to dig ourselves out of out technical debt, and in the mean time, we have to stay alive and try to thrive.

Everyone who lives on this stressed-out planet have to have plans, at every level from transnational to individual. We have to build resiliency and  capacity to cope with unstable and difficult circumstances, potentially for years, as we learn to pay down the technical debt and build the infrastructure that can work with our planet. For Californians that means stores of water and non-perishable foods, spare medication, first aid, batteries, N95 masks, and an evacuation plan,  especially for those living in fire-prone areas.

In hurricane zones, it means a go-bag. It can mean a lot of things depending on where you are and what protecting your home and family means to you. Where I live now, it means iodine pills in the bathroom first aid kit, in case the old and poorly maintained nuclear power plant not from my home goes wrong.

There are questions of right and wrong and responsibility our societies need to address, but having a plan not a matter of fairness or right and wrong. Those will be litigated elsewhere or another time. When the fires have started, the lot have gone out, the waters are rising or the radiation is leaking, it’s a matter of knowing how to take care of you and yours and your community as best you can.

I can imagine you looking at the screen, saying “It shouldn’t be this way!” But it is this way. The world we thought we had, with a safe stable environment and not too many people, that is not the world we live in. That is, in short, not real. At the individual level as well as the policy level, we need to let go of that which is not real.

We are living with infrastructure that is not fit for the reality on our planet. The faster we accept that, the faster we can get to the real work of changing it, politically and socially. Personal resiliency and societal resiliency go hand-in-hand.

Without that, bad infrastructure creates vicious circles, both logistical and political.

Back in the here and now, a lot of activists have focused in California on private ownership and investor motivations as the problem, proposing taking utilities into public hands as the solution. I’m sympathetic, but suspect this doesn’t solve any problems on its own, because there’s no solution that doesn’t involve difficult tradeoffs, and governments aren’t particularly good at difficult tradeoffs.

PG&E or the state need to modernize energy transmission to reduce waste and stop burning down whole towns. We need to modernize existing infrastructure all over the world to cope with the effects of climate change. We also need to replace and build new infrastructure to mitigate climate change and decarbonization for the future. We need to protect biodiversity, and limit extraction. In California, as in the rest of the world, these goals are hard to get out of conflict. They draw on the same pool of money, the same political will, and even the same class of workers.

Both modernizing existing infrastructure and building new sustainable infrastructure at once is slow and viciously expensive. Doing one after another is slower, a little cheaper, and more dangerous. These are the trade-offs that will characterize life in the 21st century on our lovely little water planet.

Our incentives often undermine these goals at every level.

As a simple example, power cuts lead to people buying generators, which are worse for climate change than power generation. This is a pattern we see all over the developing world, like the otherwise modern lifestyle in Beirut, but now showing up in the developed world.

More complexly, the worthy long term goal of bringing power generation closer to where it is used, such as solar roof panels and municipal or micro generation technologies pose a undesirable threat to PG&E. Localized residential and business power generation is better, with lower emissions and less fire risk. But right now, shifting to local production takes funding away from PG&E, putting it into the position of fighting against a future everyone wants — including most of the people at PG&E. This is because the less money PG&E gets, the less it can do to make power distribution safe by burying or replacing power lines, or meeting the power needs of those who can’t generate for themselves, who are most likely to be the poorest customers.

California’s political priority of changing power sources to renewables has gone quite well, but has drawn attention and money away from rebuilding boring power lines hanging above unphotogenic scrubby foliage, like the kind that caught fire last year, incinerating Paradise.

Local micropower generation is certainly what we all want in the long term, but because of how we’ve structured the idea of utility service, it can only reduce funding for large scale projects as fewer and fewer people pay in. These priorities don’t have to be in conflict, but until we rethink how we’re coordinating our response to infrastructure needs and planetary management, they will be. That is also technical debt.

Part of the is the difficulty with managing planetary resources is telling people they can’t have it all. This is hard with all humans, but especially with Americans. The only thing we seem ok with making personal sacrifice for is war, which seems hardly coincident with calling every major policy “a war on” something or other for the past 60 years.

Let me go straight to one of the roughest things we face: not being able to live where we want.

Californians think its their pioneering right to build houses and whole towns deep into the wildlands, land evolved to burn in a place that has been catching fire on a geologic time scale. But Fire doesn’t care where we think we should build our wooded, outdoorsy, and cheap retirement homes.

Flooding in Jakarta, 2013. Seika via Flickr

What Californians, as well as many other Americans, and hundreds of millions of people around the world need to give up on is living where they think they ought to be able to live. Californians are busy building new neighborhoods into the rightful territory of giant fast moving infernos; post-Hurricane Texans think they have the right to build in low-elevation Houston, and poverty-stricken Bangladeshis and Indonesians think they should hold on to the shores they’ve always lived on.

Houston is technical debt. New Orleans is technical debt. Puerto Rico is plagued by intertwined monetary and technical debt. Jakarta is sinking, literally, into technical debt.

Paradise, CA was technical debt.

One of the first lessons of climate, and infrastructure, is that people have to live closer together and in easier places, or they will die. Nature doesn’t care who deserves what. Nature is not interested in how things are supposed to be. We are interested in being kinder than nature, we are interested in justice, and we are going to have to be responsible for bringing that kindness and justice to the people displaced by nature, and who are in need in need of the good things we can all have when we pay down that technical debt and build global infrastructure that works for everyone, including nature.

Ultimately, Californians and Texans and Bangladeshis and Indonesians are participating in the same project, along with the rest of us, to manage ourselves and our resources in ways that let us live comfortably and not quite so heavily upon the Earth.

We have to retreat from the shore, stay out of the wild places, and be careful with our water. We have to use less energy, less land, and take better care of each other at the global level. The faster we figure that out, the better our chances are. Most of the world is past denial now, and so is most of California. Skipping past anger and bargaining and even depression, all the way to acceptance of this new reality, and getting to work, is the best we can do.

California National Guard, Paradise, California 2018

My work for Emptywheel is supported by my wonderful patrons on Patreon. You can find out more, and support my work, at Patreon. All of my Emptywheel work is CC By, Noncommercial. 

(Thanks to Ryan Singel for invaluable help) 

 

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Thursday: Creep

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Covers are often treated like poor relations in hand-me-downs. It’s not the performer’s own work, how can they possibly do the original justice?

Yeah…and then this. I think it’s an example of an exceptional cover. It’s one of my favorites. There are a number of other fine covers of this same piece — some are sweet, some have better production values, and some are very close to Radiohead’s original recording. But this one has something extra. Carrie Manolakos, a Broadway performer known for her role as Elphaba in Wicked, takes a breath at 2:19 and watch out. Her second album will release next month if you enjoy her work.

In Sickness and Health
Here, read these two stories and compare them:

Leaving you with the actual heds on these articles. How isn’t this simple extortion? You know, like, “Nice national health care system you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”

Cry me a river about corporate losses. Last I checked Aetna’s been paying out dividends regularly, which means they still have beaucoup cash.

If only we’d had a debate about offering single payer health care for everyone back in 2009 so we could say Fuck You to these vampiric corporate blackmailers.

Still in Shadow
A timeline of articles, analysis, commentary on the hacking of NSA malware staging servers by Shadow Brokers — no window dressing, just links:

15-AUG-2016 8:48 AM — https://twitter.com/mikko/status/765168232454037504 (Mikko Hypponen–Kaspersky tweeting discovery of Shadow Brokers’ auction of Equation Group code)

16-AUG-2016 7:22 AM — http://cybersecpolitics.blogspot.com/2016/08/why-eqgrp-leak-is-russia.html (Info sec expert Dave Aitel’s assessment on hackers responsible)

16-AUG-2016 7:40 AM — https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/765513662597623808 (Edward Snowden’s tweet thread [NB: don’t be an idiot and click on any other links in that thread])

16-AUG-2016 7:22 PM — https://securelist.com/blog/incidents/75812/the-equation-giveaway/ (time zone unclear)

16-AUG-2016 ?:?? — http://xorcat.net/2016/08/16/equationgroup-tool-leak-extrabacon-demo/

17-AUG-2016 8:05 AM EST — https://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-we-know-about-the-exploits-dumped-in-nsa-linked-shadow-brokers-hack

17-AUG-2016 ?:?? — https://www.cs.uic.edu/~s/musings/equation-group/ (University of Illinois’ Stephen Checkoway’s initial impressions)

17-AUG-2016 7:23 PM EST — https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsas-use-of-software-flaws-to-hack-foreign-targets-posed-risks-to-cybersecurity/2016/08/17/657d837a-6487-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html

18-AUG-2016 6:59 AM EST — https://twitter.com/RidT/status/766228082160242688 (Thomas Rid suggests Shadow Brokers’ auction may be “retaliation” — note at this embedded tweet the use of “retaliation” and the embedded, highlighted image in which the words “Panama Papers” appear in red. Make of that what you will.[1])

18-AUG-2016 2:35 PM EST — https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-shadow-brokers-nsa-leakers-linguistic-analysis (Two linguists suggest Shadow Brokers’ primary language is English distorted to mimic Russian ESL)

You know what this reminds me of? Sony Pictures’ email hacking. Back and forth with Russia-did-it-maybe-not-probably, not unlike the blame game pointing to North Korea in Sony’s case. And the linguistic analysis then suggesting something doesn’t quite fit.

[Today's front pages from USA Today, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, shared here under Fair Use.]

[Today’s front pages from USA Today, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, shared here under Fair Use.]

American Refugees
I read in one of my timelines today a complaint by a journalist about Louisiana flooding news coverage. Wish I’d captured the thread at the time; they were put out that the public was unhappy about the media’s reporting — or lack thereof. They noted all the links to articles, videos, photos being shared in social media, noting this content came from journalists.

Except there really is a problem. The embedded image here is the front page of each of the four largest newspapers in the U.S. based on circulation, total combined circulation roughly six million readers. NONE OF THEM have a story on the front page about the flooding in Louisiana, though three of them covered the California Blue Cut Fire. Naturally, one would expect the Los Angeles Times to cover a fire in their own backyard, and they do have a nice photo-dense piece online. But nothing on the front page about flooding.

The Livingston Parish, Louisiana sheriff noted more than 100,000 parish residents had lost everything in the flood. There are only 137,000 total residents in that parish.

Between the +80,000 Blue Cut Fire evacuees and more than 100,000 left temporarily homeless in Louisiana, the U.S. now has more than a couple hundred thousand climate change refugees for which we are utterly unprepared. The weather forecast this week is not good for the Gulf Coast as unusually warm Gulf water continues to pump moisture into the atmosphere. We are so not ready.

Longread: The last really big American flood
Seven Scribes’ Vann R. Newkirk II looks at the last time a long bout of flooding inundated low-lying areas in the south, setting in motion the Great Migration. This is the history lesson we’ve forgotten. We need to prepare for even worse because like the Blue Cut Fire in California and Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey and New York, disaster won’t be confined to a place too easily written off the front page.

One more day. Hope to make it through.
_________
[1] Edited for clarity. Kind of.

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Monday: Skate Away

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Monday means it’s movie day, and I think this charming little documentary fills the bill. Valley Of A Thousand Hills from Jess Colquhoun looks at Zulu youth participating in a skate camp and the impact on their lives. They’re quite optimistic in spite of limited resources and opportunities. The film left the feeling they’re on the verge of a breakthrough — like these kids could really change global culture if they wanted to. They appear more self-aware and energized than most adults I run into of late.

Wrath of Gods kind of weather

Might be time to brush off that copy of J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and ponder a post-apocalyptic future under water. We’ve likely passed the 1.5C degree global warming threshold without any sense of urgency to act on climate change which fuels this wave of flooding.

Sigh-ber

  • Hotels across ten states breached (Reuters) — Hey, now you philanderers have an excuse for that bizarre charge to your room at the Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt, or InterContinental hotel for strawberries, whip cream, and a leather flogger during your last business trip. “It’s just a hacker, honey, that’s all, really…” HEI Hotels & Resorts, the operator of the affected hotels, found the malware in its systems handling payment card data. The malware had been present in the system for roughly 18 months while 20,000 transactions were exposed.
  • Google ‘secretly’ developing a new OS (TechnoBuffalo) — A well-known Linux blogger wrote Google references “Pink + Purple == Fuschia (a new Operating System)” in its Git repository. The two colors are believed to refer to Magenta and LK kernels which Google is using to build a wholly new operating system. Magenta does not have a Wikipedia entry at the time of this post but Googlesource has a brief explainer for Magenta and LK. The two kernels serve different purposes but combined they may be able to operate any device whether small Internet of Things single purpose devices or multi-purpose devices like personal computers. This may be the direction Google has chosen to go rather than fully merge its Chrome OS with Android. The new operating system could also resolve some annoying problems with antitrust regulators if Android is cut loose and managed by an open source consortium, perhaps one established by and aligned with the Open Handset Alliance.
  • Banking malware attacks Android users browsing sites using Google AdSense (SecureList) — The thieves pay for a listing on AdSense, put their malicious ad in the system, and it downloads to an Android device whenever the user reads a website featuring the contaminated ad. Yuck. Use your antivirus app regularly on your Android devices as this nasty thing may pick up your financial information.

Longread: Manners matter?
At Aeon.com, Professor Eleanor Dickey of University of Reading-UK discusses the ‘magic word’ and its use in early democratic society, and its decline with the rise of a hierarchical system in the fourth century BCE. Are we a more or less democratic society based on our current level of societal manners?

Catch you tomorrow if the creek doesn’t rise!

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