Flash Floods and News Flashes
Plus: Russia’s ‘anti-woke’ visa, the U.K. Undams Beavers & death by a thousand Medicaid form paper cuts.
The floods of Kerr County, Texas, have claimed over 80 lives, and there is valid discussion over warning systems and the increase in extreme weather events via climate change. I’ll go into this a little later on the show, but I want to tackle both of these issues here as well.
First up, climate change, global warming or whatever you want to call it. There’s a growing narrative that these cataclysmic events, often described as once in 500 years occurrences are happening more frequently, adding to whatever anxiety you already feel about the issue. The evidence is that THEY ARE happening more frequently, but not as frequently as they seem. I’ll explain.
Whenever a flash flood or massive rainfall happens, you will hear that the amount of water was not supposed to have deluged that particular area more than once every hundred years. So often these extreme weather events weren’t supposed to happen more than once every hundred years. BUT THEY KEEP HAPPENING. Therefore the charts must be off or outdated. So, a bit complicatedly, the assumptions made decades ago do need to be updated to reflect more extreme weather events yet its’s also true that we only hear of the outlier events. There are thousands of stations that NOAA monitors as part of its Precipitation-Frequency Atlas of the United States. You will hear about the stations where extreme weather events occur. You won’t hear about the hundreds of stations where the 100-year estimates have held. This is a little like saying, “The odds of winning the lottery are sooooo long, yet every day someone hits it.” Yes, it doesn’t mean the odds are wrong. But to muddy our analogy, the 100 and 500-year maps DO NEED recalibration, but not because “these 100-year floods keep happening”.
And while we’re on communications, it’s hard to ignore how the warning communications strategy factored into this… except that IT IS EASY to ignore. Who among us has not gotten an Amber alert for a kid caught up in an ugly custody battle or a storm warning for some tempest 100 miles away from us? And what about that constant stream of information that I mentioned earlier? We are experiencing notification fatigue like never before, and while “it’s better to play it safe than sorry” is generally a good motto, it is making it easier to ignore a catastrophic flash flood warning. In fact, alert fatigue may have played a role in another Texas tragedy, the Uvalde school shooting. The Texas House of Representatives Investigative Committee discovered that frequent lockdowns over border-related incidents may have contributed to law enforcement’s slow response.
What am I saying, exactly? Until the dust settles and the recovery efforts are wrapped up, we won’t really know what could have been done to minimize the damage, if there was anything to be done in the first place—sometimes catastrophes happen. When they do, it’s best to have reliable warnings, but warnings that people heed.
Welcome to the Gist List—an apocalyptic, anxiety-inducing news roundup, things you should know, and my thoughts leading up to today’s podcast episode.
Here’s what’s on my mind:
🦫 The Beaver Invasion.
🫒 Worldwide food shortages (and slapstick heists)
🪆 The Anti-woke visa promises, but doesn’t deliver.
📄 Death by a thousand government-red-tape paper cuts.
🪰 The demise of the screwworm.
The Gist List
The Beavers Are Coming (The Londoner)
After 400 years of absence, a family of Eurasian beavers has made a glorious return to London—not with fanfare and velvet thrones as is fitting for this majestic beast, but via cage and van. (Oh well. It’s the destination that matters most, I guess.) The whole article is worth a read, but I can’t help but love the description of the Big Momma™️ of a beaver:
The first thing you need to know about the mother, Willow —and forgive my commenting on a woman’s weight —is that she’s massive: 30KG of pure heft (the size of an athletic labrador or an obese springer-spaniel, McCormack says).
The dad is a delicate little flower compared to her and is also quite a bit younger. So Willow is not only a beaver, but also a cougar.
As adorable as this all is, I do have to be the jerk that points out that a 400-year absence from the U.K. indicates that the beavers might not settle back in as though they just got back from holiday. In fact, I suspect enough time has passed for them to be considered an invasive species. Just remember in 10 years, when the overgrown beaver population is at odds with London’s overgrown pigeon population that, you heard it here first.
Food Shortages and Heists: Olive Oil, Coffee & Potatoes (Various)
Food is all over the news this week, and no, it’s not tariff-related (or at least not yet.) I came across three different food stories about shortages and capers (the heist variety) that you should know about:
Olives (Bloomberg): For millennia, olive trees have thrived in the Mediterranean’s dry climate, anchoring Greek culture, cuisine, and economy. But now between droughts, wildfires and unusually hot winters, olive crops are at risk. Not only that, there are slapstick-worthy heists, including one where two men stole 33 sacks of olives using a municipal truck parked in front of a security camera, who then tried to get them pressed at a local mill.
Coffee Beans (Bloomberg): Coffee prices are climbing making it a big ticket commodity for thieves, or shall we say, espresso extortionists. Brazil—the world’s largest coffee exporter—is facing a wave of violent robberies. Even better for these bean bandits, coffee doesn’t exactly grow with a serial number inscribed on it, so it is easy to launder and sell stolen beans somewhere else.
Potatoes (DW): Germany is dealing with an infestation of the surprisingly pretty-looking glass-winged cicadas. They are transmitting a bacteria that is making potatoes—and we all know how much Germans love potatoes—wilt as well as affecting other vegetables. There’s no word on whether it is affecting asparagus crops yet, but if it does, it would probably trigger a national emergency.
Russia's 'Anti-Woke' Visa Lures Those Fearing a Moral Decline in the West (Washington Post)
Russia is now offering a “shared values” visa to expats disillusioned with what they see as the collapse of traditional values in their home countries. This article goes into a few families’ choices to move to Russia, and how the grass really wasn’t greener behind the Iron Curtain. (It turns out when you get scammed out of $50,000, the Russian police aren’t all that helpful.)
This brings me back to the movie White Nights where Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov defect (or at least try to) opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. In the good old days, it used to be the crunchy lefties would go find refuge in Russia while the freedom-fighting (can you even call them conservatives?) types would try to make it to America.
Annoying People to Death (The Atlantic)🔒
The White House has a brilliant plan for cutting Medicaid waste: making it so annoying and burdensome to qualify for it that people simply quit.
The "Big Beautiful Bill" effectively guts the program by slashing $1 trillion in funding and eliminating coverage for 10 million people. The Trump administration is spinning it as a reform with nationwide work requirements. What this really does, however, is shift the administrative burden, saddling recipients with busywork while forcing people who can't work due to health issues or caretaking responsibilities to jump through a series of flaming hoops and costing taxpayers up to $5,000 per disenrollment in bureaucratic overhead. (Hoop jumping is pretty hard when you’re in a wheelchair). You keep hearing the law’s backers say that this is just targeting the able-bodied. Well, if they are able-bodied, you wouldn’t have to worry about them using up and incurring costs for all their maladies and illnesses!
How will this go in real life? According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 64% of non-disabled adults on Medicaid already work, and most of the rest have health issues, caregiving duties, or are in school. When Arkansas implemented a similar requirement in 2018, nearly 20,000 people lost coverage, with no measurable increase in employment.
The US Plans to Begin Breeding Billions of Flies to Fight Screwworm (AP)
There’s an update in the long saga that is the Gist List’s obsession with screwworm. The U.S. government is going back to ol’ reliable—a decades-old strategy of breeding and airdropping billions of sterilized flies across southern Texas and Mexico. Screwworms, as their name suggests, screw over cows by laying eggs in live cows, and their larvae eat them, causing the cow to die over a slow, excruciating two weeks.
With this plan, however, scientists will irradiate a bunch of male screwworm flies, sterilizing them (and presumably making them taller, darker and more handsome), and release them en masse to the population of female flies causing them to lay unfertilized eggs. This method is environmentally safe, avoids pesticide use, and was credited with wiping out the fly in the U.S. by the 1980s. They can still return, which is why scientists are still recommending keeping sterile fly factories alive even after the crisis passes.
Last Week on The Show: Why the Left Lost the Working Class
Professor Joan C. Williams joins the show to discuss her book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. She explains how the decline of unions, elite cultural codes, and a failure to value stability over novelty have fueled resentment. Bethany McClean was also on last week discussing the fight over U.S. Steel, and it’s worth a listen.
This newsletter was put together in collaboration with Kathleen Sykes. All mistakes belong to Mike Pesca.
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