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On Monday's show: Amid Trump administration speculation about eliminating FEMA, how would Greater Houston handle a hurricane or other disaster if the agency no longer existed or were greatly changed?

In brief: Today’s post shares some thoughts about the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season, which fortunately appears to be starting slow. We also look ahead to some modest rain chances to start the week before high pressure and Saharan dust push our highs toward triple digits by the weekend.

Hurricane season begins

The Atlantic Hurricane season officially kicked off on Sunday, June 1. The season nominally lasts for six months, but longtime Houston residents will know that the season usually starts slow, and reaches its crescendo for our region in August and September, before the threat diminishes rapidly by the start of October. So it’s a long slog, but for us it’s typically a four-month slog rather than half a year.

April and May are what I like to call “hurricane season forecast season,” and we’ve seen dozens of outlooks. Having read most of them, I can tell you that almost everyone is calling for near-normal, or modestly above-normal activity this year. The reality is there are no hugely strong signals for what to expect. It does not appear as though El Niño or La Niña will have a major impact on the season, and although sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic are running above normal, they’re not excessively so. We have a deeper rundown of all of this on The Eyewall, but to be honest, none of it matters a whole lot. As always, prepare for any given hurricane season like normal, whatever the forecast is.

As for the tropical outlook for the near future, as usual we have been seeing the US Global Forecasting model throwing out some wild solutions for a Gulf hurricane in the 10 to 16 day portion of its forecast. This is typical for this time of year, and can likely be safely ignored. We will, of course, continue to watch things closely and update Space City Weather with any tropical information that Texas residents need to know. For now it looks like we’re going to slide into the season quietly for at least the next week or so.

The most important advice I can give you is that a little bit of preparation goes a long way. Understand your vulnerabilities to wind, storm surge, and inland flooding, and know under what circumstances you would stay, and under which you will leave. Then make a plan for the supplies needed to hunker down; and have an idea of where you would evacuate to and what you would bring. With these plans made, you will be able to face whatever challenges arise this season with a measure of confidence. We promise that we’ll be here every step of the way.

Message from our long-time partner, Reliant

We first began supporting Space City Weather during the 2017 hurricane season (i.e. Harvey!) and have been grateful to Eric, Matt and the team ever since for keeping Texans informed and prepared during inclement weather. We certainly hope this year’s hurricane season will be a quiet one, but regardless, Reliant and Space City Weather will be there for you.

Take the time now to protect your family, home and business. Let this official kickoff serve as a reminder to prepare now, before the height of hurricane season here in Texas. Here are some tips to get you started:

• Create or update an emergency kit to ensure you’re stocked up on essentials like nonperishable food, water, medical supplies, flashlights and radios. Be sure to customize your kit to fit your family’s personal needs.
• Develop or refresh a communication plan with your family. This will ensure everyone is informed, on the same page and operating in a way that maximizes their safety. This includes sharing emergency contact info, including an out-of-state contact and enabling your phone’s emergency alerts.
• Protect vital documents so you can easily identify yourself, submit insurance claims and request assistance. Important files, including personal, financial and legal documents, should be saved in a waterproof, fireproof bag and backed up digitally.
• Know how to shut off water, gas and electricity in case of an emergency.
• Invest in backup power. Backup energy solutions can help you ride out the storm, including portable options or whole-home generators like the one Eric and Matt have.

Check out more preparedness tips and recovery resources at The Reliant Storm Center: reliantstormcenter.com.

Monday

We’re starting June off warm, but not excessively so. Today should bring sunny skies and high temperatures in the vicinity of 90 degrees. Winds will be generally light, from the southeast at 5 to 10 mph. Lows will be modest, in the mid-70s. Compared to what is coming, this represents a rather benign start to summer in Houston (which for my money, also begins June 1).

Tuesday and Wednesday

Both of these days will have a puncher’s chance of some showers as a front drops into central Texas, but won’t reach all the way to our region. I’d say there’s about a 20 or 30 percent likelihood of rain, with the barest chance of a thunderstorms. Most of us will see partly to mostly sunny skies most of the time, with highs in the vicinity of 90 degrees. As for humidity, we’ve reached that point of the year where the humidity is going to be high every day in Houston. It’s a fact of life. Anyway, if you’re not impressed with the rain chances these days, they’re far better than what’s to come.

Thursday and Friday

These days should be a little warmer, with mostly sunny skies. Two things are going to happen during the second half of the week that are really going to make it feel like summer around here. One is that high pressure will begin to build from the south. And secondly, we’ll see an influx of Saharan dust that will turn our sunsets redder and help to clamp down on atmospheric moisture. The bottom line? Expect highs in the low 90s on Thursday and Friday as we transition into this pattern.

Saturday and Sunday

Our temperatures should be solidly in the mid-90s to upper-90s this coming weekend, with sunny skies. Lows likely will be in the upper 70s. Need I say more?

Next week

The hot pattern continues for a couple of more days next week before there’s a possibility of some slight relief. This would take the form of some scattered showers and slightly lower daytime temperatures. But we’re still going to be in the 90s.

Summer is tick season. The Onion shares tips for protecting yourself from ticks and the diseases that they carry.

Wear long sleeves and tall socks when volunteering at the local tick shelter.

Hike in a zigzag motion to throw ticks off your trail. 

Use baking soda, though we can’t remember exactly how, where, when, or why.

​If you find a tick attached, carefully remove it with a single round from a small caliber handgun.

Coat yourself in DEET so the ticks get cancer, too.

Remember to take a picture of any rash that develops so you can sell it some freak online.

Retain the services of an opossum bodyguard.

Make yourself an unattractive host by continually listing your negative qualities. 

The post Tips For Preventing And Treating Tick Bites appeared first on The Onion.

Japan has a new sumo grand champion and the first Japanese competitor to reach the top rank since 2017, the sport having recently been dominated by Mongolians who won six of the previous seven titles. What do you think?

The post Japan Celebrates New Sumo Champion After Years Of Mongolian Dominance appeared first on The Onion.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
This is not autobiographical because in the real version there is no strawberry.

Today's News:

You may ask why Miss Maki is dressed as a cheerleader in panel 4. I couldn’t decide whether it was for a case, or whether her being a part-time cheerleader, totally at odds with her character, was a good character note for the imaginary manga she and Miyamoto star in. But had Wicked Things run on past issue 6, you would eventually have seen a whole issue of this.

The post Hostile appeared first on Bad Machinery.

Eddie Rabbitt’s also visiting Malta.

Sigmund Freud had the hots for his mom. This is creepy, sure. But probably not too damaging. What’s damaging is that his inner demon got extrapolated to the general public and he spent a lifetime trying to convince everyone else that they wanna have sex with their mom. Resentment and confusion were created from thin air.

This process of: Secret > Extrapolation > Outrage > Hypocrisy is so predictable it’s basically prescriptive. You wanna know what someone’s inner demon is? Listen to what they rage about. Open a random closet and three anti-gay activists will tumble out. (Several studies have found strong links between homophobia and latent same-sex preferences). Republicans raging about voter fraud? Guess who is most often caught in the act.

This pattern basically comes down to a lack of imagination. The thing I’m hiding from everyone else must be the same thing they are hiding from everyone else. I mean, we are all living the exact same life, right? It shouldn’t surprise us that the same people who fall prey to this have very little empathy. Empathy is the engine that teaches us that other people’s secrets are weirder than we could ever have imagined! Reading fiction is the antidote to assuming your secret is the same as everyone else’s secret. Suddenly, you are let in on all the amazing secrets that are possible in the world.

One of the admitted reasons Elon Musk purchased Twitter was because of a conservative conspiracy theory over “Shadow Banning.” The idea was that Twitter was putting its thumb on the scale and making some accounts have artificially low reach; they were targeting rightwing accounts and boosting leftwing accounts. Elon vowed in the purchase to level the playing field and to out this grand conspiracy by taking over the company and revealing the inner algorithm that wasn’t making him as popular as he should be.

With ownership of Twitter, and all the internal communications that came with it, Elon promised to reveal this grand conspiracy of evil Twitter being a bunch of big meanies. The worst thing he could find was the US government wagging a finger at Twitter for not taking misinformation seriously. Elon’s own lawyers admitted to the courts that Twitter did nothing wrong and that even the US government violated no laws. The worst you can say is that conspiracy nuts and Nazis felt like their right to air nonsense was infringed upon. Even rightwing nutters were deflated over the lack of a smoking gun here. If Twitter was trampling on their accounts, surely there would be something in the code. An email between engineers. Anything. Right?

(In fact, the shadow-banning Elon raged about has now famously become standard operating procedure in hilariously sad ways)

The same drug-addled conspiracy mindset that led to the purchase of Twitter is what also led to DOGE. It’s the great conservative canard that government is wasteful and corrupt, while corporations and free markets are models of perfect efficiency. Nothing could be more upside down and sideways than this, and Elon is doing the Lord’s work by pointing it out. Going into DOGE promising a TRILLION dollars in cuts, the program will probably end up costing US taxpayers more than it saved. Especially when you consider that it only “saved” money by cutting programs and research that were doing good in the world. Or that the fines Musk’s companies were facing were greater than the amount saved. One estimate for the direct deaths caused by defunding USAID puts the tally at 300,000 already. Most of these are children. People are dying while food rots in storage. This isn’t conspiracy or projection, it’s very real. Which makes it boring to the people who pretend to care about conspiracies, children, and waste. It also makes Elon one of the most horrific monsters of modern times, zero exaggeration.

The root cause of all this needless suffering is the same old pattern. You have damaged people who think the rest of the world is damaged like them, and instead of getting some help, they go out and cause a lot of suffering. I was indifferent to Elon right up until he accused a man trying to rescue kids of being a pedophile. The only thing I knew of Elon before this was that he had failed upward when Paypal bought out his company and forced him aside for his incompetence, resulting in a massive payday for him. This was standard startup nonsense. Screaming “pedophile!” with a big megaphone at a stranger was something different. It turns out that Elon’s sole reason for suspecting this was some other stranger whispered the allegation to him. Elon wanted to believe the worst possible thing about a stranger who was attempting to do good in the world. And he just ran with it.

Even more egregious is the case of Haraldur “Halli” Thorleifsson, which is worth a read. Basically, one of the nicest people in the world (literally — he has awards for being amazing) was bullied by the richest spoiled brat in the world. Elon only backed down because it was going to cost him.

One of the things Elon is famous for is not trusting that anyone is doing actual work. He makes employees submit justification for their existence. He’s done this at his companies and also with federal employees. His mass firings have led to a scramble to re-hire people who are only seen as indispensable after they’ve been dispensed with. The same thing played out at DOGE. And perhaps this is Elon’s darkest secret, the one that is causing harm to so many others. It’s the equivalent of Freud’s lust for his mom.

Elon Musk contributes nothing to this world, and he knows it. He knows better than anyone else that he has failed upward in life. Of all the folks out there rolling dice, someone is going to roll a perfect 20 ten times in a row. He failed at his X bank venture and was bailed out by Paypal. He failed at Paypal and his ouster led to a massive windfall. He bought an electric supercar and stumbled into a car and battery manufacturer ten years ahead of the competition. He threw gobs of money and took the reins off the best rocket scientists and they delivered the greatest engine ever built. He made the worst tech purchase since AOL, and that platform swept him into the White House, where he is not only profiting handsomely but shutting down costly investigations.

The opposite is also true: when Elon has full authority to run with his own ideas (the Boring Company, hyperloop, Cybertruck, DOGE, Starship, rebranding Twitter), the results are disastrous.

Of course, it’s easy to ascribe luck to genius. We make this mistake all the time, and Elon’s sycophants have mastered the art. But every time Elon accuses others of being lazy, or asking them to justify their existence, we are getting a peek at his inner demon. Elon Musk has one of the greatest cases of imposter syndrome in the history of humankind. He knows he does nothing better than anyone else. Don’t worry, buddy. We see you. Some of us even empathize.

The post Hypocrisy and Paranoia appeared first on Hugh Howey.

The Trump administration has confirmed that it is pulling the nomination of private astronaut Jared Isaacman to lead NASA.

First reported by Semafor, the decision appears to have been made because Isaacman was not politically loyal enough to the Trump administration.

"The Administrator of NASA will help lead humanity into space and execute President Trump’s bold mission of planting the American flag on the planet Mars," Liz Huston, a White House Spokesperson, said in a statement released Saturday. "It's essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda and a replacement will be announced directly by President Trump soon."

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In the calendar year of 1986 Tandy introduced two all-in-one computers, the Tandy 1000 EX and the Tandy Color Computer 3. Both were competitively priced at $799.00 and $219.95, respectively. At first the budget-conscious consumer may have chosen the CoCo 3 over the EX. By the next year the price of the EX had dropped by $100 while the Tandy 1000 HX took its prior price. At the same time the CoCo 3 dropped in price by $20, where it would stay until it was discontinued in 1990. The HX would displace the EX and eventually fall to $699 before it was also discontinued in 1990. In this article we will compare the features of these all-in-ones feature by feature and try to determine which would have really been the better purchase.

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Cowboy Pat? Cowboy Pat? #CowboyWho

Tensions flared and the debate turned personal as Republicans said their bill empowered parents and denied predictions that the ban will endanger children.

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, there was something of a spat between Donald Trump and Twitter. Trump announced a panel to study “anti-conservative bias” on social media, and went on some crazy Twitter tirades that raised complicated content moderation questions, and we wrote about what a mess the whole thing was. Then, Trump released a draft of an executive order about social media that was legally meaningless, and didn’t get any better in the official version. Mark Zuckerberg made some ridiculously wrong and self-serving statements about Twitter fact checking, and we explained why fact checking the president is not evidence of anti-conservative bias.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, a disappointing Supreme Court ruling sided with patent trolls, while the Obama administration filed a totally clueless argument in another case about software copyrights. A judge in Ohio was getting fed up with Malibu Media, Richard Prince’s latest art project continued pushing the boundaries of copyright law, and Cox was facing a lawsuit from Rightscorp that they called “extortionate”. The UK government was going Full Orwell with its suppression of free speech, while a UN report came out strongly in defense of encryption and anonymity online. This was also the week that Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, Lady Gaga joined the ranks of musicians who weren’t freaking out about piracy, while James Murdoch was giving confused lectures about copyright. We wondered why politicians kept using unlicensed music in their commercials, and why customs officers should be in charge of determining what counts as a copyright circumvention device. Infamous copyright trolls were out in force, with US Copyright Group threatening ISPs that refuse to cough up user names and commencing its mass lawsuit program for the producers of Hurt Locker, while ACS:Law was trying to get people who deny infringement to incriminate themselves. And one bizarre copyright fight broke out over the millennia old Tao Te Ching.

#Rowen #RoninWarriors

ZÜRICH – The clandestine organization of evil billionaires who have worked for decades to undermine the world’s education systems, thus making the populace easier to control, have recently decided that simply letting students use ChatGPT will work much faster. During a secret meeting inside an ominously lit boardroom deep within a hidden compound, the collection […]

The post Shadowy interests plotting to dismantle education just going to let students use ChatGPT instead appeared first on The Beaverton.

MIAMI, FLORIDA – After an intensely violent hockey match, the Florida Panthers have formed a line to shake hands and assure their opponents, the Carolina Hurricanes, that they feel no resentment after hours spent roughhousing, fighting, and bashing each other’s heads into the sideboards. Though many doctors suggest seeking immediate medical attention after far more […]

The post Hockey players shake hands, say there are no hard feelings about the permanent brain damage appeared first on The Beaverton.

He’s a closet ham radio operator.

It’d be great to put a Slip ‘n Slide in there.

phoenix

fortune teller

Girl and Fish visit the fortune teller.

Fortune teller: "The internet as they know it is dying? Be the killing blow."

https://analognowhere.com/_/rtroan

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Hey! Just a second! We're ... #CowboyWho

Swit won awards for her role as "Hot Lips" Houlihan, a nurse based at an Army hospital during the Korean War.

The asp or puss caterpillar is the most common species of stinging caterpillar in the Houston area, according to the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, which says they are typically encountered from April through June.

The Trump administration canceled a contract awarded to Moderna for the late-stage development of its bird flu vaccine for humans, as well as the right to purchase shots. What do you think?

The post U.S. Cancels Bird Flu Vaccine appeared first on The Onion.

MUNICH – French soccer champions Paris Saint-Germain were told by UEFA that, having accidentally eliminated all other clubs by a bookkeeping error in their complicated new tournament system, the federation now required them to play against themselves in the final of Europe’s foremost club competition, the Champions League, this month. This season marks the start […]

The post Convoluted new UEFA Champions League structure forces PSG to play themselves in the final appeared first on The Beaverton.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday updated its immunization schedules for children and adults to partially reflect the abrupt changes announced by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this week.

In a 58-second video posted on social media on Tuesday, May 27, Kennedy said he was unilaterally revoking the CDC's recommendations that healthy children and pregnant people get COVID-19 vaccines.

"I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that, as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule," Kennedy said in the video.

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