Just an ordinary guy.

Texas, USA
Texas is flooding again. I built a live map tracking every river, lake, and NOAA gauge in the state, color-coded by flood stage in real time. lakes-and-rivers-2.vercel.ap… @averytomascowx @KVUE @KXAN_Weather @Clint_wx @ChistianChevres @WalkerATX
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Scrub back 7 days of history or forward 5 days into the NWS forecast. Tap any gauge for its flood-stage thresholds, historic record crest, and live hydrograph. Built for the next flood, not just this one.
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I have two stacks on my desk. The left stack is financial disclosure forms from members of Congress. The right stack is waivers for members who filed their financial disclosures late. The right stack is always taller. On Wednesday morning, I watched a soldier get arrested on CNN. I am a Disclosure Analyst for the House Ethics Committee. I have held this position for eleven years. My job is to receive the forms, verify their completeness, and file them. I do not investigate. I do not flag. I do not refer. I file. I have a lanyard. The lanyard says ETHICS. The soldier's name is Gannon Ken Van Dyke. He is thirty-eight years old. He was stationed at Fort Bragg. He was Special Forces. In December, he created an account on a prediction market called Polymarket. On January 2nd, he bet $32,500 that the president of Venezuela would be removed from power. On January 3rd, he helped remove the president of Venezuela from power. He collected $409,881. He has been charged with five federal crimes. Commodities fraud. Wire fraud. Unlawful use of confidential government information. Theft of nonpublic government information. Unlawful monetary transaction. The Department of Justice called it "the first-ever insider trading prosecution on event contracts." I watched this on the television in our break room. Then I walked back to my desk and processed a late financial disclosure from a member of the House Financial Services Committee who purchased $250,000 in bank stocks eleven days before his subcommittee held a closed-door hearing on proposed capital reserve changes. The filing was forty-seven days late. The STOCK Act requires disclosure within forty-five days. The penalty for late filing is $200. I waived it. I waive most of them. In 2021, fifty-four members of Congress and senior staff violated the reporting rules. The fines were minimal. Most were waived. I have a form for the waiver. The form has a box that says "Reason." I write "administrative delay." In ethics, "administrative delay" means the member's office forgot and then remembered when a reporter called. My approval rate is one hundred percent. In any other field, that number would trigger an audit. In mine, it is called thoroughness. Let me show you what I processed this year. January. A senator on the Armed Services Committee sold defense contractor shares worth $1.2 million. Three days later, his committee received a classified briefing that the Iran campaign had exceeded its projected cost by 340%. The stock dropped 8%. He filed the disclosure sixty-one days late. I calculated the fine. $200. His chief of staff asked if it could be waived. He did not ask what the senator traded on. Nobody asks that. The form does not have a field for it. I waived the fine. The senator's portfolio returned 23.4% in 2025. The S&P 500 returned 16.8%. February. A representative on the Energy and Commerce Committee bought pharmaceutical stocks worth $400,000. Two weeks later, her committee advanced a bill that would extend patent exclusivity for the exact drug class she purchased. The stocks rose 14%. She filed on time. There was no fine. There was no investigation. There was nothing to investigate because buying stocks in companies regulated by your own committee is not illegal. It is legal. The STOCK Act made it legal by making it disclosed. In Congress, disclosed means legal. In my office, legal means filed. March. A member whose spouse manages a portfolio worth $9.2 million reported forty-three separate transactions in a single quarter. Twelve of them were in sectors directly affected by legislation the member co-sponsored. The timing on eight of those twelve was within a two-week window of committee action. I logged all forty-three. None were flagged. We do not flag. We file. I asked my supervisor once what would happen if I flagged a filing. She said we do not have a form for that. I never asked again. In 2020, I processed 847 disclosures. In 2023, 1,211. In 2025, 1,614. The number of enforcement actions in each of those years was zero. The numerator changes. The denominator does not. I want to tell you about the soldier again. He made $409,881. He tried to delete his Polymarket account by calling customer service and saying he lost access to his email. He moved his profits into a foreign cryptocurrency vault and then into a new brokerage account. He used his real identity. He placed thirteen bets. Every single one was connected to an operation he personally participated in. In my eleven years, I have processed disclosures from members of Congress who traded on: Pending FDA approvals they learned about in committee. Defense appropriations they voted on. Trade policy they negotiated. Pandemic response measures they drafted. Interest rate decisions they were briefed on before the public. None of them have been charged. None of them have been investigated by the Department of Justice. None of them have been referred to the SEC. The STOCK Act has produced zero prosecutions since it was signed on April 4th, 2012. Fourteen years. Five hundred and thirty-five members. $635 million in trades last year alone. Zero cases. My daughter asked me once what happens when someone breaks the rules. I told her we write it down. She asked what happens after that. I said it depends. She was nine. She is twenty now. It does not depend. Nothing happens after that. The soldier made $409,881 and faces decades in prison. Nancy Pelosi entered Congress in 1987 with a portfolio worth approximately $785,000. It is now worth $133.7 million. That is a return of 16,930%. The Dow Jones returned 2,300% over the same period. Professional fund managers who beat the market for three consecutive years are considered exceptional. She has beaten it for thirty-seven. If a hedge fund produced those returns, the SEC would subpoena the records on a Thursday. She produced them from a building with a chapel and a gift shop. She announced her retirement last year. No investigation was opened. No disclosure was flagged. Her filings were on time. In my office, on time means compliant. Compliant means closed. I want to tell you about the fine. $200. That is the maximum penalty for violating the STOCK Act's disclosure requirements. $200 for a member of Congress whose portfolio gained $4.7 million in a single quarter. I calculated what $200 represents as a percentage of $4.7 million. It is 0.004%. I could not find a comparison that made it meaningful. It is less than the price of the parking pass in the Rayburn garage. It is less than lunch at the members' dining room if you order the crab cakes, which I am told are excellent though I eat at my desk. Since 2012, thirty-one bills have been introduced to restrict congressional trading. I keep a list. The list is longer than the STOCK Act itself. On March 5th, 2026, a representative from Michigan introduced the thirty-second. He called it the "No Getting Rich in Congress Act." The bill would prohibit the President, Vice President, members of Congress, and their spouses from trading individual stocks, cryptocurrency, futures, and commodities while in office. The bill was referred to committee. The committee has not scheduled a hearing. The committee is chaired by a member whose spouse executed $2.1 million in trades last year. The bill will be reviewed. In my office, reviewed means read. Read means acknowledged. Acknowledged means a status has been assigned. A status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one. The soldier used classified information to make $409,881 on a prediction market. He has been charged with five federal crimes. The Department of Justice announced the case on the same day I processed three disclosures from members who traded on committee knowledge worth a combined $3.8 million. The difference between the soldier and the members is not what they did. It is the building they did it in. He did it from Fort Bragg. They did it from the Capitol. He used a prediction market. They used the New York Stock Exchange. He bet on a military operation. They bet on the legislation they write. He did not write the law. They did. They wrote the STOCK Act. Then they funded its enforcement at zero dollars. Then they set its maximum penalty at $200. Then they gave my office the authority to waive it. Then they traded $635 million. The soldier flew to Caracas. He breached a compound. He put his body between a mission and a bullet. The people who ordered the operation were in a building with a credenza and sparkling water. They did not go to Caracas. They went to their brokerage accounts. The soldier made $409,881 and is now in federal custody. The people who knew what he was going to do before he did it made more and filed less. His prosecution is not a failure of the system. It is the system. One conviction per decade, at the lowest level, so the briefing slides can say enforcement exists. The $409,881 is not the crime. It is the cost of making $635 million look supervised. In my field, we call this self-regulation. The soldier's Polymarket account has been frozen. His military career is over. He will spend years in federal prison. My office will process every congressional disclosure filed this year. Every trade logged. Every $200 fine calculated and waived. The system is immaculate. Fourteen years. Zero prosecutions. $635 million a year. A 16,930% return. I have not leaked a document. I have not filed a complaint. I have not deviated from the process one single time. The process was written by the people whose forms I process. As long as the disclosures go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations. My lanyard still says ETHICS. In eleven years, nobody has asked me to define the word.
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What happened to @RobertKennedyJr banning drug commercials? Seems like every single commercial break has at least one…. It’s time to ban them. In what world should an uneducated patient be suggesting a drug to their Dr?!?!
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You can see the smoke from the crash of UPS 2976 on KLVX Doppler Radar in Louisville, Kentucky.
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lakes-and-rivers-production.… I threw this site together in a couple of hours as a fun little side project. The idea started because my buddy Jeff down in Cuero wanted to see when the flood waters might arrive on the Guadalupe River, and I figured I could spin up something quick to help give him (and anyone else) some visibility. The site pulls in real-time water data from U.S. lakes and rivers and displays it in a simple, easy-to-read format. It's running on a free hosting service (Railway.app), so don’t expect flawless performance or uptime—it’s really just a lightweight tool I hacked together one afternoon using public data. ⚠️ Please don’t use this for anything critical—especially not life-or-death decisions. It hasn’t been professionally validated, and I make no guarantees about the accuracy or reliability. If you’re in a flood-prone area, always use official sources like the USGS or NOAA
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This is actually one of the dumbest posts I’ve seen Trump make I could say a lot more, but I’ll leave it at that Very disappointed
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Seems like every time there is a storm, the power goes out around my rural area. Unacceptable, @oncor @PUCTX
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Daniel retweeted
Right now there are a lot of new eyes on Signal, and not all of them are familiar with secure messaging and its nuances. Which means there’s misinfo flying around that might drive people away from Signal and private communications. One piece of misinfo we need to address is the claim that there are ‘vulnerabilities’ in Signal. This isn’t accurate. Reporting on a Pentagon advisory memo appears to be at the heart of the misunderstanding: npr.org/2025/03/25/nx-s1-533…. The memo used the term ‘vulnerability’ in relation to Signal—but it had nothing to do with Signal’s core tech. It was warning against phishing scams targeting Signal users. Phishing isn’t new, and it’s not a flaw in our encryption or any of Signal’s underlying technology. Phishing attacks are a constant threat for popular apps and websites. In order to help protect people from falling victim to sophisticated phishing attacks, Signal introduced new user flows and in-app warnings. This work has been completed for some time and is unrelated to any current events. If you’re interested in learning more, this WIRED article from February 19th (over a month ago) goes into more detail: wired.com/story/russia-signa… Signal is open source, so our code is regularly scrutinized in addition to regular formal audits. We also constantly monitor security@signal.org for any new reports, and we act on them with quickness while also working to protect the people who rely on us from outside threats like phishing with warnings and safeguards. This is why Signal remains the gold standard for private, secure communications.
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Imagine what would happen if Musk got hold of NWS? All their websites are like 1990s raw html. Only a few are very nice. All data would be in json, csv with apis. Get rid of all the nonsensical 1970s metar/recon code, replace it with lat/ lon json data.
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Replying to @YouTubeTV
@YouTubeTV @cbs @JCMoonves the BigBrother episode thumbnails are spoiling things. Can we get them changed to just the logo? I’m on E27 and already know Quinn was voted out because Kemo’s mug is on E28’s thumbnail.
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ONLY American citizens should be allowed to vote in OUR elections. RT if you agree!
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Daniel retweeted
20 years. Remember what happens when good men are pushed beyond their limits.
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Replying to @TonyGonzales4TX
@TonyGonzales4TX has a fundraiser with the traitor @SpeakerJohnson and some rich people. Shortly after @GregAbbott_TX announced his very poor decision to endorse @TonyGonzales4TX . How much the Tony pay Abbott to endorse him? Wow! Bad move @GregAbbott_TX.
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@GregAbbott_TX , Tony stands for everything you don’t. He votes with the democrats on border, 2nd amendment and Ukraine aid. Please, for the good of the great state of Texas, give the money back and endorse @TheAKGuy instead! @DonutOperator @Fat_Electrician
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The upcoming cold snap will NOT be a repeat of Feb. 2021. It won't get as cold and it won't last as long. Winter precipitation, if any, won't be as widespread. It'll still be very cold. Make sure you take care of those cold weather preps! #wfaaweather
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Hi @elonmusk we host creator range days in San Antonio where we invite online creators and celebrities out to shoot! Our last one had over 100m combined followers. For our next one we would love to have everyone shoot a Cybertruck! And of course we’d love for you to come down and join us too!
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Replying to @DonutOperator
@DonutOperator have you ever thought about doing a video on what ammunition officers carry? I'd be curious as to what the most popular choice is.
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