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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Lessons from a Dallas Deck Park

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Quality urban renewal takes a lot of commitment from multiple people and organizations. It cannot be all governmental, or it will fail to live up to potential due to suffocation in layers of red tape. You know the drill: shortfall-budgeted, bureaucratized, top-down, one-size-fits-all, rules-driven rigidity, unimaginative design, CYA decision making, and poor-quality, lowest-bidder contract work. That’s a recipe for disuse, decay and crime. Yet it can’t be all private, or it will lack transparency, public accountability and maybe even public access.

Dallas offers a success story most would have deemed highly unlikely beforehand: an urban park built over a freeway, doubted by many in city government itself, opposed by the adjoining major art museum that’s now awash in revenue from it, named after a living child. The park was conceived by highly regarded architects, urban planners, engineers and designers mainly hired through a nonprofit foundation, and molded conceptually by visits to renowned spaces in several other cities.

It was and is funded by a wide mix of wealthy private donors, venture capital, big-corporate gifts, city, state, and federal sources, all shrewdly solicited by talented business people and dealmakers devoted to applying those skills to civic service. All of the above had to set their egos aside and make compromises, which ain’t easy when great gobs of money are at stake. It sounds complicated, daring, and risky to pull off, absolutely needing bold visionaries with dogged determination to make it happen. It was all of those things — and that’s what it takes.

I’ve been to Klyde Warren Park several times now, and it’s both a relaxing and exciting hangout: a large, surprisingly roomy and open deck park bridging Uptown and Downtown in ways even the “pie in the sky” dreamers and early promoters didn’t imagine. One sees restaurants with open-air seating, street-food trucks, pavilions, trees, gardens, sunny and shaded areas, executives in Armani suits, moms strolling babies, children at play, teen lovers, yuppie residents of all the new condos nearby, buskers, tour buses, film crews, blue-collar workers from nearby taking breaks, the occasional celebrity sighting, some event or another (concerts, weddings, festivals, small fairs) almost daily, a lot of people without feeling crowded, unrestricted access from either side, and enough police presence to notice and keep it fairly safe, without being obtrusive.

That combination is not common in this country. It also hosted a huge total-eclipse party in April 2024; a lot of the awestruck, cheerful roar I heard through the urban canyons emanated from that direction within seconds after the moon blackened the sun’s space in the sky.

Massive residential, office and arts developments have sprouted around the park to the tune of over $1 billion in value, with cranes rising continually in the line of sight, and the surrounding tax base growing. Several cities look to it for inspiration for their own forthcoming projects. Best of all, access is free to the public, with a million visitors a year.

For all the problems Dallas has had the last 20 years or so on several other civic fronts, bogged down in red tape, interdepartmental and governance disputes, study after study sans tangible action, that deck park is a spectacular success. The city has just opened another over I-35E in Oak Cliff, near the zoo, with more on the way. Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster won a 2026 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for his outstanding story on how it all came about.

Excerpt:
“That philosophy of programmatic excess defines the park and makes it, aesthetically, something of an upended toy box, with its diverse goodies strewn about. There is little relationship, for example, between the park’s allée of mini-arches with Japanese-style lanterns and the cool minimalism of Phifer’s performance and restaurant pavilions. The park surely subscribes to the mantra of architect Morris Lapidus, champion of Miami Beach modernism: ‘Too much is never enough.'”

Useful Idiot, Now Merely Idiot

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This ridiculous Trump/Pope squabble is distracting folks (perhaps by design) from the far more meaningful story: Eric Swalwell and more crucially, related unmistakable, if circumstantial, evidence of a secret-state blackmail apparatus active in Congress. Could it be that we really do have shadow governance, and this is but a small signal thereof?

For background, back in 2012, a Chinese spy, Fang Fang a.k.a. Christine Fang, went after aspirational politicians in the Bay Area and elsewhere, who had eyes on national positions. Charm, money and seduction were her tools, variably employed depending on who she targeted for her deep-pocketed, long-game-minded, red Commie Chinese puppet masters.

Swalwell was one of the recipients of her caress, probably in both figurative and literal senses. Even as a rising local star without classified access at the time, he would have such privileges if elected to Congress, and she “helped” with those efforts, even becoming Facebook “friends” with his father and brother. She fund-raised for him and directed an intern in his office likely quite compliant with her espionage agenda. She also allegedly seduced Swalwell into an affair — which, given revelations about him since — is a notion far more credible than any of his denials about that, or denials about his other affair(s) and sexual harassments.

[Before China found out she was found out, and summoned her home for good, Fang Fang also got inside the pants of at least two Midwestern mayors, based on FBI surveillance revealed in multiple media stories, and who knows who else. The U.S. secret state therefore knew this stuff was happening and who all was involved. Hold that thought.]

This is not Days of Our Lives, or whatever J.R. Ewing dug up on the competition; this is serious stuff. Even information about current, former or potential government officials that is not classified yet private, like interests, exploitable personality weaknesses (Lust! Greed!), sexual preferences, financial problems, addictions, marital distress, browsing history, Snapchats, texts, Signal messages, other vulnerabilities, schedules, social networks, contacts…all of those are valuable as intelligence! [Same goes for domestic spies as for foreign. Hold this thought too!]

Despite that becoming known behind the scenes (and perhaps because of it?), Swalwell was elected to Congress. Wouldn’t you know it, he became a useful, reliable, dependable tool for his party’s well-connected establishment! He would vote exactly as predictable, right down the company line for a California Democrat (and perhaps, exactly as told?). If they had a blind spot for his lewd predations, it was willful.

Surprise, surprise! Fang Fang allegedly was far from the only woman Swalwell messed around with, outside whom he married. Swalwell’s sins with other women filled his closet with skeletons—more than a closet, a veritable boneyard of predation and lust — which have been known behind the scenes years before they were revealed recently. And how convenient it is they were publicized and compelled his exit, only when more palatable candidates (to his party) came along for both his old House seat and California governor. Amid this sudden storm that was a long time brewing, he also tried to fight the FBI hard regarding their consideration of releasing the Swalwell investigation files. What a surprise there, too (not)!

It wasn’t just the Democrats. The FBI and NSA outwardly knew a lot and inwardly had to have known far more, since he was already their radar as a major espionage vulnerability. The political establishment at large, including Republicans and some media, knew for years. They didn’t do a damn thing about it until…he became too inconvenient. How is this (not just his predations, but the hushing thereof until the time was “right”) not an epic scandal?

Could it be because this is business as usual on Capitol Hill? I’m not defending Slimeball Swalwell at all. Still, how many more Swalwells, or mini-Swalwells if still compromised but not so deeply, govern us? Who is holding what over their heads to get them to vote in certain ways for, or against, certain bills and provisions—or to not even allow them to the floor? Or influencing executive or judicial outcomes, perhaps?

We’ve seen this tactic before (e.g., Brett Kavanaugh, which was much more baseless, nothing but hearsay, and did not succeed). Go even further back and read about Anthony Weiner. Or when the Obama FBI visited CIA head David Petraeus and alerted him that he was having an affair with his biographer? That came in handy later, didn’t it? Go further still and J. Edgar Hoover’s files (whether real or not…and truth isn’t the point here) describing salacious sexual stories about Rev. Martin Luther King. Or the known mainstream media and political cover-ups of JFK’s affairs. [Ironically, his brother RFK signed off on wiretapping MLK. See how nasty and convoluted this can get?]

COINTELPRO proved it was possible in the ’60s, long before modern surveillance tech. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. I cannot help but wonder if perhaps not a majority—but at least a critical mass—of Congress, Presidential cabinetry of both parties, and the federal judiciary—is similarly compromised by publicly hidden dirt that is known to the deep apparatus through their surveillance tactics.

Does every Congressman and Congresswoman eventually get presented with old dirt and “asked” to do things certain ways at certain times? Or if the dirt is trivial or deemed not enough, a honey trap? Increasingly plausible against even those of the cleanest and most impeccable backgrounds: AI-generated fake dirt? How many of our leaders, all the way up to Presidential levels, have been and remain compromised by their own secrets…or by convincing fakes?

I’m not positing anything as certainty, except that Swalwell is another example of a political downfall to personal scandal. I am, however, taking real puffs of smoke wafting from cracks in the ground, patterns apparent therein, and asking if this represents a great subterranean coal-seam fire that has potential to bring much more down into its hellscape?

There is nothing wrong with asking questions. Getting believable answers is a different story. Good luck.

About Recent SPC Forecast Performance

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Our Stormeyes sites (including Image of the Week, East Norman Rainfall, this BLOG, and various non-SkyPix web pages, etc.) have been down most of the last few days while Cloudflare and HostPapa point fingers at each other. [SkyPix is on a different host.] The problem, whatever it was, seems to have gone away for now…so, I actually have a backlog of entries. First, a reasoned defense from an inside perspective of perceived lapses in SPC outlook and watch performance so far this year…

———————–

A story from NBC, and others on the less-than-2% outlook’s tornado occurrences in eastern Kansas, some of which also note the watchless tornadoes in Lower Michigan earlier this year, grossly oversimplify reality on the SPC forecast desk. The NBC story in particular relies on a lot of idle speculation by people who haven’t worked the SPC outlook desk, and as such, just don’t know.

I’ve done SPC outlooks for decades, and as usual, will be brutally honest here. I know how it goes there, from the inside. Read and learn. These insights don’t lend themselves to 10-second attention spans nor quick sound bites. So this is long. Don’t “TLDR” this post if you really care about actually finding out how it works.

I’ll put the bottom line here, near the top: Chances are, there is no smoking gun. That may not suit rage-baiting and click-baiting, but it’s simply reality. That’s the lede. Here’s the rest…

Why no smoking gun? Far too much goes into a forecast to lay “blame” at any one factor. Like it or not, bad forecasts happen. They always have and always will. The aim is to reduce them over years, knowing that some events are so localized and/or extreme that both human and computer forecasts can’t always nail them down. That’s reality.

Until forecasters have extremely high-resolution sampling of the real atmosphere on scales storms form and operate (a few miles), even the most sophisticated models, both from traditional, physics-based and AI/statistical packages, will suffer sometimes with localized subtleties. Guess what’s involved in forming a dryline storm here vs. somewhere else, amidst capping and modest broader lift? You got it, friends, localized subtleties.

Yes, observational balloon data were missing and are, in bulk and when quality-controlled, important to models. Several scientific papers have shown this. Maybe that mattered here. Maybe it did not. Satellite-derived data matter too, but radiosondes can influence model performance by several relatively simple situational measures (e.g., this paper, or this one, or this one).

How important was the lack of radiosondes to this case on this day? We don’t know. As Alan Gerard alludes in his article on the radiosonde-loss issue: that needs to be studied (using data-denial experiments). Until then, it’s speculation to say how much that altered output at any of many levels of the atmosphere, from models that *variably* and *incompletely* influenced this particular outlook’s positioning.

*Numerous* models are examined every forecast cycle, especially early-arriving deterministic ones, ensembles, and newer/quickly computed AI packages that work off historic pattern recognition. How they may be affected by missing input data can vary from model to model and by data type. It can be such a dense black box that such effects are simply unknown to the forecasters. We’re not, and cannot be, privy to every nook and cranny of their physics or statistical equations. Forecasters often notice and account for model biases, but where they come from can be quite complex and not just tied to one factor.

Between that and diagnostics that should precede models, it can be a veritable firehose of information, on deadline. With time, experience, on-shift mentorship of the leads and senior outlookers, and training, forecasters get better at situationally prioritizing what to drink from that firehose, when, how, and why. It is simply impossible to examine every possible diagnostic and prognostic detail from every data source.

Models are not all that go into a forecast. So do diagnostics: analyses of surface and upper-air data. The latter factually do have holes that may cause analysis to miss subtle features, but was that true here? We don’t know yet. Other diagnostics, such as satellite and radar-indicated features, and intangibles such as reading, research, forecaster experience, and intuition with specific situations, also play a role.

It’s even more speculative, and likely inaccurate, to say the lack of greater staffing affected the outlooks in these cases so far. [That isn’t to say it can’t, or won’t, the rest of the season.] Though I recently retired, and was not a participant in these forecasts, I do know the principals involved. Everyone who did the outlooks for the KS day were working normal 8-hour shifts and not overtime. If “exhaustion” or “fatigue” were factors, it comes simply from the nature of rotating shift work, which is documented to be unhealthy mentally and physically, and a known carcinogen. Don’t knock it ’til you’ve done it.

Yes, with two retirements last month, 5 openings (out of 10 positions or 50% vacant) are on the SPC outlook/mesoscale desk as of this writing. That is unprecedented. They need to be permanently filled with full-time forecasters, stat! A lot of fill-in shifts by both managers (one of whom is an extremely sharp and highly experienced forecaster), and less-tenured forecasters, will be needed until those are filled. Results may vary.

That won’t help, and yes, it might hurt! But it’s premature and speculative to pin any single forecast performance so far, or the rest of this season, just on that. Again, forecasts sometimes simply miss. SPC has a well-earned reputation for, and internally motivated standard of, excellence. Excellence is not synonymous with perfection. Even I had some bad forecast decisions I’d like to have back. 😉

Outlooks at SPC do not happen in a vacuum. One or two names may appear thereon, but it’s a team forecast. Internal collaboration is required. External coordination with involved local NWS offices (WFOs) is strongly encouraged if major changes are being made to a previous outlook. Otherwise, there is not enough time to coordinate every part of every outlook line with every involved WFO, who themselves also are busy with other tasks. Every minute doing that is a minute not spent doing meteorology. So there must be a balance achieved on deadline.

I don’t know for sure here, but it is possible that the 2% and 5% tornado lines that drove the “MRGL” and “SLGT” areas were suggested by, or compromised with, the WFOs serving eastern KS. Only they and the SPC forecasters on duty could verify either way.

And even everything I’ve typed is just a superficial, condensed summary of the outlook forecast process. I did thousands of them, both the graphics and long-form text discussions, so give me the benefit of the doubt here.

[Addendum] From a subcomment I made on one of Alan Gerard’s BLOG posts:

Even if the 5-forecaster deficit on the SPC outlook/mesoscale desk didn’t directly influence this poor forecast, that doesn’t preclude its becoming a real problem as the season wears on and staff start wearing out.

Managers and less-senior fill-ins have scrambled to get the shifts covered creatively, without much OT as it turns out, and at the expense of granting leave. As you know from being an MIC, that’s just a very short-term band-aid. At some point, leave will pile up and have to be granted (or lost!), somebody or multiple somebodies will get sick with no shift room to spare, managers will have to do their day jobs eventually too, and with half the outlook positions still empty, something will have to give. I hope it’s not forecast quality.

If and when we start seeing consistent misses/overforecasts, and minor but normally uncommon errors becoming common in the products, that’s the sign that things are starting to go poorly, and that SPC is on the brink of disaster on the forecasting floor.