machination.org

• Quiz: Are You Being Nice Enough About the Climate Apocalypse? ❧ “The world is on fire! But let’s talk about your tone, okay?” (Current Affairs)
• Our climate change turning point is right here, right now (Guardian)
• The ocean is full of tiny plastic particles – we found a way to track them with satellites (Attention to the Unseen)
• Heatwaves and drought are killing trees at an alarming rate (Attention to the Unseen)
• Heat Wave Killed Marine Wildlife en Masse (New York Times)
• ‘This Is What Bipartisanship Looks Like’: Vicious Fire Tornado Caught on Film in California — “Climate policy isn’t about imagining a spectrum from left to right and finding the sweet spot in the middle. It’s a zero-sum battle with physics.” (Common Dreams)
• Chuck Schumer Says He Doesn’t Consider Gas “Clean Energy” (New Republic)
• Climate change: US-Canada heatwave ‘virtually impossible’ without warming (BBC News)
• Pope reappears after surgery, backs free universal health care (Reuters)
• Campaign to Rein in Mega IRA Tax Shelters Gains Steam in Congress Following ProPublica Report (ProPublica)
• Workers Are Funding The War On Themselves — “How workers’ retirement savings are enriching billionaires and, in every way imaginable, financing the apocalypse.” (Daily Poster)
• The South, Slavery & the Lost Cause — Jeffery Robinson (Alternative Radio, 2017)

• Opinion: Climate change is about greed. It’s time for big oil to pay us back — “America’s test, therefore, has come down to the question of honesty, honor and survival. Can we overcome corporate greed and a broken political system to save our nation and our world?” (CNN)
• June Was Hottest on Record for North America, Fourth Hottest Globally (New York Times)
• Climate change: US-Canada heatwave ‘virtually impossible’ without warming (BBC News)
• We Are Not Ready — “On the climate crisis and other hyperobjects” (Charlie Warzel - Galaxy Brain)
• Biden Defends Ending a War He’s Not Fully Ending (David Swanson: Let’s Try Democracy)
• Biden Drafting Executive Order to Promote ‘Right to Repair’ (PCMag)
• Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg’s Partnership Did Not Survive Trump — “…He relies on two internal metrics, known internally as GFW, Good-for-the-World, and CAU, Cares-about-the-world. Facebook constantly polls its own users on whether they saw Facebook as one or both of those things. Both the numbers plummeted, and remained low, after the revelations about Russian election interference and data harvesting by Cambridge Analytica. For years, they failed to rise, no matter how many promises Facebook made to do better and how many new security programs the company started.” (New York Times)
• Tucker Carlson sought interview with Putin at time of NSA spying claim (Axios)
• Delta variant said to be far more widespread than federal estimates — “The reality on the ground is likely much higher because states and private labs are taking weeks to report testing results to the CDC.” (POLITICO)

• Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored) — “We are now living our ancestors’ nightmares, and it didn’t have to be this way” (Guardian)
• Climate Change Is Making It Harder for Campers to Beat the Heat — ‘It’s not just camp days that have changed; with climate change, nights don’t cool down as much. … Fans at night used to be enough to cool both cabins and campers. “About 10 years ago we noticed this was no longer the case,” and they installed air-conditioning in the cabins … after a “particularly brutal summer.”’ (New York Times)
• Climate change has gotten deadly. It will get worse. (Washington Post)
• Edinburgh flooding: Half of July rain fell in one hour (BBC News)
• Teaching ecology to, building habitats with disadvantaged children: ‘You’ll be amazed at how many animals arrive’ — “A charity worker says the children she teaches about the environment seem increasingly concerned.” (BBC News)
• Local: Access To D.C.’s Cooling Centers Was Limited Last Week, Despite Heat Emergency (DCist)

• At 245, America’s Old Enough to Be Honest About Its Founding (Intercept)
• ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ by Frederick Douglass (Nation)
• A Fourth of July Symbol of Unity That May No Longer Unite — ‘David Surozenski, a Republican, refused to add Trump flags to his display. “That’s not the way I was brought up,” he said. “The American flag political? No.”’ (New York Times) I can admire that.
• Nowhere is safe, say scientists as extreme heat causes chaos in US and Canada — ‘“Climate models are actually underestimating the impact that climate change is having’ (Guardian)
• Is the Future of Farming in the Ocean? (Ep. 467) — “… if you take less than 5 percent of U.S. waters and just grow seaweed, you sequester the carbon-output equivalent of 20 million cars.” (Freakonomics Radio)
• Errol Morris on Donald Rumsfeld: A Fog of Memos — “The trick was to marginalize the record, to litter it with so many contradictions that a rebuttal to any future historian could always be found.” (New York Times)
• Some major cities ranked by surveillance cameras per km (Marginal Revolution) D.C. doesn’t quite make the top 10. I didn’t crack into the linked report to see if this includes Ring doorbell cameras.
• Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald’s NSA “Scandal” (New Republic) Greenwald has become problematic for me. I appreciated, if wincingly, his defense of principle that tried to force people to recognize the rights, if not agree on the rightness, of folks across the political spectrum. I question the sycophants of the left-ish media cult. But I think Greenwald’s once solid orbit above bullshit has decayed.

Links for 3 July 2021

• The North American heatwave shows we need to know how climate change will change our weather (Attention to the Unseen)
• Biden backs Dems into a corner on climate — “Climate activists … are worried that no one — including President JOE BIDEN and lawmakers on Capitol Hill — is doing enough to fix it, and as climate policies get swallowed up by the reconciliation process, they’re gearing up for a new pressure campaign to turn up the heat on Washington.” (POLITICO Playbook)
• How to survive in a permanent climate emergency (New York Magazine)
• The Dark Side of Solar Power — “… sustainable technology can least afford to be short-sighted about the waste it creates. A strategy for entering the circular economy is absolutely essential — and the sooner, the better.” (Harvard Business Review)
• Leaky Gas Pipeline Sparks an Inferno in the Gulf of Mexico(New York Times), Horrifying Massive Oil Pipeline Blaze Sets Gulf Of Mexico On Fire (Huffington Post)
• Inside the Insurrection on Congress (New York Times by way of Kottke)
• The demographic shift isn’t driving white people to the Right — “What liberals need to do is make a positive case for their values – toleration, neutrality, equality, proportionality and freedom from arbitrary infringements of liberty – on the merits. If they do not, and proceed as if this case were self-evident, then illiberal values such as nationalism, white supremacy, ethnocentrism, male superiority, religious fundamentalism, homophobia and the liberty to take advantage of the weak will surely take their place.” (Aeon)