Jeito, jeito, jeito.
I cannot help but like Oblivion better
The Red Hand Files - Issue #158 — “Not a question but just thank you for actually loving my favourite female poet, Stevie Smith (issue #157). ‘Oblivion’ has always been my story.” (Nick Cave)
I’m not sure a poem has spoken to me more in the past couple of years.
A link post is overdue.
Tides are rising, but are our boats floating?
- 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)
I don’t think I’ve cried more in the rest of my life than I have in the past two years. For the good and the bad.
Finally
The Capitol Fence Comes Down (HillRag)
The footprint of the fencing was reduced to the Capitol Square itself the weekend of Mar. 13 and 14th. Matthew visited the Capitol Grounds Friday with his 22-month son. The family lives nearby, and said that the Capitol Grounds are part of the neighborhood. “I felt a little bit of emotion,” he confessed of the moment he saw the fence dismantled. He said he felt lucky to witness such historic moments, but views the future with a touch of cynacism [sic].
“I appreciate the eventual response to the insurrection, but also feel like I see a lot of security theatre in this town. So I wonder what’s next? When you put up walls and you shut things down, and you do it for what I think is way longer than necessary, you set a precedent. And I’m not sure we’ve rolled anything back –we’ve just paused,” he said.”
Fight greed
- 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)
Rough, with a side of sweet
It’s been a rough couple of weeks, and this and subtweeting the nature of my sleep interruptions is how I vent.
But there are good things too, I wish felt like I could share them fully on the open Internet. My kiddo is into making dinosaur noises and I’ve got a sweet video of it from this morning. He seems to be on the tail end of this bout of HF&M.
Inconvenient truth
- War on Science Persists Within Biden EPA as Staffers Allege Chemical Reports Altered (Common Dreams)
- Climate Change Drove Western Heat Wave’s Extreme Records, Analysis Finds (New York Times)
- I fucking hope so. (Keten Joshi on Twitter)
- Erik Prince Planned to Create Private Army in Ukraine: Exclusive (Time)
- Campaign to Rein in Mega IRA Tax Shelters Gains Steam in Congress Following ProPublica Report (ProPublica)
- The Rise and Fall of the Ultimate Doomsday Prepper (Intercept)
- The Tech Cold War’s ‘Most Complicated Machine’ That’s Out of China’s Reach (New York Times)
- Trump files class action lawsuits targeting Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube over ‘censorship’ of conservatives (Washington Post)
- Iceland tried a four-day work week. It was an overwhelming success (ZME Science)
- Culture, History and Economics: Louis Proyect & Harvey Pekar Present ‘The Unrepentant Marxist,’ An Extraordinary Graphic Novel Memoir (Washington Babylon)
- Local: Rudy Giuliani suspended from practicing law in D.C. court (Washington Post)
- Local: Capitol Fence to Come Down Starting Friday (HillRag)
- Local: “We need a mural for Gil Scott Heron” (Popville) Anyone got space?
I hate quoting Al, but whatever his acquiesence to other inconveniences, he was right about this one and it is among the many things that speak to the true inherent corruption of the whole fucking system.
Foot in mouth about Hand, Foot and Mouth
At the end of last week my wife and I were congratulating ourselves for missing a Hand, Foot and Mouth outbreak at our daycare. But, by Saturday morning it was clear something was off about the kiddo and a rocky weekend was underway. By Saturday afternoon, blisters were visible. By Sunday he had broken out and he had a fever.
Luckily he kept eating, drinking enough to not get dehydrated and children’s Tylenol and Motrin do their thing fairly well. Sleep came hard from the irritation of the rash and an incessant fusillade of neighborhood fireworks, with near professional grade barrages lasting for hours, going past midnight. After hours of trying to console him in his room, we brought him into our bed and we all slept, some.
Today we measured no fever, but the blisters continued to break out and cause havoc. Sleep still did not come easy.
It’s been an exhausting weekend with no bandwidth for catching-up on anything, let alone for relaxing.
This—these few words—are the extent of the “breaks.” I hear him awake again and crying despite being exhausted himself.
I understand this is not an exceptional hardship in the panoply of parenting challenges. It is merely another first for me, and it is wrapped in skating on the edge of burnout, and limited ability to get the kind of childcare help we’d normally have the privilege to tap because of the pandemic and other circumstances. So, I’m just kvetching.
Living nightmares
- 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)
I’m sitting in a blacked-out room with a sick child clutching to me, listening to the world explode around us. That’s got to be a metaphor for something.
Be honest, nowhere is safe
- 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.
Restoring liberties
Here’s hoping:
Reports say Capitol Hill is coming next week though I bet the bike rack fence they had over last summer will be up for awhile https://t.co/8IQgtSlz92
— Barred in DC (@BarredinDC) July 4, 2021
Statehood for DC would be nice too.
"I am trying to function as a small business, and I don't have someone in Congress that's gonna fight for me, that's gonna fight for my business, because it's in Washington, D.C." - @thorcheston, Right Proper Co-Founder on @CBSSunday with @MoRocca pic.twitter.com/kzbK5kIxWN
— Right Proper Brewing (@RightProperBeer) July 4, 2021
How to survive
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)
Climate insomnia & amnesia
The heat wave here in DC, nothing like the heat dome effects of the Southwest and Northwest, has actually broken. So I did not have a hot, sleepless night. Merely a sleepless one.
Still, our early and exceptional heat wave coupled with news about the western heat waves and correspondence with a friend in my childhood home turf about a heat wave in Upstate New York brought my insomniac attention to the issue of overnight temperatures.
I did a search for some news on it, and found something adjacent to where my friend was that corroborated his experience: the heat waves beyond the heat dome have been hot at night too. Which can be dangerous.
As I looked down my search results, I was jolted further awake by seeing repeated reporting on this going back over the decade:
- Record-breaking overnight temperatures could make heat wave deadly for cities — 2019
- Nights Are Warming Faster Than Days. Here’s Why That’s Dangerous. — 2018
- Hottest Night in Recorded History Just Logged in Oman — 2018
- Summer Nights Are Getting Hotter. Here’s Why That’s a Health and Wildfire Risk. — 2018
- Overnight heat can be more deadly than daytime
- …
- Record Warm Nighttime Temperatures: A Closer Look — 2011
It is overwhelming, how much time we have wasted.
Near miss
The Mid-Atlantic region and DC were always known for stormy summers, and even catching the tail of hurricanes now and again. But yesterday, and last night especially, was intense. The Tornado Warning alerts caught us off guard. I had to check to see if was meant for us. I found I lived inside territory covered by those red boxes and ultimately under that storm track.
Tornado Warned storm left rotation track right through the middle of Washington, D.C. around 9:10 PM! Trees down in Falls Church, winds gusted >50 southeast of DC! #DCwx pic.twitter.com/l83k7kiia6
— Jesse Ferrell (@WeatherMatrix) July 2, 2021
UPDATE! Local Storm Report "1 S THE WHITE HOUSE" 😬😬
— Jesse Ferrell (@WeatherMatrix) July 2, 2021
"Numerous trees were toppled in downtown DC near the National Mall." pic.twitter.com/odfTVKUng3
DCA had a fun day: 91 high, storms with a severe gust of 58 mph this afternoon, then storms with a 52 mph gust this evening. Topped an inch of rain as well. pic.twitter.com/zRAr1xJ0wi
— Ian Livingston (@islivingston) July 2, 2021
A couple years ago, I’d have gone outside (and probably would’ve been fine) but this time I grabbed my kiddo out of bed and we sat in the basement for 15 minutes, waiting for the danger zone to move past us.
Postscript, 3 July — National Weather Service Confirms Two Rare Tornadoes In D.C. and Arlington.
Counting blessings, being counted
I filled out a random Census survey on behalf of my family about my child’s health over the past year. I am once again reminded as to how immensely lucky my family is, and saddened by all the challenges out there (the vast majority that I, so far, could respond “no” to). Still, certain questions made it clear that we were deeply affected this year, and maybe the kiddo’s parents are worse for wear. Burnout is on the Census Bureau’s radar, after many other more imminent challenges for so many.
More importantly: the frailty of the safety net and the widespread and deep impact of economic injustice made me feel more vulnerable than maybe I am, but I know I am vulnerable if my fellow citizens are.
Not going to miss this guy.
Is the world getting better or worse? I am not sure.
In the Shenandoah
Senator Mike Gravel passed away.
I had lunch with him in 2007 at McCormick & Schmick’s on K Street. I heard out his bizzaro communications strategy for his quixotic presidential run (and I was in the mix as a veteran of such a campaign), and took a pass.
I liked the guy.
The pandemic is “ending,” on a slew of bittersweet notes for me.
(And of course, it isn’t really over yet for so many around the world, including small children here.)
After a long year, I'm seeing the cracks
“I’m breaking a little," (or words very close to that) was a sentiment shared with me recently.
Me too.
Throughout the peak of the pandemic, my anxiety was managed just fine. Now, with things getting back to “normal”, I can feel it slipping out of control. Make sense? 😕
— Dan Cederholm (@simplebits) June 21, 2021
…And not just us. (Not to say that this other person’s experience is about anxiety, but both what I infer or imagine about theirs and what Dan Cederholm shared resonates with me.)