Drinking the Cool Aid

AC's cold hard truth. Plus, Cosby free?

The natural reaction to climate change induced heatwaves is to add fuel to the fire. It gets hotter. You get an air conditioner. But air conditioners are one of the biggest contributors to climate change. So as we add AC to cool off, the world will only heat up faster, causing more people to get air conditioners. Nothing in life is free, especially freon. "What we put into the world has lasting effects on others, whether we know it or intend it or acknowledge it or not." Eric Dean Wilson in Esquire: Before You Blast Your A/C This Summer, Think About This. (Unless you live in Portland, Seattle, or parts of Canada where it's too hot to think about anything without the A/C on.) 

+ "Extreme heat is colorless, odorless, and silent; like heart disease, its reality seems abstract until it happens to you. Then it kills. In most years, heat is the deadliest type of weather event in the United States. At least 600 and possibly as many as 1,500 Americans die every year of heat-related disease, although the real numbers may be higher because all-cause mortality rises during heat waves. Heat is deadliest in places where people do not have air-conditioning." Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic: Nowhere Is Ready for This Heat. (And when it comes to climate change progress, we're going nowhere fast.) 

+ Canada weather: Dozens dead as heatwave shatters records. 

+ Ho hum, just another headline from California. Exploding Lava Fire whips up firenado, triggers evacuations. 

+ BoredPanda: Extreme heatwave is sizzling the US and Canada. Here are 31 pics to show how insane it is.

2. Sex Predator on the Loose
Here's a headline you probably didn't see coming. Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction overturned by court. "Pennsylvania’s highest court threw out Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction and opened the way for his immediate release from prison Wednesday in a stunning reversal of fortune for the comedian once known as 'America’s Dad,' ruling that the prosecutor who brought the case was bound by his predecessor’s agreement not to charge Cosby." 

+ "Very rare to see a court of appeals overturn a verdict on this basis." Here's the latest from CNN.


3. Afghanistan By Me
The "plan will not protect the countless other Afghans who lashed their lives to the ideals and the hopes of the U.S.-led invasion. That includes the young urbanites of Akbar’s generation who defied the Taliban and signed on to a Sisyphean reconstruction effort in the midst of war, only to find, after years of violence and disappointment, that U.S. and nato forces—which are, because of their uncontested airpower, the only forces that can reliably keep the Taliban out of the cities—would be abruptly withdrawn." Steve Coll in The New Yorker: The People We’re Leaving Behind in Afghanistan. The Afghan 9/11 has been going on for decades. And it's about to get worse.


4. This is Not a Test (Or is it?)
"On Tuesday, the next mayor of New York City was revealed to be: Are You F**king Kidding Me?" The lede says it all as the latest NYC mayoral election results are announced and then pulled when the election board realized that test results were counted by mistake. This is really the worst possible time for this nonsense since this was one of the first high profile ranked choice elections and because of the ongoing craziness around the big lie.


5. Realign in the Sand
"In what’s been dubbed the 'Great Resignation,' a whopping 95% of workers are now considering changing jobs, and 92% are even willing to switch industries to find the right position, according to a recent report by jobs site Monster." Great Resignation gains steam as return-to-work plans take effect. 

+ Those stats from Monster are probably a bit more extreme than the real story. But the story is real and it's hard to hire these days. Here's a collection of articles on The Great Realignment.


6. It's Not Over Til It's Over
"Nearly all the staff at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are vaccinated against Covid-19. Yet they are all still wearing masks to work. These researchers, who are among the most well-versed in the tricks of the coronavirus, aren't taking any chances. They're advising the rest of the country and the world to be similarly careful as strains like the Delta variant arise and spread." Rise of Delta variant brings mask question back, even for the vaccinated. 

+ Should vaccinated people wear face masks or not? How the CDC and WHO disagree.


7. Call Into Question
"But the calls kept coming, one after another to the same phone until more than a dozen had accumulated through early Monday. Sometimes when the family called the landline themselves, Samuelson said the phone was somehow answered and they would stay on the line and listen to the static. Other times, the calls went to a busy signal." WaPo: Their grandparents’ landline from the collapsed condo kept calling. They still don’t have answers. 

+ Here's the latest on the Surfside building collapse where 16 bodies have now been recovered.


8. Dakota Fanning Flames
"South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who's gaining attention as a possible 2024 presidential contender, made a splash on Tuesday with an announcement that she was deploying an unspecified number of National Guard troops to the border in Texas. A news release said the deployment 'will be paid for by a private donation.'" Nothing like turning the National Guard into a private militia. GOP megadonor funds S.D. troops' border deployment.


9. Lost Angeles
"They held the title for nearly 30 years, but Los Angeles residents can no longer claim they have the worst traffic in the country, according to a study on traffic trends in 2020." Congrats to the New York-Newark region! Seriously, there's nothing worse than sitting in traffic for hours a day and coming in second place.


10. Bottom of the News
"Noted local criminal Mark McCloskey played host to a barbecue/political rally on Sunday afternoon, drawing tens of admirersto the sweltering parking lot of a closed outlet mall in St. Louis County to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the time he pulled a gun on a crowd of people who otherwise would never have noticed or cared he existed." 

+ 50 years after Willy Wonka premiered, a mini oral history of the gross chocolate river scene. I'll never forget when young Augustus was tube-sucked to his bittersweet demise. And it's not at all clear that this was a tribute to the 50 year anniversary of Wonka: Chocolate Factory Worker Smashes Colleague's Head With Giant 2lb Candy Bar, Gets Fired. "Help. Police. Murder."