I'm biased, but I've always adhered to the belief that the West coast is the best coast. But for the last couple weeks, the West coast has been the test coast. We're living in a steaming petri dish as nature's latest and extended heatwave tests just how much heat people can take. Almost everyone in the West has been involuntarily entered into this clinical trial. But maybe no place tests how the human body might be forced to react in the future more than the locale that is increasingly living up to its name: Death Valley. I can't lie. I do wonder what it feels like to walk outside into unthinkable heat. For now, I'll settle for reading about it as I watch the Bay Area fog roll in. Ross Anderson in The Atlantic (Gift Article): I Went to Death Valley to Experience 129 Degrees. "129 hits different. When you emerge into that kind of heat from an air-conditioned space, you feel its intensity before the door even closes behind you. It sets upon you from above. It is as though a clingy gargoyle made of flame has landed atop your head and neck. This gargoyle is a creature of pure desire. It wants only one thing, to bring you into thermal equilibrium with the desert. It goes for your soft spots first, reaching into the corners of your eyes, singeing your nostrils. After a few minutes pass, it tries to pull moisture straight through your skin. You feel its pinches and prickles on your forearms and calves. The breeze only makes things worse, by blasting apart the thin and fragile atmosphere of cooled air that millions of your pores produce by sweating. Your heart hammers faster and faster. Your cognition starts to blur. Only eight minutes in, I looked down at my phone. It had shut down entirely. I chose to view that as an act of solidarity." 2An Age Old QuestionJoe Biden has been a very good president. But things are looking really bad. You can blame the media for overemphasizing his age-related deficiencies. You can blame the Trump campaign for its constant attacks on a man who is clearly 100x more mentally fit than the addled criminal they support. You can blame leading Democrats for so publicly attacking Biden before they were sure about his willingness to step aside. You can blame the two weeks of media/donor/insider age-fixation that have probably done more damage than the debate itself. You can blame Freud who explained what's going on in the Democratic party a century before it happened: "In psychoanalysis, the narcissism of small differences is the idea that the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences perceived in each other." No matter who's to blame, the numbers aren't good. Polls are notoriously bad. But they're powerful when they confirm a gut feeling people have. And right now, a presidential race that should be all about the crimes and craziness of the most dangerous man to ever sit in the Oval Office is all about Biden's age. WaPo (Gift Article): Most Democrats want Biden to drop out, but overall race is static, poll finds. "Overall, 2 in 3 adults say the president should step aside, including more than 7 in 10 independents." Meanwhile, The Embattled Biden Campaign Tests Kamala Harris’ Strength vs. Trump. 3The Prosecution DefendsRussell Maze has been in prison for nearly 25 years since being convicted of killing his baby. But a lot of people are now convinced that he wasn't responsible and that the conviction was based on bad and/or outdated science. Among those convinced he's innocent are people in the prosecutor's office that convicted him. Yet, that might not matter. A remarkable story well reported from ProPublica and NYT Mag: The DA’s Office Says He’s Innocent, but That Might Not Be Enough. "Bewildered, Eaton tried to grasp what she had just read: The judge was penalizing them because everyone — the state, the defense, the witnesses — agreed that the Mazes committed no crime." 4Patchwork"As a skin-care tool, pimple patches, which gained traction in the late 2010s, were a game-changing development in skin-care technology. But they’ve also become a fashion trend. And although their proliferation heralds a shift in attitudes toward acne — one of the most universal discomforts of being a human — they’ve also begun to act as a social signifier." WaPo (Gift Article): The pimple patch becomes a breakout fashion statement. (If this election-related stress doesn't abate soon, I may need to order a full bodywrap.) 5Extra, ExtraBus(iness) as Usual: "The French government has put thousands of homeless immigrants on buses and sent them out of Paris ahead of the Olympics. The immigrants said they were promised housing elsewhere, only to end up living on unfamiliar streets far from home or flagged for deportation." (The problems around the world are remarkably similar. The solutions are similarly evasive.) NYT (Gift Article): France Is Busing Homeless Immigrants Out of Paris Before the Olympics. 6Bottom of the News"Estate attorneys are creating trusts aimed at extending wealth until people who get cryonically preserved can be revived, even if it’s hundreds of years later. These revival trusts are an emerging area of law built on a tower of assumptions. Still, they’re being taken seriously enough to attract true believers and merit discussion at industry conferences." This gives new meaning to frozen assets.
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Thursday, July 11, 2024
Firing the Temp
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