Dispatches from the Heat Front 4: Apocalypse NOW

I tried to write about how extreme the weather has been in the PNW. I wrote at Wonkette & here on my blog. I tried to keep track of high temps, excessively high low temps, fires, and other important aspects of this heat wave. But I wasn’t willing to state that it was the most extreme heat wave event in the history of meteorology. I just don’t have the knowledge necessary to make such a judgement.

So don’t take it from me. Take it from climate scientists (source: Common Dreams):

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I can’t support burning buildings down

I condemn arson. The most I can say in support of the persons presumed to be burning down Catholic churches in Canada is that I fully understand how it came to pass that some indigenous people in Canada might wanna burn down all the churches. I don’t condemn their rage. I don’t condemn any statement that justice has been denied for hundreds of years and remains out of reach. And, yes, I do see a violent response as inevitable to the kinds of repeated injuries that Canada as a nation and the RCC as a church have inflicted on indigenous peoples.

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Bias does not exist, bring on the sportsball!

So you’re presumably familiar with Sha’Carri Richardson who will miss the Olympics. What I did not know is that the test she “failed” is notoriously inaccurate. We can say what we want about banning marijuana and not gewurztraminer (and I’ve said plenty this week), but this thing looks a whole lot worse when we find out the test isn’t even accurate:

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Critical Race Theory: Videos by people much more fun than me

For our next fun & games with CRT, I’m just going to share two good videos. One is very non technical while still getting most everything right. I like it a lot. Whatever quibbles I have with it I’m not going to bother with because right now I just want you to hear something from a lay person about CRT because hopefully whatever language they use will be more accessible and less wordy than whatever I would say. (Yes, I’ve heard myself speak. Can’t really help it. Sorry/not sorry.) This first, non technical video was actually suggested in the comments so if you’ve been following along in the comments, you might have already watched it. If you haven’t though, your narrator and host goes by the handle T1J and is excellent. Get to it:

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A sin to remember

All the criminal defense attorneys in the world would tell me to shut up now and not say another word, but I have to confess to a crime.

When I was a teen, I was a hardened troublemaker. I would tell my mom I was going to stay the night at one friend’s house but actually I’d go stay the night at another’s, a friend she didn’t approve of as much, and whose parents weren’t going to be home. Sometimes I would say I was going to ride my bike to Beaverton to go to the mall for roller skating and the comic shop on the way home, but actually I’d go to a convenience store and buy 30 pounds of sugary crap, then bicycle out to the Coast Range and picnic (while eating not one damn bit of healthy food) on top of a mountain so that I could look at the ocean without riding all the way down there. Not that the beach had no power to draw me, but even that small bit further would take an extra 20 minutes on the way out AND would guarantee that I would have to ride back up the damn mountain on the way home, with just that extra homeward stretch easily adding another hour and a lot of fatigue.

Oh, and it got so much worse.

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Fucking Latvia. I bet this is rq’s fault somehow.

Apparently there was a secret plot hatched in Latvia 5 millennia ago to release Yersinia pestis into the world in order to take down Constantinople, usher in the Dark Ages, and then prolong them by sweeping through the entirety of Europe in the 14th Century. Per Agence France Presse:

Researchers said Tuesday they had found its first known victim: a hunter-gatherer who lived 5,000 years ago in what is now Latvia, whose remains carried the Yersinia pestis bacteria that causes the disease.

“The analyses of the strain we identified shows that Y. pestis evolved earlier than thought,” Ben Krause-Kyora, head of the aDNA Laboratory at the University of Kiel in Germany, told AFP.

Notice how they aren’t even investigating the possibility that Y. pestis escaped from an early Latvian virology lab? Yet more evidence of widespread conspiracy. The only way to combat this is to rename the Black Death. From now on, we’re calling it the Latvian Plague.