Paige Spirinac and More

She's so lovely on Twitter.

Plus, Rachel Weisz.

And, at Drunken Stepfather, "STEPLINKS OF THE DAY."

Floods in Germany (VIDEO)

At the Guardian U.K., "‘Like a bomb went off’: survivors of Germany’s worst floods in 200 years relive their agony":

It looks like a bomb went off. Everything’s destroyed. There’s nothing left of the city centre,” said Michaela Wolff, a winemaker from one of the German towns worst hit by last week’s catastrophic flooding.

Her family vineyard and guesthouse, the Weingut Sonnenberg, would normally be filled with tourists descending the red wine trail. This weekend it was filled with desperate refugees from homes destroyed when the Ahr burst its banks on Wednesday after days of heavy rain.

“We have water and we have electricity. The gas has been shut off, but we have more than most,” she said. “It’s chaotic, absolutely chaotic.”

Floods across western Germany and Belgium have killed at least 160 people, and the worst-hit area is the Ahrweiler district, which includes Wolf’s town of Bad Neuenahr.

Ninety-eight deaths have so far been confirmed there, among them 12 in a home for disabled people. Many more people are missing and the toll is expected to rise.

Thousands have also been made homeless, and the economic fallout from lost homes and businesses and the cost of repairing infrastructure is likely to run to billions.

Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler is a historic spa town surrounded by picturesque vineyards and populated by many small-scale vintners. Days of unrelenting rain earlier this week sent a wave of water several feet high down the Ahr, which divides the town in two.

The roads were left buried in water and mud, cars were tossed on to their sides in the square, and parts of buildings were swept away. One house was left gaping open to the street as if a bomb had blown away its front wall.

Wolff’s wine cellar was the only one in town to survive the wall of water, and it was a narrow escape: “The water stopped just centimetres from our doorstep. We had incredible luck.” Since the flood began receding, she has been working around the clock with her family to help with local clean-up and rescue efforts.

Beyond the terrible human toll, the damage to infrastructure, including roads, bridges and railways, is likely to take months to repair. The fallout is already prompting a political reckoning about the costs of climate change, with the Netherlands prime minister Mark Rutte on Friday directly blaming changing weather patterns for the intensity of flooding...

It's always global warming, right? 

Still more.

And ICYMI: "What They Haven't Told You about Climate Change."

U.S. Diplomats in Afghanistan Try to Cope with Little Military Backup

Like an episode straight outta "Homeland."

At WaPo, "U.S. diplomats in Afghanistan face daunting, dangerous mission with little military backup":

The conclusion of the Pentagon’s two-decade effort in Afghanistan lays bare the challenges facing U.S. diplomats and aid workers who remain behind, as a modest civilian force attempts to propel warring Afghans toward peace and protect advances for women without the support and reach provided by the military mission.

Current and former officials described an array of obstacles that a shrinking cadre of civilians in the bunkered U.S. Embassy in Kabul must navigate, with the coronavirus pandemic and the specter of a possible diplomatic evacuation compounding the significant difficulties inherent to working in Afghanistan.

“In the absence of a military complement in Kabul, the task of the U.S. Embassy is made infinitely more complex, dangerous and difficult,” said Hugo Llorens, who served as the top U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

The diplomatic challenges have come into focus after President Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces by the end of August, a move that has emboldened the Taliban, which has intensified its campaign to retake lost ground, and deepened fears that the Kabul government could collapse.

Already a growing list of countries, including France and China, have evacuated their citizens from Afghanistan. Peace talks between the Taliban and Afghan government show few signs of progress.

Biden this month defended his decision, saying Afghans must now defend their nation. He also vowed that the United States would not abandon Afghanistan, making the diplomatic and aid mission — in particular, U.S. support for local security forces and the plight of women and girls — a central test of the president’s strategy.

“The complexity of the operations in Afghanistan are orders of magnitude greater than virtually anywhere else,” said a former senior official with knowledge of the mission in Afghanistan, where insecurity, the country’s landlocked position in central Asia, its geography, intense poverty, and tribal and ethnic division all contribute to the cost and difficulty of the newly solitary civilian mission. Like others interviewed for this report, this person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing policymaking.

In the 20 years since the United States launched its first airstrikes in Afghanistan, the work of the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other civilian agencies has been largely overshadowed by the military mission, massively larger in scale, manpower and funding.

At the height of the “civilian surge” that accompanied Obama’s troop increase in 2010, aid workers and diplomats were arrayed at consulates and outposts across the country in an effort to lay the conditions for lasting security gains.

Even after that high-water mark, diplomats in Kabul benefited from the network of military bases and the presence of military aircraft, both enabling more frequent visits to far-flung outposts to review conditions on the ground and providing an additional channel of information from troops in the field.

The U.S. nation-building effort, which once included ambitious plans to modernize infrastructure and transform the country’s economy, is littered with examples of failure...

Keep reading.

 

Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination

At Amazon, Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.

Saturday Cartoon

This is nasty, anti-Semitic.

At the Jerusalem Post, "Republicans want to brand Mark Zuckerberg as ‘Zuckerbucks.’ ADL says stop. This month, the term made it into Congress: Rep. Claudia Tenney, a New York Republican, proposed the End Zuckerbucks Act, which would ban nonprofits classified as tax exempt and nonpartisan."

South Africa Violence (VIDEO)

At least 100 dead and 25,000 troops deployed.

Needless to say, it's not going too well down there.

At the Guardian U.K., "South Africa’s leaders fear fresh wave of violence by Zuma loyalists: Attacks by supporters of jailed former president ‘are bid for pardon or to unseat government’":

Triple Crown Winner Victor Espinoza Racing at Del Mar (VIDEO)

The dude's definitely elite.

At ABC 10 New San Diego:

Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom

At Amazon, Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle.

The Climate Emergency

Following-up, "The Climate Apocalypse is Near!"

Here's the best video ever, featuring Patrick Moore, for Prager University:

'Reason to Believe'

This song was actually Stewart's first single off his first studio album.

I think I had this 45 when I was a kid.

The Climate Apocalypse is Near!

Look, the climate certainly is changing --- for example, with the record-setting temperatures in California's Death Valley a few days ago. But I always ask people: How do you know it's carbon emissions or some other factor or phenomenon that's causing changes in climate, etc? It's simple science: One has to definitively rule out other possible causal factors for the changes. The Earth's axis wobbles a bit as it travel its orbit around the sun, or the sun itself has extreme periods fire-blast flareups off its surface, sending down more radiation than it normally would. Fact is, the Earth's climate is always --- and has been --- changing, for eons.

And we know much of the climate phenomena happening in this era has happened before, especially fires and floods on a biblical scales. And never forget that we had a warming pause for about 20-25 years starting around 1990, a period when more carbon emissions were spewed into the atmosphere ever in history. No one can explain why temperature remained flat during that time, when there should have been --- according the climate "experts" --- a significant increase of heat on the surface of the Earth. I didn't happen. 

So, always remain skeptical of stories that cite anthropological climate change. 

In any case, at the New York Times, "‘No One Is Safe’: Extreme Weather Batters the Wealthy World":

Some of Europe’s richest countries lay in disarray this weekend, as raging rivers burst through their banks in Germany and Belgium, submerging towns, slamming parked cars against trees and leaving Europeans shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction.

Only days before in the Northwestern United States, a region famed for its cool, foggy weather, hundreds had died of heat. In Canada, wildfire had burned a village off the map. Moscow reeled from record temperatures. And this weekend the northern Rocky Mountains were bracing for yet another heat wave, as wildfires spread across 12 states in the American West.

The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it. The week’s events have now ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas — activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.

“I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change. “There’s not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save peoples lives.”

The floods in Europe have killed at least 165 people, most of them in Germany, Europe’s most powerful economy. Across Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, hundreds have been reported as missing, which suggests the death toll could rise. Questions are now being raised about whether the authorities adequately warned the public about risks.

The bigger question is whether the mounting disasters in the developed world will have a bearing on what the world’s most influential countries and companies will do to reduce their own emissions of planet-warming gases. They come a few months ahead of United Nations-led climate negotiations in Glasgow in November, effectively a moment of reckoning for whether the nations of the world will be able to agree on ways to rein in emissions enough to avert the worst effects of climate change...

Reining in global warming emissions, blah, blah, blah...

Developing countries will not forego the use of fossil fuels to power their development. Even China, which is an economic powerhouse these days --- is in many respects still a developing country, and its leaders won't sign on to a global pact to cut the use carbons, lest they halt their upward economic trajectory, and consign hundreds of millions of their people to perpetual poverty. 

These are truth claim, not scientific hokus pocus. *Shrugs.*

Still more here.

Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well

From one of the premier legal theorists of critical race theory, at Amazon, Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.

Charles Murray, Two Truths about Race in America

At Amazon, Charles Murray, Charles Murray, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America.

CNN is Going Down!

I don't know if the whole network's going down, but their much-vaunted flagship morning program, "New Day," is down for the count.

At Fox News, "CNN boss Jeff Zucker, former king of morning shows, can’t fix ‘New Day’ disaster: 'Ratings for ‘New Day’ are shockingly low, almost at the point where they are merely collecting viewers who are randomly cruising through a channel lineup,' Jeffrey McCall said."

White House 'Flagging' Posts for Facebook to Censor for Promoting 'Disinformation' (VIDEO)

Glenn Greenwald posted an awesome thread on this yesterday: "The White House is admitting that they're compiling lists of people who they claim are posting content they regard as "problematic" and that constitute "misinformation" and are demanding Facebook remove them. This is authoritarianism."

And from yesterday's All-Star Panel with Bret Baier, at Fox News. An excellent segment, especially Ben Dominech and Kim Strassel:

Many Jobs Lost During Pandemic Are Gone for Good

No surprise here.

At WSJ, "Many Jobs Lost During the Coronavirus Pandemic Just Aren’t Coming Back":

Job openings are at a record high, leaving the impression that employers are hiring like never before. But many businesses that laid off workers during the pandemic are already predicting they will need fewer employees in the future.

As with past economic shocks, the pandemic-induced recession was a catalyst for employers to invest in automation and implement other changes designed to curb hiring. In industries ranging from hotels to aerospace to restaurants, businesses have reviewed their operations and discovered ways to save on labor costs for the long term.

Economic data show that companies have learned to do more with less over the last 16 months or so. Output nearly recovered to pre-pandemic levels in the first quarter of 2021—down just 0.5% from the end of 2019—even though U.S. workers put in 4.3% fewer hours than they did before the health crisis.

“When demand falls, it’s a natural time to retool or invest because you won’t lose customers or sales while you tinker and shut things down,” said Brad Hershbein, senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “You don’t want to interrupt business when it’s at its peak.”

The changes will require many workers to adapt. Though the job market is strong right now for highly paid professionals and low-wage service workers alike, not everyone can find a match for their skills, experience or location, creating a paradox of relatively high unemployment combined with record job openings. Economists said it can be a prolonged process for some laid-off workers to find jobs or acquire the skills needed for new careers...

Still more.

And at WaPo, "Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends":

Millions of jobs that have been shortchanged or wiped out entirely by the coronavirus pandemic are unlikely to come back, economists warn, setting up a massive need for career changes and retraining in the United States.

The coronavirus pandemic has triggered permanent shifts in how and where people work. Businesses are planning for a future where more people are working from home, traveling less for business, or replacing workers with robots. All of these modifications mean many workers will not be able to do the same job they did before the pandemic, even after much of the U.S. population gets vaccinated against the deadly virus.

Microsoft founder-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates raised eyebrows in November when he predicted that half of business travel and 30 percent of “days in the office” would go away forever. That forecast no longer seems far-fetched. In a report coming out later this week that was previewed to The Washington Post, the McKinsey Global Institute says that 20 percent of business travel won’t come back and about 20 percent of workers could end up working from home indefinitely. These shifts mean fewer jobs at hotels, restaurants and downtown shops, in addition to ongoing automation of office support roles and some factory jobs.

“We’re recovering, but to a different economy,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said in November.

The nation’s unemployed are starting to react to these big shifts. Two-thirds of the jobless say they have seriously considered changing their occupation or field of work, according to the Pew Research Center. That is a significant increase from the Great Recession era, when 52 percent said they were considering such a change.

“We think that there is a very real scenario in which a lot of the large employment, low-wage jobs in retail and in food service just go away in the coming years,” said Susan Lund, head of the McKinsey Global Institute. “It means that we’re going to need a lot more short-term training and credentialing programs.”

One problem for many unemployed people is they lack the money to retrain. This crisis has put many out of work for nearly a year, and the financial support from unemployment and food stamps is often not sufficient to pay their bills. The stimulus legislation being debated in Congress does not include any money for retraining.

“Trying to figure out what to do six months from now is hard when you are trying to make ends meet and you don’t have enough food,” said Brad Hershbein, who helps design and study retraining programs as a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research...

As the say, capitalism is creative destruction.

More here.

 

John McWhorter, Woke Racism

At Amazon, John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

Senator Marco Rubio on Cuba and Human Rights (VIDEO)

The senator, perhaps the sole remaining neoconservative in the G.O.P., discusses Cuba, human rights, and Black Lives Matter. 

At Fox News:

Plus, more at the New York Post, "BLM under fire for defending Cuban regime, blaming protests on US."

Megan Parry's Friday Forecast

I guess the real heat's gonna hit the Southland in August and September, because temps this summer have so far been consistently below average.

Here's the lovely Ms. Megan:

Lame: Los Angeles County Re-Ups the Mask Mandate

I personally hope this doesn't last too long. It's so stupid, and I work in Long Beach, which is, wouldn't you know, in L.A. County. *Eye-roll.*

At the L.A. Times, "L.A. County will require masks indoors amid alarming rise in coronavirus cases."

Of course, L.A."s the only county (or city) in the state reimposing the mandate. It's all so lame. 

The state of California says it will not follow L.A. County with a new indoor mask mandate, so, once again, L.A. County is flying solo & going further than state & CDC guidelines, just like when they were initially the only county that decided to ban outdoor dining last fall.

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) July 16, 2021