Month: July 2021

It's summer, so how about a nice, big sunflower lit by the setting sun? This picture was taken at Hana Field, a commercial flower growing operation run by Tanaka Farms, one of the few local farms still in operation here in Orange County. They mostly grow zinnias, which I will show you someday, but off in a corner they also have an acre or two of sunflowers.

It's the silly season, which means there's not much hard news to write about. So I thought I'd check in on the Republican Party instead. What are they up to these days? This:

• Refusing to investigate the deadly insurrection of January 6 because it might make Donald Trump look bad.
• Refusing to increase funding for the IRS because that might force rich people to pay the taxes they actually owe.
• Claiming without evidence that the NSA is spying on Tucker Carlson.
• Whining that Facebook hates them, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary.
• Declining to persuade their fellow conservatives to get vaccinated.
• Passing laws that allow Republicans to replace election officials who are insufficiently loyal to the party.
• Complaining endlessly about critical race theory, despite the fact that they still haven't produced much evidence about how racism is actually taught in American classrooms.
• Pretending to negotiate over infrastructure funding.

Missing from this list is anything aimed at actually making the country any better off than it is now. It's all just political theater. I hope they're proud of themselves.

The Washington Post reports that about 160,000 families received rental assistance in May:

Experts say those numbers pale in comparison to the number of people who risk losing their homes when the CDC eviction moratorium expires after July 31. According to the Census Household Pulse Survey from June, 1.2 million households reported being very likely to face eviction in the next two months. “With the federal eviction moratorium set to expire in four weeks, these data are a five-alarm fire,” said Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The Household Pulse Survey is released every two weeks, so it's easy to look at the trend over time of those fearing eviction:

It's a tragedy when even a single family gets evicted, but the most recent figure of 1.2 million households fearing eviction is actually close to a low point over the past year. That strikes me as useful context here.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 7. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Climate scientists say that our recent heat wave was almost certainly a result of global warming:

Temperatures were so extreme — including readings of 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland, Ore., and a Canadian record of 121 in British Columbia — that the researchers had difficulty saying just how rare the heat wave was. But they estimated that in any given year there was only a 0.1 percent chance of such an intense heat wave occurring.

“Although it was a rare event, it would have been virtually impossible without climate change,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who conducted the study with 26 other scientists, part of a collaborative group called World Weather Attribution.

Climate change is a lot like loading the dice in a game of chance. If you throw a die 60 times, you'd expect each number to come up about ten times. But what if you got this result instead?

This result isn't impossible. But it's so unlikely that anybody with a lick of common sense would demand a fresh set of dice.

This is what climate change does. It loads the weather dice to make extreme events not just possible, but common. We need a fresh set of dice if we want to avoid a future of extreme weather events that leave thousands of dead bodies in their wake.

With all of the Sheephole mountains to choose from, why did I decide to take this rather undistinguished sunset picture? I didn't, actually. But as I was driving to where I wanted to go, I ran into a police barricade that halted traffic. I waited and waited, but finally had to figure out a picture to take right there. And this was it.

The activity causing the barricade was finished a few minutes later, but by then the sun was down. So for better or worse, this is my Sheephole sunset picture.

The latest JOLTS data is out, and it shows much the same as it did last month:

This only goes through May, but it does show a second month of a record high number of unfilled job openings. This bolsters the argument of those who think that stimulus payments and expanded UI benefits are keeping workers on the sidelines for a while even though plenty of jobs are available.

Personally, I don't find this worrisome. I've always figured that it would take a little while for the economy to settle down after it reopens, so a few months of supply chain readjustment, spot shortages, and job hunting are only to be expected. By the end of 2021 I expect that we'll be close to historically high levels of employment and historically low levels of unemployment. We just need a few more months for everything to shake out.

I've been pondering something for the past few days that might seem like I'm being faux naive or something, but here it is anyway: Why has the Florida condo collapse gotten so much news coverage for so long?

Obviously this was a newsworthy event. That's not what I'm talking about. But it strikes me as the kind of thing that would normally get three or four days of coverage and then fade away. Instead, it's been front-page news for a solid two weeks now. Why?

I can't come up with an answer. Is it a bigger deal than I think? Is it due to lack of news in other quarters? Or does it say something about our collective fear that the United States is falling apart?

Maybe I'm just inventing something that isn't there, but it seems like the condo collapse has seized our attention far more than other, similar disasters. Is it simply the fear of sudden death in a place we normally consider 100 percent safe? Or what?

Any ideas?

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 6. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This is a penguin at the San Diego Zoo, picking nits or bugs or who knows what from his fur. I wish I could own a penguin. I'd like to see how the cats would react.