It has been obvious ever since Trump first ran for president that many of his core supporters actually hate the people who hate Trump, more than they care about Trump or any particular action he takes, no matter how awful. Thomas Friedman in The New York Times

Of course, I think it is right on because I completely agree and have, inexpertly, been trying to say something close to this since early 2016 when I wrote a Post entitled Driving down the fault thinking about stupid. The essence of the Friedman Editorial is in a quote by Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, s “Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties had no compelling answer.” These grievances “are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.”

Friedman goes on to say that Humiliation, in my view, is the most underestimated force in politics and international relations. The poverty of dignity explains so much more behavior than the poverty of money. Check it out here (and my post here).

Your SF Bay Area friends are not OK. We are baking inside our homes. But we can’t open the windows not only because of the heat wave, but because the air quality is in the red zone. A Tweet from Melissa Hung @melissahungtx Writer & Journalist. Words in NPR, Vogue, Longreads on culture & immigrant communities. Writing about chronic pain @catapultstory. Founding editor @hyphenmag. San Francisco, CA melissahung.xyz

The things to me that makes 2020 different than other moments of national and global crisis are: 1) the scale of the threats 2) the absolute ability we have to mitigate those threats 3) our inability to actually do so for political or societal reasons the climate crisis in particular operates on a scale that is apocalyptic, and yet we mostly understand it, we already have the technologies to mitigate its impact, and we just aren’t doing it, covid, nasty as it is, is much less in scale, but again we understand how viruses work and how it spread and we just aren’t doing the things we need to do. There have been so many moments of intense crisis throughout human history, but I can think of nothing compared to a world on fire and oceans rising, happening with the full knowledge and understanding of humanity, and yet no action. A series of Tweets from David M. Perry @Lollardfish Journalist and historian. Pub musician. Dad. Husband. I also do dishes. #TheBrightAges http://patreon.com/lollardfish. https://paypal.me/lollardfish.Twin Cities davidmperry.com

Yesterday, it was somewhere around one hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside and we spent the day inside – no air-conditioning of course, this is coastal Northern California, for crying out loud – waiting for it to cool off outside as the inside temperature slowly climbs. At ninety one inside, it is still warmer outside but feels more comfortable. Only slightly, still, the air is clear and we go outside seeking the fresh air. Sitting In the late afternoon shade, it feels great after waiting most of the day in a stuffy house.

This has been a year of waiting, mostly inside. Waiting for the plague to run its course and waiting for the smoke to go away. Waiting for widespread testing, waiting for a vaccine. Waiting through a chilly early summer for it to get warmer and now waiting for it to get cooler. Waiting for summer and, now, waiting for summer to end. Waiting for Biden to pick a running mate and waiting for the ballots to arrive so we can vote and then wait for the results.

In the background, always in the background – and that’s the problem with watching the world while quarantined, everything seems to be in the background – the headlines announce some daily carnage; protests in Oregon getting violent, a colossal explosion in Beirut destroying much of the waterfront, two hurricanes hitting the gulf coast, fires in California, fires in Siberia and the Amazon, and on and on. All the time, every day, the plague invisibly getting worse, people we don’t know dying. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the death count is raising – today it totaled 136 deaths in San Mateo County, 13,764 in California, 189K in the United States, and is approaching 900K in the world – as we sit trapped inside and waiting, feeling fortunate we have an inside in which to sit.

The Green New Deal is not radical, but let me tell you what is: A president who rejects science and calls climate change a hoax while unprecedented hurricanes batter the Gulf, wildfires rage in the west, an 800-mile derecho destroys towns and the Arctic melts. That’s radical. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the longest-serving independent in congressional history. Vermont/DC sanders.senate.gov

@SpeakerPelosi please apologize for condescendingly saying “green dream or whatever.” We need a GreenNew Deal to halt rapid irreversible climate and ecological breakdown. Decisions we make over the next few years will affect humanity and the living Earth for millions of years. Peter Kalmus (climate scientist) @ClimateHumanClimate scientist terrified by what I see. Shifting norms & living on 1/10th the fossil fuel. BLM. Book: Being the Change (link) #NotMeUs Views me not NASA Altadena, CA…according to Wikipedia, Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist, writer and climate activist based in Altadena, California. He is a data scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an Associate Project Scientist at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering. 

I just got a new Green New Deal T-shirt through Ocasio Cortez’s website and I am pleased to report that it is on brand.

On brand for AOC because the T-shirt is made in America and has an Union Bug¹ on it. The shirt is made by Bayside, a company I have never heard of before and, when I Google Bayside T-shirts, the first site to come up is not Bayside but ssactivewear.com, then Amazon, T-Shirt Wholesaler, ClothingShop On Line, BlankApparel, blah, blah, but no Bayside. My guess is that Bayside is a manufacturer who only sells to wholesalers. Whatever , or whoever Bayside is, they really, really, really, want us to know that the shirt is Cotton harvested in USA, Cotton grown in USA, Yarn spun in USA, Knitted in USA, Fabric Dyed in USA, Sewn in USA, Made in USA.

On brand for the Green New Deal because this is the most uncomfortable T-shirt I can remember ever wearing. It is rough and scratchy, sort of like a hair shirt² (although, I have to admit, I’ve never worn a hair shirt before and always considered them a strange, outdated, religious tradition). I have nothing against rough cloth, I enjoy using towels that have been line-dried, and I don’t like super high-quality sheets that feel slick, so the uncomfortableness of this shirt has surprised me. Where it is most uncomfortable is by the back of my neck because the the huge, stiff, tag, telling me all the ways it is made in the USA, keeps rubbing me there. In that way, I am constantly reminded that The Green New Deal is not going to be easy, it will entail massive discomforts.

Our society, our world, really, is based on the massive burning of carbon based fuels, turning the carbon into CO2, which, in turn, is heating up our planet and, increasingly, making it uninhabitable. Uncomfortable is not fun, but it is better than uninhabitable and those are our only choices. We are going to have to stop burning coal, the worst offender, which we all know is bad, but also, burning Natural Gas, and barbecuing with briquets, and having comforting wood fires. We are going to have to cut way back on meat which is a staggering inefficient way to provide calories, and air travel (at least, short term). We are going to have to radically change our lives and that thought is uncomfortable.

1. A Union Bug is also known as a Union Label and it means that the item has been made/printed by Union workers.
2. According to the Collins English Dictionary, 1. A hair shirt is a shirt made of rough uncomfortable cloth which some religious people used to wear to punish themselves. 2. countable noun. If you say that someone is wearing a hair shirt, you mean that they are trying to punish themselves to show they are sorry for something they have done.

This has been a strange year and, just when it doesn’t seem like it can get any stranger, it does. We have to find little pleasures where we can and this week, driven into the house by the smoke outside, our little pleasure is that Michele and I have new Covid19 masks and we are thrilled, well, not thrilled exactly, but a little happier than if we didn’t have them. We first saw the masks while watching Formula One Racing. 

Michele and I have been watching Formula One auto racing for years and this year is no exception except that the season started six months late and we are watching them race in front of empty grandstands; it is eerily different. Another thing that is eerily different is that everybody is wearing a protective mask – this does not seem to be an “I have the right to make other people sick!” crowd – and most of them seem to be wearing the same type mask. One of the fun things about Formula One, for me, anyway, is that it is so high tech, and the masks are not an exception.

Michele decided to research it and it turns out that, like almost everything in Formula One, the masks are high tech and expensive. They also work better than any other masks we have tried. The basic architecture is that of a four-ply mask held on by a stretchy outer layer. The mask is good for two hundred hours, is certified by a couple of EU Commissions, are easier to breath in than the N95 masks we had been wearing, and, strangely satisfyingly is that they are the same as worn by several F1 Teams.

Speaking of Formula One, Richard asked if Michele and I were distracted from the world’s worries by Formula One and Lewis Hamilton and the answer if “Yes” although today’s race, The Grand Prix of Belgium at Spa – known locally as the Grote Prijs van België bij Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps – was a pretty boring race with Hamilton winning from pole. The race was spiced up only by the leader’s concerns over tire wear. Formula One cars are terrible on tires, they have  extraordinarily complicated upside-down wings pushing the cars down onto the pavement to generate wear-creating adhesion. This race is slightly over a one hundred and ninety miles and most teams tried to run the race on only two sets of tires which requires a time consuming stop to change onto a new set of tires. Nothing is simple if Formula One and the tire changes – which the best teams do in about two seconds – are no exception.

Until the last possible moment, the new tires are wrapped in electric blankets which keep them heated to about 100°C – that’s the boiling temperature of water – so they go on the car as close to operating temperature as possible. The speed limit in the pit lane is 100KPH so the drivers pull in the driveway- so to speak – at about 60 MPH and stop on a mark where a guy with a pneumatic torque wrench is kneeling, waiting for the car to stop. When the car stops, the wrench guy removes the nut holding on the wheel, the next guy pulls the wheel and tire off, and a third guy puts on a fresh wheel and tire all in around two seconds.

At this point, I was going to just reference the video below, but, for reason unknown to me, clicking on it goes nowhere except to tell you you can’t see it here but you can see it on You Tube with a link which takes you to the 55 second video on the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team making a double wheel change. It’s only 55 seconds, so give it a click.

The virus is indoors; the fires are outdoors. There are few places left to go. Caption in a New Yorker article by Anna Wiener entitled An Apocalyptic August in California

OK, two days – maybe three or four – but it seems like a very long week. First it was the heat, then the lightning, the fires, and, finally, the smoke. We went through a sort of twisted Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Discomforts might be more accurate, discomfort, fearful awe, self-satisfied caution turning to stark fear as the reality became clearer, then discomfort again, and, as the toxic smoke settled in, deep fear to go along with the discomfort.

We are safe now, it is cooling off, the day before yesterday’s forecast of lightning didn’t materialize, the fire, slowly being contained, is burning south, Cal Fire says no new evacuations, and the smoke level is acceptable if not good.

Everyday last week – well, up to Thursday, at least – our little world got hotter, topping out at slightly over 100°F on Thursday before it started to cool slightly. We don’t have air conditioning relying on the old fashioned but effective method of closing all the doors and windows during the heat of the day and, as the world cools in the evening, opening everything up, turning on the fans, and leting the house cool. The hottest the house got during the day was 86° which is not great but not terrible.

Then came the lightning storm in the pre-dawn morning, lighting up the sky. We are not really used to lightning although I have been in two lightning storms. Once, while camping at Shadow Lake in the Sierras and the second time on a hilltop overlooking the Yellow Sea, while stationed in Korea. At Shadow Lake, the lightning was so close we could hear it hitting the rocks around us (which was surprising because we had dropped down to Shadow at about 8800, from Thousand Island Lake which was a thousand feet higher, because of the storm). In Korea, the lightning was so close, it hit our communications antenna. In both cases, the lightning was close enough that we could smell the ozone. This storm seemed pretty benign by comparison, but the fire it caused wasn’t.

The lightning set several fires south of us which soon coalesced into the CZU Lightning Complex. The next night – or maybe it was two nights later, or three, it all seems like one long horrible memory without time stamps – we started to smell smoke when we went to bed, so we buttoned up the house and sweltered. But by noon the next day, the smoke was gone, the temperature dropped a little, and everything seemed right again. Then the smoke really rolled in and we sheltered in place, sweltering, sweating, worrying. According to PurpleAir – a great website if you are at all interested in the quality of the air you are breathing – the sensor on the street next to us, where we often go for our morning walks, was measuring in the low 600s. As a disturbing aside, Aston Pereira said that he had been following PurpleAir for years and didn’t think the measuring equipment even went that high. End aside. Back at the fire site, it has consumed 538 structures and damaged 43 more, killing seven people. As of this morning, the fire is 19% contained.

Still, while the fires are still raging, the air is clearer now, here, at least. Our fear has settled into a dull worry; worry that this is just the start and it will continue to get worse, next year and the year after that, as we do nothing to address the Climate Crisis, worry that California, our poor, beautiful, state is being destroyed, worry that the government of our country is unraveling, worry that apocalypses are real.

On the theory that, maybe, just maybe, humor is the best tonic, I’ll end this with a New Yorker joke.