Favorites July 21 2021

I have a fun… puzzle? at the end today.

CAL FIRE SCU @calfireSCU

CAL FIRE Santa Clara Unit Strike Team 9163G is engaged on Division Q of the #DixieFire. These explosive Mega Fires in California leave no room for error. Please heed all evacuation orders.

Incredible photo.

Buffy Wicks @BuffyWicks

This is alarming: CA's new COVID surge would have put many counties back into the most restrictive tier under our reopening blueprint. It's time we do something uncomfortable: make vaccination mandatory—at schools, gyms, hospitals, workplaces, etc. Thread—

mercurynews.comCalifornia’s COVID surge would vault a dozen or more counties to restrictive purple tierA dozen counties including Los Angeles, Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano now have 7-day average daily case rates of 10 or more per 100,000 people.

Yes! Buffy Wicks is the best!

Robinson Meyer @yayitsrob

Every study about PM2.5 is like, well, bad news is, pumping tiny ash particles through your cardiopulmonary system completely destroys your alveoli, heart muscle, and blood vessels, but don’t worry—they waltz clear across the blood-brain barrier and ruin your brain chemistry, too

Ethan Mollick @emollick

Pollution impacts thinking: going from a no-pollution day to high pollution (only 15 PM2.5, which isn't that much!) in Ottawa reduces the quality of politician's speeches so much that it is equivalent to them having half a year less education that day. https://t.co/sUvwFTJeDA https://t.co/KMbEybOSce

These are really low levels too, yikes

J.D. Morris @thejdmorris

NEW: PG&E wants to bury 10,000 miles of power lines underground in high-risk California fire zones in the coming years, CEO Patti Poppe just announced at a Chico news conference. story TK @sfchronicle

This is interesting, it's probably going to be slower and more expensive to repair after earthquakes, but high wind may now be a bigger problem than earthquakes. Honestly, I'm not sure what the right answer is.

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I don't think this is that complicated. The vaccinated are a supermajority of voters, they have every reason to be highly annoyed with the unvaccinated and the people who abet them, and the Delta variant makes it more likely this will still be a salient issue by November 2022.

Josh Marshall @joshtpm

there's just no good explanation for Republicans suddenly getting vax religion. the best bad ( in the sense of implausible) explanation remains bad polling. https://t.co/smwxI4rfSF via @TPM

Overall, not trying to get your constituents killed shouldn't be *that* surprising as a strategic move.

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

For as much as we're a hopelessly polarized country, ~70% of adults (and I'd guess more like ~75% of likely voters) are already at least partly vaccinated. It's hard to get 70-75% of the country to agree on anything!

Super majority of vaccinated people makes a difference.

Finally, If you saw the clip from Scarface as a Pixar film yesterday, I managed to make a Pixarified version of something myself.

The lip movement, the lighting effects, it’s really really impressive. Let me know if you recognize the source.