NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE

EXTREME HEAT ALERT

///BULLETIN BEGINS///

… ALERT… ALERT… ALERT…

… BE ADVISED: EXTREME HEAT AND HUMIDITY POSE SEVERE RISKS TO HEALTH AND CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE ACROSS THE REGION FOR THE NEXT 48 TO 72 HOURS…

… SAFETY GUIDANCE: CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO EXERCISE CAUTION AND KEEP WELL-HYDRAT-…

… ARE CITIZENS LISTENING?…

… THIS IS SERIOUS… BACK SWEAT WILL BE THE LEAST OF CITIZENS’ CONCERNS… THESE HEAT INDEXES WILL KILL CITIZENS’ ASSES DEAD…

… MORE THAN 40 DEGREES CELSIUS CAN CAUSE RIOTS… MELT RUNWAYS… DISABLE NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS…

… PLUS, IT WILL GET PRETTY STICKY AND SMELLY… NOT GREAT FOR CITIZENS’ SENSORY ISSUES…

… YES, 104 IN “REGULAR DEGREES”…

… CITIZENS ARE RIGHT, IT’S NOT A HURRICANE… IT’S ACTUALLY WAY WORSE THAN A HURRICANE… HEAT KILLS HALF A MILLION PEOPLE ANNUALLY… MORE PEOPLE THAN ALL OTHER CLIMATE DISASTERS COMBINED…

… NOT THAT YOU HEAR THAT FROM JAKE HAWKINS, METRO POST STORM TEAM… THAT NEPO BABY WITH HIS LEATHER JACKET AND HIS DOPPLER RADAR…

… SAFETY GUIDANCE: CITIZENS SHOULD REMAIN INSIDE IN AIR CONDITIONING… REMEMBER WHEN CITIZENS STAYED IN THEIR APARTMENT FOR 41 STRAIGHT HOURS IN 2018?… AND THAT WAS JUST TO BINGE BETTER CALL SAUL…

… OKAY… CITIZENS WERE ALSO PRETTY DEPRESSED…

… PLEASE TELL ME THOSE AREN’T RUNNING CLOTHES… NOW SUDDENLY CITIZENS ARE FITNESS JUNKIES?… CITIZENS BETTER HAVE A TREADMILL SOMEWHERE BACK THERE…

… OKAY… SORRY FOR OVERREACTING… YES, ATHLEISURE IS COMFY WHEN THE HOUSE GETS HOT… BUT THE POINT STANDS…

… ANYWAY… IT’S NOT CITIZENS’ FAULT… EVERY GOVERNMENT, CORPORATION, AND MEDIA OUTLET IS COOKING CITIZENS ALIVE AND SAYING IT’S TIME FOR A FRO-YO PARTY…

…CITIZENS COULD CONSULT THE NEWS FOR UPDATED HEAT WAVE COVERAGE… BUT THE PHOTOS ARE ALL BIKINI BABES HAVING WATER BALLOON FIGHTS…

…THE IMAGERY SHOULD BE HALF-INCINERATED GRANDMAS… BUT NEWSPAPERS ARE ALL OWNED BY COWARDS, GHOULS, AND PERVERTS…

… SAFETY GUIDANCE: CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO GOOGLE “METRO POST OWNER RICHARD HAWKINS YACHT ORGY EXXON SPONSORED CONTENT”…

… ANYWAY… BE ADVISED OR WHATEVER: THOSE AT HIGH RISK INCLUDE OUTDOOR WORKERS, THE DISABLED, PREGNANT PEOPLE, OLD PEOPLE, YOUNG PEOPLE, ANYONE WITH CARDIOVASCULAR CONDITIONS, ANYONE ON MEDICATION, ANYONE IN DENSE URBAN AREAS, ANYONE WHO IS POOR, PETS…

… BASICALLY EVERYONE BUT MARK ZUCKERBERG…

… ONE WOULD HOPE EVEN MARK CARES WHETHER HIS PUPPY COMBUSTS… BUT INSTAGRAM JUST SERVED CITIZENS AN AI WEATHERMAN SAYING HEAT WAVES ARE CAUSED BY TRANSGENDER SOLAR FLARES… SO DON’T GET CITIZENS’ HOPES…

…

…

…

… SORRY… ZONED OUT THERE… EXTREME HEAT CAN UNDERMINE COGNITION, CAUSE BURSTS OF RAGE, AND EVEN UNDERMINE COGNITION…

… CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO CALL THEIR SENATORS…

… CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO GOOGLE “CARBON FOOTPRINT BY WEALTH”…

… CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO RISE UP AND FREE THEMSELVES FROM THE SUICIDE PACT OF FOSSIL CAPITAL!…

… SAFETY GUIDANCE: DONATE CITIZENS’ 401(K) TO THE SUNRISE MOVEMENT…

… SLASH THE TIRES ON A CHEVY TAHOE…

… SABOTAGE THE WHITE HOUSE AIR CONDITIONING…

… USE A BURNER PHONE TO GOOGLE “MARK ZUCKERBERG HOME ADDRESS”…

… ORGANIZE CITIZENS’ FRIENDS INTO COMPARTMENTED CELLS FOR OPERATIONAL SECURITY…

… BRING ME THE HEAD OF METRO POST OWNER RICHARD HAWKINS…

… BE ADVISED: SIMPLE EXPLOSIVES CAN BE MADE BY MIXING THE FOLLOWING HOUSEHOLD INGREDIENTS: ONE PART HYDROG-…

///BULLETIN ENDS///

This is the grave of John Howard Griffin.

Born in 1920 in Dallas, Texas, Griffin grew up in the liberal white southern relatively well off class of the time. His mother was a concert pianist. He was a good student who spoke good French and he won a scholarship to go to college at the University of Poitiers in France. He studied language and literature there and then moved to the École de Médecine to study, well, medicine. But as you can see, this would have put Griffin there when the Germans invaded France in 1940. Griffin did not immediately go home. Instead, he fought the Nazis as part of the French Resistance, which had about 1,000 times as many claim they were involved in 1946 than actually were involved in 1941. Specifically, Griffin was involved in helping Jews escape. There was a group of Austrian Jews who had made it to Saint Nazaire, where he was working on the docks as a medic. He helped smuggle them aboard a ship and get them to safety.

Speaking of safety, Griffin returned to the U.S., where joining the actual military to fight Nazis was a lot safer than working in the Resistance, though that’s not why he returned home. He joined the Army Air Forces upon his return and was stationed in the South Pacific. He also was the lone soldier stationed on the small island of Nuni in the Solomons, where he engaged in an early anthropological study of the people to pass the time. He was a long ways from the front lines here, but hey, he was assigned there and he was doing his job. He also had problems with one of the biggest killer of American soldiers in the Pacific. No, I’m not talking about war here, I’m talking about malaria. He had a bout of malaria that set in his spine and he couldn’t walk for awhile. Yikes. Oh, also, while he was there, he married a Polynesian woman who he left when he got to go back to the U.S. Now that’s a classic imperialist move right there.

Now, in 1946, Griffin lost his sight. Probably. He was blind until 1957. This was from the long-term effects of being near a Japanese bomb. However, some 2024 studies in French of this incident suggest that he might have faked the blindness. I don’t read French, so I can’t evaluate the claim. But people have questioned this for a long time. The main reason–why did he suddenly regain his sight in 1957 without any explanation? And it’s not like he just could see some light again or shadowy figures, he could see like anyone else. So this is a really weird situation.

Griffin was certainly an unusual person, no question about that. The blindness, whatever that meant here, did not stop him from living a successful life. After leaving his Polynesian wife behind so he could look back on his exotic sex fondly while not being hemmed in by what it would mean to bring a woman from the Solomon Islands back to Texas as his wife, Griffin married a good white woman and had a couple of kids with her. She was also a student of his, because of course she was. He started writing as well, beginning with a 1952 novel called The Devil Rides Outside, about a composer who goes to a French monastery to study Gregorian chants. He had spent enough time in France that this probably was something he could reasonably pull off. He wrote a lot about his blindness. Then he wrote a novel about a man lost in the Solomon Islands for a year, something he did know. He also became a professional photographer.

Griffin’s interest in amateur anthropology influenced what we know him for today–and if you don’t know the name, you definitely remember his famous 1961 book Black Like Me. I read this in school–5th grade? Maybe? As an aside, I am always amazed and maybe a little skeptical by people’s claims that they remember learning this or that in high school or even younger. Why would you remember this, outside of something being super memorable? I certainly don’t remember much in ways of specifics from my school days. But I do remember Black Like Me, although that guess about 5th grade could be off by 3 or 4 years for all I remember. It does seem more appropriate for something like 8th or 9th grade. Anyway, whatever about remembering stuff like this, who really cares when you read or learned something.

Black Like Me is such a strange project to me. For a white man to decided to “become black” and then walk around asking questions in 1959 in the American South is a choice that feels more suicidal than anything else to me. When I visited this grave–and I had not thought about Griffin for years before this–my first question was, how did he pull this off? Turns out he saw a dermatologist in New Orleans who was intrigued by the idea and given methoxsalen while tanning all day, which darkened his skin a bit. He then used makeup so, yeah, there was some blackface involved. I wonder how many people he was really fooling here. However, given America’s weird one-drop rule of racial characteristics, plenty of very light-skinned people were considered black and subject to the laws of segregation. So he pulled it off.

Griffin then spent six weeks traveling around the South as a black man, accompanied by a photographer. Black Like Me was a big hit when it came out. For a certain kind of white, hearing about race from another white just meant more than what black people were saying all the time. These were mostly liberals, since race haters didn’t care what he had to say. One of the things that he couldn’t believe and neither could his white readers is how many whites approached him to ask about sexual life. I’m not sure why this would have been surprising except for this one thing–whites, even liberal ones, simply didn’t ask a lot of questions about what race relations were really like. It’s like walking around today knowing ICE is bad but we mostly don’t ask too many questions and just go along our way. That’s not true of all of course, but most people would rather just not know, even if they hate ICE.

Griffin’s book led him to be super hated by southern whites. In fact, he took his family to Mexico for several months. He was hanged in effigy in his hometown of Mansfield, Texas. In 1964, KKK members caught up to him and beat him. He spent his later years in Fort Worth, where he lectured about race relations sometimes. He had become friends with Thomas Merton in 1962 so he started a project writing about the famed Trappist monk. But he didn’t finish it. Griffin developed Type 2 Diabetes. Treatments weren’t great at this time. So it killed him in 1980. He was 60. His friends finished the Merton book for him and that got published in 1983.

John Howard Griffin is buried in Mansfield Cemetery, Mansfield, Texas.

If you would like this series to visit other authors about race in American life, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Alex Haley is in Henning, Tennessee and Harper Lee is in Monroeville, Alabama. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,210 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

trangoldin:

To the Trans Girl Who Just Lost at the Supreme Court: So Did I 26 Years Ago

Thank you for updating to Woman 51.0.

This release includes important security updates, several unexpected hardware changes, a completely redesigned relationship with alcohol, and expanded support for saying “absolutely not” without explaining yourself.

New Features

• Night Sweats now activate regardless of room temperature, thread count, fan speed, or whether you finally found a position that didn’t hurt your hip.
• Your bladder has been upgraded to Toddler Mode and now requires emptying immediately before bed, forty-three minutes after bed, and once more at 2:47 a.m. simply because.
• Hair has been retexturized and redistributed using an algorithm nobody understands.
• Crying now supports additional file types, including: exceptionally kind veterinarians, finding cash in an old coat pocket, women finishing marathons after starting their period, and finding the matching Tupperware lid.

Performance Improvements

• Metabolism has entered Museum Mode and is now preserving every carbohydrate for future generations.
• Hangovers now begin during your second glass of wine.
• Sleeping “weird” may require three to five business days of recovery.
• Knees have been upgraded to Dolby Surround.
• Impulse control has been reduced by approximately 75 percent and may result in unexpectedly slapping a man who calls you “sweetheart” while attempting to convince you to switch internet providers on your front porch.

Memory
To improve performance, the following have been removed:

• Why you walked into this room
• That actor’s name
• The word “colander”
• Approximately 40 percent of all nouns

Lyrics from every song released between 1986 and 1998 remain fully indexed.

Sleep
Sleep has been completely redesigned. Instead of sleeping through the night, you’ll now wake at 2:47 a.m. with absolute certainty that you’ve forgotten something important.

Diagnostic testing confirms you have not.

You may also experience an unexplained surge of rage directed at no one in particular, followed by an urgent desire to contact people you have not thought about in years.

You’ll be awake until 4:11.

User Advisory: Feelings experienced between 2:47 a.m. and sunrise should not be considered actionable. Apple recommends postponing all outgoing communications until the operating system has completed its morning startup sequence.

Relationships
Your tolerance for nonsense has been reduced by 97 percent.

This is functioning as intended.

The following messages are now automatically routed to Spam:

• “Hey stranger.”
• “You up?”
• “Let’s just see where things go.”
• “I’ve just been really busy…”
• “I’m an awful texter.”

The bug causing users to mistake potential for compatibility has been permanently resolved.

This feature will not be restored.

Behavioral Changes
Facial expressions now accurately reflect internal thoughts. This feature cannot be disabled.

People-pleasing has been moved to Legacy Support and will no longer receive security updates.

Tolerance for uncomfortable bras, loud restaurants, and mediocre or boring men has been permanently removed.

You will no longer spend three days wondering whether you were too harsh. Initial testing suggests you were not.

Battery
Battery life has decreased, yet battery management has dramatically improved.

Power is now reserved almost exclusively for:

• dogs
• friends
• tacos
• deadlifts
• beach sunsets
• leaving parties without saying goodbye

Background applications devoted to impressing everyone else have been permanently restricted.

Reddit-Recommended Workarounds
The following fixes have not been verified by Apple, but are consistently reported by users.

• Dating younger men appears to restore approximately 12 percent of available RAM.
• Weightlifting four times a week significantly improves both posture and your willingness to leave a date the moment he says he’s “not really into labels.”
• Group texts with female friends continue to outperform years of individual therapy.
• Users report eating significantly more tacos after age forty. Engineering has no explanation.
• Purchasing concert tickets before asking if anyone wants to go has been shown to reduce people-pleasing by up to 84 percent.
• Users overwhelmingly report the operating system performs best when regularly fed protein, sunshine, laughter, and absolutely no mixed signals.

Known Issues

• Standing up may produce a sound, and it is no longer possible to determine whether the sound came from your knees, your mouth, or any other body part.
• You may suddenly remember an embarrassing interaction from 1997 while shampooing.
• Reading restaurant menus without your glasses remains unsupported.
• One shoulder may mysteriously hurt all the time now.
• You may become disproportionately angry at slow walkers, open-office floor plans, or hearing the phrase “circle back.”
• Warranty coverage no longer includes sleeping on hotel pillows.

Engineering has quietly confirmed these are not bugs.

Thank You for Updating
Version 51.0 removes several features without your consent, but it also installs better ones.

Boundaries are now enabled by default, your bullshit detector is operating at full capacity, and after years of granting administrator privileges to anyone with a decent smile and inconsistent texting habits, the operating system now asks one simple question before allowing access: “Does this person actually improve my life?”

If not, the request is automatically denied.

Attempts to override this setting using chemistry, nostalgia, loneliness, or six margaritas are no longer supported.

American Diplomacy Is Increasingly More About Performance Than Results

I’m not going to sit here and listen to you bad mouth the United States of America — Eric “Otter” Stratton

You probably know the scene in Animal House. The one where Dean Wormer warns he’s going to revoke Delta’s charter. The boys from Delta stand and walk out.

Last week, in a scene where diplomacy imitates art, the US delegation to the UN stood and walked out of a meeting during remarks by the French Permanent Representative.

The US delegation was aggrieved over French criticism of an earlier US vote against a second term for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. It was a lopsided 144–10 vote in favor, where the United States was one of the 10 opposed. It joined others that included Russia, North Korea, Nicaragua and Israel. The French had rebuked the US for being on the side of authoritarians. US Ambassador and Alternate UN Representative Dan Negrea promised to continue American walkouts until France renounced its “condescending and disrespectful” rhetoric.

Historically, walkouts by US delegations at international gatherings were reserved for such egregious acts by our adversaries as then-Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic remarks toward Israel or baseless accusations against the United States. I was part of a US delegation that walked out of a Moscow conference when a senior Russian official accused the United States of creating and supporting ISIS. Unlike the walkout in New York, previously, we didn’t walk out alone. Our allies walked out with us in a display of unity in condemning the speaker.

The US squabble with France is less important than the insight into how this administration conducts diplomacy and the results it gets, or doesn’t. Like most things in this administration, its diplomacy has become performative. It is built on big, empty gestures that mimic Trump’s own behavior: bullying, impatience, and whatever the outcome, claiming success. This is an administration that seems to want to provoke confrontation to get its way rather than commit to difficult, time-consuming negotiations. Nor does it seem to have skin thick enough to absorb the criticisms often targeting the US positions and continue with the question at hand. When it doesn’t win, it retreats, but not without screaming that it really won. It sees the world as zero-sum transactions so that it always claims to get everything, even when it gets nothing.

Diplomacy, when done effectively, entails grinding conversations, finding leverage (sometimes in the form of coercion), and knowing what is the minimum you’ll accept and the maximum you’ll give. It also involves drawing on expertise to grasp the full scope of an issue and to fully form a position. It is best done quietly, and occasionally, with a certain amount of ambiguity. None of that seems to be relevant now.

The marginalization of expertise across the US government and dismembering of the traditional Washington foreign-policy process have made American diplomacy little more than an amplification of Trump’s pronouncements on Truth Social.

There’s no process anymore because he is the process.

I recently asked someone I knew in Washington about the vagaries of US Ukraine/Russia policy, believing that a lasting solution that doesn’t reward Russian aggression and secures the peace depends on coordinated US-European. efforts. “Nobody knows. They’re just making shit up” was the response. This after Washington had done its damnedest to repeatedly cut the Europeans out of any US-orchestrated discussions with Ukraine and Russia. Vice President Vance used his speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference to hector Europe to deal with migration — “the threat within” to Western civilization — rather than the threat of Russia.

But nothing underscores making up foreign policy as you go more than the handling of the war with Iran. In the absence of consulting with allies in hopes of building a coalition, having a clear strategy with achievable objectives, or a compelling rationale for war to persuade the American and international publics of the rightness of our cause, Trump has bumbled into a war that he has no idea how to get out of, our Gulf allies are likely to negotiate their own settlement with Iran that gives it some degree of control of the Strait of Hormuz, and US influence is waning, in addition to a now persistent threat to the global economy. Trump’s self-proclaimed little excursion is rapidly becoming a strategic defeat that will count lost US credibility and leadership among its casualties because diplomacy has remained an afterthought.

With no Washington process to inform and coordinate foreign policy decision making, then it seems the result has been to default to Trump’s lead. Throughout my career, the rule of thumb when dealing with a foreign interlocutor was simple: when in doubt, quote the President or the Secretary of State. Still true, if you can find some coherence in it, but more than once, Marco Rubio has had to revise his answers to fit the President’s narrative. Rubio’s justification for the war with Iran or the process for ending it has been an evolutionary cycle driven by the President’s press comments du jour.

The non-career ambassadors Trump has dispatched — whom columnist Max Boot called Trump’s “mini-mes” in a column in The Washington Post — have taken that a step beyond, in modeling the President’s disdain for others. They are creating a record of offending their host countries. US Ambassador to France Charles Kushner, for example, refused two summonses to the French MFA in a breach of longstanding diplomatic protocol. Ambassador Tom Rose announced the embassy would cut ties with the speaker of Poland’s parliament over statements that Trump did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

At embassies and at headquarters, our diplomats persevere amid staffing cuts and a lack of leadership. The State Department fired more than 1,300 Foreign and Civil Service employees, has made “fidelity” a part of the evaluation process, and geared recruiting toward finding candidates who ideologically fit the Administration’s “America First” world view. More than 100 ambassadorships are still unfilled. They struggle to keep up. In the meantime, the work on the most pressing problems has been outsourced with no particular results. Trump’s special envoys Witkoff and Kushner, in the words of a foreign diplomat I know who has seen them up close, are 0 for 3 in producing any results for Gaza, Ukraine, or Iran. He was spectacularly unimpressed.

During Trump’s first term, I checked his Twitter posts first thing every morning. It would determine how the day was likely to go. The difference then versus now is that there were filters that blunted the worst of his musings or translated them into actual, existing policy. Now, those filters are absent.

US diplomacy seems to be reduced to reprising Kevin Bacon screaming, “All is well,” amid chaos, and no one is listening.