Seattle’s air quality is as bad as smoking 7 cigarettes. Blame climate change deniers

Everyone Is Looking For Someone To Blame
Everyone Is Looking For Someone To Blame

Vox reports:

Ash and smoke are choking Seattle’s air for the second week in a row, as wildfires smolder in the Cascades and in British Columbia. The air quality in Seattle this week has been worse than in Beijing, one of the world’s most notoriously polluted cities.

As of Wednesday morning, the Air Quality Index in Seattle was at 190, a rating classified as “unhealthy.” In parts of the city, the index rose as high as 220, which is “very unhealthy.” Other parts of Puget Sound, like Port Angeles, Washington — 80 miles from Seattle — saw the AQI rise to 205 this week.

To put it in perspective, an AQI of 150 is roughly equal to smoking seven cigarettes in a day. People breathing air this unhealthy should avoid being outside and exerting themselves, particularly people with heart and lung problems, the elderly, and children.

(click here to continue reading Seattle’s air quality is as bad as smoking 7 cigarettes. Blame wildfires. – Vox.)

And yet one of the two major political parties in the US is adamant that nothing can or even should be done to ameliorate the effects of climate change. A vote for the GOP is a vote for this kind of apocalyptic condition to worsen.

Clouds over Seattle- Kodak HIE

Fires are a natural occurrence in many woodlands and are essential to a healthy ecosystem. But the growing scale and destruction from these fires stems from human activity.

What kinds of human activity? According to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, environmental terrorists.

“[Fires] have been getting worse,” Zinke said in an interview with Breitbart News Saturday. “We have longer seasons, hotter conditions, but what’s driving it is the fuel load. And we have been held hostage by these environmental terrorist groups that have not allowed public access, that refuse to allow the harvest of timber.”

I asked the Interior Department who these terrorists are and they pointed me toward Zinke’s August 8 editorial in USA Today, where he said that radical environmentalists “make outdated and unscientific arguments, void of facts, because they cannot defend the merits of their policy preferences year after year as our forests and homes burn to the ground.”

Environmentalism is a recurring scapegoat in the Trump administration. Earlier this month, Trump blamed “bad environmental laws” for amplifying wildfires.

But researchers say this ire is pointed in the wrong direction. And in Zinke’s zeal to blame conservationists for deadly fires, he conspicuously sidestepped larger human-caused factors driving the current rash of wildfires, including climate change.

(click here to continue reading Ryan Zinke’s “environmental terrorists” claim for wildfires, explained – Vox.)

The Conversation Sketch

The Conversation Sketch

The Conversation Sketch, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

not sure what happened here, but looks pretty good printed out. You’ll have to trust me on that. Probably could do better if my Photoshop skills were better, whatcha gonna do…

Large is somewhat legible
View On Black

Seattle alleyway

Sonics Psycho

I have no idea of the context of this video, which mostly consists of a young woman in a plexiglass box writhing and go-go dancing to the Sonics song, Psycho. Dancers from 1965 crack me up, but The Sonics are great in any context.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw6Fjo6VXTg


“Here Are the Sonics” (The Sonics)

Reading Around on May 7th through May 8th

A few interesting links collected May 7th through May 8th:

  • Barack Hussein Obama’s un-American mustard choice – The latest blogospheric brouhaha? When President Obama ordered a burger earlier this week, he asked for it without ketchup — and with Grey Poupon. No, seriously. Not that this should be surprising by now, but even Sean Hannity has picked up on the story and broadcast it to millions of Fox News viewers. Naturally, in response, various liberal outlets are responding with equal fervor.…Why, then, am I writing about this? Well, because it gives me an excuse to link to a really fascinating article Malcolm Gladwell wrote for the New Yorker a few years back about the science of taste — why people like certain kinds of things like ketchup, spaghetti sauce, soda and mustard. Turns out that those store brand colas really aren’t very well-made, that Heinz really might be the platonic ideal of ketchup and that almost everyone prefers Grey Poupon to patriotic and manly (but lousy) American mustard. From the piece:
  • The Seattle Traveler » Waterfront Fun at Seattle Maritime Festival – Seattle puts its maritime prowess on display this weekend with the annual Seattle Maritime Festival.

    Saturday’s Family Fun Day is always a big treat, and the highlight is the Tugboat Races. These are the largest Tugboat Races in the World = with over 40 boats expected to participate.
    Photo credit: swanksalot @flickr

  • Lawmaker Defends Imprisoning Hostile Bloggers | Threat Level – “Rep. Linda Sanchez responded Wednesday to Threat Level’s tirade against her proposed legislation outlawing hostile electronic speech. Her answer: “Congress has no interest in censoring.”Sanchez, with the introduction of the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, clearly has a great interest in censoring.”

Reading Around on March 18th through March 19th

A few interesting links collected March 18th through March 19th:

  • Reminiscing at Arco Arena – Quickly, I thought to myself, Jesus, I don’t know what I’m going to do about it, but I can’t back down now. I noticed that he had just brushed his teeth and there was a little toothpaste in the corner of his mouth, so I pointed to the corner of his mouth and said: “Hey, Gary, you’ve got a little toothpaste in the corner of your mouth.” To this day, I have no idea why I said that. I just didn’t have an answer to “So what are you gonna do about it?” I knew I couldn’t say: “I’m gonna kick your butt” because I was a flabby 39-year-old sportswriter at the time and he was 26 and chiseled and no doubt would have beaten the hell out of me.

    His response to the toothpaste comment was this: He came at me with an overhand right that was intercepted by either Sam Perkins or David Wingate, thankfully, because it no doubt would have hurt my face.

    Then George Karl bear hugged me, to prevent me from charging Payton, figuring I had plans to do that, which I didn’t.

  • Base Station Firmware May Resolve Time Capsule Disk Problems – “One piece of advice if you’ve had problems in the past: Back up any existing Time Machine disk images to an external disk using the Archive feature in Disk Utility, erase them from the drive, and start fresh with new Time Machine backups.

    The Leopard-only Time Machine feature works as an incremental backup system, writing all files on a selected system to a disk image in a first pass, and then only creating copies of files that have changed each hour while Time Machine is active.”

  • Gapers Block : Drive-Thru : Chicago Food – San Marino Deli: Welcome New Addition to West Loop Lunch Desert – Just noticed this place, but haven’t tried it yet.
    “A small deli counter is stuffed with imported cheeses, cured meats, marinated olives, salads and a rotating daily selection of warm entrees like lasagna and herb-roasted chicken. Classic sandwiches are made with a few different types of Italian breads, cheeses and cured meats. The sandwiches are gigantic, even on an American scale. The meatball sandwich (called “American”) was about two feet long, with four 2-inch meatballs and a generous ladleful of homemade tomato sauce (I got two lunches out of it). There’s a full coffee bar that serves illy coffee and an assortment of simple but delicious-looking pastries “