Global warming update; Gaza update; Project 2025 training videos leaked

Nunatsiaq News reports on a heat wave in the Arctic region:

Heatwave hits Nunavut with ‘astounding’ temperatures

A heatwave is hitting Kitikmeot and Kivalliq communities this week bringing temperatures above 30ᵒ C (86ᵒ F), twice as high as the average temperature for these regions at this time of year.

The Government of Nunavut issued a public health advisory for two communities Wednesday where the most extreme conditions are expected. Kugluktuk is expected to see a high of 33ᵒ C on Friday, while Kugaaruk’s forecast high is 26ᵒ C that day, according to Environment Canada.

“It’s astounding temperatures,” said Stephen Berg, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, in a phone interview Thursday.

Baker Lake, for instance, has had only eight days where temperatures reached 30ᵒ C since the start of record keeping in 1946, Berg said.

Before moving east toward Nunavut, the mass of hot air caused record-breaking temperatures in Northwest Territories, including Fort Good Hope which saw temperatures as high as 35.7 C on Wednesday.

Relief is expected in Nunavut after the weekend with gradual cooling over the next week, Berg said.

With climate change hitting the Arctic more rapidly than the rest of the world, this might be a good time to think about infrastructure that will help mitigate the effects of future heatwaves, said Dr. André Corriveau, Nunavut’s acting chief public health officer, in a phone interview Thursday.

I feel bad for the people of Kugluktuk and other affected towns. They're not used to this global warming stuff.

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The WaPo reports (not paywalled):

An Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians killed at least 93 people in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, civil defense authorities said, deepening global scrutiny of Israel’s conduct of the war more than 10 months into its campaign to eliminate Hamas.

Gaza civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said the al-Taba’een school in Gaza City was housing about 6,000 displaced Palestinians when the bombs struck around 4:30 a.m. He said at least 11 children and six women were among those killed, with at least 54 injured and dozens missing.

Video from the scene showed scores of bodies wrapped in sheets and blankets laid in the schoolyard after the strike, as women crouched over corpses in grief. The strike was one of the single deadliest bombings of the war, and Bassal said the toll was expected to rise. “The recovery operations are indescribable,” he said in an interview.

The Israel Defense Forces said the strike targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants it claimed were operating a command and control node from within the school, accusing the group of using civilians as human shields.  

An Israeli military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with IDF protocol, said that three precision munitions struck a prayer hall, which he said was used by militants, on the ground floor of the three-story school building. Residents said the facility had been converted into a shelter for Gazans forced to flee their homes.

The Middle East horror is endless. The commentary from US officials is an embarrassment. 

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ProPublica reports about videos leaked from Project 2025 headquarters:

One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.

The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.

In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”

“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.

In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”

Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”  

In a video titled “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide,” Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at USAID during the Trump administration, warns viewers that Washington is a place that “does not share your conservative values,” and that new hires will find that “there’s so much hostility to basic traditional values.”

By traditional values, Mr. Primorac means support for kleptocratic authoritarianism*, legalized bigotry, forced social and legal acceptance of Christian fundamentalism, and bizarre fixations on (i) controlling everyone's sex lives, and (ii) turning all non-heterosexual people into heterosexual people by force. Yup, Project 2025 is just studded with sparkly traditional values.

One of those sparkly traditional values is crackpot denial of climate science and global warming. 

* Some form of mixed kleptocratic dictatorship, kleptocratic plutocracy and kleptocratic Christian theocracy with Christian Sharia law implemented by a White, heterosexual male Christian Taliban.