Wild weather coming (what else is new?)

It looks like our above-normal temperatures will continue probably through the end of the year, but the next few days look nuts:

And yet, the weather isn't nearly as nuts as the OAFPOTUS and his administration:

• The Times reports that White House Budget Director Russel Vought is pushing to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research, because it's the premier climate research center in the world and Vought is a climate-change-denying tool.
• Francis Fukuyama thinks the OAFPOTUS is losing steam, and "Trumpism is also not a permanent condition."
• Brian Beutler digs into the now-infamous Vanity Fair profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and finds half a dozen reasons to fire her.
• Jamelle Bouie throws up his hands, calling the White House a "lost cause."
• Matt Yglesias asks, "can JD Vance sustain Trump's cult of personality?" Uh, no.
• Jen Rubin compares Australia's and our reactions to last week's mass shootings and despairs about the United States.
• Closer to home, the wackadoodle Lubavichers found a way to make the Bondi Beach shooting about themselves, primarily by getting local Chicago reporters to call them "members of Chicago's Jewish community."

Finally, Jacob Savage looks at the dramatic shifts in gender- and race-based hiring preferences since 2015, and worries about the future of Gen-Z and younger Millennial white men. "In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023." But, as he says, that's only the spark and not the cause of young men drifting right:

It’s strange and more than a little poisonous to see yourself buffeted by forces beyond your control. But there’s also a comfort in it. Because it’s less painful to scroll through other people’s IMDb pages late at night, figuring out what shortcut—race, gender, connections—they took to success, than to grapple with the fact that there are white men my age who’ve succeeded, and I am not one of them. I could have worked harder, I could have networked better, I could have been better. The truth is, I’m not some extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in ordinary times that would have been enough.

Food for thought.