Guardian:

“Unfortunately there’s this intersection of our climate crisis and our housing emergency,” said Jonna Papaefthimiou, chief resilience officer for the Portland bureau of emergency management, adding that unhoused people “face the greatest risk from all kinds of severe weather.”

Peter Marcuse:

„homelessness exists not because the system is failing to work as it should, but because the system is working as it must“

—“Neutralizing Homelessness,” Socialist Review 88.1 (1988), 93.

Friedrich Engels:

The so-called housing shortage, which plays such a great role in the press nowadays, does not consist in the fact that the working class generally lives in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings. This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it. In order to make an end of this housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class.

—The Housing Question, 1872, 17, emphasis in original.

There were some excerpts from Engels in the Deutsches Historisches Museum exhibit on Saturday. Reading this paragraph I am struck by how easily Americans use the phrase „working class“ in a mildly condescending manner to indicate people whose status is beneath their own invariably „middle“ class, and how impossible it is for Americans infatuated with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, et al. to say „ruling class“.

Und als ich ihn [Ernst Fischer] mit mehr und mehr Fragen löcherte, lieferte dieser erfahrene und kluge und ehrliche Intellektuelle mir zum Schluss ein kindliches Schlüsselwort: »Ja, wir dachten: Wenn es so grauenhaft ist, wie es aussieht, dann kann es gar nicht so sein, wie es ist.«

—Wolf Biermann, »Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten!«, (Berlin: Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, 2016), 148.

FAZ:

Spiegel:

Der ehemalige SPD-Kanzler ist im Mai von seinen Posten bei russischen Staatskonzernen zurück­getreten. Nun ist Gerhard Schröder einem Medienbericht zufolge wieder in die Diktatur von Wladimir Putin gereist.

Ex-Kanzler Gerhard Schröder steht für seine Nähe zu Russland und zu Kremlchef Wladimir Putin seit Monaten massiv in der Kritik. Trotzdem soll er nun erneut nach Moskau gereist sein, wie die Sender RTL/ntv berichten. »Ich mache hier ein paar Tage Urlaub. Moskau ist eine schöne Stadt«, sagte Schröder angeblich einem Reporter von RTL/ntv in der russischen Innenstadt.

„Die Diktatur von Wladimir Putin“.

[Heiner] Müller rettete sich in die sarkastische Prophetie kommender Weltuntergänge. Der Schritt vom Welterretter zum Zyniker und Apokalyptiker ist kurz.

—Wolf Biermann, »Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten!«, (Berlin: Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, 2016), 145.

Ohne die Funktionäre funktioniere keine Partei! Und ohne Partei gäb’s keinen Kommunismus! Unsere Klassiker Marx und Engels, belehrte mich [Peter] Hacks, hätten eben 1848 nicht etwa das »Kommunistische Manifest« geschrieben, wie die Banausen denken, sondern wohlweislich »Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei«.

—Wolf Biermann, »Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten!«, (Berlin: Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, 2016), 143.

This is so interesting! I had just asked myself why the »Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei« title was used at the exhibition on Saturday.

BBC:

A wildfire near Yosemite National Park in California is spreading quickly, threatening thousands of homes.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection described it as being „zero per cent under control“ on Saturday morning local time.

Central and North Eastern regions of the US are also sweltering under extreme heat.

Temperatures of 38C (100.4 F) are forecast in Washington DC and Dallas, with New York only slightly cooler.

An official in Oklahoma – where the temperature is expected to reach 41C on Sunday – said heat was the main cause of weather-related deaths in the US.

Dubbed the Oak Fire, the blaze in California started on Friday afternoon local time and had grown to 10.2 square miles (26.5 sq km) by Saturday morning, the Associated Press reports.

Climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires.

The world has already warmed by about 1.1C since the industrial era began and temperatures will keep rising unless governments around the world make steep cuts to emissions.

This is the entire BBC „story“, disjointed as it appeared, with a Yosemite headline over all of two short sentences about a fire near Yosemite. The remainder of the „article“ seems to be fire and weather related sentences grouped perhaps by algorithm. I can’t really imagine a human writing this, but then my powers of imagination are perhaps those of an engineer, rather than an artist or poet.

I don’t think we’re going to get out of this situation with media like this.