OUR PICKSHurricane Sinks Unsinkable “Dome Home” | Biden Completing Bits of Trump’s Wall | Sounding Alarms Ahead of Midterms, and more

Ian Sinks Florida ‘Dome Home’ Built to Survive Hurricanes  (Daniel Cusick, Scientific American)
A house built from geodesic domes off the coast of Florida was designed to withstand gale-force winds and powerful storm surges but not sea-level rise

The Biden Administration Is Quietly Completing Bits of Donald Trump’s Wall  (Economist)
The southern border is a political problem for Democrats because it is an actual problem.

DHS Taps Key Architect of 9/11 Response to Oversee Domestic Counterterrorism Efforts  (Jane Winter, Yahoo News)
A key architect of the U.S. response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been tapped to coordinate and amp up domestic counterterrorism efforts, as the federal government reevaluates its approach to combating the threat of violent extremism.
Nicholas Rasmussen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), is heading to the Department of Homeland Security to oversee counterterrorism prevention, intelligence, policy and other efforts across the department and component agencies like the Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration and Customs and Border Protection.

Talk of ‘Civil War,’ Ignited by Mar-a-Lago Search, Is Flaring Online  (Ken Bensinger and Sheera Frenkel, New York Times)
Soon after the F.B.I. searched Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend.
Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours as Mr. Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on radio programs and podcasts, as measured by Critical Mention, a media-tracking firm.
Posts mentioning “civil war” jumped again a few weeks later, after President Biden branded Mr. Trump and “MAGA Republicans” a threat to “the very foundations of our republic” in a speech on democracy in Philadelphia.
Now experts are bracing for renewed discussions of civil war, as the Nov. 8 midterm elections approach and political talk grows more urgent and heated.

Violent Threats and Disinformation Have Officials Sounding Alarms Ahead of Midterms  (Caleb Ecarma, Vanity Fair)
U.S. national security authorities made clear that election denialism is a huge concern

Lisa Smith’s Sentence for Being at ‘Lowest Level’ of Isis Terror Group Excessive, Court Told  (Eoin Reynolds, Irish Times)
Former soldier Lisa Smith, who was convicted earlier this year of membership of Islamic State (Isis), was at the “lowest level” of the terrorist organization and her sentence of 15 months was “excessive”, her lawyers have told the Court of Appeal. Appealing the sentence, Michael O’Higgins SC told the three-judge court that his client went to Isis-controlled Syria “got married, kept house and that’s it”. He said she went out of a religious conviction and “did not contribute to any state-building exercise and did no positive act in favor of Isis”. Mr. O’Higgins said that the Special Criminal Court, which convicted and sentenced Smith, did not give enough regard to the mitigating factors, including that she is a mother of a young child. He said the court had incorrectly placed her offending at the higher end of the lower level for membership of a terrorist organization and stated that the evidence showed that her involvement with Isis could not have been at a lower level than it was. Mr. O’Higgins also said that, in sentencing Smith, the Special Criminal Court should have taken into account the nine-and-a-half months she spent in two detention camps in Syria. The conditions in those camps were appalling, he said, adding that she was locked up “day and night” in a place where people held extreme views and where murder “routinely happens.”

Plan to Secure Open Source Software Involves Agencies Using More of It  (Mariam Baksh, Nextgov)
The discovery of exploitable weaknesses in Log4j is resurfacing a 6-year-old push to save taxpayers money by calling on agencies to embrace open-source code.

The United States Isn’t Ready for the New Phase of Climate Change  (Alice Hill, Foreign Affairs)
or decades, scientists have warned that climate change would unleash ferocious natural disasters unlike anything in recorded human history. They predicted that ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions would cause global temperatures to rise, touching off a vicious cycle of longer and hotter heat waves, deeper droughts, and bigger storms. Most decision-makers, however, treated climate-fueled disasters as the stuff of a distant future. And those who actively worked to fight climate change worried primarily about mitigation—reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Adapting to climate extremes received second billing.
In 2021, however, the natural disasters long foretold by scientists arrived with a vengeance.

More Americans Are Moving into Hurricane Zones Even as Climate Risks Mount  (Anna Phillips, Washington Post)
The Southeast’s low cost of living beckons retirees and younger workers, but the boom is putting more people in harm’s way.