Ocean foam invades some Australian beaches

Australia is famously home to forms of nature not found in other parts of the world. And now, sea foam has been appearing on the beaches of parts of Australia, bringing with it all manner of things, including snakes.

People are being warned to stay out of sea foam that has appeared on the beaches of northern New South Wales and Queensland in the wake of severe storms this week, with sea snakes and hazardous material hidden in it.

Storms have lashed the two states, bringing heavy rain, flooding and coastal erosion. The foam is formed by the churning of seawater with algae, salts, fats and other pollutants.
…

Nathan Fife, Gold Coast Lifesaving services supervisor at Surf Lifesaving Australia, told Guardian Australia the foam was not good for people’s health.

“Health-wise it’s probably not great to let your kids play in it,” he said. “Also the marine creatures that might get in it, like sea snakes.”

According to the Marine Education Society of Australasia, there are 32 species of sea snakes found around Australia. While they are venomous, the risk of death is low.

The sale of the foam is pretty impressive.

Is this ocean foam phenomenon peculiar to Australia? If so, why?

So why is this a bad thing, exactly?

In a speech, Mike Pence said that “”[Democrats] want to make rich people poorer, and poor people more comfortable.” As if that’s a bad thing. The idea that poor people should get a break even once in a while strikes terror in the hearts of these sociopaths.

Newsmax next to back down under legal threat

After the right wing echo chamber broadcast and amplified Trump’s wild claims of election fraud by the Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, they were threatened with legal action. Smartmatic posted on their website the basis of their complaint.

According to Smartmatic’s demand letters, these organizations could have easily discovered the falsity of the statements and implications made about Smartmatic by investigating their statements before publishing them to millions of viewers and readers. Smartmatic had nothing to do with the “controversies” that certain public and private figures have alleged regarding the 2020 U.S. election.  Multiple fact-checkers have consistently debunked these false statements with stunning consistency and regularity. 
[Read more…]

Trump pardons killers of people of color

Yesterday, Donald Trump pardoned a lot of people and you can be sure that there will be more to come before he is kicked out of the White House.The list of pardon beneficiaries include the usual cronies and politicians. But the ones that really stick in the craw are the pardons of people who killed civilians and were tried and convicted of their offenses.

The four Blackwater guards — Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, and Dustin Heard — were convicted by a federal jury in 2014 after a lengthy trial that saw some 30 witnesses travel from Iraq to testify against them. Prosecutors accused the men of illegally unleashing “powerful sniper fire, machine guns and grenade launchers on innocent men, women and children.”

According to prosecutors, the four were among seven Blackwater employees who opened fire in the Nusoor Square traffic circle in Baghdad, killing 17 people.

An FBI investigation found 14 of the deaths unjustified, according to rules of engagement for private security contractors in Iraq. Slatten was accused of firing the first shots.

[Read more…]

What will happen on January 6th

Now that 12 Trump cult members of the House of Representatives seem to have decided to oppose the acceptance of at least some of the electoral votes that gave the win in the Electoral college to Joe Biden, attention has shifted to what might happen on January 6th, the day that a joint session of Congress meets to finalize the election results. Objections on this day are not rare. They happened in 2001, 2005, and 2007. But they have never succeeded.

Here is what will happen, according to the Congressional Research Service, when the joint session of Congress meets “for the purpose of opening the 2020 presidential election electoral votes submitted by state government officials, certifying their validity, counting them, and declaring the official result of the election for President and Vice President.”
[Read more…]

Et tu, Pat?

It looks like Jesus has let Pat Robertson down. After promising his viewers that Jesus would ride in to save the day before the Electoral College meets, saying “this fraud will not stand and it will be exposed and that the lord himself will intervene before this country turns into something socialist”, he now says that it is all over and that Trump should concede the election. Worse, he says that Trump “lives in an alternate reality”, is “very erratic”, and that he has had his day and that it is time to “move on”. Being told by Pat Robertson of all people that you are living in an alternate reality has got to hurt.
[Read more…]

Trump may end Pentagon support for CIA covert operations

I read with interest this report that Trump may end the Pentagon’s cooperation with the CIA in the latter’s covert operations.

Last week, news broke that Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, sent a letter to the CIA notifying the agency that the Pentagon would review the terms of its military support to CIA operations. News reports suggested that the Pentagon was planning to strip the CIA of its support for counterterrorism missions around the world almost immediately. Drones, elite soldiers, fuel, and medical evacuation of casualties, for example, would disappear almost overnight.
[Read more…]

It’s official: We are a nation of idiots

A group of massless people invaded a Target store and marched through it shouting “Freedom!” and “This is America!” and also, inexplicably,”Library Card!” (At least, that is what that last one sounded like.)

I can understand a person feeling, however wrongly, that wearing a mask is an infringement of their rights. But to care so much about it that they go out and recruit other people to engage in such an absurd stunt is to display idiocy of a high order

Can we all agree that the very lowest priority for getting the vaccines should be people like those in the Target store who are deliberately flouting the guidelines and needlessly putting other people at risk just to make a silly political point?

Seth Meyers makes the case for others who should be on the bottom of the list.

Under threat of lawsuit, Fox News backs away from some fraud claims

Fox News has felt free to parrot Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud and have even added to the charges and named companies that they claim colluded in it. Finally one outfit called Smartmatic got fed up and threatened to sue it and all the other right-wing news outlets for making false and defamatory claims.

Under that threat, three of their main shows that had been promoting these ideas, hosted by Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro, went into damage control and tried to walk back their claims. But the three did it in a strange way, by showing the identical pre-taped item.
[Read more…]

Trump’s incompetence helped speed up vaccine approval

After the expected spike in covid-19 cases and deaths about two weeks after Thanksgiving, the rates have started dropping again, although they are still high. We will now have to brace ourselves for another spike about two weeks after Christmas when some people will violate the guidelines once again to visit with family and friends.

The incompetence of the Trump administration in its handling of the pandemic has been responsible for the massive numbers of infected people and deaths in the US. In terms of total numbers (though not per capita), the US easily leads the rest of the world with over 18 million confirmed cases and about 325,000 deaths. Currently those numbers are rising at an average daily rate of about 200,000 and 2,500 respectively. Those numbers could been much lower if from the beginning Trump had been urging everyone to adopt the common sense safety guidelines that scientists and public health experts were advocating, instead of mocking them and hosting events that openly violated them and dismissing the seriousness of the pandemic.
[Read more…]