Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
The Republicans now disowning themselves from Trump and the Republicans after helping to create the very climate he has exploited to create the current chaos have been described using the well-worn metaphor of rats deserting a sinking ship. In Austin, Texas, that metaphor came to life.
A spokesperson for the Travis County sheriff’s office in Texas says “several” boats sank Saturday while taking part in a parade in support of President Donald Trump.
“We responded to multiple calls of boats in distress, several of them sank,” but there are no reports of fatalities or injuries and investigators have not determined how many boats sank on the lake near Austin, according to sheriff’s spokesperson Kristen Dark.
…“We have no reason to suspect foul play in any of these,” sinkings, Dark said.
Dark said weather conditions were generally calm and meteorologist Paul Yura with the National Weather Service in Austin/San Antonio said there were were no storms in the area at the time and winds were generally 10 mph or less.
“The lake should be fairly navigable, without issue at those wind speeds,” according to Yura.
It is not clear how many rats escaped.
For US politicians there are two sacred cows: God and the military. Even the stupidest of them know to always say only positive things about either in public. Trump had been particularly assiduous in this, waving the Bible about at photo ops and lavishly praising on the military. So it reflects an incredible level of obtuseness that Trump made derogatory remarks about soldiers who died, were injured, or captured in the many, many wars that the US has engaged in, calling them losers and suckers.
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Samantha Bee explains that this is not just a waste of money and a breeder of anti-science beliefs but can also be very dangerous to women’s health.
My current laptop is getting pretty old, close to eight years. That by itself does not bother me since I use it mainly for writing, email, and the internet and do not really need any of the fancy doodads that manufacturers keep adding on. But it has started to show disturbing signs of being about to kick the bucket, such as the screen suddenly going dark and then getting the ominous ‘black screen of death’ message in about eight different languages saying that some mysterious problem had occurred and that I needed to hit a key to reboot. While it has been rebooting, I have been told that this is a sign of an impending hard disk crash and that one of these days, it will never come back to life.
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It seems that the National Rifle Association may be in greater trouble than we thought. New York states attorney general had brought charges against the organization that its top executives , especially Wayne LaPierre had been using its funds as their personal piggy bank to live high on the hog. This at a time when the organization had been losing revenue because of declining membership and had had to make cutbacks to staff benefits.
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Samantha looks at the links between the two. She also asks a good question: why aren’t these heavily armed groups of white people who roam the streets called ‘gangs’?
Part 1:
Part 2:
Suppose you could get a layer of liquid to stay suspended in mid-air, then you could observe counter-intuitive things such as objects like toy boats floating on both the top and bottom surfaces, being right side up on the top surface and upside down on the bottom surface.
But how could you get such a layer of liquid to defy gravity in this way? It turns out you can, as can be seen in this video.
Massachusetts is a strongly Democratic state with all its congressional and the two senate seats held by Democrats. The governor is an outlier in being a Republican but he has been careful to position himself as a centrist moderate technocrat and distanced himself from the nutjobs that currently make up the Republican party. So the primaries are where the real action is and on Tuesday we saw two proxy battles between the party establishment and progressive insurgents.
In the senate race there was a generational switch in that the incumbent Ed Markey who has been in Congress for 44 years represents the progressive wing and the much younger challenger Joseph Kennedy turns out to be the establishment candidate. Markey has aligned himself with the progressives in Congress, co-sponsoring the Green New Deal with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and they in turn strongly backed him. Kennedy was clearly seeking to use his famous name to move from the House of Representatives (where he currently holds a seat since 2013) to the Senate. No Kennedy has lost an election in Massachusetts and no doubt he hoped to ride the wave of the family name to victory. His problem is that his politics are more Republican-friendly.
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