Cow Burps & Haunted Ships
October 12, 2022
Marchant Of Election Death
In a speech at the Make America Great Again rally in Minden, Nevada this Saturday, Jim Marchant, the Republican secretary of state candidate for Nevada, promised that he and his “coalition of America First secretary of state candidates” colleagues would secure a Trump victory in two years.” Marchant heads the aforementioned coalition, a group of secretary of state candidates who believe that Trump should have won the 2020 presidential election and plan to take action to get him re-elected.
At the rally, Marchant said that he’d looked into 2020’s “rigged election” and had discovered “horrifying” irregularities. As we all could have predicted, an official investigation by Nevada’s current secretary of state, there was no evidence of mass fraud in Joe Biden’s Nevada victory, which he won by a margin of 34,000 votes. “When I’m secretary of state of Nevada, we are going to fix it, and when my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024,” he said.
Secretaries of state are generally not covered much in the media, but they hold key powers over elections. They act as states’ top election officials, presiding over all elections including federal and presidential ones. One way a band of rogue secretaries (what an interesting phrase!) could interfere with a presidential election is by sending a pro-Trump group of electors to Congress even if the former president were to legitimately lose the state’s election. In 2020, Marchant advocated for fake Trump electors to be sent from Nevada to Congress. When asked if he might try the same in 2024 if he was elected, he replied, “That is very possible, yes.” Marchant currently leads his Democratic challenger, Cisco Aguilar, by 8 points at the polls. (Guardian)
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Not Ready In Nippon
- As Japan reopened to tourists Tuesday, the country seemed unprepared for a wave of tourism that it hopes will provide a boost to its declining economy. The nation is reopening visa-free travel to dozens of countries, putting an end to some of the strictest Covid-19 border controls in the world. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida hopes that a surge in tourism will wake up the yen from its slump to a 24-year low.
- In 2019, a record 31.8 million tourists took a trip to the island nation. In 2022, just over half a million brave souls have tangled with its strict border policies. While the government hopes to raise tourism revenues to the tune of an estimated 5 trillion yen ($34.5 billion) annually, many shops are still shuttered. In Narita Airport, the biggest airport in the country, around half of the 260 shops and restaurants remain closed.
- The story is similar outside the airport. About 73% of hotels say they were short of workers in August, up from about 27% in August last year. Hotels are also wary of foreigners’ responsiveness to Covid-19 safety measures. “From the start of the pandemic until now, we’ve had just a few foreign guests,” said one Tokyo innkeeper. “Pretty much all of them wore masks, but I’m really not sure whether the people who visit from here on will do the same.” (Reuters)
Taxing The Four-Legged Methane Pumps
- New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the world’s first plan to price and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture on Tuesday (“emissions” could even include cow burps – yes, really). The plan is part of the nation’s goal of cutting methane emissions 10% by 2030, merely a short-term goal for New Zealand’s net-zero emissions target for 2050.
- New Zealand is home to around 26 million sheep and 10 million cattle, with about half of the country’s methane emissions coming from the agricultural industry. Worldwide, methane accounts for 11% of all greenhouse gas emissions, but the gas’ temperature-raising effects are 25 times greater than those of carbon dioxide, according to the EPA. Roughly a quarter of all human-influenced methane emissions come from agricultural sources, making New Zealand an outlier in the size of its agricultural emissions.
- “No other country in the world has yet developed a system for pricing and reducing agricultural emissions, so our farmers are set to benefit from being first movers. Cutting emissions will help New Zealand farmers to not only be the best in the world but the best for the world,” said Ardern. The country’s agricultural lobby, for its part, was angered, with one spokesperson saying the plan would “rip the guts out of small town New Zealand.” (Axios)
Additional World News
- Iran protesters shot by police so afraid to go to hospitals they’re asking U.S. doctors for help online (CBS)
- Billionaire investor Yuri Milner renounces Russian citizenship (Axios)
- Lavrov says Russia open to talks with West, awaiting serious proposal (Reuters)
- UN mulls quick foreign troop deployment to ease Haiti crisis (AP)
- Biden to ‘Re-Evaluate’ Relationship With Saudi Arabia After Oil Production Cut (NYT, $)
- Bank of England in fresh emergency move to calm markets (BBC)
- Storm Julia kills 25 in Central America as it churns toward Mexico (Reuters)
- Israel and Lebanon reach historic agreement, paving the way to potentially rich gas exploration (CNN)
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” – Lao Tzu
First Lady, But Not First Victim
- Harvey Weinstein’s second criminal sex trial has begun in Los Angeles, and among those on the witness list is Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a former actress and filmmaker, and the wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom. Weinstein, 70, faces 11 charges in a trial that is expected to last up to eight weeks.
- Siebel Newsom is one of the seemingly countless women who came forward. She was working as an actor and documentary filmmaker when she had a meeting with Weinstein. In 2017, a day after The New York Times broke the news that he had been paying off women who accused him of sexual misconduct for decades, HuffPost published an essay that Siebel Newsom wrote about her experience. (NYT, $)
Gabbard The God-Fearing
- Former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard announced on Twitter that she is leaving the Democratic Party. The failed presidential candidate said the party is “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism…”
- Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the sentence – she adds that the members “actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are hostile to people of faith & spirituality, demonize the police & protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.”
- Gabbard, who apparently never learned what a run-on sentence is, represented Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District from 2013 to 2021. She included in her announcement the launch of a podcast series on YouTube called “The Tulsi Gabbard Show.” The first upload is a 28-minute episode titled “Why I’m leaving the Democratic Party,” because apparently, her 73-word announcement wasn’t thorough enough. (ABC)
Additional USA News
- New York school official seen crowd surfing at high school football game is charged with DWI shortly after (NBC)
- Supreme Court denies appeal by Charleston church shooter (The Hill)
- Boaters who went missing on a fishing trip were rescued by the US Coast Guard as they fended off shark attacks (CNN)
- Biden’s about to turn 80. Don’t expect a blowout birthday bash. (Politico)
- Allentown: 27 children and daycare employees are rushed to hospitals after carbon monoxide leak (CNN)
- Baltimore Prosecutors Drop Charges Against Adnan Syed (NYT, $)
- Ron Herrera: Los Angeles County Federation of Labor president resigns amid city council racist remarks scandal (CNN)
A Sinking Tide Lifts All Creepy Boats
- Things we expect to find at the bottom of a lake: a corpse weighed down by a concrete block, an old boot, and a couple of catfish. Things we don’t expect to find at the bottom of a lake: a World War 2 troop transport boat that served in D-Day invasions across the Pacific. Unfortunately for the World War 2 Higgins vehicle known as the “Ghost Boat” found in California’s Lake Shasta last fall, truth is often stranger than fiction.
- The boat seemed to rise from the depths of California’s largest reservoir last year as the lake dried up due to drought. It was finally excavated just this Sunday and is now on its way to being restored for display in a museum in Nebraska. “The circumstance of its sinking remains a mystery,” U.S. Forest Service officials stated. Luckily, military records can fill us in on a little bit of the boat’s history.
- The number painted on the boat’s side shows that it served on the Attack Transport USS Monrovia, which participated in the occupation of Sicily in 1943. “Eisenhower also was on this ship at that time, and it went on to a further six D-Day invasions in the Pacific,” stated officials. It was also used in the invasion of Tarawa before it “sank in shallow water during that invasion.” It served as an attack transport in 1943, earning seven battle stars over the course of its career before being sold for scrap in 1969. How it ended up at the bottom of the lake remains a mystery. (Guardian)
Additional Reads
- Six Gray Wolves in Washington Were Fatally Poisoned, Officials Say (NYT, $)
- 500 pilot whales die in mass strandings on remote New Zealand islands (CNN)
- Box covering Columbus statue sports colors of Italian flag (AP)
- A Minecraft Player Set Out to Build the Known Universe, Block by Block (NYT, $)
- Massive 2,560-pound pumpkin raised by Minnesota horticulture teacher breaks U.S. record (CBS)
- Ancient Mars could have been teeming with microbial life, researchers find (Guardian)