With Great Salt Lake Drying Up, Utah Lege Looks Into Pipeline From Pacific Ocean. Yes Really.
What about just buying up all the bottled water in the stores and dumping it into the lake bed?
Utah's Great Salt Lake is, like a lot of western lakes, drying up and shrinking at an alarming rate due to long-lasting drought that's intensified by climate change. Unlike Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the Now Just Adequate Salt Lake is a natural lake, not the result of damming the Colorado River (or damning it, as Ed Abbey used to say), but the calamitous drop in water levels results from similar causes: not enough water coming into the lake from rivers, plus lots of thirsty humans and their agriculture using upstream sources. In late April, state water officials projected the lake will once again hit a new record low water level this year, a good two feet lower than the previous record low level of 4,190 feet, set just in October 2021.
The Deseret News explains,
The projection is based on levels that flow into the lake from its core tributaries, like the Bear, Weber and Jordan rivers. Normally those rivers add about 3 feet of water during the irrigation offseason, while there’s a 2-foot reduction once the irrigation begins. That’s a net gain of about a foot per year.
But this year’s spring runoff is not looking good for the lake. The National Weather Service’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center announced last week that it adjusted its forecast to project a runoff at 60% of normal. It previously forecast a normal runoff at the start of the year.
Last year, instead of the usual off-season increase of a foot, the lake's level only rose by six inches. And the state's snowpack is far lower than normal due to the drought. Also, fun fact: because of mineral concentrations in the lakebed, the drier the lake gets, the greater the chance of toxic dust blowing into populated areas.
Yeah, that's bad. Here, have some video from a BOAT, mofo, with more walking than there oughta be on a boat tour.
In late April, Gov. Spencer Cox declared a drought emergency for the second year in a row, since apparently his admonition last summer for Utahns to "pray for rain" didn't quite do the job. The state legislature has passed a number of water conservation bills, including $450 million in water infrastructure projects, and also established a "Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Program" that will include a new $40 million water trust aimed at helping the lake. Other measures will offer financial aid to homeowners who replace grass lawns with more desert-friendly landscaping, which seems like a smart idea.
And then there's the plan to at least study the feasibility of building a 700-mile pipeline that would pump saltwater from the Pacific Ocean to the Salt Lake, because desperate times and all that. That's one of several ideas being explored by the Lege's Water Development Commission, although it's probably the most radical one; the Salt Lake Tribune reports other ideas being studied include
metering residential water connections in rural Utah; examining the impacts of new groundwater wells on senior water rights holders; limiting releases from Utah dams; reusing treated wastewater; re-evaluating diversions from the Weber to the Provo river; and altering Utah’s representation on interstate compact regarding the Bear River, which Utah shares with Idaho and Wyoming.
The package of study items also includes one measure that might even be more desperate than "pipeline," which would involve looking into "putting septic effluent into Utah’s water supply," which of course sounds gross but works great if you're on the International Space Station. It's treated, people.
State Sen. David Hinkins (R), co-chair of the Water Development Commission, did some logic on the pipeline idea, which would require getting the pipeline over the Sierra Nevada mountains and crossing the states of California and Nevada:
"There’s a lot of water in the ocean and we have very little in the Great Salt Lake." [...]
"It’s just an idea," cautioned Sen. Hinkins in an interview with FOX 13 News. "Other countries are doing it to fill their lakes because of the drought situations. We ought to know if there’s a feasibility or even if we’ll get right of ways for that sort of stuff, but get an idea of how much it’ll cost."
Now, before you go snottily pointing out that lakes are freshwater, the Salt Lake Trib explains Hinkins was talking about an Israeli proposal to pipe Mediterranean water to replenish the Dead Sea, which is getting deader all the time.
Hinkins also suggested that, on the downslope run from the Sierra Nevadas, the water could even be used to generate electricity, although that sounds kind of like a perpetual motion thingy to us, since you'd expend a lot of energy getting the water up there in the first place? We'll freely admit we are not a Doktor of Hydrostuff, though.
Lynn de Freitas, executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, was skeptical of the pipeline idea, and not solely the feasibility and cost of the damn thing. She argued
A pipeline would not only degrade the landscape it crosses but would also disrupt the terminal lake’s chemistry.
“Rather than bringing fresh water to a system already challenged by impacts from increased salinity concentrations, it would be bringing in even more salinity,” she wrote in a text. “What’s wrong with this picture?"
She suggested it would be smarter to reconsider a proposed project to divert water from the Bear River for municipal and industrial use, saying that project would "only exacerbate the effects of a mega drought and climate change on our Lake.”
State Rep. Joel Briscoe (D), didn't seem too gung ho on even the notion of studying the pipeline. Following Tuesday's meeting of the Water Development Commission, Briscoe
sighed loudly and said: "Why don't we try water conservation?"
Beyond the feasibility of it, Rep. Briscoe said he had concerns about the cost to taxpayers.
"I thought we were a state that respected frugality and efficiency," he said. "There’s no way you’re going to be able to afford pumping saline water from the Pacific to Utah."
Environmental advocates also criticized the idea as a "boondoggle," as if spending billions of dollars that would enrich construction companies was somehow not the best possible use of state money. They have a point. Heck, maybe it would be a better idea to put money into reducing use of fossil fuels, just to see if not warming the planet might do something to slow the effects of drought.
Haha, like anyone could afford that! Maybe the Utah Lege could start researching the feasibility of developing stillsuits.
[KSTU-TV / Salt Lake Tribune / Deseret News]
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Egad, A Dinesh D'Souza Movie LIED? Fetch Forth My Smelling Salts!
Next you'll say the movie's entire premise is bad just because it is.
Poor Dinesh D'Souza can't seem to get a break, apart from his pardon from Donald Trump, his constant appearances in rightwing media, and all the money he gets from adoring low-information fans. His latest documentary-shaped object, 2000 Mules, alleges there's evidence off rampant voting fraud in the 2020 election. But it's being ignored by Tucker Carlson and even Newsmax, and there's practically nothing too stupid or crazy for Newsmax.
Read More: No One Taking Dinesh D'Souza's Documentary Seriously, Except Other People Who Also Make Things Up
And now some snotty liberal fact checkers at NPR have confirmed that one of the film's central claims is just plain false. In the film, the bogus "election integrity" group True the Vote claims it used cellphone tracking data to prove massive voter fraud; to show just how reliable its methods are, the group claimed its data analysis even helped solve a MURDER that had police baffled.
But as NPR explains, hahaha LOL LMAO True the Vote didn't solve dick. (Slight paraphrase of NPR.) Also, have we mentioned D'Souza was himself convicted of election fraud? But he was pardoned, so now he's blameless.
The claim was so impressive that Donald Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington gushed that True the Vote
"solved a murder of a young little girl in Atlanta. I mean, they are heroes." Fans of the film have echoed that message on social media.
Unfortunately, that's a load of codswallop:
Authorities in Georgia arrested and secured indictments against two suspects in the murder of Secoriea Turner in August 2021.
In response to NPR's inquiries, True The Vote acknowledged it had contacted law enforcement more than two months later, meaning it played no role in those arrests or indictments.
That's not just NPR proving the claim is false; that's True the Vote admitting it didn't solve, as we say, dick.
Phone-y Business
The movie purports that True The Vote proved a massive vote fraud effort by analyzing a shitload of phone geolocation data purchased from companies what track location information from phones and other mobile devices. Supposedly, the data identifies around 2,000 people who made at least 10 visits each to absentee ballot drop boxes, many of them located in different parts of cities, as well as to a number of nonprofit groups. They're the "mules" of the title, because mail-in voting is just like drug dealing! (Yes, the movie refers to "ballot trafficking" and calls the nonprofits "stash houses," because of course it does. These may be terms Dinesh learned in prison.)
The phone data supposedly "proves" the nonprofit groups were paying people to pick up ballots and to stuff the drop boxes! But as fact checks by the AP, and by Politifact, and by the Washington Post have all pointed out, the tracking data can only indicate a general location. It isn't anywhere near granular enough to prove even that someone was standing next to a drop box, much less that they put ballots (legally or illegally) inside. And since elections authorities put drop boxes in places people are likely to find convenient, there are plenty of reasons one person might have been near those locations at various different times without going up to a ballot drop box. (In Atlanta, for instance, 28 of Fulton County's 36 drop boxes were at public libraries.)
Murder, They Vote
Now, back to the murder claim. In the movie, True the Vote's executive director Catherine Engelbrecht and board member Gregg Phillips (who also have executive producer credits on the film) claim their analysis was so good it helped solved not one but two murders, both of which were "ebbing on cold case status." But they only talk about one, the killing of eight-year-old Secoriea Turner in Atlanta on July 4, 2020.
Phillips says he and his team obtained device data from the area of the shooting, which showed "only a handful of unique devices that could have pulled the trigger...each of these devices has a unique device ID, and we turned the bulk of this information over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
"Now, I read they've arrested two suspects," D'Souza responds to Phillips.
"They have," Phillips says.
Also too, on a podcast flogging the film, D'Souza made an even more specific claim, that True The Vote gave its data to the FBI, and that the feds passed on the data to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
"Shortly after that," D'Souza said, "boom" - there were two arrests and indictments.
NPR contacted the GBI to fact-check this claim.
"The GBI did not receive information from True the Vote that connected to the Secoriea Turner investigation," said Nelly Miles, the GBI's Director of the Office of Public and Governmental Affairs.
Aha. Neither Engelbrecht nor Phillips would give NPR an interview, but Engelbrecht did send an email saying that she
"called a contact at the FBI" and Phillips gave him the information about the Turner case "on or about October 25, 2021."
That would have been about two months after both suspects had already been indicted, on August 13. And contrary to Engelbrecht's assertion that the case was nearly "cold," police had arrested one of the two suspects within two weeks of the murder. Indeed, he turned himself in. The second suspect was arrested in early August. As WaPo's Philip Bump points out, "There is no indication that geolocation data played a role in either arrest, much less data provided by Phillips’s team."
So nope, True the Vote didn't solve dick. Like, maybe its data did include the two suspects' phones? But by the time that analysis was done, the alleged killers' names were already in the news for a couple months. Oh look, you found their phones somehow.
Antifa Super Soldier Vote Mules!!!@!
NPR points out other problems with the movie's assertions, debunking a claim D'Souza made in an interview that the phone data also matched up with another organization's data, to prove that some of the "mules" had also been Antifa rioters!!!!!
"There is an international organization called ACLED [Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project] that monitors the cell phones of all violent rioters around the world," D'Souza said on the Dan Bongino Show. "What True The Vote did was they took the cell phone data on the mules and matched it against the ACLED data on the rioters. And guess what? There's a pretty big overlap."
In the film, Phillips also cites ACLED, which is a nonprofit research organization.
"There's an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent protests around the world. We took a look at our 242 mules in Atlanta and, sure enough, dozens and dozens and dozens of our mules show up on the ACLED databases," Phillips says in the film. "This is not grandma out walking her dog, these are, you know, violent criminals sometimes."
First of all, that Dinesh D'Souza quote right there -- "There is an international organization called ACLED [Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project] that monitors the cell phones of all violent rioters around the world" -- can only be spoken by someone utterly confident that their target audience is absolutely fucking clueless about how everything in the entire works.
Even so, Sam Jones, a spox for ACLED, said both claims were "categorically false," and that it's "highly unlikely that these conclusions have any basis in fact." ACLED's director of research and innovation, Roudabeh Kishi, noted that the company "does not track device ID" at all.
And while ACLED does track riots and other violent incidents, plus peaceful protests,
Their data do not include specific locations inside a city - such as neighborhoods or city blocks - where protests took place. ACLED does not track the time of day of those incidents or generally note individual participants, except for high-profile leaders.
Kishi said nobody from the film had contacted the company at all.
Engelbrecht had an explanation, though! When Phillips said, "There's an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent protests," he didn't mean ACLED, although she wouldn't identify where the supposed data proving "mules" had also been rioting came from. As for D'Souza's statement that the data came from ACLED, she wrote, "If you have questions about Dinesh's comments, my suggestion would be to ask Dinesh." Conveniently, D'Souza didn't respond to NPR's interview requests.
Dinesh Explains It (Not At) All
Now, we should at least note that D'Souza, grumpified by an earlier article Philip Bump wrote about the problems with trying to use phone data to prove "ballot trafficking," did sit down for an interview with Bump to explain why, logically, the movie's conclusions are 100 percent true. As Bump puts it, the takeaway is that the hourlong interview "can be summarized fairly succinctly: D’Souza admits his movie does not show evidence to prove his claims about ballots being collected and submitted."
D'Souza can't even prove that the "whistleblower" the movie claims blew the lid off the fraud scheme even exists. He never met the guy, who wanted to remain anonymous.
But he frequently tells Bump it's really unfair and illogical to demand he provide evidence that any of the "mules" the movie talks about submitted even a single illegal ballot, so that's amusing. He also accuses Bump of "armchair theorizing" about his great big MAGA fanfiction of a movie.
Read it only if you want to burn one of your free WaPo reads this month; it's not worth using one of my "gift" linkies for.
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Trump Thought China Controlled The Weather With A Hurricane Space Laser. Because Of Course He Did.
Can't wait for that loon to get back on Twitter. Gonna be so awesome.
Does China have a space laser that it's firing at the US to cause hurricanes? Many people are saying China controls the weather and we should bomb the shit out of them if they don't stop fucking with the weather in God's own US of A.
And by "many people," we mean the former president and no one else.
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley recently decamped from the Daily Beast to Rolling Stone, but they're still supplying us with all the good dirt on wingnut crazytimes. Hashtag blessed!
Today's offering is a batshit story about "your favorite" weather-obsessed president. The same guy who wondered why we couldn't just nuke a hurricane and drew dicks on a map to prove that Hurricane Dorian was actually going to hit Alabama. Apparently that weirdo thought about weaponized weather so much that it was known around the White House as the "Hurricane Gun" thing.
“I was present [once] when he asked if China ‘made’ hurricanes to send to us,” a former senior official told RS. "[Trump] wanted to know if the technology existed. One guy in the room responded, ‘Not to the best of my knowledge, sir.’ I kept it together until I got back to my office… I do not know where the [then-]president would have heard about that… He was asking about it around the time, maybe a little before, he asked people about nuking hurricanes.”
“It was almost too stupid for words,” another source told RS. “I did not get the sense he was joking at all.”
The China hurricane gun queries continued until 2018, with the former president wondering if this aggression would necessitate military reprisal. Not that it stopped him conducting international relations on the lanai at Mar-a-Lago, charming the pants off Xi Jinping with "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen." Well, at least until it all went to shit in a trade war that was good and easy to win.
In other Trump news, TPM got its hands on a copy of Mark Esper's upcoming book, in which he reports that Trump wanted to recall retired military officers to active duty so that he could court martial them for the crime of shit-talking the commander-in-chief. Specifically, he wanted former Gen. Stanley McChrystal and former Navy Admiral William H. McRaven re-activated to answer for being "disloyal" to their country, as embodied in the figure of one Donald J. Trump.
“The next thing I knew, Mark Milley and I were sitting in front of the president trying to talk him out of recalling McChrystal to active duty,” Esper wrote about a meeting with Commander Spray Tan in May of 2020.
Esper says that he and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were only able to talk Trump down after Milley agreed to call the generals personally and "ask them to dial it back.”
"There was no call I remember — and I would have remembered that," Gen. McChrystal told TPM.
And once again the Republic was saved because everyone around Trump said "yes" and then ignored his rantings. Which makes them goddamn heroes, right?
Haha, FUCK YOU. These military stalwarts knew what a lunatic he was, they knew that he was ratf*cking democracy and was likely to blow up NATO if given another term, and they still stood behind him and lent their gravitas to a nutjob who thought China controlled the weather as he ran for a second term. No points — and no money — will be awarded for spilling the tea two years later when it doesn't matter any more.
Do not buy it, and, for the love of God, do not buy this asshole's book.
OPEN THREAD.
[Rolling Stone / TPM]
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TUCKER NOT MAD AT VACCINATED NEW YORK GOVERNOR, TUCKER LAUGHING AT HER!
Fine, Tucker, See You Lext Tuesday.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson was simply delirious with joy at learning that New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul was diagnosed with COVID-19 on Sunday, because it proves no one needs to be vaccinated or something. Hochul wrote on Twitter, "Thankfully, I’m vaccinated and boosted, and I’m asymptomatic. I’ll be isolating and working remotely this week."
Today I tested positive for COVID-19. Thankfully, I\u2019m vaccinated and boosted, and I\u2019m asymptomatic. I\u2019ll be isolating and working remotely this week. \n\nA reminder to all New Yorkers: get vaccinated and boosted, get tested, and stay home if you don\u2019t feel well.— Governor Kathy Hochul (@Governor Kathy Hochul) 1652034743
Tucker found it simply hilarious that, after saying she was vaxxed and boosted, Hochul called on all New Yorkers to get vaccinated and boosted, because what the hell good would that do? Like, apart from the vaccines' proven effectiveness at preventing serious illness and death.
Also too, Carlson left out the part about her being asymptomatic, which is kind of a big deal, and the point of why the vaccines are extremely effective even against a quickly changing virus.
Here's the video of Carlson being extremely weird about all of this, via Media Matters:
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has never actually been elected to the office she holds, but she has tested positive for COVID-19! Recently, right now, you know what that means. It means the vaccine works perfectly!
Again, it means the vaccine helped keep Hochul from developing serious illness, being hospitalized, or dying.
Next, Carlson read only part of Hochul's statement, leaving out the bit about being asymptomatic.
Here's the statement she released: "Thankfully I am vaccinated and boosted. Reminder to all New Yorkers, get vaccinated and boosted."
This was followed by a burst of insane Tucker Carlson laughter, which is a deeply disturbing phenomenon. But he had to cackle like that, because Kathy Hochul is completely out of her mind to believe the vaccine had anything to do with her continued good health. Maybe she accidentally brushed against a horse and got protected by dewormer, you ever think of that?
That's right, maybe she got secondhand horse pasted, and that is why she is fine.
He was disgusted, he said:
She is just reading the catechism! If that sounds like a religious ritual, well, because to Kathy Hochul the vaccine is a religion. Here she was in September.
Carlson cut to a clip of Hochul telling people that vaccines are effective, and suggesting that the Christian thing to do, to show you love others, is to get vaccinated and to urge them to do so as well, for the good of all. As if that had anything to do with the real Gospel of Jesus Christ, who wants you to keep America safe from Mexicans and to fire all the gay teachers.
"Now she's got the 'rona!" Carlson scoffed. "Looks like her stupid little cult religion didn't work. Time to pick a better god!"
Possibly that god should be orange and irrational.
Carlson then went on to point out that the White House is warning of a new COVID surge this fall, which he seems to think is a sneaky election year plot, because who doesn't love a surge of deadly infections? Kidding! He's afraid people might vote by mail, which is automatically cheating because it just is.
Then Tucker chatted with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an "infect everyone" COVID numpty from way back, who said it was very irresponsible of the White House to "warn that this is impending doom again," which of course the White House never said, and who said that America simply cannot go back to lockdowns, which is also not being considered.
Ultimately, the two agreed that the virus will just be around forever, so why bother even getting vaccinated, everything's fine, and God will sort through the bodies and send some of them to heaven, the end.
[Media Matters / Aaron Rupar on Twitter]
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