The Pantanal is on fire:

The Pantanal, a vast floodplain in South America, is among the largest wetlands in the world. The mosaic of grasslands, shrublands, forests, marshes, and lakes covers an area as large as West Virginia. It is home to thousands of species, including many that are rare and endangered, such as jaguars, giant river otters, hyacinth macaws, and giant armadillos.

Though the number of ranches and cattle pastures have increased on the plateaus that surround the Pantanal in Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia, the floodplain itself has remained mostly free of development in recent decades. But in the past few years, the Pantanal has faced a new challenge: uncontrollable fire.

The 2019 fire season (July through October) was unusually active, and a shortage of rainfall during the 2020 wet season (December through April) meant Pantanal wetlands never had a chance to recharge. That made it easier for fires to continue burning throughout the first half of the calendar year, when fire activity is typically minimal in this region. The unusually dry conditions have meant that many fires that were lit intentionally—often to maintain pastures—have been escaping and burning uncontrolled through Pantanal ecosystems.

And once such fires have started to spread rapidly and widely, they can outpace the available infrastructure for firefighters to contain or stop them.

Via Arnaud Desbiez on Facebook:

The biggest problem of Pantanal burns is the direct impact with the loss of fauna that has an ecological importance in the ecosystem.

That’s a hotel logo but it’s a powerful photo anyway.

Another Spiritual Message heard from:

A charismatic and outspoken pastor with a national following drew hundreds to a Snohomish church Wednesday to hear a spiritual message, while some embraced another message the pastor has made repeatedly in Facebook videos: He is adamantly against rules about being forced to wear a mask in public.

That’s redundant, and a thumb on the scales in favor of the “charismatic” (says who?) pastor – there are rules about wearing a mask in public, there are no “rules about being forced to wear a mask in public.” Nobody comes up to you and pins you to a wall and glues a mask to your face. There are potential fines and there is the possibility of being asked to leave, and escorted out if you refuse to leave, but there is no physical forcing people to wear masks.

While speaking to more than 2 million Facebook followers across the country, Tennessee Pastor Greg Locke admits taking bold, controversial stands on religious and political issues, and he makes it very clear — he regards wearing a mask as an insulting violation of both his religious and political expression.

More wording that makes the pastor sound more reasonable than he is. Telling people not to wear masks isn’t “bold” and it isn’t merely “controversial” and it is in no way either a religious or a political issue, it is a medical issue.

So when hundreds of people gathered to see Pastor Locke speak at The House Ministry Center near Snohomish, subtle anti-mask messages were seen emblazoned on T-shirts. Most people attending walked through the smoky haze without wearing a mask.

The smoky haze has nothing to do with it; ordinary face masks do nothing to protect us from the smoke.

One attendee, who asked not to be identified, told KIRO 7, “This is about freedom. The place is packed, there’s no social distancing, people embrace and people are not wearing masks because we believe in the freedom to worship the way we choose to worship.”

But no one is hindering their freedom to worship, or trying to hinder it. And “this” is not about freedom; it’s about not killing other people. Your mask protects other people – and their masks protect you. It’s a social contract in miniature. Your refusal to wear a mask puts other people at risk, not you. I’m not seeing the spiritual grandeur here.

Governor Inslee’s Safe Start plan indicates religious services must be at only 25% of a building’s capacity or up to 200 people, whichever is less, and everyone inside is mandated to wear a mask.

KIRO 7 learned the Snohomish County Health department called the church, and indicated a message was not returned. Snohomish County Sheriff Adam Fortney has called Gov. Jay Inslee’s stay-home order “unconstitutional” and said he would not enforce it.

Let’s have more contagion in Snohomish County. Freedomfreedomfreedom.

Oopsie.

Olivia Troye, who until recently served as Vice President Mike Pence’s top coronavirus task force adviser, slammed President Donald Trump’s pandemic response in an interview with The Washington Post and in a new video for the group Republicans Voters Against Trump.

“When we were in a task-force meeting, the president said, ‘Maybe this COVID thing is a good thing — I don’t like shaking hands with people. I don’t have to shake hands with these disgusting people,'” Troye says in the two-minute video. “Those disgusting people are the same people he claims to care about. These are the people who are still going to his rallies today, who have complete faith in who he is.”

Yebbut they don’t have huge apartments with everything shiny golden shiny, and they don’t have a melania, and they don’t have forty seventeen failing golf courses. They’re disgusting.

So now HHS is putting out disinformation under the CDC byline. That’s not cool.

A heavily criticized recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month about who should be tested for the coronavirus was not written by C.D.C. scientists and was posted to the agency’s website despite their serious objections, according to several people familiar with the matter as well as internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

The guidance said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus. It came at a time when public health experts were pushing for more testing rather than less, and administration officials told The Times that the document was a C.D.C. product and had been revised with input from the agency’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield.

And that “guidance” makes absolutely no sense. The whole point is that people can spread the virus while they are asymptomatic – they can and they do – so why in hell would the CDC say something so stupid? They wouldn’t; Trump’s HHS would, but under the CDC byline. It’s unbelievable.

But officials told The Times this week that the health department did the rewriting itself and then “dropped” it into the C.D.C.’s public website, flouting the agency’s strict scientific review process.

It should be called the death department, not the health department.

A new version of the testing guidance, expected to be posted Friday, has also not been cleared by the C.D.C.’s usual internal review for scientific documents and is being revised by officials at Health and Human Services, according to a federal official who was not authorized to speak to reporters about the matter.

Fabulous. Do more of the same. That should go well.

“The idea that someone at H.H.S. would write guidelines and have it posted under the C.D.C. banner is absolutely chilling,” said Dr. Richard Besser, who served as acting director at the Centers for Disease Control in 2009.

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the agency during the Obama administration, said, “H.H.S. and the White House writing scientifically inaccurate statements such as ‘don’t test all contacts’ on C.D.C.’s website is like someone vandalizing a national monument with graffiti.”

…

The current guidelines on testing, posted on Aug. 24, said people without symptoms “do not necessarily need a test” even if they have been in close contact with an infected person for more than 15 minutes. Public health experts roundly criticized the C.D.C. for that stance, saying it would undermine efforts to contain the virus.

These hacks. These fucking fucking Trupian hacks.

“Suggesting that asymptomatic people don’t need testing is just a prescription for community spread and further disease and death,” said Dr. Susan Bailey, president of the American Medical Association, which usually works closely with the C.D.C.

Some experts also said the recommendation appeared to be motivated by a political impetus to make the number of confirmed cases look smaller than it is.

No shit. That’s all Trump is interested in.

At a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Dr. Redfield said the agency was revising the recommendation and would post the revision, “I hope before the end of the week.” The revision was written by a C.D.C. scientist but was being edited on Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House coronavirus task force, according to a federal official familiar with the matter.

So it will say asymptomatic people don’t need to be tested even if they’ve been exposed. Genius.

Trump’s disgusting bilge about the need to force children to be fanatically PatriOtic and believe that everything we’ve ever done as a country has been perfect and heroicalistic:

Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character. We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. (Applause.)

We’re not. There is much that’s interesting about our history, and even much that’s impressive. The Bill of Rights has been an inspiration and a model for many countries shaking off tyrannical rulers or ruthless colonialists or both at once. But that doesn’t mean we’re perfect, to put it mildly, and yes the bad stuff does have to be taught. Slavery was real; the repeal of Reconstruction was real; a century of Jim Crow was real. Yes, citizens do need to understand that, because the consequences are all around us. Trump’s mindless Wee Da Best is worthy of a childish clown like him and no one else.

To grow up in America is to live in a land where anything is possible, where anyone can rise, and where any dream can come true — all because of the immortal principles our nation’s founders inscribed nearly two and a half centuries ago.

Bullshit.

On this very day in 1787, our Founding Fathers signed the Constitution at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It was the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western civilization. Our Constitution was the product of centuries of tradition, wisdom, and experience.

It would be interesting if someone asked him to expand on that point. He wouldn’t have the faintest idea. He doesn’t know what tradition, what kind of wisdom, experience of what – he knows literally nothing about it.

Yet, as we gather this afternoon, a radical movement is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance. We can’t let that happen. (Applause.) Left-wing mobs have torn down statues of our founders, desecrated our memorials, and carried out a campaign of violence and anarchy.

Founders? Not so much. Confederate generals? They’re not our “founders.” Slaveholders and slave traders? Why shouldn’t statues of them be taken down? They were put up to intimidate that class of people who had been enslaved, so why shouldn’t they be moved to museums instead of sitting in the middle of town?

The radicals burning American flags want to burn down the principles enshrined in our founding documents, including the bedrock principle of equal justice under law. In order to radically transform America, they must first cause Americans to lose confidence in who we are, where we came from, and what we believe. As I said at Mount Rushmore — which they would love to rip down and it rip it down fast, and that’s never going to happen — two months ago, the left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.

Comical to see so clearly where he interjected his own genius, isn’t it.

Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country. That is why I recently banned trainings in this prejudiced ideology from the federal government and banned it in the strongest manner possible.

How do you ban something in a particularly strong manner? Ban is ban. Does he mean he shouted at everyone while he signed the paper? Pounded the desk? Grabbed everyone by the crotch?

Under our leadership, the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant to support the development of a pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.

That’s unfortunate.

Today, I am also pleased to announce that I will soon sign an Executive Order establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education. It will be called the “1776 Commission.” (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. It will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding. Think of that — 250 years.

What about it? Too short? Too long? Half of 500? What’s his point?

Recently, I also signed an executive order to establish the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans who have ever lived.

Somebody should tell him about the National Portrait Gallery.

Politico got Trump’s script for the National Archive harangue.

“We are here today to declare that we will never submit to tyranny,” Trump plans to say, according to his prepared remarks. “We will reclaim our history, and our country, for citizens of every race, color, religion and creed.”

Every religion? What was the Muslim ban about then?

“America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal and prosperous nation in human history,” the prepared text states.

No it didn’t. The chain wasn’t unstoppable, and anyway it’s pretty rich to say the founding of a slave state set in motion the abolition of slavery. How about skipping the middle part and just abolishing slavery at the founding? Eh?

The Office of Management and Budget recently disseminated a directive to federal agencies to stop any use of “critical race theory” or “divisive, un-American propaganda training session.”

Racist rallies on the other hand are just fine; good people on both sides.

The EPA has put off an internal speaker series on environmental racism to review its compliance with the OMB memorandum, and POLITICO reported last week the Department of Education is scouring a host of internal forums, ranging from book clubs to training documents, to root out “Anti-American propaganda” in service of the White House’s directive.

BEE MOAR RACIST!

Oh please. When has Trump ever read a word of Howard Zinn? Or any historian at all? Or any book that’s not about him?

This is Stephen Miller, with Trump as the carnival barker.

That’s funny because he’s the least patriotic president we’ve ever had. He’s trashing the country for his own entertainment and enrichment. That’s not patriotism.

An “activist” called Benjamin Butterworth was on the tv yesterday saying how terrible JK Rowling is. He has an interesting history.

On Tuesday 17th September The Times published a story about parents who are raising their child as ‘gender neutral’.

September 2019 that is.

Hobbit Humphrey and Jake England-Johns are keeping the sex of their 17-month-old child a secret, even from their own family. They refer to the toddler by the pronoun “they” and plan to allow them to choose their own gender.

Journalists Sonia Poulton and Benjamin Butterworth discussed this story on Sky News. They talked about the projection of harmful gender stereotypes onto children and the conflation of sex and gender before turning to the idea that one can be born in the wrong body.

BUTTERWORTH: Of course some people are born in the wrong body.

POULTON: No, no. I have to take complete issue with that. That is a really dangerous statement.

Butterworth continued to defend the absurd claim that one can be born in the “wrong” body (so many slapstick cartoons suggest themselves).

Butterworth is at least consistent – he “identified as” black for awhile – at least long enough to fill a slot meant for a black person at a conference.

LSE students wrote an open letter to Butterworth, asking him to stand down and give his place to a black delegate. He did not.

He stopped “identifying as” black after that, but he’s cheerfully dogpiling on women who say that being a woman isn’t like putting on a coat.

If this is how we decide what is true…we have a problem.

“Trans women are women legally.”

I’m not sure I believe the law has the power to change physical reality that way. The law can define people as citizens or non-citizens, criminals or not, and other social categories like that. It can define people as children or adults, I guess – certainly there are laws that rely on the categories. But can the law just decide that men who say they are women are in fact women? Maybe it has the power to do it, but does it have the right? And do we actually have to accept the law’s definition?

“The belief that trans women are men is not a protected belief”

But it’s not a belief. The shoe is on the other foot – the belief that a man becomes a woman by saying so is a belief, while saying that a man is not a woman is not a belief, it’s just reality.

It’s quite gaslighty, this business of pretending that it’s a mere frivolous lightly-adopted belief that men are not women.

” and was considered “not worthy of respect” by the judge in the Forstater case.”

Even a judge doesn’t get to tell us we have to stop knowing that men are not women. We do know that men are not women, and we couldn’t stop knowing it if we tried. We could pretend, we could lie and bullshit and flatter, but that’s the utmost that is possible. Given that some of us think lying and bullshitting are bad, we’re not very motivated to make the attempt.

House Whip Jim Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, is not impressed by Barr’s claim that pandemic restrictions are second only to slavery as a violation of rights.

That statement by Mister Barr was one of the most ridiculous, tone-deaf, godawful things I’ve ever heard. It is incredible the chief law enforcement officer in this country would equate human bondage to expert advice to save lives. Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives. This pandemic is a threat to human life, and the experts, the medical experts, the scientists are telling us what it takes to respond successfully to this pandemic. And if this administration – this godawful duo of Trump and Barr – were going about the business of doing what is necessary to protect the people of this great country, we would be beyond this pandemic by now.

Now let’s tie together Barr and the Trump admin attacks on reasonable pandemic precautions and scientific advice in general into one smelly package:

Attorney General William Barr argued Wednesday that coronavirus-related lockdown orders were surpassed only by slavery as the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties” in the nation’s history.

Oh yes. Certainly. The internment of Americans of Japanese descent in 1942 was as nothing compared to health measures during a lethal pandemic. The Trail of Tears? Pff, a walk in the park. Mass incarceration? Three strikes laws? HUAC? The Espionage Act of 1917? The Sedition Act of 1918? All mere vapor compared to inconvenient emergency health measures.

The remarks from the attorney general came during an event hosted by Hillsdale College, where Barr delivered a speech defending his intervention in high-profile Justice Department cases and comparing career prosecutors to preschoolers.

“You know, putting a national lockdown, stay-at-home orders, is like house arrest. It’s — you know, other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,” Barr said during a question-and-answer session following his remarks.

Very cogent, except for the fact that it’s not like house arrest, because we are allowed to shop for necessities and go out for exercise and the like. We’re urged to stay home as much as possible and we’re told (in some jurisdictions) to social distance, but we’re not under house arrest. People in actual quarantine are, but the rest of us aren’t. I daresay Barr knows that perfectly well.

At one point, Barr seemingly suggested that the federal response to the pandemic should be guided by politicians and elected officials rather than medical experts and the broader scientific community.

“The person in the white coat is not the ‘grand seer’ who can come up with a right decision for society. A free people makes its decision through its elected representative,” he said.

That’s just great – feeding the idiotic fanatical hostility to medical expertise we’re already dealing with. Barr is such scum.

I don’t know how I managed to miss this yesterday – Caputo is taking a two month “leave of absence”…i.e. he’s been told to stfu and take a break until after the election. Alexander is out altogether.

The video is hilarious given the knowledge that he’s been told to fuck right off. If I’d watched it not knowing that it wouldn’t have been funny at all.

Just to refresh our memories (or maybe just mine – I find Caputo and Alexander very forgettable somehow), NPR on Caputo two days ago, so the day before he “went on leave”:

According to a report in Politico last week, Caputo and other officials tried to block or amend CDC reports, including the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, to make them appear more favorable to President Trump.

Caputo is a longtime political operative who worked on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He also recently published a book titled The Ukraine Hoax: How Decades of Corruption in the Former Soviet Republic Led to Trump’s Phony Impeachment.

A political operative. Not the right kind of job experience for a public health spokes.

Anyway he’s off on his hols and with any luck he won’t be back because Trump will be too busy packing his bags.

More from Barr:

Attorney General William P. Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who had committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition, according to two people familiar with the call.

The highly unusual suggestion to charge people with insurrection against lawful authority alarmed some on the call, which included U.S. attorneys around the country, said the people, who described Mr. Barr’s comments on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The attorney general has also asked prosecutors in the Justice Department’s civil rights division to explore whether they could bring criminal charges against Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for allowing some residents to establish a police-free protest zone near the city’s downtown for weeks this summer, according to two people briefed on those discussions.

A DoJ spokesperson denies it.

The directives are in keeping with Mr. Barr’s approach to prosecute crimes as aggressively as possible in cities where protests have given way to violence. But in suggesting possible prosecution of Ms. Durkan, a Democrat, Mr. Barr also took aim at an elected official whom President Trump has repeatedly attacked.

And a woman, and the mayor of a city on the Left Coast, and yadda yadda. Meanwhile Trump’s constant stream of crimes continues uninterrupted.

The disclosures came as Mr. Barr directly inserted himself into the presidential race in recent days to warn that the United States would be on the brink of destruction if Mr. Trump lost. He told a Chicago Tribune columnist that the nation could find itself “irrevocably committed to the socialist path” if Mr. Trump lost and that the country faced “a clear fork in the road.”

Oh ffs. Socialism! Biden is nowhere near a socialist; he’s a very conservative Democrat. Trump is far more of a literal fascist than Biden is a literal socialist. Plus Trump is an actual criminal, who is committing crimes now, right in front of us, as we watch slack-jawed; none of that is true of Biden.

The attorney general’s question about whether Ms. Durkan, the former U.S. attorney in Seattle, had violated any federal statutes by allowing the protest zone was highly unusual, former law enforcement officials said.

“The attorney general seems personally, deeply offended by the autonomous zone and wants someone to pay for it,” said Chuck Rosenberg, the former U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. “If the people of Seattle are personally offended, they have political recourse. There is no reason to try to stretch a criminal statute to cover the conduct.”

Meanwhile about that whole far-right thing…

Two men associated with the Boogaloo, a far-right movement that supports the coming of a second civil war, were arrested on terrorism-related charges last week. Prosecutors said they used the protests as cover to try to sell weapons to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which the United States and other countries consider a terrorist group, and to use the money to support the Boogaloo movement.

But the real terrorist is…Jenny Durkan?

Trump’s consigliere is trashing the prosecutors who work for the Justice Department.

In scathing remarks criticizing his own staff, Attorney General William Barr said Wednesday that the Justice Department has recently acted “more like a trade association for federal prosecutors than the administrator of a fair system of justice” and equated some prosecutors to preschoolers and “headhunters.”

Too much deference is given to career prosecutors, rather than to politically appointed leaders who can be held accountable at the ballot box, he said in remarks that are likely to further strain relations between Barr and some of the Justice Department’s career prosecutors.

Ya think???

Barr did not mention any specific cases, but he has been criticized by current and former government lawyers for moving to abandon the prosecution of President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and seeking a less harsh sentence for Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign adviser. Career Justice Department lawyers quit the prosecution teams in both cases.

In other words Barr, who is supposed to be the Attorney General, is a corrupt conscienceless political hack who is working to prop up Trump rather than doing his real job.

“Name one successful organization where the lowest-level employees’ decisions are deemed sacrosanct,” he said. “There aren’t any. Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it’s no way to run a federal agency.”

That’s just horseshit. What Barr is doing is meddling with federal cases to help Trump’s criminal allies and criminal Trump himself; he’s not doing disinterested apolitical quality control of the Justice Department.

Involuntary hysterectomies…why does that sound so familiar…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democrats demanded an investigation on Tuesday into claims by a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Georgia that detainees there have been denied basic medical care and possibly subjected to hysterectomies without their informed consent.

Dawn Wooten, a registered nurse who worked full-time at the Irwin County Detention Center until July, outlined her allegations in a complaint filed on Monday to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General by a coalition of advocacy groups.

“If true, the appalling conditions described in the whistleblower complaint – including allegations of mass hysterectomies being performed on vulnerable immigrant women – are a staggering abuse of human rights,” Pelosi said in a statement. “The DHS Inspector General must immediately investigate the allegations detailed in this complaint.”

Now why would ICE be doing mass hysterectomies? Trying their hand at eugenics are they?

In her complaint, Wooten said that she and other nurses had noticed female detainees getting hysterectomies at an improbable rate, and worried that the women didn’t understand what procedure they were receiving, as most medical staff members don’t speak Spanish.

…

LaSalle Corrections, the Louisiana-based company that runs Irwin, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The firm faced similar complaints about coronavirus safety at another facility it runs in Louisiana in July, which a company official denied in later congressional testimony.

It’s ludicrous and revolting that we use for-profit companies to imprison (and control and perhaps sterilize refugees and immigrants).

Wooten says there was widespread disregard for protecting staff members and inmates [from COVID] at the Georgia facility. The nurse worked at Irwin for three years over the course of separate stints, she told the Intercept, but was demoted in July to an on-call position with few hours — retaliation, she claims, for demanding stricter adherence to medical rules.

…

The 27-page complaint filed Monday details a laundry list of alleged failures at the facility: detainees being ignored or denied tests despite having coronavirus symptoms; others who have tested positive being placed back in the general population; and officials fudging statics on the number of infections.

Staff members, Wooten said, were pressured to “work symptomatic and work positive as long as we had a mask on.” Although ICE purchased two $14,000 rapid-test machines, she said, no nurses were ever trained to use them.

Detainees interviewed for the report said that social distancing was impossible and that everyone was given just one mask and no replacement.

…

Although ICE has reported just 42 cases and no deaths from covid-19 at Irwin, Wooten alleged that those numbers are not accurate because officials have not been “reporting all these cases that are positive.”

In general, Wooten outlined a failed medical system at the facility. Nurses there routinely destroyed the paper requests detainees have to fill out to ask for medical help and made up vital signs for reports after not seeing patients, she alleged.

Well look at it from their point of view: they have to make a profit.

This sucks.

Biologists in New Mexico have sounded the alarm after thousands of song birds were found dead in recent days.

New Mexico State University Professor Martha Desmond told local media that the reason for the mass die off is a mystery but could be tied to smoke from wildfires, or the recent cold weather.

She says the number could be in the millions.

Scientists have reported North American bird populations have declined massively in recent years.

I know that swallows used to be abundant around here and now I very rarely see them. Barn swallows and violet greens, both, have all but disappeared from Seattle.

Some birds – including migratory warblers, swallows and bluebirds – were seen acting strangely before their deaths, according to witnesses.

“It’s devastating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything this horrible in my life,” Prof Desmond, who works for the university’s department of fish, wildlife, and conservation ecology, told KRQE-TV.

“When you’re there, you know, picking them up off the ground and seeing the extent of it and then looking at all these carcasses come in,” she continued.

Via Birding New Mexico:

New Mexico residents are finding dead birds throughout the state, both migrant and resident songbirds like these Western Bluebirds. Ben Bauer (Jemez WL technician) found 12 dead Western Bluebirds Soda Dam in Jemez springs (9/10/2020). He witnessed some that were still alive in a little cave (see the picture) huddled together. He also mentioned that some of the birds were actually in the warm water that is at Soda Dam.

US Forest Service personnel are surprised at the adult birds that have died. Some of these species are year round residents and are accustomed to such weather.

The recent storm was record breaking – the precipitation we received in Jemez was very wet -heavy snow (only like ½ inch above 7,500 ft.) and maybe their plumage had not yet developed for winter weather. Another theory is that the fires raging in other states may have released toxins.

Another day another lies conference:

Donald Trump started off the press conference by doubling down on his assertion that there will be “a hundred million vaccine doses by the end of 2020”. He said that vaccines should be ready by “mid-October”.

Trump criticized Joe Biden for spreading “anti-vaccine theories” by saying that Trump is trying to politicize a vaccine by rushing its development before the election. potentially foregoing safety precautions.

“They’re recklessly endangering lives,” Trump said, saying that if Democrats were in the same position, the would be saying how important vaccines are.

It’s not anti-vax to say Trump is making bullshit promises because he wants to win the election. Quite the contrary – a pretend vaccine is no use to anyone.

It’s of course important to remember that health experts have reiterated that a vaccine on Trump’s timeline is highly unlikely.

And that Trump lies more easily than he does almost anything else.

But no, other people are “confused” says the genius.

…a reporter asked the president why he said a vaccine would be available by mid-October when Redfield told a Senate panel today that a vaccine would likely be available in the “second or third quarter” of 2021 at the earliest.

“I think he made a mistake with that statement,” Trump said. “When he said it, I believe he was confused. I’m just telling you we’re ready to go.”

Aka he’s just lying.

He makes reckless claims – he’s not very good at thinking about how such claims could backfire on him.

Trump, continuing to contradict what Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield said earlier today, just said at a press conference that “under no circumstance would [the vaccine] be as late as the doctor said.”

He can’t know that. Sensible people don’t make absolute claims like that, because they know it’s reckless.

Donnie Pinhead is also saying Redfield is wrong to say masks are important.

Trump again contradicted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield once again, saying that Redfield “made a mistake” when he said that masks are “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.”

“I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine,” Redfield told a Senate panel Wednesday.

Trump said that a vaccine will be more effective as masks have to be “handled very gently, very carefully”. Trump said that he has seen people at restaurants not being careful with their masks.

And that’s why he does campaign events where very few people wear masks at all. Ok.

In one bit of good news (a scarce item these days), Navalny is doing better.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Nalvany plans to return to Russia, according to his spokesperson. He was recently poisoned with a nerve agent and has been undergoing treatment at a German hospital for more than three weeks.

“It’s puzzling to me why anyone should think otherwise,” Navalny spokesperson Kira Yarmysh tweeted.

Fair point. Since Putin can poison him outside Russia as easily as inside, staying out of Russia would be futile.

Nalvany took to Instagram Tuesday to post a photo with his wife and children from his hospital bed — the first photo of him publicly released since he was admitted to the hospital.

“Hi, this is Nalvany. I miss you,” he wrote in his post, according a Bloomberg translation. “I still can’t do practically anything. But yesterday I breathed on my own for the whole day. All by myself. No outside help, even didn’t use this valve in my throat.”

The new Jesus and Mo:

And the ones who have to submit? Not the fantasists, but the people who retain their grip on reality. It’s only fair, right?

The J and M Patreon

It’s the herd mentality you see, it will save us.

President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday during a televised town hall that “herd mentality” could make the coronavirus “disappear” with or without a vaccine.

During a 90-minute town hall hosted by ABC News in the must win battleground of Pennsylvania, Trump defended his repeated assertion that the virus will eventually disappear even without a vaccine, citing what he called “herd mentality”…

Herd immunity, dipshit.

ABC News’ Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Trump whether the coronavirus “would go away without the vaccine?”

“Sure, over a period of time. Sure, with time it goes away –” Trump responded.

Stephanopoulos interjected: “–And many deaths.”

“And you’ll develop, you’ll develop herd — like a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd developed – and that’s going to happen. That will all happen,” Trump said.

He knows more about it than anyone.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, who is the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, has said the “death toll would be enormous” if the country attempted herd immunity.

Yeah yeah yeah, whatever, but you get your herd mentality and then you can have football and crowds again.