DL Open Thread: Thursday, January 11, 2024

“Anyone Who Is Unwilling To Say Trump Is Unfit To Be President Of The United States Is Unfit Themselves To Be President Of The United States.”  That soundbite from Chris Christie during his announced withdrawal from the presidential race should be aired relentlessly between now and November.  Not even Biden’s advisors can screw this up, can they?

Not Even Christian Dominionist Mike Johnson Can Be Spared The Wrath Of The MAGAts.  Begs them to stop being mean to him on social media.  Remind you of anything?  Like this?:

The difference being, Chris Crocker was right.  Mike Johnson deserves no such absolution.  Don’t leave him alone!

One Major Reason To Stick With Tap Water:

At this point, it’s common knowledge that bottled water contains microplastics—fragments of the insidious material that can be as small as a bacterial cell. But the problem is much worse than previously known: It turns out that bottled water harbors hundreds of thousands of even tinier pieces of the stuff.

A paper published Monday used a novel technique to analyze one-liter samples of bottled water for plastic granules, going down to just 50 to 100 nanometers in length—roughly the width of a virus. They found nearly a quarter-million of these tiny particles per liter, about 10 to 100 times more than previously published estimates.

What’s more, the researchers were able to differentiate between types of nanoplastic. To their surprise, most of the particles were not polyethylene terephthalate, or PET—the material most water bottles are made of. Rather, they found more particles of polyamide (a type of nylon) and polystyrene, suggesting that the pollutants are, in a bit of irony, getting into bottled water as a result of the filling and purification process. 

Nylon, eh? “Better Living Through Forever Chemicals”.  Just thought you’d like to know…

Texas:  ‘We Kill Varmints Dead At The Border’.  Just like people caught in their barbed wire fences:

Internal US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) memos obtained by an environmental group reveal that government scientists found scores of burnt animals against a mile-long stretch of the border wall last August, after a wildfire in the Lower Rio Grande Valley national wildlife refuge, a federally protected area.

“This horrifying account of animals being burnt alive while trapped by the border wall is just the latest proof that border barriers are deathtraps for wildlife … We are fearful that this will only become a more common story as climate change progresses,” said Laiken Jordahl, south-west conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, who obtained the FWS memos.

An interlude:

Might as well close out this thread on yet another, more obvious, musical note:

What do yoo-woo-oo-woo-oo want to talk about?