https://youtu.be/125vCeD9yao

The Texas Tribune’s Patrick Svitek reports former State Rep Matt Rinaldi wins the race to replace former Texas Republican Party chairmaniac Allen West in the first round of voting.

Donald Trump won a commanding 70% of the votes cast in the CPAC straw poll for the 2024 favorite to get the GOP nomination for president, taken during the group’s second conference this year.

Republican governor Ron DeSantis came in second with 21% of the vote.  No other person garnered more than 1% of the vote.

If Trump is taken off the ballot, DeSantis takes 68% of the vote, with Mike Pompeo finishing second with 5% and Donald Trump, Jr. third with 4%, according to PatriotTakes.

In the last essay in this series, there was a list of the four stages of the ego-maintenance process. Those four stages are:

1. The initial stress
2. The perception of failure
3. Introduction of the agitator
4. Reinforcement

Temperatures in Death Valley, California could reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit for the second time in three days on Sunday afternoon as the Western United States struggles once again with excessively high heat, NBC News reports.

The highest temperature recorded on the Earth’s surface was 134 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley.  The current heat dome hovering over the western states continues to produce record highs.  Las Vegas recorded their all-time high temperature of 117 degrees on Saturday, and Utah saw its state record fall when St. George, Utah also reached 117 degrees.

Nights have provided little relief:  Las Vegas missed its highest daily low temperature by one degree when temperatures dropped to a low of 94 degrees Sunday morning. 

A Michigan man preparing his backyard for some renovations made a striking discovery:  158 bowling balls set in the concrete that made up his back patio, Michigan Live reports.

David Olson of Norton Shores was breaking up concrete steps that led to his back door when found the first ball.  Sparing no effort, he continued to dig around the yard, uncovering 158 balls, most of which were unpolished and without finger holes.  They were all stamped with the Brunswick brand.

Brunswick ran a bowling ball manufacturing plant in nearby Muskegon.  Looking for some background on the find, Olson contacted Kirk Bunke, site manager at the Muskegon Heritage Museum, who found the host of bowling balls right up his alley.  Bunke had heard that the factory would let workers take irregular or rejected bowling balls from the factory, and worker would use them as fill in landscaping projects.

“We talk about rewriting history.  Let’s talk about rewriting history,” Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem says moments before rewriting history.  “How about Republican governors in this country pretending that they didn’t shut down their states, that they didn’t close their beaches, that they didn’t mandate masks, that they didn’t [inaudible] shelter in place.  Now I’m not pickin’ fights with Republican governors.  All I’m sayin’ is that we need leaders with grit, that their first instinct is to make the right decision.  That they don’t backtrack and then try to fool you that they never made the wrong decision.”

It’s true.  We need leaders who will make the right decisions, unlike Noem:  South Dakota has the third highest coronavirus infection rate in the nation and the 10th highest fatality rate from coronavirus.

Hundreds of Texans signed up to voice their opinions–some in favoring, but most opposing–on Saturday on legislation Texas Republicans are promoting that would severely reduce the ability of voters to cast ballots by early voting, mail in or absentee voting, but they were required to wait more than 17 hours, with public testimony started at 1:50 a.m. Sunday morning.

The Texas Tribune reports that 295 people had signed up to address the state house Elections Committee, headed by Republican Briscoe Cain, who was earlier in the year embarrassed on the house floor when he admitted that he did not know the racists origins of language he used in the bill.

Initially, 484 people signed in to testify at the house committee hearing:  407 opposing the legislation, 65 supporting it and 12 neutral.  By the time the public comment section rolled around, about 40% of those who had signed in had left.

On July 9th Alan Dershowitz published an editorial defending the “Former Guy’s” lawsuit against big tech companies and the arguments are so incredibly stupid that it makes you think Trump must have some really serious dirt on Dershowitz. For a former Harvard Law Professor to repeatedly debase himself like this, and present such ridiculous arguments, you just can’t help but wonder what that “dirt” happens to be. This editorial will be a brief dismantling of Dershowitz’ ridiculous claims.

The trial prospects for domestic terrorist Kyle Rittenhouse are looking increasingly bleak as his current lawyer just filed a defense argument that is filled with a ridiculous amount of speculation, his former lawyer is currently involved in a morass of childish in-fighting over Rittenhouse’s attempt to get gullible conservatives to donate to his legal defense, and his lawyer/media consultant Lin Wood is facing a steadily mounting series of his own troubles, including the possibility of disbarment, and a requirement that he submit for a psychological evaluation. Rittenhouse has also weakened his own case by being seen hanging out with members of the group “The Proud Boys”, whose members participated in the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol building. Associating with a group that’s been labeled as a terrorist group in Canada (and which would likely suffer the same label in the US if it weren’t for GOP obstruction) is just one more strike against him. It’s likely that Rittenhouse will be spending many years of his life in state and Federal prison.

The heat wave hitting North America is shooting temperatures to historic highs, including the killing off of clams and mussels that are literally cooking in their shells on the beaches of British Columbia, Canada, CNN reports.

Christopher Harley, a professor in the zoology department at The University of British Columbia, found dozens of bivalves with their shells cracked open, signalling that the creature inside is dead.

“I could smell that beach before I got to it, because there was already a lot of dead animals from the previous day, which was not the hottest of three,” he said. “I started having a look around just on my local beach and thought, ‘Oh, this, this can’t be good.'”

The Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium has advised nearly 200 campers who slept overnight in the zoo’s aquarium since July 4th get rabies shots after a wild bat with rabies was found flying around the building, NBC News reports.

The Nebraska Department of Health recommended the 186 overnight guests and some staff members to get the rabies shots as a precaution after seven wild brown bats were found in aquarium building that housed the campers.  One woman awoke in the middle of the night to find a bat buzzing around her head.

The zoo caught and destroyed the bats; a necropsy found one was infected with rabies.

“The bats we identified were little brown bats, a common bat species in Nebraska that anyone could find in their backyard or attic,” Animal Health Director Dr. Sarah Woodhouse said. “It is not unusual for a wild bat to be infected with rabies, which is why you should never directly touch a wild bat.”

(… reportedly …)

The apparent burner Twitter account for Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (Q-Rifle) has reportedly been identified due to her need to seek revenge on a website run by a foe of hers.

Toby Morton runs the anti-Boebert website TheLaurenBoebert.com.  He was taking some footage for the website outside Boebert’s Rifle, Colorado bar (which has given multiple people cases of food poisoning) when Boebert showed up taking video.  So what did Morton do?  He shot video of Boebert shooting video.

Somehow, the video Boebert shot was uploaded to a little used Twitter account with the account name “freedomfighter,” the first account to upload the video from Boebert’s perspective.  “freedomfighter” follows Donald Trump’s POTUS account, Matt Gaetz, Kevin McCarthy and a number of other conservative accounts.  And she follows Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s account (which explains how Boebert responds to AOC’s tweets so quickly when she doesn’t follow AOC on her official accounts). 

Former Trump White House director of strategic communication Mercedes Schlapp with her husband, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp, on a panel titled “Columbus, the Constitution, & the Consecrated: The Left’s Destruction of History & Holiness”, per the CPAC 2021 Texas agenda.

It’s far from unheard of in academic contexts to use a writer’s name synonymously with their body of work and its impact in the present discourse, whether they are deceased or not. Like you could say “Voltaire is friggin hilarious” and no one who knows who Voltaire is and what era he hailed from would be under the impression you believe he is still alive.

CPAC is not an academic context, and as such it’s fairly certain that this dumb harridan Schlapp thinks Karl Marx is a late-Gen X or early millennial-aged pro-Critical Race Theory Substacker with a couple hundred thousand premium subscribers. The only words of a sentence that begins with “Karl Marx has been pushing…” should end with are “…daisies for 138 years now”.

“Clearly they were hoping, the government was hoping, that they could sort of sucker 90% to get vaccinated and, and it, and it, it isn’t happening.  There, there, there’s a– young, younger people are well aware of what the risks really are and they’re well aware of the side effects of the vaccine.”

Spotted in front of a residence on Pennsylvania State Route 611 in Tannersville, Pennsylvania by National Zero’s New York City bureau chief on Saturday. Unclear is why the MAGA hatter did not make the removal of the Vice Former Guy more subtle by using a shade of paint closer to the blue background of the sign or – better yet – place a large American Flag sticker over his name. Then again maybe it’s obvious on purpose, as a Trump fan still displaying a sign nearly six months after the Orange Pharaoh left office in disgrace would also likely consider Mike Pence dead to him.

Solar-fresnel energy and desalination plants appear to be a technology whose time has come as the state of California reaches record high temperatures. The technology behind such plants is incredibly simple: ocean water is pumped into shallow pools inside of chambers whose roofs consist of solar fresnels. The fresnels concentrate sunlight onto the pools, raising the temperature to in excess of 212 degrees fahrenheit, causing the water to boil rapidly. Steam pressure forces the steam into uptake pipes where it then drives low-speed steam piston driven engines, which convert the heat and steam pressure to mechanical energy to turn generators and create electricity.

“The Miami-Dade County Courthouse will begin undergoing repairs immediately because of safety concerns found during a review prompted by the deadly collapse of a nearby condominium building,” the AP reports. “An engineering firm that examined the 28-story courthouse recommended that it undergo immediate structural repairs and that floors 16 and above be closed.”