I love LA
by digby
Two “Russian soldiers” are now guarding the destroyed Donald Trump Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame:
"what digby sez..."
Month: July 2018
Retreat from democracy
by Tom Sullivan
That hand is white and most likely male.
Talking Points Memo with the help of the American Federation of Teachers is posting a 10-part series on the state of democracy in America. Grab a cup of coffee and a bagel and settle in. Parts 1 and 2 are online now at TPM.
We are losing ground. I have long noticed that Republican friends enjoy reminding us the United States is not a democracy. It is a republic, they say with pedantic smile. For some reason, Republicans just like the sound of “a republic” better than “a democracy.” But secondly, many simply don’t like the entire concept of democracy. For all their public reverence for the U.S. Constitution, many of our fellows break faith with it after choking on the first three words in its preamble.
At the signing of the Treaty of Paris, there were an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 loyalists among just over 3 million people living in the new United States (including a large population of slaves). Democracy American-style was foreign to them, yet only a small percent left the country. Loyalists were acculturated to belief in government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. It was not just a reflection of political philosophy, but of personality type. Their progeny are still with us.
“In many ways, today’s battles over voter ID, felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering and more are simply a continuation of a struggle that has been going for more than two centuries,” Josh Marshall writes, “with a clear line of continuity stretching through the battle for voting rights in the Civil Rights Era South.”
Since the nation’s founding, the slow, unsteady expansion of the franchise has always come with consternation from those with power when faced with sharing it.
In part 2 of the Retreat from Democracy series, Gregory Downs, Professor of History at University of California, Davis, reminds readers that the notion of democracy did not come naturally as we may think:
For white men, the United States became a democracy by degrees, not by design, and it showed in the chaotic voting systems. While colonial Americans cast beans, peas, and corn into containers or called their vote aloud, in the 1800s most men either wrote the candidate’s name on a blank sheet of paper or turned in a ballot helpfully printed for them by the local political party or newspaper. Outside of Massachusetts, almost no one registered to vote. Even if someone challenged a man’s age or residency, there often was no way to prove it. Voting ran by routine, not regulation.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, waves of new immigrants challenged the notion of universal suffrage (that was never universal). Then came the Civil War. In its wake, freed African-American men and war veterans registered to vote in droves. “By the fall of 1867, more than 80 percent of eligible African-American men had registered,” Downs writes. “During the subsequent elections, at least 75 percent of black men turned out to vote in five Southern states.”
Then came the backlash. In Alabama, a series of “reforms” resulted in voter rolls shrinking dramatically. But, Downs writes, Republicans who sought protection for black Southern voters enacted new rules meant to keep immigrants from participation in Northern elections:
When Americans treat voter disfranchisement as a regional, racial exception, they sustain their faith that the true national story is one of progressive expansion of voter rights. But turn-of-the-20th-century disfranchisement was not a regional or a racial story; it was a national one. Even though rebels perfected the art of excluding voters, it was yankees who developed the script. During the 1901 convention, Alabama delegates circulated copies of Massachusetts’ voting laws with the Bay State’s grandfather clause, literacy test, registration requirement, and secret ballots, all intended to make voting more difficult for immigrants. These Massachusetts laws worked, if not quite as well as they did in Alabama; voter turnout fell from 55 to 41 percent.
Today we face another backlash. In response to demographic and cultural changes and to the election of the country’s first black president, states have erected voting barriers aimed to stop the young, the poor, and racial minorities.
Downs discusses his installment in the series with Josh Marshall in a TPM podcast.
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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
Saturday Night at the Movies
Nursery crimes: Three Identical Strangers (***½)
By Dennis Hartley
From whence it follows, that one thing cannot have two beginnings of existence, nor two things one beginning; it being impossible for two things of the same kind to be or exist in the same instant, in the very same place; or one or the same thing in different places.
-John Locke, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
It’s a well-known secret that Elvis Presley had a stillborn twin brother. As biographers have noted, Jesse Garon Presley nonetheless remained “with” Elvis until his own death 42 years later. Family and friends recounted that during times of stress or bouts of depression, it was not unusual for him to have long conversations with his “missing half.”
There is at least one inarguable bond between multiple birth siblings. First and foremost, there is an empirically evident biological closeness, particularly with identical siblings, who literally come from the same zygote and thereby share 100% of its genetic material.
However, once you push beyond obvious similarities like physical resemblance and shared mannerisms, you quickly enter the realm of the theoretical. For example, do some (like Elvis) have a kind of unbreakable “psychic” connection from the womb until death? Are some “pre-programmed” by nature to share the same likes, dislikes, aesthetic taste, etc.-even after they’ve left the nest and gone their separate ways to live their adult lives?
Consider the long strange trip undertaken by Robert Shafran, Edward Galland, and David Kellman, three young men who grew up in separate families within the same 100-mile radius yet were blissfully unaware up until the age of 19 that they were identical triplets.
As recalled by one of the brothers in British filmmaker Tim Wardle’s mind-blowing documentary Three Identical Strangers, it was initially a case of random chance back in 1980 that led him to discover that he had a twin brother. However, the “twins” would not be such for very long; once the media picked up on this irresistible human-interest story, it was but days before kismet put the cap on a perfect hat trick: for then there were three.
The triplets were given up at birth in 1961 by their single mother. Separated immediately, they were placed with three families through the auspices of a New York City adoption agency. While it is not unusual for the identity of the biological parents to be withheld, it was somewhat unusual in this case that (for reasons unveiled as the film unfolds) even the three sets of adoptive parents were not told that their respective adoptees had siblings.
Interestingly, the families the three were placed with were socioeconomically disparate to a fault: one blue collar, one middle class, and the other well-moneyed. Even more remarkable then that the 19-year-old triplets not only bonded so quickly but discovered that they had grown up sharing many of the same predilections; ranging from a love of wrestling, smoking Marlboro cigarettes, and being attracted to the same type of woman.
Blessed with strapping good looks and exuding enough positive, goofy energy to power a small city whenever they were in the same room together, it’s hardly surprising that they became instant media darlings (archival footage demonstrates them effortlessly working their charm offensive on Tom Brokaw, Phil Donahue and Paula Zahn). They were not shy about cashing in on their celebrity; they moved into a N.Y.C. apartment together, eventually opened a SoHo restaurant (“Triplets”) and were feted by the likes of Madonna (who landed them a cameo in Susan Seidelman’s 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan). Each bro found the love of his life, adding “happily married” to their collective fairy tale.
Their story could’ve (should’ve?) ended there; a perennial feel-good 6 o’clock news kicker if you ever heard one. But that would be assuming that we don’t live in a cruel, unfeeling universe that can randomly taketh away…as casually as it can randomly giveth.
Here’s where my review potentially becomes…complicated. I could tell you what happens next, but then, I’d have to kill you. And I don’t even have your address. Besides, I am a man of peace and don’t own a firearm, so it’s an ineffectual, empty threat…at best.
So here’s what I will do for you. If you have no plans to see this film, just go ahead and Google the story (it’s a doozey). But, if you do plan to, and you enjoy documentaries that unfold deliberately, like the best riveting conspiracy thrillers do, chock full of unexpected twists and turns, I’d recommend that (like me) you go in completely “cold”. Granted, some of those deeper questions vis a vis “psychic connections” and such between identical siblings are not answered, but Wardle’s film does have a lot to say about “nature vs. nurture”, scientific ethics, celebrity culture, and the unshakable bonds of familial love.
Previous posts with related themes:
More reviews at Den of Cinema
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—Dennis Hartley
One way to disrupt the election would be …
by digby
… to take down the electrical grid on election day. Not that that’s what they’re talking about here. And this could be a little bit of hysteria, too. Still, it’s worth being aware of since it has been done before:
State-sponsored Russian hackers appear far more interested this year in demonstrating that they can disrupt the American electric utility grid than the midterm elections, according to United States intelligence officials and technology company executives.
Despite attempts to infiltrate the online accounts of two Senate Democrats up for re-election, intelligence officials said they have seen little activity by Russian military hackers aimed at either major American political figures or state voter registration systems.
By comparison, according to intelligence officials and executives of the companies that oversee the world’s computer networks, there is surprisingly far more effort directed at implanting malware in the electrical grid.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence findings, but their conclusions were confirmed by several executives of technology and technology security firms.
This week, the Department of Homeland Security reported that over the last year, Russia’s military intelligence agency had infiltrated the control rooms of power plants across the United States. In theory, that could enable it to take control of parts of the grid by remote control.
While the department cited “hundreds of victims” of the attacks, far more than they had previously acknowledged, there is no evidence that the hackers tried to take over the plants, as Russian actors did in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016.
I sure am glad we have the Trump crew in charge.
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The GOP moderates are not amused
by digby
Democracy Corps did some focus groups with GOP moderates. They do not like Donald Trump. Not one bit. Granted, there aren’t a lot of them compared with the right wing extremist white nationalist faction of the party. But they could be decisive:
Democracy Corps just completed focus groups with key segments of the Republican Party. They confirm very clearly that Donald Trump riling up his Tea Party and Evangelical base both fuels the Democratic resistance and pushes away many in the GOP. Trump’s base strategy is especially disillusioning for the GOP moderates who are one-quarter of the Republican base. The same is true for nearly half of the secular conservative Republicans who are roughly one-fifth of the Republican base and the subject of our next focus group report to be released.
You can read the whole report here. It shows that there still exist some people who call themselves Republican and aren’t completely batshit insane.
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The long super-hot summer
by digby
There is so much about this era that’s awful. And maybe we’ll all come out of it politically stronger. But having a moronic demagogue in the White House backed by a craven party of cowards in the congress which denies that any of this is happening and degrading science in general, could be catastrophic:
In the town of Sodankyla, Finland, the thermometer on July 17 registered a record-breaking 90 degrees, a remarkable figure given that Sodankyla is 59 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a region known for winter snowmobiling and an abundance of reindeer.
This is a hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet.
Greece is in mourning after scorching heat and high winds fueled wildfires that have killed more than 80 people. Japan recorded its highest temperature in history, 106 degrees, in a heat wave that killed 65 people in a week and hospitalized 22,000, shortly after catastrophic flooding killed 200.
Ouargla, Algeria, hit 124 degrees on July 5, a likely record for the continent of Africa. And the 109-degree reading in Quriyat, Oman, on June 28 amazed meteorologists because that wasn’t the day’s high temperature. That was the low . It was the hottest low temperature ever recorded on Earth.
Montreal hit 98 degrees on July 2, its warmest temperature ever measured. Canadian health officials estimate as many as 70 people died in that heat wave.
In the United States, 35 weather stations in the past month have set new marks for warm overnight temperatures. Southern California has had record heat and widespread power outages. In Yosemite Valley, which is imperiled by wildfires, park rangers have told everyone to flee.
And it’s not a random coincidence:
The brutal weather has been supercharged by human-induced climate change, scientists say. Climate models for three decades have predicted exactly what the world is seeing this summer.
And they predict that it will get hotter — and that what is a record today could someday be the norm.
“The old records belong to a world that no longer exists,” said Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It’s not just heat. A warming world is prone to multiple types of extreme weather — heavier downpours, stronger hurricanes, longer droughts.
“You see roads melting, airplanes not being able to take off, there’s not enough water,” said Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. “Climate change hits us at our Achilles’ heel. In the Southwest, it’s water availability. On the Gulf Coast, it’s hurricanes. In the East, it’s flooding. It’s exacerbating the risks we already face today.”
Those Chinese hoaxters sure are talented.
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Scary unstable simpleton
by digby
It isn’t possible to reliably diagnose any individual from a distance, but it is reasonable to flag clear, observable signs of impairment and to make inferences based on repetitive patterns of behavior. There is a significant difference between diagnosing a specific disorder and analyzing the meaning of the qualities Trump exhibits, such as paranoia, grandiosity, lack of empathy and pathological deceit. Trump’s behavior, we believe, is the predictable outgrowth of this psychological disposition, exacerbated by the stress of the intensifying criminal investigations he faces.
Our assessment is based on descriptions from those who have worked with him, his own voluminous responses to real situations in real time, and above all by our unique vantage points. One of us is a forensic psychiatrist who has treated more than 1,000 individuals with characteristics similar to Trump’s. The other spent 18 months shadowing, observing and interviewing Trump in order to co-write The Art of the Deal.
Trump’s increasing grandiosity is evident in the superlatives he uses to refer to himself—“stable genius” among them—and in the way he has consolidated his power by getting rid of aides and Cabinet members who have challenged his authority. Because no person or circumstance can possibly satisfy his needs, nearly everyone in his life eventually becomes expendable, and he becomes more and more isolated.
Trump’s growing paranoia is reflected in the vitriolic comments he has made about a range of perceived enemies, including Democrats and Republicans, allies in the G-7, the intelligence community, the news media and immigrants. His hunger for absolute power is evident in his bizarrely admiring words about despots, including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. His frequent lies reveal his need to redefine reality when the truth doesn’t serve his needs.
Given Trump’s volatility, incuriosity and severely limited attention span, his decisions are not significantly influenced by reflection or analytical reasoning. Because he cannot tolerate even the mildest criticism, he is largely immune to learning and growth. Instead, unable to regulate his emotions, he reacts angrily, and often with threats of revenge, to any challenge to his authority. Even success provides him with only momentary satisfaction.
That sounds right to me. And it’s as profoundly disturbing today as it was the day he was elected. But I kind of assumed that the Republicans in congress weren’t quite as craven and cowardly as they are. I don’t know why I thought that. My Bad.
Anyway:
While our elected officials and much of the news media have avoided the topic of Trump’s mental health, it is clear that our adversaries have carefully studied his psychological weaknesses and determined how to use them to their advantage, as we saw during his negotiations with Putin and Kim Jong Un. Ironically, our own intelligence community does just this sort of analysis about foreign leaders.
Trump’s grip on reality will likely continue to diminish as he faces increasing criticism, accusations, threats of impeachment and potential criminal indictments. We can expect him to become more desperate, more extreme in his comments, more violent in his threats, and more reckless and destructive in his actions.
I sense that he’s unraveling — at the same time that he has discovered that there are few limits on his power. It’s a combustible situation.
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They are accomplices
by digby
There seems to be a growing awareness that the Trump administration (and, needless to say, the GOP congress) have done nothing about election interference. Oops:
After nearly two years of calling Russian election interference a hoax and its investigation a witch hunt, President Donald Trump on Friday presided over the first National Security Council meeting devoted to defending American democracy from foreign manipulation.
“The President has made it clear that his administration will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections from any nation state or other malicious actors,” the White House said in a statement afterward.
But current and former officials tell NBC News that 19 months into his presidency, there is no coherent Trump administration strategy to combat foreign election interference — and no single person or agency in charge.
In the statement, the White House took issue with that, saying a strategy was put in motion when Trump took office. No such strategy has been made public — or even mentioned before.
[…]
To be sure, individual government agencies have responded in various ways. The Department of Homeland Security is working with states to improve cyber security in voting systems. The FBI created a “foreign influence task force,” and the Justice Department announced a new policy his month to inform the public about bots and trolls on social media. The National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command are coordinating to counter Russian influence in cyberspace, the general in charge of those agencies has said.But even members of Trump’s national security cabinet have acknowledged the need for a central, unifying effort — one that experts say is missing. Senior officials have also admitted that the government has failed to take steps necessary to give the Russians second thoughts about intervening in American politics. Trump hasn’t done so, and neither did Barack Obama, whose response to election meddling — expelling diplomats and closing Russian compounds in December 2016 — has been described by some of his own former aides as tepid.
If any evidence was needed that the Russians haven’t been deterred, a Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, said Thursday she was the target of an unsuccessful Russian hacking attempt. A Microsoft official says that company has also observed attempted Russian hacks against two other unnamed candidates.
“I do think we need to do more as a government. It requires a whole of government, because it’s not just the elections,” Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary, told NBC’s Peter Alexander at the Aspen Security Forum earlier this month.
Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, said in a speech this month that “the system is blinking red” on Russia cyber threats but “we have to do better in what we deliver to our customers.”
In April, a top National Security Agency official said the U.S. doesn’t “yet have the political fortitude to say how we’ll strike back” against Russian misbehavior in cyberspace. No additional fortitude has been on display in the months since. NSA director Paul Nakasone, asked about those comments last week, said he wasn’t aware of them.
“We have to as a nation bring all of the elements of our power against our adversaries,” he said.
In February, his predecessor, Adm. Mike Rogers, told Congress the Russians “haven’t paid a price at least that’s sufficient to get them to change their behavior,” adding later that “we’re taking steps, but we’re probably not doing enough.”
Last week, House Republicans voted down a proposal by Democrats to increase election funding to states by $380 million — the cost of about four F-35 fighter jets.
“In a normal White House, there would be a point person on the National Security Council, to coordinate all the different agencies and to work with the states and the social media companies to make sure our electoral systems aren’t so vulnerable to attack,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, who is helping lead an investigation into Russian interference as ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NBC News.
“But President Trump’s inability to acknowledge that the Russians interfered in 2016 and that they will be back in 2018 is really hampering the government’s response to this threat. We just don’t have a whole-of-government strategy for dealing with this problem, and it leaves us incredibly vulnerable to continued interference by the Russians or, for that matter, any other adversary who might try to steal their playbook.”
The GOP benefits. And, as Trump telegraphed earlier this week, if Democrats win they are planning to use the “Russia interfered” meme against them.
Win-win for them.
Lose for the rest of the planet.
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That money has to be somewhere
by Tom Sullivan
“Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere,” laughed President George W. Bush. His presentation to the 2004 Radio and Television News Correspondents Association dinner included slides of him looking under furniture in the Oval Office. “Nope, no weapons over there … maybe under here?” he laughed. Thousands of Americans died in his trumped-up invasion of Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The tasteless joke evoked a brief firestorm of criticism. Halliburton, the firm once run by Bush vice-president Dick Cheney made at least $39.5 billion on the war. Americans and Iraqis paid. Contractors made.
The Bush administration story comes to mind again as Americans endure our sitting president’s bragging about about economic growth and low unemployment. Where are their pay raises?
Will Bunch wondered this week. Workers have been duped again:
By and large, American workers haven’t been getting the kind of pay raises that history predicts for an economy with such a low unemployment rate. That’s even more astounding when you remember 2017’s $1.5 trillion tax cut that was heavily weighted toward large corporations, with the promise that — this time, we swear — a lot of those dollars would trickle down to the rank-and-file worker.
Now, the post-tax-cut numbers are coming in, and you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that America didn’t get that pay raise after all. In a widely read column last week for Bloomberg, Noah Smith pointed to statistics from PayScale showing that so-called real wages — your paycheck, but adjusted for inflation — actually fell in the just-ended second quarter of 2018, by 1.8 percent.
Wages were supposed to rise after Trump's tax cuts. Instead, they’ve fallen https://t.co/LactYzTE7a via @bopinion pic.twitter.com/qUdfYQK1En— Bloomberg (@business) July 21, 2018
That’s adding insult to injury for America’s middle class. Real wages for the average worker have dropped since 2006, with an overall decline of 9.3 percent, including these ugly new numbers. The GOP/Trump tax cuts were supposed to fix that problem, not make it worse.
But like finding WMDs, it was a ruse. Workers’ pay raises were never the point. Where did the money disappear to? Bunch asks. The money went to where it always goes: into the paychecks of Wall Street CEOs and into stock buybacks to boost investors’ portfolios. It went where it did under Bush’s deceptively named American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. The bill allowed corporations to repatriate offshore monies — at a steep tax discount — under the promise of creating jobs for struggling Americans. Instead, observed Allan Sloan, corporations bought stocks, pocketed the extra profit and cut more jobs:
American Enterprise Institute fellow Phillip L. Swagel, formerly chief of staff of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, told my Post colleague Jonathan Weisman last August that “you might as well have taken a helicopter over 90210 [a Beverly Hills Zip code] and pushed the money out the door.” That’s a memorable quote — and a dead-accurate observation.
The Trump-GOP tax cut plan just ran the same repatriation scam again.
This time, we swear.
“It’s not that corporations don’t have more money — it’s that they have no particular reason to give that money to workers,” reads a subhead from Vox. Meanwhile, America continues to decay around them.
Bridges across Mississippi are closed and crumbling, creating detours and raising production costs for small businesses and commuting costs for residents who cannot afford any more stretch in their budgets. “Across the state, residents now have to circumvent nearly 500 closed bridges that have been declared unsafe,” reports NBC. Many were built during the Eisenhower administration:
“We ain’t got no money for these bridges. We ain’t got nothing but prayers here in Washington County,” Redmond said, cocking his head back and laughing in the county courthouse in Greenville. “That’s why we got a preacher on the board.”
According to Redmond and that preacher, county supervisor Jesse Amos, the county has used up almost all of its multi-million dollar road budget addressing the bridge closures. It now has just $37,000 for the rest of 2018.
In Nebraska, twenty bridges are closed in rural Lancaster County:
The Lincoln Journal Star reports that the engineer recently closed four bridges after storms dumped about 7 inches of rain in parts of Lancaster County in late June.
Several of the problem bridges were built in the 1950s and early 1960s, using timber for some parts. That was a popular bridge construction method at the time, but there is a tendency for water to get behind the timber, which rots and creates maintenance problems, Dingman said.
Other closed bridges were built in the 1920s and 1930s, Works Progress Administration-era bridges, with washed-out footings no longer on solid ground.
“Their little feet aren’t in the dirt anymore,” Dingman says.
These older bridges generally cannot be repaired and need to be replaced. Their life expectancy was 50 years and they are nearing 100 years old.
Aging infrastructure is an issue in the northeast. An aging steam pipe exploded last week in Manhattan. The system is 150 years old. Boston too has its issues.
From a union household, Marty Walsh in some ways fits the profile of the white working-class man that helped elect Donald Trump. But the college dropout and recovering alcoholic is also mayor of deep-blue Boston. “An intense defender of Obamacare, immigrants and unions and a vocal supporter of full equality for LGBTQ Americans,” Walsh reminds Politico his city is twenty-eight percent foreign-born and forty-eight percent first-generation. “We’ve had 85,000 new people move in the last four years,” he says of one of the safest cities in America. But he’s worried the country has lost its way and wonders what the 2020 election will bring:
“This election has to be covered in the sense of not ‘Trump versus person X.’ It has to be covered in ‘where America is today,’” Walsh said. “We need more stories about where is our water system in America? I don’t think the people understand how fragile our water system is in America. I don’t think people understand how bad our infrastructure, roads and rails are in this country. I think they think they have a good road system—we really don’t. It’s crumbling. I think people need to understand what’s happening in the environment in our country that, in Boston, if we don’t really focus on building protections on the harbor, what could happen if a Superstorm Sandy comes, and then what’s happening in the Midwest with forest fires.”
“What’s at stake in this country is not necessarily undocumented immigrants; what’s at stake in this country isn’t some of the things that they’re talking about,” he said. “It’s exactly our own backyard, what’s happening.”
Incomes are flat. Standards of living have been stagnant for years. Promises of better times keep coming and go unfulfilled. It’s not that there is no money. It’s that it’s not going where it’s needed or to people who struggle the hardest to earn it. But the investor class is doing just fine.
Someone set Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s $40 million yacht adrift this week on Lake Huron. The 164-foot Cayman Islands-registered yacht is one of ten in the family’s fleet.
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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
Friday Night Soother
by digby
I usually do a post about adorable animals in this slot. Tonight I wanted to share a story about an amazing individual who changed his world in a beautiful way:
What Happens If You Plant A Tree Every Day For 37 Years? You Get A Forest Twice The Size Of Central Park |..In 1978 Jadav Payeng began transforming Majuli Island, India (in the Brahmaputra river) into a forest reserve now home to animals, birds, and plants.
⤵️Thread #ahemENVIRO pic.twitter.com/y1UM7qSsdR— aHEMagain ❌ (@aHEM_again) December 11, 2017