Baby elephants walk… Hilvarenbeek, NL, May 14, 2024 – Recently, three African elephants were born within four months: Mosi, Ajabu, and Tendai. The calves are doing very well, each weighing over 150 kilos. A few weeks ago, they also met their father Yambo for the first time. The calves and the rest of the herd immediately got along well. Vogels says, “The calves play together constantly and are very curious. They are also enthusiastically exploring this new habitat together.” The new Elephant Valley is one of the various enclosures housing the entire elephant herd of Beekse Bergen. In total, there are eleven African elephants in the Safari Park. Recently, Nile antelopes and Defassa waterbucks have also started using the valley. The three young elephants at Beekse Bergen have explored the Elephant Valley for the first time. This large habitat is entirely new to the calves; previously, they resided in an adjacent enclosure. In their new environment, there was a lot to discover, says head zookeeper Yvonne Vogels. “The herd behaved naturally, with the young ones staying nicely in the middle of the group and constantly staying together.
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I saw this and assumed it must be a joke. It isn’t: Who knew? On Friday morning, Pope Francis was in fact full of praise for 105 entertainers from 15 countries who were invited to meet with him at a gathering that the Vatican described as an effort to “establish a link” between the humorists and the Roman Catholic Church. “In the midst of so much gloomy news,” Francis told them, “you denounce abuses of power, you give voice to forgotten situations, you highlight abuses, you point out inappropriate behavior.” He also lauded them for getting people to “think critically by making them laugh and smile.” Francis is a bit of a wisecracker himself. One of his standard punchlines, when people say they are praying for him, is to reply: “For or against?” — a line he riffed on during Friday’s gathering. He has also quipped that the best remedy for an ailing knee is tequila, and the comedian Ellen DeGeneres once made up a whole set built on one of Francis’ mother-in-law jokes.
Dissent in the ranks It’s important to remember that as crazy as MAGA Republicans are now that the presidential election and the future of the Supreme Court does not hinge on the large numbers of voters chanting Don-ald Trump, Don-ald Trump like zombified extras in The Mummy. Trump is bleeding support he cannot afford to lose. The old, “death by a thousand cuts” routine worked against Hillary Clinton in 2016. It can work for Democrats and Joe Biden in 2024. Greg Sargent points to an item lost in Politico’s Playbook coverage of Trump’s effort to defund Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Trump prosecutions: “I don’t think it’s a good idea unless you can show that [the prosecutors] acted in bad faith or fraud or something like that,” Rep. Mike Simpson, a senior appropriator, told Playbook, speaking about the defund-Smith push. He denounced the idea as “stupid,” adding of prosecutors: “They’re just doing their job—even though I disagree with what they did.” Wait, what? Trump’s prosecutorial tormentors are not acting in bad faith or being fraudulent? Do tell!
Here’s another total waste of time that will do nothing to help them win re-election in November or illustrate anything about the Democrats. It’s just performative nonsense: The House narrowly cleared defense policy legislation on Friday after Republicans tacked on divisive provisions restricting abortion access, medical treatment for transgender troops and efforts to combat climate change. Speaker Mike Johnson’s move to permit culture war amendments to the annual National Defense Authorization Act turned a widely bipartisan bill into a measure supported almost entirely by Republicans. The tactic represented a gamble for Johnson, who could have pushed to pass a more bipartisan version with the help of Democrats, but instead catered to a sliver of his right flank. That gamble ultimately paid off for Johnson as enough Republicans united to win the final vote. But the most conservative parts of the House defense bill stand no chance in the Senate, and the dispute likely won’t be sorted out until after the November elections. It’s one thing to put up messaging bills to make a point. Both parties do that.
Interesting if less practical than advertised The headline did not take me where I thought it would. Linda Kinstler’s New York Times guest essay, “Jan. 6, America’s Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion,” (gift link) examines “an ‘act of oblivion,’ an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence.” It is a pragmatic effort at “forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault.” Oblivion, a form of amnesty new to me and now fallen out of favor, served to put behind a society the rifts of past transgressions rather than see to it that every last transgressor receives punishment, especially where entire armies or classses are targets. That serves only to keep wounds open instead of heal them. I’m not there yet. Kinstler cites its roots in Greek history and writes, “As a legal mechanism, oblivion promised the return to a past that still had a future, in which the battles of old would not predetermine those still to come.
Trump’s been making a lot of wild promises lately. All restraints are gone. He’s even bribed the oil companies with vows to remove all regulations if they’ll give him a billion dollars. Dave Weigel took a look at how its landing: Ending all taxes on tips. Declassifying all files on 9/11 and the JFK assassination. Freeing a darknet market mogul from prison. Protecting Bitcoin and TikTok from government meddlers. In his four-year presidency, Donald Trump did none of that. In the last few weeks, he’s promised to do all of it — sometimes in front of crowds ready to cheer his new policies, sometimes with interviewers who don’t ask why he flipped. Democrats, already battling voter “Trumpnesia” and warmer feelings about the MAGA years, are now wrestling with out-of-nowhere promises that don’t match up with Trump’s record. The latest promise, to make tipped wages tax-free, debuted at Trump’s Sunday rally in Las Vegas. “We’re going to do that right away, first thing in office,” said the Republican nominee.
Trump says that if he loses the debate it will be because he did it on purpose Just as he always telegraphs ahead of time that elections are rigged just in case he loses, here he is planting the seeds that he actually threw the debate in case he loses that too: Donald Trump is already doing damage control for his upcoming debate with President Joe Biden. The former president laid out a few different excuses, attempting to explain away why Biden might perform well on the stage in two weeks, during an interview Thursday night on the far-right news network Real America’s Voice. “I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can say this. If he does make it through, which I think he will, they’re gonna feed him a lot of stuff,” said Trump. “And we should do a drug test, I’d love to do a drug test before.” Trump, who rarely casts an accusation that is not also a projection, previously suggested that Biden was “higher than a kite,” during his State of the Union address.
Oh, please, oh please Should Donald Trump actually show up for the scheduled June 27 presidential debate, he may find the rules irritatingly confining. There will be no opening statements. Both Trump and Joe Biden wil have two minutes to answer questions before moderators cut their mics. Red lights will flash when they have five seconds left. Trump will have little time to ramble on about windmills, electric boats and baby sharks doo doo doo doo doo doo. Commercial breaks will give both men a breather, the New York Times reports, but they will be prohibited from huddling with advisers. Not that Trump would, although he proved (when under threat of a contempt charge in a New York court) that his attorneys could contain him, barely. But Judge Juan Merchan will not be moderating for CNN: The two men are readying themselves for the debate in ways almost as different as their approaches to the presidency itself. The Biden operation is blocking off much of the final week before the debate, after he returns from Europe and a California fund-raising swing, for structured preparations. Mr.
You’re carefully taught It’s a common enough appeal. Common sense. So why is common sense so uncommon? Invoking common sense is often intended to quash inquiry, not stimulate it. Common sense. Game over. Earth is flat. It’s common sense. You have to produce an ID to get on an airplane. You should have to present one to vote. Remember when it was common, if not common sense, under Jim Crow to ask Black people to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar or recite the Preamble to the Constitution before they could vote? It’s always something (Bolts Magazine): In late May, the GOP-controlled New Hampshire legislature adopted a bill that would require people to present their birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers proving their U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote, with no exceptions. That would be a major departure from longstanding New Hampshire law that allows people to sign sworn affidavits as a substitute if they don’t have proof of citizenship when they register to vote. It’s already a crime to register if you are ineligible. It’s already a crime to vote if you are ineligible.
If you think wind prices are high now…. Andy Borowitz: Marjorie Taylor Greene Warns That Windmills Will Drive up Cost of Wind LAS VEGAS (The Borowitz Report)—Speaking at a campaign rally on Thursday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene warned that plans to build more wind turbines in the US would “send wind prices through the roof.” “If you think you’re paying a lot for wind now, just wait until Biden starts building all the windmills he wants,” she said. “Joe Biden is coming for your wind!” Painting a dark picture of the havoc wind power will wreak on the American consumer, she said, “It’s simple economics.