Every Day is a good Day for Mesolithic Giant Beavers!

Why giant human-sized beavers died out 10,000 years ago
by Tessa Plint, The Conversation
May 29, 2019

Giant beavers the size of black bears once roamed the lakes and wetlands of North America. Fortunately for cottage-goers, these mega-rodents died out at the end of the last ice age.

Now extinct, the giant beaver was once a highly successful species. Scientists have found its fossil remains at sites from Florida to Alaska and the Yukon.

A super-sized version of the modern beaver in appearance, the giant beaver tipped the scales at 100 kilograms.
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The species suddenly became extinct 10,000 years ago. The disappearance of the giant beaver coincides with that of many other large-bodied ice age animals, including the iconic woolly mammoth. But until now scientists didn’t know for certain why the giant rodent had died out.
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Towards the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, the climate became increasingly warm and dry and wetland habitats began to dry up. Although the modern beavers and the giant beaver co-existed on the landscape for tens of thousands of years, only one species survived.

The ability to build dams and lodges may have given the modern beaver a competitive advantage over the giant beaver. With its sharp teeth, the modern beaver could alter the landscape to create suitable wetland habitat where it needed it. The giant beaver couldn’t.

As Charlie Piece at Esquire would say- “They lived then to make us happy now.”

Here’s a Beaver Lodge near Stars Hollow North Lake-

Kind of difficult to take out, the dam I mean. It’s the main access to that part of the Farm (unless you want to cross cow patty field) and it has a big old culvert draining it (I’m standing right on top of it for this shot) that the Beavers plug up every Winter and you have to uncork every Spring unless you simply replace the culvert and roadbed when the big melt does it for you.

Anyway I’m sure there will be plenty of news but I won’t know any of it because I’m going to be on the road all day and then I’m going to take a nap.

Hong Kong extradition protests leave city in shock

Authorities have shut some government offices in Hong Kong’s financial district after the worst violence the city has seen in decades.

By Thursday morning the crowds had largely dispersed around government headquarters – where police and protesters had pitched battles on Wednesday.

The protesters are angry about plans to allow extradition to mainland China.

Despite the widespread opposition, the government has not backed down.

However, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) delayed a second reading of the controversial extradition bill and it is unclear when it will take place.

State projects leave tens of thousands of lives in the balance in Ethiopia – study

British Navy’s Maritime Trade Operations arm urges ‘extreme caution’ amid report of explosion involving oil tankers.

The US Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet is assisting two tankers in the Gulf of Oman after receiving distress calls from the vessels amid a “reported attack”.

“US naval forces in the region received two separate distress calls at 6:12am local time and a second one at 7:00am,” the fleet said in a statement issued on Thursday. “US Navy ships are in the area and are rendering assistance.”

The statement came after the UK’s Maritime Trade Operations, which is run by the British navy, put out an alert earlier on Thursday claiming an unspecified incident had taken place in the area. It did not elaborate further but said it was investigating the incident and urged “extreme caution” amid heightened United States-Iran tensions.

Hundreds protest across Japan over acquittals of men in sex crimes

KYODO

Hundreds of people took to the streets across Japan on Tuesday to protest a recent series of court acquittals of men in sex crime cases, including a man found not guilty over having sex with his underage daughter.

Holding flowers as a symbol of empathy for victims, participants gathered in Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Yamaguchi, Fukuoka and Kagoshima, as the “Flower Demo” movement spread to nine locations.

The campaign started in April when hundreds demonstrated in Tokyo and Osaka against rulings including the March 26 decision by the Nagoya District Court’s Okazaki Branch in the incest case, which sparked public outcry and criticism by some legal experts.

The fight over the 2020 census citizenship question, explained

The battle over a simple question involves both Congress and the Supreme Court. And the stakes are high.

By Dara Lind and Libby Nelson 

The latest face-off between House Democrats and President Donald Trump is over the proposed citizenship question on the 2020 census.

The House Oversight Committee voted Wednesday to recommend holding Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas in the committee’s investigation into how and why the question was added.

Trump invoked executive privilege earlier in the day, refusing to share documents that House Democrats want for their investigation.

All of Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio’s problems with breaking laws, obstruction of Justice, lying, etc. can not be attributed to the Russian Treason Plot. For instance Stephanie Clifford, hush money to a Porn Star is a violation of election law and Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio has certainly lied and obstructed Justice in that case, but it seems to me the kind of thing he would have done without any Russian involvement at all. The only connection is some of the actors.

Likewise pro-Republican Gerrymandering (in this instance Citizenship Questions on the Census designed to intimidate non White Male Republicans from filling it out for a true count) is just the normal course of action for the Party of Racist, Bigoted, Misogynists who are too weak to win an election fairly and have to cheat.

The Obstruction and Contempt of Congress are about the same, but because the actual activity is entirely different the thin excuses of Executive Privilege that are transparently threadbare in the Russian Treason Plot. The material being denied with no justification at all really is neither a Communication not a Deliberative Process and under even the broadest interpretation is not protected by Executive Privilege, which actually means something and not just what Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio wants it to mean.

The Trump administration’s desperate census coverup continues
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
June 12, 2019

The Trump administration really, really doesn’t want Congress and the public to know any more than they already do about its decision to add a citizenship question to the Census.
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I’m not going to go over all the details in this case (see our previous coverage here, here, or here). The short story is that the Trump administration decided to add a citizenship question to the Census precisely because they knew that doing so will make immigrants (both documented and not) less likely to answer, which will make the places where they live look smaller.

That, in turn, will draw resources and representation away from those places to places where there are more whites and more Republicans. The undercount could be as high as 4 million people.

The administration sold that plan — to the public, to Congress, and to the courts — with a preposterous lie, claiming that they wanted to add the question to the Census merely in order to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act. Which is like your eight-year-old telling you he needs to eat more Snickers bars because he’s so concerned about maintaining proper dental health. Enforcing the Voting Rights Act is the last thing the Trump administration wants to do.

We’ve already gotten documents proving that it was a lie, but there are obviously more, which is why they are refusing to comply with the congressional subpoena. Which brings us to this bogus executive privilege claim.

To begin with, the fact that Attorney General Barr asked for the privilege assertion in response to the threat of a contempt vote shows how disingenuous the administration is being. A contempt vote is essentially an expression of the House’s opinion; it doesn’t force the production of the materials they’re after. It has no direct legal consequence.

So Barr essentially said that because the House was being mean to him, in retaliation he’d get the White House to assert executive privilege so they couldn’t get the documents they’re demanding. This doesn’t end the controversy, because Democrats can sue over the privilege claim. And they ought to win.

Let’s examine that claim on the merits. When you hear “executive privilege,” you probably think of the president shielding his communications with key aides. The idea is that in order to get unvarnished advice when making decisions, he has to be able to have frank discussions without the threat that everything anyone says could eventually be revealed.

That’s one type of executive privilege, called the presidential communications privilege. There’s another, known as the deliberative process privilege, that applies a similar (though more limited) privilege for executive agencies. In this case that’s the Commerce Department (which oversees the Census) and the Justice Department. But courts have found that Congress can overcome the deliberative process privilege if they have a clear need for documents or testimony in order to carry out their oversight responsibilities.

How pressing is that need in this case? The administration is trying to make a significant change to the Census, a constitutionally mandated task with sweeping effects on all kinds of policies the federal government makes. The change they want to make, in the opinion of virtually every expert in the field, would have dramatically harmful consequences. The justification they have offered is an obvious lie; the secretary of Commerce has even lied about it under oath.

In short, if there’s a case that demands congressional oversight more than this one, it would be hard to think of what it might be. Which means that the administration’s assertion of privilege is weak to the point of being non-existent.

On a more basic level, we should be asking: What is the administration trying to hide?

If the story they’re telling were true — that they want to add a citizenship question to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act — then producing the documents would show that. But we all know that’s not what the documents will show.

We know that because emails produced in a lawsuit over the Census showed definitively that in fact, Commerce asked the Justice Department to turn back around and ask the Commerce Department to add the question, which makes no sense until you realize they were trying to create a phony paper trail for the lie they were telling about the Voting Rights Act. (The Justice Department at first resisted, but eventually gave Commerce what they wanted.)

What the administration may really be trying to prevent is not just Congress and the public seeing documents that will expose their lies and bad faith, but the Supreme Court seeing them, too. The court has heard oral arguments in a case challenging the addition of the citizenship question but has yet to issue its ruling. Once the administration has been fully exposed, it will be harder for the five conservative justices to rule in their favor.

Not that they won’t; the odds are that those five justices will do pretty much anything that’s in the interests of the Republican Party, as adding a citizenship question is (indeed, that was the whole point). But if nothing else, the court, and the rest of us, ought to see just how cynical and dishonest the administration has been. If we can’t stop their crimes against democracy, at least we can understand them fully.