FLORENCE, Ariz.—Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is.

“I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. "This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back."

Tonight’s rally was Trump’s first public event since July. On paper, the gathering was meant as his response to the anniversary of January 6, as well as an unofficial kickoff for his efforts to support Republicans in the midterm elections. But the event also served as the soft launch of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Although he didn’t say the words, the former president seems poised to run in two years—”Make America Great Again Again … Again,” he joked to the crowd—and tonight, his message was as clear as it was dishonest: He didn’t lose to Joe Biden in 2020, and he’ll spend the next year working to elect Republicans who agree.

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An hour or so into his speech, Trump turned his attention to January 6th, calling the storming of the Capitol an excuse for Democrats to arrest people and abuse them in jail. He mocked the police officer who shot Ashley Babbitt, and the crowd cheered. He suggested that the FBI planted people in the crowd outside the Capitol to incite the riot. “The real insurrection took place on election day, November 3,” he added.

It is not customary for the Embassy to comment on press articles in public. We just want to make it very clear: This character, H. Göring, committed crimes against humanity and was one of the pillars of the Nazi regime. (1/2)

That leaves not the slightest room to justify or minimize morally and or politically - and much less in legal terms - its nefarious role during the Nazi regime and in the Holocaust.
(2/2)

WI GOP State Rep. Treig Pronschinske, in support of a law banning business from requiring vaccines, says that there is no way to prevent covid since you “can’t physically see the virus.”

Does it hurt? Being this fucking stupid, I mean.

On Black Friday, Jessica and Nikii Gerson-Neeves bought a blender. It was a Vitamix blender, a professional-grade splurge, and the couple was looking forward to a winter of smoothies and soups.

It arrived on Dec. 16 at their home on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Jessica put the hefty box down on the floor in the kitchen, just for a second. Her 4-year-old tuxedo cat, Max, otherwise known as the “sentient soccer ball,” jumped up on the box. Jessica thought it was funny and snapped a photo.

Then Max’s 13-year-old feline siblings, George: Destroyer of Worlds (“sentient potato”) and Lando Calrissian (“the questionably sentient dust bunny,”), demanded their turn on the knee-high box.

That was three weeks ago. Since then, the cats have refused to leave the box, fighting over who gets to perch upon it and taking turns standing guard while the others eat or are busy elsewhere. The blender remains ensconced inside.

In the early days of radio broadcasting, producers discovered that they could easily recreate the murmuring sound of a crowd in a restaurant or other public space by having the actors not currently involved in the dialogue quietly repeat the word “walla” over and over again.

With the advent of television broadcasts wherein the listener-turned-viewer could now see the crowd, they switched to using casual improvised conversation (so that it wouldn’t look like everyone in the restaurant was, oddly, chanting the same thing over and over again). Despite the transition away from using the pat phrase, the term is firmly embedded in Hollywood, and actors who provide the background noise for the post production effect that is layered over the video of the background extras speaking are known as the “walla group”.

What’s particularly interesting about the “walla walla” phenomenon is that the phrases used by actors are highly regional and influenced by the native language of the region. American actors said “walla walla”, British actors said “rhubarb rhubarb”, German actors said “rhabarber rhabarber”, and Japanese actors said “gaya gaya”.