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News 2025 Hugo Awards 2025 Hugo Awards Nomination Statistics Reveal Several Close Final Ballot Races Many notable Hugo Award nominees just missed the cut in 2025. By Matthew Byrd | Published on September 3, 2025 Image: Working Title Films Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Working Title Films While the 2025 Hugo Awards winners were revealed a couple of weeks ago, the event’s organizers have since released a series of supplemental statistics that reveal how the winners for each category were determined. Most interestingly, they also recently released a report that shows just how close many of the initial nominees came to making the final ballot. For context, nominations for the Hugo Awards are counted using a system that has been dubbed E Pluribus Hugo (EPH). The nominee breakdown sheet mentioned above explains exactly how that system works, but it’s basically an elimination program that turns nominations into “points” that ultimately help determine which nominees make the final ballot. Such systems are designed to help decide which nominees advance to the final ballot in the likely event that multiple nominees receive the same number of initial votes. They can help make tough determining calls in competitive races, and the 2025 Hugo Awards certainly featured quite a few such races. For instance, Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees also just missed the finalist list for the Best Graphic Story or Comic category by one vote, while the Doctor Who episode “Rogue” was one vote shy of making the finalist list for the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form award. It was also noted that three Doctor Who episodes qualifying for that finalist list would have triggered a provision in the awards rules that would have required one of the three episodes to be excluded from the final vote.  This sheet also helps explain what happened to notable initial candidates in other major categories. Helldivers 2 just missed the Best Game or Interactive Work cut by a single vote, while The Substance narrowly missed the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form cut in the final round of voting. It also shows that nominees that did make the initial final ballot in their respective categories (such as Moonstorm in the Lodestar Award race) later had their nominations withdrawn, while other selections (like Dune the Musical Show) were ultimately deemed ineligible for their respective categories. The full nominee breakdown is very much worth reading for both a better look into the mechanics of the voting process and to see just how competitive many of these categories were. Most importantly, it should help you find a few new names for your reading/watchlist. [end-mark] The post 2025 Hugo Awards Nomination Statistics Reveal Several Close Final Ballot Races appeared first on Reactor.

A bipartisan group of House members, including the chamber’s most conservative and most liberal members, said at a press conference Wednesday that they have a bill to end the problem of insider trading of stocks by members of Congress. Introducing the Restore Trust in Congress Act, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said that it “takes the best elements of all of our legislation, puts it together to restrict and limit and ban trading of stocks by individual members of Congress.” “Capitol Trades, for example, reports that 113 members of Congress made 9,261 trades in 2024 involving 706 million shares of other assets,” said Roy, referring to a website that tracks members of Congress’ finances. “That’s not why people sent us here to Washington. … If you want to day-trade, leave Congress.” Roy has long pushed for a ban on members trading stocks, having introduced the “Trust in Congress Act” with former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., in 2020. But this time, Roy says he’ll get a vote. “We’re going to get a vote on it. This is a nondebatable proposition,” he said. A Bipartisan Effort Joining him at the rare bipartisan press conference was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who called their cooperation “one of those rare moments where I feel like Washington is working the way that it’s supposed to work.” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., joked that he didn’t “agree with some of these people on anything” and that “if Cortez told me the sun was coming up tomorrow, I’d go out and check it out.” The members boasted of the bill’s closing of loopholes, which it does by applying the law to spouses and by prohibiting not just trading stocks but also owning them. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas (Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images) In the bill, it appears Democrats and Republicans have tabled some of the major disagreements that have stunted efforts for a stock trading ban in the past.  In the Senate, the two parties have yet to advance the HONESTY Act for a floor vote, which prohibits stock trading for both members of Congress and—at Democrats’ insistence—for the president and vice president. President Donald Trump has argued the bill targets him unfairly. Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., told reporters he was willing to set this issue aside for the time being in the interests of passing the bill. “To be clear, we are not saying that the president and the vice president aren’t going to be included in the end product,” he said. “What we’re saying is, we’re starting the process now, hopefully through regular order, through committees, and if we can get the critical mass of support to include the president and vice president, we will put an amendment and we will do that.” He added, “One of our operating principles was not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Like, let’s get the strongest reform that we possibly can get passed with a realistic shot of getting done this Congress.” Can the Bill Be Enforced? One of the quirks of the bill is that it sets out to address a practice which, under current rules and laws, is already regulated. Members of Congress are—in theory—supposed to report their business dealings, and insider trading is a crime. If members followed the rules and laws already on the books, there would not be much need for the bill. But Magaziner told The Daily Signal he’s confident in the new bill’s enforcement mechanisms. He explained them after the press conference. “Those of us who were in the rooms negotiating felt it was very important that, No. 1, the House administer its own discipline, rather than the executive branch. … Having another branch police the rules of the House could become very political and very problematic,” he told The Daily Signal.  Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) Magaziner added, “The Ethics Committee is going to be in charge of enforcing this. However, we also recognize the fact that the Ethics Committee often moves slowly is sort of a black box, and so we deal with that by being very prescriptive in the bill about what constitutes a violation and what the consequences should be.” Magaziner explained that members caught trading stocks would have to “turn over any profits that [they] made off the trade, plus a 10% fine on the value of the trade. So, if you trade $100,000 worth of stock, you have to give up your profit, plus $10,000.” One thing the members said they were most in favor of is getting a vote on the bill. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said that if the House leadership does not put the bill on the floor, “there is a discharge petition prepared and ready to go,” referring to a legislative tool used to bypass House leadership and force consideration of a bill. .@RepChipRoy on 'Restore Congress Act', banning Members of Congress from stock trading: "If you want to day trade, leave Congress." pic.twitter.com/aisl2LEZM0— CSPAN (@cspan) September 3, 2025 The post Congressional Stock Ban Backed by Republicans and Democrats Alike appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been another shooting, mass shooting, this time in Minneapolis at Annunciation, a private Catholic school. One Robert Westman, who transitioned a few years ago to female status, now called Robin Westman, shot and killed two youths, two kids, I should say, inside a church and wounded 18 others. The church was locked. He stood outside with a variety of weapons and kept firing through the windows at the pews to kill small children. Killed two and wounded 18. I would say it’s another one of these tragic mass shootings, but I don’t like the word “tragic” because tragedy, a good Greek word, does not denote culpability. It’s not just tragic. These things just don’t happen. They happen because of evil, and this man, this young man, was evil. But here’s what is really disturbing: In the reaction to it, to this shooting, we got moral lectures and strictures from the mayor of Minneapolis, from the governor of Minneapolis, from the governor of California. And almost immediately they said, “Do not politicize this.” And then they went and politicized it. They did that in two ways. One, they said, “It’s verboten. You cannot talk about the transgender status of the shooter.” And two: “This was only because of the easy accessibility of guns. Mr. Westman or Ms. Westman—Ms. Westman acquired these guns legally, and therefore, the law should be tightened.” I don’t know what we’re going to do about that. There are over 400 million guns, and the Left can’t even distinguish between an automatic and semi-automatic rifle. If you have a .22 and it’s a semi-automatic rifle and you painted it black and dressed it up, you could say that it was an assault weapon because it fired semi-automatically. But nonetheless, they won’t have any discussion over transgenderism. This falls in the broader category of exempt DEI woke topics, but I think we should talk about this. This is the fourth or fifth incident—I don’t even like the word “incident”—occurrence of transgendered shooters who are protected by authorities. I don’t mean from their criminal acts, but after they are killed or after they commit suicide, the authorities and the public at large do not wanna discuss the implications of the act. And so, in the case of the Tennessee transgendered shooter, we were not given any information about his/her handbook or her/his manifesto, which expressed hatred toward Christianity and society at large, traditional society. In this case, Mr. Westman put his own hate-filled rants, including one that suggested that he was angry that he had transitioned to female status, on the internet. It was quickly put down, but otherwise, we wouldn’t have known much about him. But there’s another thing that DEI does that we don’t really talk about. It exempts certain topics that before warranted free discussion. What do I mean? Now, in this case, for example, Jake Tapper was more worried about getting the proper pronouns than he was about condemning the shooter. And that was true of a lot of people. Some people just said, “Well, this is a white male MAGA shooter.” Obviously, that was Rosie O’Donnell. She was mimicking the CNN anchorwoman who said in the New York Manhattan shooting at the NFL headquarters, her first response was, “It was a white male.” It was not, of course. So, people on the left are quite prone to jump to conclusions and stereotypes, but not when it comes to honest discussion about transgenderism. And here’s my point, again. Prior to the transgendered movement, we were told by scientists to psychologists, medical experts that gender dysphoria was a very rare syndrome. It was classified as a mental disorder, and it was about one or two per 100,000, not 30% of some of the campuses in which students feel that they might want to transition. It’s more or less, I don’t wanna say a cult, but it’s a fad. There’s another disturbing point about it, other than its exaggerated numbers and frequency, and that is the drugs used to transition one from one gender or sex to another. Usually, they are, respectively, massive doses of testosterone or estrogen. I grew up with the Left’s warning about both of them. We were told that you have to be very careful about injecting testosterone. And we used kind of a patois about it. Roid rage was for steroids, but testosterone rage was another symptom. Every time a football player died or a weightlifter died, the media suggested that they had courted death by using massive doses of testosterone. In the 1950s and early ’60s, women who went into menopause were regularly and without caution prescribed large doses of estrogen. We were told, “Be careful about Big Pharma. Be careful about Big Med.” All of those worries and prohibitions and cautions were thrown out the window, as were SSRI antidepressants. These were selective serotonin prohibitors. In other words, they altered the chemistry of the brain, supposedly, to correct mental disturbances, depression, bipolarity. But they’re very dangerous drugs. But when it came to the exempt topic of transgenderism, suddenly the society was supposed to accept that this was not a mental disorder. It was not a rare occurrence. It was a national crisis where large percentages of the population were transgendering. It was completely fine to enhance that transformation through the use of prior very serious and often dangerous drugs. And any criticism of the general public of this new civil rights issue branded one as a transphobe or otherwise, a bigot. And even in some extremes, as we see in Minnesota, they pass laws suggesting that you cannot prohibit a youth, depending on the age, from transitioning. They have a freedom to do that. And if, in a free society, when you have an inordinate amount of shooters and a more inordinate amount of death, and there seems to be a pattern of overrepresentation, whether it is white males or black males or Asian women, if any of these groups is overrepresented, the Left usually says, “We have to investigate.” By that I mean, if the victims were—this was a school or a medical center for trans children or teenagers and a white MAGA male with a red hat had come in and shot up that center and killed some, God forbid, I think you would see the Left would be quick to stereotype and say that we have a pathology of white males shooting up trans children. But we don’t apply the same rules in opposite. And just to finish, that is one of the great problems with DEI, which I’d like to discuss at a later moment. But DEI gives exemptions, or I should say it censors legitimate controversies, discussions, disagreements about certain topics, race, ethnic background, and sexual orientation, transgenderism. I’m not talking about -isms and -ologies or bigotry. I’m just talking about normal questions of whether it is proper or not proper to apply particular rules or exemptions to particular groups. Until we have that discussion, I think we’re going to be, as a society, completely unable to talk honestly and empirically about these mass shootings. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Democrats Deflect From Truth About Minnesota Trans School Shooter appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday again decried those working within the government “who believe that they have the right to undermine the duly elected president of the United States because they disagree with his positions or his policies, and that they know better.”  In a speech at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, Gabbard argued that government officials’ “sole focus must be on serving the American people and upholding the Constitution.” In her remarks, Gabbard criticized by name one of her predecessors as director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and former CIA Director John Brennan. “For me to be here as the eighth director of national intelligence and uncover how James Clapper and others like John Brennan manufactured intelligence to try to undermine President Trump’s administration and presidency, and the voices of the American people, and then go back to the founding of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that came about as a result of the terrorist attack on 9/11 and the manufacturing of intelligence to support the regime-change war in Iraq that George Bush led is an interesting bookend,” the former congresswoman from Hawaii said. Gabbard also decried parts of the surveillance state perpetrated on the American people, contending it was abused by some federal officials. “We’ve seen other examples—those that we know of, there are many others that I believe we don’t yet know of—how leaders in the intelligence community and the FBI knowingly use false information to gain FISA warrants to illegally spy on American citizens,” the ODNI chief said. “These are just a few of, unfortunately, what is a long list of known examples of politicization and weaponization that all point to the truth that many of us here in this room know, which is that the rot runs deep, and it’s not just in the intelligence community,” she said. “I’ve seen examples of this across almost every federal agency, and so it requires us all to confront the uncomfortable truth that we have these conspiracy conspirators, these traitors to the Constitution, who are working within our government, who dangerously believe that they are not only above the law, but that they are above the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” Gabbard continued.  Gabbard, 44, a former Democrat-turned-Republican, argued that these rogue government employees are hurting the American form of government. “It undermines our Constitution, our democratic republic, if we have people within our government who are not the president of the United States, who are not elected by the American people, taking it upon themselves to undermine, ultimately, the American people and the Constitution,” she said. The intelligence chief urged a reorientation of American life and governance to pursuing truth. “I’m grateful to serve in this position, grateful to President Trump for entrusting me with this mission to truly seek the truth, find the truth and tell the truth to the American people, so that true accountability and true change, lasting change can come about,” she explained.  “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” Gabbard concluded, quoting John 8:32 from the Bible. The post Gabbard Rips Clapper, Brennan for Thinking They Had ‘Right to Undermine Duly Elected President’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Virginia’s Loudoun County is once again at the center of a transgender scandal that may impact a key off-year governor’s race. In 2021, a male student at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn sexually assaulted a girl in a girl’s locker room, sparking outrage about the Loudoun County Public Schools policy opening sex-segregated private spaces to members of the opposite sex who claim a transgender identity. That scandal galvanized the parental rights movement, leading Republicans Glenn Youngkin and Winsome Earle-Sears to victory in the races for governor and lieutenant governor, respectively. This year, Earle-Sears is running to take the place of the term-limited Youngkin, and Loudoun County Public Schools is again in the news over its transgender policy. This time, however, a girl at Stone Bridge entered a boys’ private space—a locker room—and filmed the boys as they noted her presence in the room. Rather than bringing a case against the girl—whose filming violated school district policy—Loudon County Public Schools brought claims of sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination against three boys, claiming they violated Title IX, a law banning sexual harassment. This took place in March, and the school district concluded last month that two of the boys had indeed violated Title IX. ‘Blatant Religious Discrimination’ While the district cleared one boy, who is Muslim, it found the other two boys, who are Christian, guilty of sexual harassment. One of those Christian boys moved out of the district, but the finding will remain on his permanent record. “We think it’s blatant religious discrimination,” Josh Hetzler, the boys’ lawyer, told The Daily Signal in an interview last month. Although the school system brought “identical facts” against all three boys, it eventually dropped the case against the Muslim boy. While the district “didn’t say Muslim,” Hetzler said “that was the only difference we could find.” Loudoun County Public Schools delivered a punishment: 10 days of suspension, a no-contact order with the girl, and a corrective action plan to be worked out between the boys and the school district. Hetzler announced that the school district has paused the suspension as the attorneys appeal the suspension. “If [Loudoun County Public Schools]] fails again to do the right thing, we will have no choice but to pursue swift legal action in the coming days,” the lawyer added. The school district’s Title IX office is still adjudicating the appeal, as of Wednesday. The Political Ramifications Earle-Sears, a Republican, has condemned Loudon County Public Schools’ actions and urged Virginians who are outraged about this to consider supporting her campaign. “We’re talking about three boys, three young boys, who have been punished because they were … saying they were not comfortable having to undress in front of girls,” Earle-Sears said at a press conference at Stone Bridge last month. “This school system has decided they are going to use the parents’ own tax money against them and punish these boys.” “What are we supposed to do now?” she asked. “Well, I’ll tell you what we can do. There are things called elections.” The Republican noted that she and Gov. Youngkin won their elections in 2021 amid a parental rights movement that grew in part in response to the Loudoun County transgender scandal that year. “We were elected to stop the insanity, but apparently the school system has not heard that message,” she said. “Well, this year, we’ve got another election, and so, I’m asking you to continue to support me for governor of our great Commonwealth of Virginia.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found Loudoun County’s transgender policy in violation of Title IX earlier this year and revoked most federal funding from the county late last month. Two other Virginia counties filed a lawsuit last week, challenging the finding. The post WATCH: Here’s the Moment When 2 Boys Allegedly Violated Title IX by Responding to a Girl in Their Locker Room appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Read the original post "22 Free Fall Printables" on A Modern Homestead. Fall is a time of rich colors, warm drinks, and cool weather. Celebrate the season with these 22 free fall printables to decorate your home for the season with ease! Whether it’s enjoying a fall beverage or a baking a fall treat, fall is ever present here in our home once about September 15th rolls... Read More The post "22 Free Fall Printables" appeared first on A Modern Homestead.

The Young Turks co-host Ana Kasparian made a complete fool of herself when she let one of her anti-Israel brain drain episodes affect her so much she tried to convince the world America spends more on Israel than Social Security. Kasparian went on a tear against Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro during the September 2 edition of CNN NewsNight for correctly suggesting that America’s massively inefficient approach to Social Security would bankrupt the country. Kasparian, clearly triggered, was livid that Shapiro didn’t focus on what she considered to be the real culprit behind America’s debt bomb. “I totally reject what you just said about how we’re going bankrupt because of Social Security? Really? You don’t think the trillions of dollars that we spent on wars in the Middle East might have something to do with that?” She proceeded down the logical toilet, crying over how “we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Israel — on Ukraine.” Seriously, a simple Google search would have cleared this right up. The Brown University Watson School for International and Public Affairs estimated that the United States appropriated and is obligated to spend $8 trillion for the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East from 2001 to 2022. For the same period, government data suggests Social Security roughly cost the U.S. government around $17 trillion, not even counting Medicare and Medicaid expenditures.     CNN commentator Scott Jennings honed in on the Israel point Kasparian brought up as a matter of basic mathematics. “You think Israel is a bigger portion of our budget than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” Jennings asked with a smirk. Kasparian didn’t directly answer the question, and deflected: “You think Social Security is more of an issue compared to how much we just shell out for conflicts abroad?” Bewildered by her answer, Jennings clapped back: “As a matter of expenditures and math, yes!”  Kasparian’s rant gave new meaning to the phrase the math isn’t mathing. Social Security in 2024 cost $1.461 trillion. From the October 7, 2023, Hamas genocide on Israelis through September 2024 by comparison, the U.S. only spent just over $22 billion on Israel’s military operations and related U.S. operations in the region. Cumulatively, Israel received just $310 billion from the U.S. since its founding in the 1940s to 2022 according to the Council on Foreign Relations.  In summary: It’s not even close. But the lefties on The Young Turks brigade are not exactly known for sending their best and brightest anyway.