'Targeting political opponents'

John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers came together in February 1963, serving as a launching pad for numerous musicians who would later achieve their own fame. The band operated under the Bluesbreakers name until 1968, after which Mayall continued performing as a solo artist with various lineups until his death in July 2024. Throughout this 61-year period, the band and Mayall’s subsequent groups recorded over 50 studio albums and featured more than 100 different musicians across multiple configurations. The original Bluesbreakers disbanded in 1968 when Mayall relocated to Los Angeles, though he briefly reformed the group in 1982 for a reunion The post Complete List Of John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers Band Members appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Books Seeds of Story Radioactive Wastelands and Also Legal Wrangling: Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s A City on Mars Real talk about how we can settle space — and if it’s really a good idea. By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on October 7, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? It’s a funny, discomfiting takedown of one of the central tenets of science fiction, eventually working around to real long-term possibilities for humans living beyond Earth. What It’s About From its golden age onward, science fiction has been confident that humanity is on the verge of a great leap out into the universe. We will colonize the moon and Mars, the asteroid belt, space stations, and eventually exoplanets. Some stories focus on the initial steps of our own solar system; space opera usually has us spread throughout the galaxy, with Earth a dim myth or just an ancient backwater. We will do it because it’s hard, or because humans have a natural instinct to explore, or because you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, or because Earth has become uninhabitable. (Definitely not because colonial cultures want to imagine colonialization that doesn’t displace people already there.) The Weinersmiths examine the actual, evidence-based barriers to space settlement, and what would be needed to overcome those barriers. The list is extensive, and Heinlein was extremely incorrect when he claimed that “Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door—C.O.D. It’s yours when you pay for it.” Sure: the things you need to pay for include a ton of intermediate research. A City on Mars starts with the biology of space travel. Some authors (Heinlein again) proposed that living on the Moon might be good for one’s health. Maybe joint problems would benefit from less gravity? It turns out, alas, that our bodies do much better in the environment where they evolved. For a start, Earth has extremely good radiation shielding. Long-term exposure to the radiation levels beyond our magnetosphere probably cause long-term physical damage, with a regular risk of short-term physical damage. We have limited data on what kind of damage, because so far, all long-term (i.e., still under 2 years) tenures in space have been on small stations inside the magnetosphere. Similarly, we know a reasonable amount about the health problems caused by microgravity on the space station, but not by the stronger but less-than-1G pull of Mars or the Moon. It would be nice to learn more before we sent a lot of people to live there. Then the Weinersmiths get into the question of reproduction in beyond-Earth settlements, which is a lot of fun; I won’t summarize it here except to say that pregnancy is hard enough on Earth. Babies also have trouble with multi-hour exercise routines. There are decades of medical research required before we’re ready to train Martian midwives, and “strangely, among people advocating for vast space settlements in the next thirty years, nobody is doing the sort of enormous spending necessary to get answers.” From there they move on to the perennial real estate question of location, location, location. The Moon is short on the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous required to grow plants (or any other sort of life). You’d also need radiation protection, which probably means living in (very small) underground habitats, and some way to deal with regolith (nasty to touch, nastier to breathe, clings to everything). But it’s close to Earth, and a good site for launching to elsewhere. Elsewhere, for many, implies Mars. It’s got carbon, but it’s also got regolith and a perchlorate-infused surface that’s poisonous to earthly life. The thin CO2 atmosphere gets planet-wide dust storms. You’re also a long way from Earth—and from the Sun, increasing the investment needed for energy. But you could turn that atmosphere, long-term, into water and methane, and in the meantime you could recapitulate the growth of plants that ultimately turned Earth’s land from rock to ecosystems. (It took a while; I may cover Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands here sometime.) Then there are space stations. You’re starting from scratch, so that’s even harder than the other options. We have yet to create a successful long-term-stable closed ecosystem on Earth. If we get that good at managing waste and energy and species balances, the odds are good that we’ll have done it through solving the most challenging problems our species currently faces. This would be a major bonus, but is also surprisingly low among the funding priorities for many settlement advocates. You may have heard all these issues before, and indeed argued against them. But the Weinersmiths’ most interesting section focuses on the most annoying and least discussed barrier: space law. Post-WWII space exploration was closely tied to not only the Cold War, but to wartime rocketry development. The resulting treaties were generally concerned with avoiding the expansion of hot wars into space. This was valuable: as of my drafting this article, an impressive zero cities have been destroyed by orbital mass weapons. The Outer Space Treaty limits land claims, and generally—also often ambiguously—describes what resources you can use in space, and how, without potentially starting a war. These limits could lead to a lot more—yet still ambiguous and potentially war-causing—constraint in, say, a land rush over the least-unlivable parts of the moon. They also (probably) constrain the creation of either country-specific space colonies or brand-new space countries. We need a lot more negotiation over, and clarification of, space law, to create settlements that don’t cause serious international problems. Buy the Book A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? Kelly and Zach Weinersmith Buy Book A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? Kelly and Zach Weinersmith Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget If science fiction has a religion, it’s manned space travel. Exploration and settlement are the ultimate destiny for humans, and the activities that will save us from ourselves. This belief is based on science, sure—but science doesn’t provide evidence that we should live on Mars. Or that we shouldn’t—science provides evidence about what would be necessary to live on Mars. And many of the people who most want to live on Mars are deeply uncomfortable with this evidence. At one point I worked in an organization that funded and managed high-risk research—stuff that could create huge improvements for society if it worked out, but that might well not pan out. My boss shared with me an Onion satire of TED Talks, in which a man talks movingly the idea of a “compost car”—“Get the best engineers, pay them double what they make, and I’m confident they will do this. The upside is just too great not to.” My boss’s point was not that a compost car is a terrible idea. It was that if you’re serious about a great idea, you need to plan seriously for the discomfiting details. The Weinersmiths are enthusiasts for the long-term project of moving beyond Earth, but also shockingly clear-eyed about what it requires. They are also very open about the fact that what they learned while writing this book is not what they expected to learn: Our original assumption was that space settlement was coming soon and that a question of governance was looming. We now believe the timeline is substantially longer and the project wildly more difficult and that the governance work to do is more about regulating the behavior of Earthlings than designing a Martian democracy. When I was in my teens and twenties, I was eager to relocate to any other planet that would take me. The more I’ve seen of Earth, the more convinced I am that we have a lot of work left to do here before we go elsewhere. If we can’t get to a sustainable, thriving ecosystem from “polluted planet with some risk of extinction,” it seems challenging to get there from “CO2 atmosphere and poisonous dust, possible subsurface microbes” or “radioactive vacuum.” Trying to solve the latter problems as a way of escaping the first one…seems backwards. A City on Mars lays out all the ways Earth is easy mode. It doesn’t suggest that the work isn’t worth doing. But it’s very clear about how much work that is, and the degree to which solving earthly problems is a key component. It’s also clear about quality of life. A small algae-coated lava tube on the Moon is probably not as nice as a terrible shoebox apartment in New York, or a hut on the edge of the desert, or even a research station in Antarctica that has free oxygen and also penguins. The Weinersmiths ultimately propose going slow and going big, taking all the baby steps needed at the pace they require—before eventually, long-term, building places elsewhere that are worth living. It’s persuasive. It’s also an approach that rarely appears in SF. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories The Incremental Project: Science fiction that doesn’t leap to faster-than-light travel is often set at the dramatic points of improvement in space exploration: Zephram Cochrane’s first warp drive flight, the announcement of the Martian Olympics in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, first contact. These are all awesome, but every “more research needed” problem identified in A City on Mars is a dozen novels waiting to happen. The first trauma surgeon at the first permanent lunar space station. The debate over reproductive safety for the first person pregnant off-world. (I just read Naomi Kritzer’s Obstetrix, coming next June, so could easily fill an entire paragraph with pregnancy-in-space ideas.) The international tension over the land grab for the Peaks of Light, and all the people staying up late at the UN trying to forestall a resulting war. Filkers, I can tell how recently you’ve been to a con by whether you’re now humming “A Toast for Unsung Heroes” or “Somebody Will.” Space Law and Space Lawyers: Beyond the big stories about preventing war—we’ve now had a good handful of books about interstellar hospitals. Don’t we deserve a Lunar Law series? Every case is a precedent, and every case has to wrestle with hundreds of years of existing national and international law. And there aren’t a lot of entertainment options on the moon, so the peanut gallery (or at least the call with people zooming in from their lava tube homes) is always full of controversy. Everything That Can Go Wrong… Despite all the barriers, there are a lot of powerful people pushing for faster human expansion into space. Frequently they expect the risks to be carried by disposable peons, because Mars is a great place for a company town. Many of these advocates are probably not serious, just running scams or trying to increase the future-iness of their Brand. But what if one of them were serious? Perhaps one prone to ignoring the advice of engineers? “Everybody dies because they can’t grow food” isn’t a very interesting plot. But with just enough going right for temporary survival, and a couple of engineer heroes determined to “science the shit out of” longer-term survival—plus lawyer heroes on Earth determined to save the settlers from indentured servitude—there are stories to be told. New Growth: What Else to Read Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars focuses less on future challenges, and more on the messy solutions already used to enable life in space. Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, which I’m currently in the middle of reading, talks about the ideologies behind Silicon Valley technofuturism (and behind a lot of space scammers). Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear isn’t about outer space at all, but given the number of libertarians who think that Luna would be an even better home for freedom than New Hampshire, it’s maybe an important cautionary read. Andy Weir’s The Martian admits that survival on Mars will require a lot of sciencing. Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series has a whole hive dedicated to the long work of interplanetary exploration. Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars makes the case both that Mars is a decent backup plan if Earth’s oceans are about to boil, and that it would require a massive international priority project to have any chance of working. And Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is one of my favorite depictions of near-now life on the International Space Station. Where beyond Earth would you want to live, given solutions to the air and soil problems? And what are your favorite stories about the places on your off-world bucket list?[end-mark] The post Radioactive Wastelands and Also Legal Wrangling: Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s <i>A City on Mars</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Nearly a week into the federal government shutdown, Senate Democrats are still withholding their support for a short-term funding extension, but pressure to reopen government could soon intensify as the government runs out of money to fund certain programs and paychecks. On Monday, Republicans gained no ground in their latest attempt to reopen the government, with a vote to end debate failing 52-42. Republicans need at eight Democrat caucus votes in order to pass the bill, assuming Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., continues to vote against it. Given that three Republicans did not vote, it appears nobody expected the bill to pass, anyway. Some Senate Democrats are concerned enough to support Republican efforts to reopen government, most notably Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa. The Daily Signal asked Fetterman if there were specific programs that he was worried about lapsing during the shutdown, and he replied, “the whole government.” Fetterman added that Democrats can “disagree on all these policies,” but that it is “a core responsibility to keep our government open.” For now, however, most Senate Democrats are continuing to vote down the short-term funding measure in a game of political chicken set to intensify in short order. If the government shutdown continues through Oct. 15, military troops and many government employees will miss their first paycheck.  According to a number of major news outlets, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., identified that mid-October cutoff on a House Republican conference call as a major pressure point for Democrats that could hasten their acquiescence. If Oct. 15 comes and goes, Oct. 29 would be the next paycheck that personnel could miss if the government remains shut down. If the shutdown made it to Oct. 29, it would be nearing the longest shutdown in American history, which lasted 35 days, during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Additionally, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), a nutrition and health care program for pregnant women, mothers, and children, could run out of funds in the coming days. The program has been running on $150 million in contingency funding during the shutdown, but an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) spokesperson said in a statement that it “will run out of money in October, and women and children could no longer receive benefits.” Some Republican senators say that they are not worried about interruptions in services just yet. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., for example, says that the closing of Farm Service Agency (FSA) offices likely will not lead to farmers missing services and payments in his state, given the fact that there is always a lag in those operations. “Whether the government was open or closed right now, it would take months to get the money there,” he told reporters Monday. “So, I think that [if] we get the government open in a week or three, it won’t impact the timing of getting that out the door.” He added: “The good news is, I talked to all the FSA offices the day we closed, or the day before we closed, and they were all caught up” on distributing payments to farmers. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., also appears altogether unconcerned about interruptions in government services. “Haven’t heard any complaints yet,” he told The Daily Signal Monday, when asked whether he worried about any cutoffs in programs. “No complaints.” What sets this government shutdown apart from previous ones is how the White House has attempted to pressure the Democrats by threatening a Department of Government Efficiency-style reshaping of the government. OMB Director Russell Vought has repeatedly publicized his shutdown cuts to disfavored programs, and Trump has amplified Vought’s work with memes posted on social media. But Democrats deny that these tactics will work on them, given that cutting federal programs is business as usual under Trump. “The way to look at it is, sort of, [to] look at it as the reverse of what Russell Vought said,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told reporters. “‘If this shutdown goes on, I’m going to fire a lot of people,’ [Vought says]. So, if it doesn’t go on, you’re not going to fire a lot of people?” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images) Kaine continued, “I mean, I believe that he’ll fire people, because he was firing people … before the end of last month. So, I believe that. But how about giving us a commitment that if we do a deal, you won’t? And you won’t claw back money, and you won’t cancel economic development projects in Virginia or take $400 million of public health funding away? So, I’d like to know that if there’s a deal, they’ll honor it.” There have been three members of the Senate Democrat caucus who have supported the GOP funding extension, fearing the consequences of a shutdown—Fetterman, along with Sens. Angus King, I-Maine, and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. The post Funding Cutoffs Could Make Dems’ Shutdown Strategy More Difficult appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, at a press conference on Tuesday, decried Senate Democrats’ refusal to vote to end the government shutdown. “We only have 53 Republicans, and so we have to have a handful of Democrats who will wake up and do the right thing and stop inflicting pain on the American people so that they can score political points,” Johnson, R-La., said. The federal government has been shut down since Oct. 1 after Senate Democrats blocked the passage of a continuing resolution that passed the Republican-controlled House and is supported by most Senate Republicans and the president. As a result, thousands of federal employees have been furloughed and essential federal personnel such as members of the military have been forced to work without pay until a continuing resolution is passed.  Johnson pointed out what he regards as the hypocrisy of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who had previously voted in March to fund the government with a continuing resolution. “While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse,” Johnson said, quoting the Senate Democrat leader’s remarks in March in favor of a funding bill that kept the government open. Johnson attributed Schumer’s change of heart to the need to appease his liberal political base. “[Schumer] is recognizing the reality of the political winds changing in the state of New York. As I mentioned yesterday, they are likely to elect a Marxist to be the mayor of New York City, and Chuck Schumer is terrified by that,” the Louisiana Republican said. “He’s not far enough left for the Marxists, and he knows he’s going to get a challenge from his left wing, so he has to show a fight against President Trump. No matter how ridiculous it is, no matter how distracting it may be to the actual issues of the day,” he added.  Johnson noted that Democrats have struggled to win the approval of the public since their defeat in last year’s election. He affirmed support for giving federal workers currently furloughed their back pay once the shutdown is over. “I hope that the furloughed workers receive back pay. Of course, we have some extraordinary Americans who serve the federal government. They serve valiantly, and they work hard. And they serve in these various agencies doing really important work,” Johnson said, adding that President Donald Trump agreed with him. “[The president] doesn’t want people to go without pay, and that’s why he pleaded with Chuck Schumer to do the right thing and vote to keep the government open. We don’t want this to happen,” the speaker said.  When pressed about why he had voted against continuing resolutions in the past, but supported one this time, Johnson cited the changing political environment. He emphasized that Republicans had, in his view, avoided including political nonstarters for Democrats in the current proposed CR.  “I could have put some of our priorities, or ‘poison pills,’ or things that Democrats have done in the past to us. We didn’t, and that’s why there’s nothing to negotiate right now,” he explained. The post Johnson Calls on Democrats to ‘Do the Right Thing’ on Shutdown appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Two Years Later: Are the Hostages Any Closer to Home?

Scientists have produced stronger magnets, but they tend to violently explode when used.

Not all that glitters is gold, although the snow-tipped spurs of Lapland aren't a bad place to start.

Fish, tadpoles, frogs, and even crayfish. It’s all on the menu for these spiders.

If Jay Jones were a Republican, he’d probably be a household name by now.  Imagine if there was a Republican candidate in a hotly contested race that was convicted of reckless driving, caught wishing death on a politician and his family in texts, accused of wanting to see police officers shot, and was called to drop out of the race by the sitting President of the United States?  That candidate’s face would be plastered all over ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS’s news shows, next to those heinous texts, accusations, and arrest record, but because Jay Jones is a Democrat, he enjoys the protection of the broadcast networks.  In resurfaced texts that were released on October 3, Jones (who is running for Virginia attorney general) suggested he would shoot then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert over Adolf Hitler and declared that Gilbert’s wife should be forced to watch his “fascist” children be killed. The texts from 2022 are more relevant given the heightened tensions about political violence, especially since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. On October 5, President Donald Trump called on Jones to drop out.   So how much time did the broadcast networks devote to the texts controversy?  63 seconds.  MRC analysts looked at the ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS evening, morning and Sunday roundtable shows from October 3, the day the texts were first reported by National Review, through the morning of October 7 and found just ONE mention of the Jones text scandal. The only discussion of Jones on the broadcast networks arrived on NBC’s Sunday roundtable show.  On the October 5 edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, former Donald Trump staffer Marc Short brought up the controversy, sparkinga 63-second conversation.  MARC SHORT: But can I also say in your interview with Leader Jeffries, that can we stop with the pearl clutching about the mean tweets and sombrero tweets? That this week it came to light that a Democratic candidate for Attorney General of the State of Virginia called for the assassination of a political opponent, called for the assassination of that political opponent’s family, and there’s not one national Democrat calling for him to step aside. Not one. It’s disgraceful. This prompted Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker to press former President Joe Biden staffer Neera Tanden: “Neera, let me let you respond to that because that is going to be a big story, I think, in the coming days.” But this “big story” was never mentioned again on Welker’s own network or any other broadcast news show, for that matter, in the two days since. And now there is a new opportunity to discuss Jones’s texts, as it appears Jones may have advocated the killing of police officers.  On October 6, the New York Post reported:  Virginia’s Democratic attorney general candidate Jay Jones chillingly suggested that if more cops got killed after being stripped of legal protection, they would shoot fewer people, according new claims from an ex-colleague in the state legislature. Jones, a former Democrat representative in Virginia’s House of Delegates, is already facing calls to drop out after Republican Del. Carrie Coyner revealed 2022 text exchanges between them in which he suggested he would shoot then-House Speaker Todd Gilbert over Adolf Hitler, and said Gilbert and his wife should have to watch his “fascist” children die. The networks have also failed to discuss Jones’s 2022 conviction of speeding at 116 mph.  The following 63-second conversation on Meet the Press remains the ONLY mention of the Jones controversy on any of the broadcast networks:  Consider where we are: on Meet the Depressed, former Pence CoS @marctshort calls out national Dem silence over VA AG candidate Jay Jones' disgusting, violent texts fantasizing about the murder of a political opponent and his family. Kristen Welker flips the hot potato over to… pic.twitter.com/C6LD1kgNNV — Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) October 5, 2025   For this study MRC analysts looked at the broadcast evening (ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News), morning news shows (ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, CBS Saturday Morning, CBS Sunday Morning, NBC Today, NBC Sunday Today), Sunday roundtable shows (ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation), and PBS’s NewsHour from October 3 through the morning of October 7.