Los Angeles [Communist] Democrat Mayor Karen Bass is openly calling for mayhem. She is telling the radicals in LA, part of her Rapid Response Network to let everyone know when ICE is around. The network includes gangs, antifa, illegal aliens, and any terrorists here and there. She needs to be arrested. In LA, the criminals […] The post LA Mayor Bass Colludes with Mexico, Gangs, Antifa to Stop ICE appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

Over two dozen fugitives from Mexico, accused of drug trafficking, murder, and kidnapping, were extradited to the United States on Tuesday.  Those extradited include men linked to Mexican drug cartels that have been classified as terrorist organizations by the Trump administration. They now face criminal charges, including drug trafficking, hostage-taking, kidnapping, gun crimes, human smuggling, money laundering, and murder.  “Today is the latest example of the Trump administration’s historic efforts to dismantle cartels and foreign terrorist organizations,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said. “These 26 men have all played a role in bringing violence and drugs to American shores — under this Department of Justice, they will face severe consequences for their crimes against this country. We are grateful to Mexico’s National Security team for their collaboration in this matter.”   Almost all of the fugitives face life in prison if convicted in federal court. The Justice Department said the men were collectively responsible for smuggling tons of cocaine, meth, fentanyl, and heroin into the United States.  “This transfer is yet another example of what is possible when two governments stand united against violence and impunity,” U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson said. “These fugitives will now face justice in U.S. courts, and the citizens of both of our nations will be safer from these common enemies.” Several of the men were members of the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), and Cártel del Noreste, all terrorist designated cartels, according to the Justice Department.  One of those extradited, Robert Salazar, was wanted in connection with the murder of  Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Juan Escalante in 2008. Escalante was shot by two gang members outside his home before he left for work.  Another one of those handed over to American authorities was Abdul Karim Conteh, a Sierra Leon national accused of smuggling illegal immigrants from Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Somalia, Cameroon, Senegal, Mauritania, Ethiopia, and Egypt into the United States.  Luis Raul Castro Valenzuela, A Sinaloa Cartel member set to face American justice, is charged with kidnapping and holding hostage an American, the Justice Department said.  The extradition agreement with Mexico coincides with a report from last week that President Donald Trump had quietly signed an order to use military force against drug cartels in foreign countries. Mexico has resisted suggestions that the American military be deployed on the ground to crack down on the cartels.  “We cooperate, we collaborate, but there is not going to be an invasion,” Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said. “That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out,” she continued. “It is not part of any agreement, far from it. When it has been brought up, we have always said no.”

Ashley Killeen collects and resells antiques. She admits to being a self-taught painter and antiques enthusiast with a dirty mouth. While we won’t be sharing any colorful language today, we will look at some vintage kitchen gadgets that never should have vanished from our daily lives. The Hotel Bar Butter Cutter is a vintage kitchen gadget that has newer adaptations. However, the newfangled devices just don’t deliver that same old-fashioned satisfaction for some reason. This device is a rectangular frame with stretched wires between the two long sides. The wires act to slice butter into equal slices, or “pats.” Each slice is roughly equivalent to just over one teaspoon of butter. @theprofessionalmagpie I love vintage kitchen gadgets #vintage #kitchen #kitchengadgets #butter #baking #cooking #oldschool ♬ La Vie En Rose – Louis Armstrong There is no documented date for the invention of this innovative vintage kitchen gadget, but there is knowledge of their use as far back as the Victorian times. The modern-day alternative is a One-Click Stick Butter Cutter for individual slices of cold butter, or this Butter Cutter Slicer with Wooden Tray to slice an entire stick at once. Egg slicers are another of those vintage kitchen gadgets that deserve more credit. While the most commonly seen design was invented in 1912 by German inventor Willy Abel, several different patents were filed earlier for devices with the same purpose. @theprofessionalmagpie Replying to @Becca S Anderson what can I say I’m a sucker for kitchen gadgets #kitchengadgets #vintage #antique ♬ Param-Pam-Pam – Carlos Campos This little gadget is often overlooked as a “seldom-used gadget” that takes up too much space. However, several other uses often go unmentioned. In addition to slicing eggs neatly and evenly for salads, recipes, or garnishes, it slices strawberries, avocado, and soft cheeses. It can be useful for slicing cherry tomatoes and seedless grapes. Be creative. If you enjoy learning about vintage kitchen gadgets, you can follow The Professional Magpie on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and eBay. Please share. You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post Old School Cool: Vintage Kitchen Gadget Will Have You Saying “I Need One Of Those!” appeared first on InspireMore.

Ahhhh, now I see

'Angry mobs all over the country tore down historical statues'

'This is personal'

REPORT: NEWLY DECLASSIFIED 'ARCTIC HAZE' MEMOS ... FBI BEGAN HUNTING FOR CLASSIFIED INTEL LEAKERS IN AUGUST 2017 ... COMEY'S LAW PROFESSOR FRIEND MAY HAVE BEEN LEAKING CLASSIFIED INTEL AMID TRUMP-RUSSIA HYSTERIA ... JUST THE NEWS: Comey's media mole told FBI he shaped Russia narrative, needed ‘discount’ to deny leaking intel

'It felt so good'

Column Science Fiction Film Club Planet of the Vampires: Spooky Gothic Horror Goes to Space No actual vampires, but plenty of dread, death, and creepy abandoned spaceships! By Kali Wallace | Published on August 13, 2025 Credit: Italian International Film / AIP Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Italian International Film / AIP Planet of the Vampires (1965). Italian title: Terrore nello spazio. Directed by Mario Bava. English screenplay written by Ib Melchior and Louis M. Heyward, based on the short story “One Night of 21 Hours” by Renato Pestriniero. Starring Barry Sullivan, Norma Bengell, Ángel Aranda, and Evi Marandi. I love a spooky atmosphere. In fact, a spooky atmosphere might be one of my favorite things in the world, both in fiction and in real life. On the one hand, this means I am always up for a walk in a fog-shrouded cemetery. On the other hand, this also means readers of my early drafts are always telling me, “It’s got a great spooky atmosphere! But it needs… the rest of the story.” My approach to writing is a lot like planning a seven-course meal entirely around dessert: I love the rising tension and building dread that comes along with a creepy, spooky, eerie atmosphere, so I start there and figure out everything else later. It’s certainly not impossible to find properly spooky space-based science fiction. Atmospheric sci fi horror is a small but healthy genre niche across storytelling media. When it comes to movies, I have mentioned once or twice or one million times that Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is one of my favorites. It’s also a movie made up of a bunch of components sourced from previous sci fi and monster movies, as they weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel so much as build a scarier, gorier vehicle from familiar parts. Along with It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), Mario Bava’s 1965 Planet of Vampires is one of those components. An amusingly dismissive Cinefantastique review of Alien from 1979 is even titled “ALIEN: It! the Terror from Beyond the Planet of the Vampires.” Which is both fair and pretty funny, because while Alien’s similarities to It! The Terror From Beyond Space are notable, its similarities to Planet of the Vampires are much stronger, and it’s only partly because of that spooky, spiky, foggy, ominous space-Gothic atmosphere. That atmosphere is a hallmark of director Mario Bava’s films. Bava got his start in film working on special effects and cinematography in the 1950s, when American and other international film studios were sending their productions to Italy, mostly for economic reasons. These international co-productions started with the sword-and-sandal historical epics that were briefly very popular, then it evolved to include the Spaghetti Westerns of the ’60s. Bava worked in various capacities on films in both of those genres. He also worked on what is generally regarded as Italy’s first sci fi film: The Day the Sky Exploded (1958), which stars Paul Hubschmid, familiar to readers of this column as lead actor “Paul Christian” in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953). I haven’t dug too much into The Day the Sky Exploded, but most modern sources take it as fact that while Paolo Heusch is the credited director and Bava is the cinematographer, Bava actually did a lot of the on-set directing. But it was in gothic horror that Bava truly established his name and made his mark. His first official film as director was Black Sunday (1960). Even if you just watch the gloriously melodramatic and brutal opening scene of Black Sunday, you can already see the dark, moody, violent, and thoroughly spooktastic style that Bava would become known for. It’s all shadows and fog and hooded figures with torches amongst leafless trees and creepy masks and ominous drums, and it’s great. It’s so great! There is no point is doing gothic horror if you aren’t going to go way, way over the top. Bava continued in that vein for several more movies through the early ’60s. His horror films were primarily Italian productions, although some were European co-productions, but they were often aimed at an international audience. This was pretty common in the ’60s, when the Hollywood studio system was failing and television was growing in popularity, but the surge of the “New American Cinema” of the ’70s had yet to take hold. Companies focused on funding and distributing international co-productions stepped in to take advantage of Hollywood’s floundering. One such company was American International Pictures (AIP). AIP distributed and financed a vast number of genre films through the ’50s, ’60s, and into the early ’70s. Their entire business model was to churn out a steady supply of movies with the specific goal of getting young people into movie theaters while their parents were home watching TV. Anything was fair game, as long as it was relatively cheap to make and would draw teenagers and young adults into theaters: comedies, spy flicks, thrillers, a bunch of very-of-their-time “beach party” and biker films—and of course, piles of sci fi and horror. Combine those last two and that’s how we get Planet of the Vampires, which was one of the many low-budget films AIP co-produced with Italian International Film and some funding from a Spanish production company. Upon release in the United States, it was paired second in a double feature with a movie called Die, Monster, Die!, an adaptation of H.P Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” that stars Boris Karloff. Die, Monster, Die! sounds completely awesome, and I am putting it on my to-watch list right away. (We could do an entire month watching only “The Colour Out of Space” film adaptations. We probably won’t, because the psychological and emotional repercussions would be alarming, but we could.) Planet of the Vampires is based on a sci fi short story “One Night of 21 Hours” by Italian writer Renato Pestriniero, first published in 1960. I can’t read Italian and can’t vouch for the English translation, but the story is an interesting read, and it has some nice passages about the inherent fears and dangers of exploring space. There are no actual aliens or monsters in this story; as is the case with too many sci fi stories from that time period, the real monster is the Freudian depths of the human psyche. Bava wrote the screenplay adaptation of the story with several cowriters, while Ib Melchior wrote the script for the English dubbing. From what I can tell, however, the Italian version of the movie was also dubbed. Many Italian films made during that time period for international distribution were in fact filmed silently, and all of the sound, including the dialogue, was added afterward. Here’s an example: an iconic scene from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). It’s not entirely clear to me if that’s exactly how Planet of the Vampires was filmed, but it seems likely. The cast is multinational—American, Brazilian, Spanish, Italian—and according to at least one source (a biography of Melchior), they spoke their lines in their own languages on set. In any case, it doesn’t seem like the Italian and English versions of the film are meaningfully different. (Aside: Universal dubbing to overcome language and production is less common these days—except in the Chinese television industry, where it is still very much standard practice. If you’ve ever watched a Chinese drama, you’ve almost certainly watched a show that has been dubbed post-filming in the same manner, often by different actors than those on screen. The dubbing happens due to both production demands and the desire for uniform accents and dialects regardless of the cast.) When the film opens, we meet Captain Mark Markary (Barry Sullivan), commander of the starship Argos. (Even though this movie came out years before the invention of D&D, I choose to believe “Mark Markary” was chosen because a DM had to invent an NPC name on the fly.) Argos and its fellow ship Galliot are approaching the mysterious planet Aura. They have followed a signal to Aura, but from above they can’t see anything of planet’s surface thanks to a thick fog. As they land, the ships are seized by some unknown force and drawn down to the planet at such high acceleration that nobody should have survived it. The crew falls unconscious, but the Argos lands safely. As soon as they land, the unconscious crew members wake up and immediately try to kill each other. I love it! I love inexplicable homicidal impulses in space! Gotta be one of my favorite ways to introduce characters to a new planet. Eventually they snap out of it, but their day does not get any better. When they locate Galliot, they trek across the foggy, volcanic surface of Aura to investigate. In a 1985 article in Fangoria, Bava is quoted gleefully explaining that the planet’s eerie landscape was made up two leftover prop rocks from a sword-and-sandal film and a whole lot of smoke to obscure the rest of the set. He may have been exaggerating a bit—a lot of his well-earned reputation as a filmmaker came from being able to do a lot with very little—but it is certainly apparent that the planet’s surface is made up of miniatures, mirrors, forced perspective, and a whole lot of “fog.” The model shots of the ships in flight are extremely silly. The landing struts of the spaceship exteriors look like… large planter pots, maybe? Like the kind you might find holding anemic under-watered flowers near the entrance to a bland corporate office park? Whatever props the production crew scrabbled together, the result is visibly low-budget, but with a willing suspension of disbelief, it still works. The planet’s surface sets an unsettling tone. We are assured that this is a creepy, unpleasant place to die. And, boy, do these unlucky space travelers die. The crew of the Argos discover that the crew of the Galliot succeeded in their mass murder frenzy and have all beaten each other to death. Crew member Tiona (Evi Marandi) is pretty sure she sees them up and walking around later, but because the rest of the characters still think they are in a sci fi movie and not a gothic horror, they don’t know that they are supposed to believe it when a beautiful woman says she sees the dead wandering around. She’s right, of course, but it’s a while before anybody else catches on. One by one, the crew of the Argos are picked off and killed, which is exactly what should happen in a sci fi horror movie about being stuck on a spiky planet inhabited by a hostile presence. As they are being winnowed down, Captain Mark “Marky Mark” Markary and crew member Sanya (Norma Bengell) do some exploring on the planet’s surface, which leads to my favorite sequence in the film. Mark and Sanya discover the wreckage of an alien spaceship and a couple of giant skeletons. The scenes are eerie and a bit odd, with the camera following the characters through the wrecked ship sometimes from a distance and sometimes at odd angles. (There is also some unintentional humor when Mark immediately touches something that’s just delivered a nasty electric shock to Sanya and is surprised to be shocked himself.) It will familiar to anybody who has seen Alien, of course, because it was more or less lifted wholesale from this movie into that one, and pretty much into Prometheus (2012) as well. That’s not why I like it so much. Or perhaps I should say: I like it in different movies for the same reason, and I don’t mind if lots of sci fi horror movies keep having people stumble across gruesome things in wrecked spaceships. I suspect it’s the same reason Ridley Scott (and many other filmmakers) like it as well, and that comes down to the nature of potential dangers in space-based sci fi horror. We know space is dangerous. It’s big and dark and unknown, which makes it perilous even if it’s completely empty. But in a horror story, what’s big and dark and unknown is almost never completely empty, and that’s where the real scares come in. A dusty old house isn’t scary when it’s empty; it’s scary when we suspect it’s not empty but can’t see what’s hiding in the shadows. And what’s true of haunted houses is true of any horror setting, whether that’s a castle, a cave, the woods, or the farthest reaches of space. The possibilities of there being something in that darkness is a key part of how many horror stories build dread. Stalwart human explorers stumbling across wrecks, ruins, and corpses are a delightful way of ratcheting up that dread in sci fi horror. Now we know that even what’s lurking in the darkness is vulnerable to something else. We know that something else has fallen into the same trap the characters have just fallen into. We know that something else—as big and alien and strange as it was—never escaped. This is where Planet of the Vampires really shines. The combination of that heavy, shadowy atmosphere pulled right from gothic fiction with the modernist aesthetics of ’60s space travel fiction means that the film is stylish enough to look at that I don’t really mind the clunky dialogue and sometimes inexplicable choices of crew members constantly wandering off alone. It helps that the film doesn’t pull its punches. The crew gets killed off and reanimated by the disembodied aliens one by one, until we’re left with a small group, then just three, then only one. Crew member Wes (Ángel Aranda) tries his best to stop the aliens from leaving the planet, but there is to be no last man standing in this film. He dies as well. None of the crew’s efforts help in the end. The aliens escape Aura and head to Earth. What I really enjoy about Planet of the Vampires is how even with the low budget, even with the two-rocks-and-some-mirrors visual effects, even with a cast of people speaking their lines in four different languages and rocking Star Trek-style fight choreography, it still manages to create a layered, immersive atmosphere of fear. It’s far from a perfect movie (it’s even quite silly in places), but I don’t care, because it showcases perfectly why space exploration is such a superior premise for horror stories: out there in the darkness, we don’t know what we’re going to find, and we don’t know if we’re going to be able to run away when we do find it. What do you think of Planet of the Vampires, which has no vampires? Do you know where your Meteor Rejector is? You better locate it before it’s too late. Next week: We’re jumping ahead to the late ’90s and a film that was critically panned upon release but has since earned itself an ongoing reevaluation, which seems to be part of the natural life cycle of a horror film. Watch Event Horizon on Amazon, Apple, Plex, and others.[end-mark] The post <i>Planet of the Vampires</i>: Spooky Gothic Horror Goes to Space appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Reddit is sharply reducing what the Internet Archive can store, blocking the Wayback Machine from saving most of the site. Only the Reddit.com homepage will remain available for archiving, meaning the public record will no longer include individual posts, comment sections, or user profiles. The change effectively strips away the ability to look back at the full discussions that once played out on the platform, leaving little more than a daily snapshot of trending headlines. The company says it is responding to AI developers who have been using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor to harvest Reddit data. “Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but we’ve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,” said Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt. He added, “Until they’re able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content), we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors.” This crackdown is not unique to Reddit. Across the internet, more companies and publishers are locking their content behind paywalls or gated APIs, arguing that AI firms are exploiting open access to train their models without consent or compensation. While some see this as a way to force licensing deals, it also closes off public avenues to knowledge and history that were once freely available. The Internet Archive, for its part, has spent decades doing important work and preserving digital history, including old web pages, books, video, and audio, ensuring that even deleted or altered material can still be studied. The Wayback Machine has been an essential tool for journalists, researchers, and ordinary users trying to recover information that might otherwise be lost to censorship, political pressure, or corporate rebranding. Restricting its reach weakens one of the last truly public safeguards for the internet’s collective memory. Reddit says the new limits begin taking effect immediately and that the Internet Archive was notified in advance. This follows a pattern: in 2023, Reddit sold data access to Google for both search and AI purposes, then blocked major search engines that did not pay. That same year, it enacted API changes that shuttered numerous third-party apps, sparking widespread protests. The company has since struck a deal with OpenAI and is suing Anthropic, alleging continued scraping despite assurances it had stopped. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, responded, “We have a longstanding relationship with Reddit and continue to have ongoing discussions about this matter.” By targeting the Internet Archive alongside AI scrapers, Reddit is feeding into a larger trend where fear of AI misuse becomes a pretext for locking away the public web. This may protect profits, but risks erasing parts of the digital record that cannot be replaced once gone. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Reddit Slams the Door on Internet Archivers appeared first on Reclaim The Net.