'These are all things that we will better prepare for'

He has a right to be concerned, but holy hell, this is hilarious

'It is more than appropriate that Mr. Kindred tendered his resignation'

News The Bright Sword Lev Grossman’s Arthurian Novel The Bright Sword Is in Development as a Series The oddball Knights of the Round Table are coming. By Molly Templeton | Published on July 9, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share The Bright Sword, the new novel from Magicians author Lev Grossman, isn’t out until next week—but it’s already on track to become a series. Deadline reports that Lionsgate Television and 3 Arts Entertainment have picked up the rights to the novel, with a planned series to be produced by Grossman, Erwin Stoff, and a showrunner who has yet to be found. The Bright Sword has the subtitle “A Novel of King Arthur,” but it begins in an unexpected place: After Arthur’s death. The book synopsis says: A gifted young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a spot on the Round Table, only to find that he’s too late. The king died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, leaving no heir, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table survive.They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Table, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.But Arthur’s death has revealed Britain’s fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords lay siege to Camelot and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they’ll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell, and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain’s dark past. In a statement, Grossman said, “My ambition with The Bright Sword was to completely reimagine the legend of King Arthur—to make it fresh, relevant and diverse, while at the same time hanging onto all the classic elements that fans like me love.” One hopes that that freshness extends to the adaptation. The Bright Sword has its share of fight scenes, but it is also, at times, really quite funny. What I am saying, basically, is that I dearly hope the adaptation doesn’t try to turn it into Game of Thrones: The Post-Arthur Years. Producer Stoff has a long genre track record that spans everything from The Matrix to the cult series Kings to Blue Eye Samurai. Grossman, of course, has been through the adaptation process before with The Magicians, the Syfy series which adapted his trilogy of books into a very different but entirely outstanding series. It’s going to be very interesting to see who gets brought on as showrunner for this one.[end-mark] The post Lev Grossman’s Arthurian Novel <i>The Bright Sword</i> Is in Development as a Series appeared first on Reactor.

Books Front Lines and Frontiers Bigger Isn’t Always Better: Skylark of Valeron by E.E. “Doc” Smith A pulpy space adventure intent on blowing up the reader’s suspension of disbelief in spectacular fashion… By Alan Brown | Published on July 9, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement. It is summertime, which I have always found to be the best time to read pulp adventures—the pulpier, the better. Whether it is space opera or planetary romance, there is an energy to pulp stories that can hold your attention even when the distractions of a sunny day surround you. Today, I’m taking a look at the third book in E.E. “Doc” Smith’s seminal Skylark series, Skylark of Valeron. I thought it would be a good one to read while bobbing around my above-ground pool in a rubber raft, enjoying the weather. But unfortunately, Smith’s urge to constantly outdo himself with ever grander ideas got the best of him, and this is a book that didn’t stick the landing. Skylark of Valeron, which appeared in Astounding in 1934 and 1935, is the sequel to The Skylark of Space, which debuted in Amazing Stories magazine in 1928 (you can see my review here), and Skylark Three, which appeared in Amazing Stories in 1930 (you can see my review here). There was also one more book in the series, the much later (about three decades later!) Skylark DuQuesne, which appeared in Worlds of If in 1965. The copy of Skylark of Valeron I reviewed is a reissue from Pyramid books, a second paperback edition published in 1966. The cover is another impressionistic painting by Jack Gaughan, who had also illustrated Pyramid’s reprints of Smith’s Lensman series and the other Skylark books. While not as evocative as Gaughan’s other covers, it captures a lot of pulpy energy, matching the book it adorns. I’ve previously reviewed Smith’s entire Lensman series, including Triplanetary, First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second Stage Lensmen, Children of the Lens, and Masters of the Vortex. Once again, as with the Lensman books, I must thank Julie at Fantasy Zone Comics and Used Books for finding this book for me. About the Author Edward Elmer Smith (1890-1965), often referred to as the “Father of Space Opera,” wrote under the pen name E.E. “Doc” Smith. I included a complete biography in my review of Triplanetary. Like many writers from the early 20th century whose copyrights have expired, you can find quite a bit of work by Doc Smith on Project Gutenberg, including The Skylark of Valeron. Expanding Stories Sometimes, either deliberately or seemingly on their own accord, stories will grow both in length and in scope. An author will write a work that is so long publishers will break it into multiple volumes, as was done with one of the first trilogies I ever read, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. But more often than not, authors who write a series or trilogy often do not originally set out to do so. The first volume is frequently a story that stands by itself. Part of this is economic, as it is not prudent to set out to write multiple books before you know the first one will be popular. A modern example of this is the original Star Wars trilogy. The first movie, Star Wars (now known as A New Hope), was intended to tell a complete story (though Lucas had conceived of a much larger story in his early drafts), but its wild popularity allowed George Lucas to go further. He had in mind a story that would require at least three installments (if not more) to tell, and was audacious enough to leave the second movie, The Empire Strikes Back, with a cliffhanger ending, which was not resolved until the next film, Return of the Jedi. While that had been a common occurrence in the movie serials that inspired him, it was quite a shock to moviegoers of the 1980s, who were not used to the practice. I was reminded of Star Wars when I read the third volume of Doc Smith’s Skylark series. Like Star Wars, that series started with a volume complete in itself. The next volume, however, ended on a cliffhanger, with the heroes starting off on a long journey, and the fate of the villain left as a loose thread. So it was up to the third volume to bring the story to a close. There is another element of the Skylark series that reminded me of Star Wars, and that is the way the scope and stakes of the stories escalate over time. Doc Smith is famous, both in his Skylark series and in the Lensman series, for presenting bigger and bigger scientific discoveries, grander spaceships, more destructive battles, and increasingly menacing foes. In fact, I would say it’s a tendency that Smith takes to a fault. The scope of the Lensman series grew until whole planets and even stars were being destroyed. And in the Skylark series, not only is each new Skylark ship larger than the last, but Dick Seaton faces ever fiercer foes until he meets immaterial beings who can bend reality to their will. There is a concept called “suspension of disbelief,” always important in science fiction, which involves convincing the readers to accept elements of the story that they might otherwise reject. And unfortunately, Smith’s stories often became so grand that the sheer scope undermines the reader’s suspension of disbelief, and becomes implausible. The Star Wars series follows a similar arc. The first Star Wars movie introduced a giant space station, the Death Star, which the rebellion attacked with small fighters. By the third movie, an even bigger space station, the Death Star II, was the center of a conflict between dueling fleets of capital ships. And the scope grew even grander in the newer Sequel Trilogy, where the first movie introduced a planet that’s been turned into a giant battle station capable of destroying multiple planets simultaneously, and the third introduced a whole fleet of ships with planet-killing weapons. The cost of building such a battle fleet was not addressed, probably because it would not just threaten the necessary suspension of disbelief, but would shatter it completely. It turns out that in storytelling, bigger is not always better. Skylark of Valeron The book picks right up where Skylark Three left off, or actually before the end of that previous book. If you wondered what happened to Blackie DuQuesne and his henchman “Baby Doll” Loring, who had been heading for the world of Fenachrone just before Dick Seaton and his allies blew it up, you get your answer here. DuQuesne has a Fenachrone officer he rescued from space, and a mind-reading machine that can transfer all the memories from the alien to his own brain. He and Loring then employ that knowledge to capture a Fenachrone battleship, which he plans to use to conquer the Earth. DuQuesne detects the destruction of the Fenachrone home world just in time to escape the blast wave, and sets out to find the alien race that gave his foe Seaton the power to destroy an entire planet. Dick Seaton and company (including his wife, Dorothy, his friends Martin and Margaret Crane, and their faithful but barely mentioned valet, Shiro), had in previous volumes, after repeated assassination attempts by DuQuesne and his allies, decided they were all safer traveling in space than staying on Earth. After bringing peace to the world of Mardonale, Seaton had worked alongside (and even swapped memories with) the advanced scientists of Norlamin to learn the secrets of higher orders of reality, all the way up to the sixth order, an order of thought. He and his friends then boarded their ship, Skylark Three, used that knowledge to destroy the home planet of the evil and repulsive Fenachrone, and pursued and destroyed a ship full of Fenachrone dissidents who were trying to escape to a distant galaxy. Next, Seaton and his companions decided that, rather than waste the velocity they had built up, they would visit that far-flung star system. But as this volume joins them, they encounter disembodied energy creatures called “the pure intellectuals,” who board the Skylark Three without regard for physical bulkheads, and want to disembody Seaton and his friends. In desperation, the crew boards the smaller Skylark Two as a lifeboat, and Seaton uses his expanded powers to shift them into the fourth dimension. Meanwhile, DuQuesne finds the planet of the Norlaminians, presents himself as a friend of Seaton, and tricks them into sharing with him the scientific secrets they’d previously shared with his foe. With that knowledge in hand, he and Loring head home to Earth to conquer the world. In the fourth dimension, the crew of the Skylark Two are separated, and Seaton and Margaret have to fight their way across a strange plane of existence to rejoin the others. And when Skylark Two returns to the normal three-dimensional world, they find themselves so far away from home that they can’t locate the Earth, or any of the worlds they have visited. They look for a planet they can use as a base to build a detector powerful enough to find their way home, and stumble across the human-inhabited world of Valeron, which is under attack by the evil, chlorine-breathing amoebic creatures called the Chlorans. Smith then takes us on a long digression that describes the conflict between the Valeronians and the Chlorans, whose world had been deposited into the solar system of Valeron when its star passed too close. They had then waged a long war, which the humans had been slowly losing, until only one crowded city remained, huddled under a weakening force field. But the arrival of Seaton gives the Valeronians the knowledge they need to build advanced defenses that use the forces of the higher orders of reality, and soon the Chlorans are defeated. Seaton then uses the resources provided to him by the grateful Valeronians to begin building a new Skylark ship. Dorothy convinces him to abandon his old system of numbering ships, and they christen her the Skylark of Valeron. Seaton builds a giant computing device, something we might now refer to as an artificial intelligence, which is at the heart of the new ship, and finishes the construction process itself. The new ship is huge, a sphere a hundred kilometers in diameter that masses millions of tonnes. In a move much more merciful than his destruction of the Fenachrone, Seaton uses his new ship and its powers to place the Chloran planet back into its home solar system, securing safety for the Valeronians, and displaying the mighty powers now at his disposal. Then, having built the ship around a giant detector, Seaton and his comrades map the universe and locate the Green System, the home of their friends on Mardonale and Norlamin. At this point, there were only a few pages left in the book, and I found myself fearing a rushed conclusion. Unfortunately, I was right. The crew of the Skylark of Valeron again encounters the pure intellectuals, and this time the once-fearsome foe is no match for their new powers. When Seaton and company turn their attention to freeing Earth from the clutches of DuQuesne, conveniently sweeping aside the immense power their foe has amassed as if it were nothing, the story reaches a conclusion that is more anticlimax than thrilling ending. Final Thoughts Skylark of Valeron could have been another fun adventure in the series, but unfortunately, by trying to outdo the preceding volumes, Smith takes his fictional technology to a level where it works to the detriment of the story rather than enhancing it. An author can boggle the reader’s mind with wonders, but can also take things to the point where the hero is so powerful that the story loses all believability. Now it’s time for you to join the conversation, and provide your thoughts on Skylark of Valeron in particular, the rest of the Skylark series, or “Doc” Smith’s work in general. And as always, if you have any other space opera adventures you want to discuss, especially those that make good summer reading, the floor is open.[end-mark] The post Bigger Isn’t Always Better: <i>Skylark of Valeron</i> by E.E. “Doc” Smith appeared first on Reactor.

News Crumble Animation Studio Laika Steps Into Live-Action Film With Brian Duffield’s Crumble Ancient curse! Ancient curse! By Molly Templeton | Published on July 9, 2024 Credit: 20th Century Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: 20th Century Studios The animation studio Laika—creators of Coraline and the upcoming, much-anticipated Piranesi—is trying something new. Deadline reports that the Oregon-based studio is producing Crumble, a live-action film from writer-director Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You, pictured above). This news comes three years after Laika’s announcement that it planned to begin making live-action films alongside its lauded animated features. At the time, it was announced that the studio would produce a live-action adaptation of the novel Seventeen by John Brownlow; it’s unclear what the state of that film might be. Crumble will be produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the Oscar-winning producers of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. As for the film’s story, Deadline says only, “Crumble tells the tale of a married couple who go on a world-traversing adventure in the hope of finding a cure to an ancient curse.” Writer-director Duffield had a streaming hit with the horror film No One Will Save You, which premiered on Hulu last year. He also created Netflix’s animated Skull Island series, and recently signed on to direct and co-write an adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s novel Whalefall. No casting or production timeline has been announced for Crumble.[end-mark] The post Animation Studio Laika Steps Into Live-Action Film With Brian Duffield’s <i>Crumble</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Sen. Josh Hawley spoke Monday night at the National Conservatism Conference.In his speech, he contrasted “Christian nationalism” with other kinds of nationalism. “The nationalism of Rome led to blood-thirst and conquest; the old pagan tribalisms led to ethnic hatred. The empires of the East crushed the individual, and the blood-and-soil nativism of Europe in the last two centuries led to savagery and genocide,” the Missouri Republican said. “By contrast, Augustine’s Christian nationalism has been the boast of the West. It has been our moral center and supplied our most cherished ideals. Just think: those stern Puritans, disciples of Augustine, gave us limited government and liberty of conscience and popular sovereignty.” “Because of our Christian heritage, we protect the liberty of all to worship according to conscience. Because of our Christian tradition, we welcome people of all races and ethnic backgrounds to join a nation constituted by common loves.” Here’s his remarks, as prepared for delivery: I want to speak to you tonight about the future. About the future of the conservative movement, and of this nation. But every future is rooted in some earlier past—or as Seneca said, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” So let me begin in the year of Our Lord 410: the year of the end. That was the year, you may recall, that the city once thought Eternal, Immutable, Unconquerable—the capital of the ancient world—Rome—finally bowed to the invading Visigoths. And with that fell stroke, the era of the Empire and the pagan world of antiquity came to a close. Yet in that end for Rome was a beginning indeed—our beginning, the beginning of the West. For even as Rome lay shattered and smoldering, a thousand miles away across the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Christian bishop of Hippo—a man named Augustine—took up his pen to describe a new age. His vision would inspire the West for millennia to come and help define the destiny of this country. He called his work “The City of God.” Augustine’s first ambition was to defend Christians from blame for Rome’s fall. Some said the Christian religion, with its new virtues—like humility and service—with its glorification of common things—like marriage and labor—with its praise for “the poor in spirit”—the common people—had made the Empire soft and left it vulnerable to its enemies. Augustine knew just the opposite was true. The Christian religion was the only vital force left in Rome at the time of its collapse. And now Augustine imagined that religion rising from the ruins of the ancient world to forge a new one, to create a new and better civilization. And what would be the secret to this new order? Love. Love was a great word for Augustine. It contained the whole of his political science. Every person is defined, he said, by what he loves. Every society is driven by its loves. A nation is in fact nothing other than, to quote Augustine, “a multitude of rational creatures associated in a common agreement as to the things which [they] love.” The trouble with Rome was that they loved the wrong things. And as its affections became corrupted, the Roman republic fell into disrepair. Romans began by loving glory and practicing self-sacrifice. They ended by loving pleasure and practicing every form of self-indulgence. And so Rome rotted from its core. But amid the Roman wreckage, Augustine envisaged a new civilization animated by better affections. Not the old Roman lusts for glory and honor, but the sturdier, stronger loves of the Bible: the love for wife and children; the love of labor, neighbor, and home; the love of God. And while Augustine said all nations are constituted by what they love, his philosophizing actually described an entirely new idea of the nation unknown to the ancient world: a new kind of nationalism, if you like—a Christian nationalism organized around Christian ideals. A nationalism driven not by conquest but by common purpose; united not by fear but by common love; a nation made not for the rich or for the strong, but for the “poor in spirit,” the common man. And his dream became our reality. A thousand years after Augustine wrote, some twenty thousand practicing Augustinians ventured to these shores to found a society here on his principles. History knows them as the Puritans. Inspired by the City of God, they founded the City on a Hill. We are a nation forged from Augustine’s vision. A nation defined by the dignity of the common man, as given to us in the Christian religion; a nation held together by the homely affections articulated in the Christian faith—love for God, love for family, love for neighbor, home and country. And some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. Is there any other kind worth having? The nationalism of Rome led to blood-thirst and conquest; the old pagan tribalisms led to ethnic hatred. The empires of the East crushed the individual, and the blood-and-soil nativism of Europe in the last two centuries led to savagery and genocide.   By contrast, Augustine’s Christian nationalism has been the boast of the West. It has been our moral center and supplied our most cherished ideals. Just think: those stern Puritans, disciples of Augustine, gave us limited government and liberty of conscience and popular sovereignty. Because of our Christian heritage, we protect the liberty of all to worship according to conscience. Because of our Christian tradition, we welcome people of all races and ethnic backgrounds to join a nation constituted by common loves. The truth is, Christian nationalism is not a threat to American democracy. Christian nationalism founded American democracy. And it is the best form of democracy yet devised by man: the most just, the most free, the most humane and praiseworthy. And my claim to you tonight is that we must recover the principles of our Christian political tradition now for the sake of our future. This is true whether you are a Christian or not, a person of a different faith or none at all. The Christian political tradition is our tradition; it is the American tradition; it is the greatest source of energy and ideas in our politics—and always has been. It has inspired conservatives and liberals, reformers and activists and moralists and trade unionists down our history. And now we need this grand tradition again. For the common loves that sustain this nation are fraying. And as they do, the nation itself risks coming apart. You know the litany of our ills as well as I do; you can read the signs of the times. Our streets are not safe, not least because our border stands starkly and utterly open. And millions of illegal migrants pour into this country who have no interest in our common heritage and no commitment to our common ideals. Good, stable work is in too-short supply. Our economy has entered a new and decadent Gilded Age, where working-class jobs disappear and working wages erode and working families and neighborhoods fall apart—while denizens of the upper-class live a cloistered life behind gates and private security and woke CEOs rake in millions in pay. Meanwhile, religion is hounded from the public square. And fanatics take to our campus quadrangles to chant “Death to Israel!”—precisely because they despise the biblical tradition that links the nation of Israel and the American republic together.   And at back of each of these trends and all of them, at back of the chaos and coming-apart, is an assault on our common loves—the affections that come to us from our Christian inheritance. God, work, neighborhood, home. The great affections of the West. They are dissolving before our eyes. And why? Not by happenstance. The modern Left wants to destroy our common loves and replace them with others, to destroy our common bonds and replace them with another faith, to dissolve the nation as we know it, and remake it in their image. This has been their project for fifty years and more. But it is the Right that is failing this country most acutely. The Left’s agenda we know. The Left’s threat we expect. It is conservatives who should be defending this nation, defending what makes us a nation. But instead? In this moment of crisis, they’re busy tending the dying embers of neoliberalism. They’re reading their copies of John Stuart Mill and Ayn Rand. They’re still talking about fusionism and its three-legged stool. For conservatives, that will no longer do. In this hour of chaos and crisis, conservatives’ only hope, and the hope of the nation, is to recover the Christian tradition on which this nation subsists. Our only hope is to renew our common loves. Now we need not the ideology of Rand or Mill or Milton Friedman, but the insight of Augustine. For the future, to save this country, this must be our mission: defend the loves that unite our country; defend the loves that make us a country—defend the common man’s work, the common man’s home, and the common man’s religion. I fear my fellow Republicans labor under a misunderstanding. The Left’s strategy, their overriding aim, is not simply to slow our economy with regulations. It is not merely to grow big government bigger. Concentrated power is only part of their program. The Left’s primary purpose is to attack our spiritual unity, our common loves. They want to destroy the affections that link us one to another and substitute a set of altogether different ideals. The Left preaches its own gospel, a creed of intersectionality, of deliverance from tradition, from family, from biological sex—and of course, from God. They regard the faith of our fathers as a fetter to be broken. They deem our common moral inheritance as cause for repentance. Instead of Christmas, they want Pride Month. Instead of prayer in schools, they venerate the trans flag. Diversity, equity and inclusion are their watchwords, their new holy trinity. And they expect their preachments to be obeyed. They may speak of tolerance, but they practice fundamentalism. Those who resist are called deplorable. Those who question are labeled threats to democracy. And this is why progressives have such little patience these days for working people. They are too attached to the old ways, to the old faith of God and family and home and nation. This is the Left’s true Replacement Theory, their true replacement agenda: to replace the Christian ideals on which our nation was founded and to silence those Americans who dare still stand by them. *** Sadly, the Republican Party of the last thirty years has been in no position to resist the onslaught. Instead of defending the affections that bind us to each other, Republicans of the Bush-Romney era have championed libertarian economics and corporate interests. Their fusionist faith has become one note: money first, people last. In the name of “the market,” these Republicans cheerleaded for corporate tax cuts and low barriers for corporate trade, then watched these same corporations ship American jobs overseas and use the profits to hire DEI experts. In the name of capitalism, these Republicans sang the praises of global integration while Wall Street bet against American industry and bought up single family homes—so that after the banks took the working man’s job, he couldn’t afford a house for his family to live in. Then Wall Street crashed that global economy—multiple times—and the housing market—and these same Republicans kept right on rhapsodizing. And subsidizing. It was all just too big to fail. These Republicans forgot that economics is first and last about people—and the things they love. About providing for a family. About personal independence. About having a place to call home and a job that gives you pride. You could say like this: the free market is valuable exactly to the degree it sustains the things we love together. Otherwise, it’s just cold profit. And somewhere along the line, Republicans fell in love with profit for its own sake. And they seem almost embarrassed that their most committed and reliable voters are people of faith. Let’s be honest: In that three-legged stool of yesteryear—with religious conservatives, libertarians, and national security hawks—it was always the religious people who supplied the votes. And it was our shared religious tradition that supplied conservatism’s most compelling ideas. For instance: constitutional government—or individual liberty, or the rights of workers. Still today, churchgoing Americans who are married and raising children—whether white or Hispanic or Asian or whatever—are the backbone of the Republican Party. If the Republicans have a future, it lies with them.   And they are exactly the people the Party takes most for granted and serves least well. Give the Left this: at least they know that people make politics. And they reward their people. Witness the trans flag on every federal building and a sluice of federal money flowing to climate change boondoggles.    But Republicans? They give their voters this Hobson’s choice: between the high-tax, high-regulation globalism of the Left—or the slightly lower-tax, lower-regulation globalism of the Right. A choice between the aggressive social liberalism of the Left or the accommodating social liberalism of the Right. And then Republicans wonder why they have managed to win the popular vote only twice in the last nine presidential elections. Republicans need a place to stand. They need a future to offer the country. And for conservatives who want to save this republic, there is only one place worth standing, and only one vision with propounding: the Christian tradition of nationalism that unites this country. Work, family, God. These are the great loves that define America. And these are the ideals the Republican Party must now defend. *** Republicans can start by defending the common man’s work. In the choice between labor and capital, between money and people, it’s time for Republicans to get back to their Christian and nationalist roots—and start prioritizing the working man.  The recent Republican Party, the 1990s party, privileged the money crowd in just about every possible way. In policy. In the tax code. In praise. Think of all that worshipful talk about corporate tax cuts. Think of all that rhetoric about the efficient allocation of resources. All of which really meant profits for Wall Street. Workers meanwhile were left to fend for themselves: to watch their factories shut down; to watch their wages flatline; to watch their mortgages soar and their home values plunge. To explain to their children why they had to move out of the home they grew up in; why they couldn’t go to the doctor while Daddy tried to find work. To all this, Republicans said, it’s the nature of things. I would simply point out that this has not been the nationalist, Christian tradition of this country. Abraham Lincoln said it best when he said that “capital is only the fruit of labor …. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Theodore Roosevelt spoke for the same tradition when he said, “I am for business, yes. But I am for manhood first, and business as an adjunct to manhood.” That’s the spirit. The Republican Party of tomorrow, a party that can unite the nation, must put people before money. And the way to do that is to prioritize the interests of the working person. The greatest economic challenge of our time is not the debt or the deficit or the value of the dollar. It is the astounding number of able-bodied men without good work. To get them that work, we need policy change. We are about to have a grand debate about extending tax cuts. Perhaps we should start with this question: Why should labor ever be taxed more than capital? They should not be. Why should families get less tax relief than corporations? Families should always be first. And we haven’t heard the word “usury” in a few centuries, but it certainly occupied a lot of Christian thinkers over the years, and it should occupy us again. There is no reason credit card companies or the banks behind them should be allowed to charge working people thirty and forty-percent interest. No profit margin in the world justifies that kind of extortion. No amount of money excuses profiting off other people’s pain. We ought to cap credit card interest rates by law. And it’s time Republicans embraced the trade unions of the working man. I’m not talking about government unions, public sector unions—I mean the unions that go to bat for the working guy and his family. I’ve been on the picket line with the Teamsters. I voted to help them unionize Amazon. I supported the railway strike and the autoworkers’ strike. And I’m proud of it. And when it comes to woke corporations, I’ll just say this: If you want to change the priorities of corporate America, make the suits responsible again to an American workforce. Re-empower labor and you’ll change the priorities of capital. *** Maybe one reason Republicans in recent years have not put the working man first is that they haven’t been willing to put the working man’s family first. A party of a Christian nation must defend the family. Republicans have talked about the family, to be sure. There has been talk unending. But Bush-type Republicans have rarely paused to ask themselves why so few of their countrymen are actually forming families. Happy and hopeful people have children. Yet fewer and fewer Americans do. Why? Could it be that the economy Republicans have championed—the globalist, corporatist economy they helped create—is bad for the family?   Time was, a working man could support his family—a wife and children—on the work of his own hands. Those days are long gone. Now Americans toil away in dead-end jobs in cubicles, servicing the global corporations, while paying outrageous sums for housing and healthcare. They don’t have families because they can’t afford to have the families they want. No wonder they’re anxious. No wonder they’re depressed. And those that do have children can’t afford to be home with them. Today, two parents have to work to make the kind of money, with the kind of purchasing power, that one wage got you fifty years ago. So government daycare now shapes our children’s worldview. Screens now teach our children self-worth—or self-criticism. The media and the advertising industry shape their sense of right and wrong. You want to put family first? Make it easy to have children. And put Mom and Dad back in the home. Make it the policy of this country to get American workers a family wage—one that a man can support his family on; one that allows a married couple to raise their children as they see fit. For the truest measure of American strength is the flourishing of home and family. *** And conservatives must defend the common man’s religion. Of all the affections that bind a society together, none is more powerful than religious affection, a shared vision of transcendent truth. To the extent our talking heads deign to acknowledge religion at all, they usually insist it is religious liberty that unites Americans. That is not, strictly speaking, true. Religion unites Americans, which is why the liberty to practice it is so important. Every great civilization known to man has sprung from a great religion, and ours is no different. Despite experts telling Americans for decades that religion divides them, that religion destroys their civil peace, that religion is out of bounds—most Americans shared broad and basic religious convictions: theistic, biblical, Christian. Our national faith is there in the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.” Our national faith is there on our currency: “In God We Trust.” President Eisenhower summed it up well when he said about that motto, in 1954: “Here is the land of liberty—and the land that lives in respect of the Almighty’s mercy to us.” The elite consensus about religion is exactly wrong. Religion is one of the great unifiers of American life, one of our great common affections. Working people believe in God, they read the Bible, they go to church—some often, some not. But they consider themselves in all events members of a Christian nation. And they understand this fundamental truth: their rights come from God, not from government. The seventy-year push to eliminate every vestige of religious observance from our public life is precisely the opposite of what the nation needs. We need more civil religion, not less. We need open acknowledgment of the religious heritage and the religious faith that bind Americans one to another. The campaign to erase America’s religion from the public square is just class warfare by other means: the elite versus the common man, the atheistic monied class versus America’s working people. And it’s not really about eliminating religion, either: it’s about replacing one religion with another. Every nation observes a civil religion. For every nation is a spiritual unity. The Left wants religion: the religion of the pride flag. We want the religion of the Bible. So I have a suggestion. Take the trans flags down from our public buildings and inscribe instead, on every building owned or operated by the federal government, our national motto: In God We Trust. Symbols matter. Most Americans, most everyday Americans, most working Americans find solidarity in the Christian faith. They believe God has blessed America; they believe God has a purpose for America—and they want to be part of it. And that conviction is what gives them the sense that, as Burke wrote, the nation is a “partnership—between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Decades of misguided court rulings and elite propaganda have not erased Americans’ religious convictions, not yet, and that’s a prime reason we still have a nation. Conservatives must defend our national religion and its role in our national life. They must defend this most fundamental and ancient of moral bonds—as Macaulay put it, “the ashes of [our] fathers, and the temples of [our] God.” *** Work, home, God. These are the things we love together. That sustain our common life together. That make us a nation—and provide the ground of our unity. And this is what Christian nationalism means, in the truest and deepest sense. Not every citizen of America is a Christian, obviously, and never will be. But every citizen is heir to the liberties, to the justice, to the common purpose our biblical and Christian tradition gives us.   That tradition is why we believe in free speech. It is why we believe in freedom of conscience. It is why we deplore the virulent anti-Semitism on display in our elite institutions and campuses. I do notice that some who call themselves “Christian nationalists” offer different counsel, a counsel of despair. There is a certain End of Days flavor to much of their talk. All is lost, they say. America cannot be saved—or is not worth saving. And from that place of fear they recommend fearful policies: an established church, ethnocentrism— “a Protestant Franco.” What foolishness. That is not our tradition. That is not what we believe. Let us not be controlled by fear. Let us not return to the harsh, ethnic nationalism of the ancient world or to the authoritarian ideology of blood-and-soil. That is not what the Christian legacy has left us. In this land, we defend the liberty of all. In this nation, we practice self-government of the people. Let us return instead to what joins us in common communion. The dignity of labor. The sanctity of home. The love of family and of God. That is our civilization. That is America. And those great loves on which our nation was founded have not failed. They are as compelling today as they were when Augustine first wrote of them. They are as vibrant now as when the Puritans first set sail for these shores. We need only recommit ourselves to defending them, to strengthening them—to reviving our devotion. And when we do, we will save the nation. The post ‘Christian Nationalism Founded American Democracy’: Read Sen. Josh Hawley’s Full Remarks at NatCon appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Within days of its election, Britain’s new Labour government removed a de facto ban on new onshore wind farms introduced by the former Conservative government in 2015. The decision, which has been celebrated by environmentalists, represents an encouraging early step in the new government's efforts to combat climate change, but it will likely cause concern for those who are suspicious of onshore wind farms. So, what’s the difference between onshore and offshore power and why have people objected to it?How do wind turbines work?Throughout history, people have tried to leverage the power of the wind for their own purposes. It is an excellent source of energy, albeit a tricky one to master. Modern wind turbines are just the latest expression of this effort. They work by turning kinetic energy from the wind into electricity.Wind turbine blades are light and durable and are designed like airplane wings. They are attached to a hub and together they form a rotor. When the air moves across the blades, the rotor spins, which also turns something called a low-speed shaft. This shaft is also connected to a gearbox that converts the slow spin motion from the shaft into a high-speed rotary motion. This then turns a drive shaft that powers an electric generator.What is onshore wind energy?Fundamentally, there is no technological difference between onshore wind turbines and offshore ones. The only difference is the obvious: their location.Onshore wind farms are collections of wind turbines that are installed in rural areas where there are strong and consistent wind patterns. Open plains, coastal areas, hills, and mountain passes tend to be good locations for them. Offshore windfarms are the same, they are just located in the sea and generate electricity from the wind that blows across the water.When collected together, each turbine is positioned to optimize the capture of wind and to prevent turbulence from one turbine on another. Given the variations in topography, there are no uniform patterns for their layout, though there are some suggested optimal ones. They can be positioned in linear arrangements or grid patterns, depending on the context. Regardless of their arrangement, each turbine generates electricity that is transferred to a substation, then run to the grid where its power can be accessed by communities.What are the benefits and costs of onshore windfarms?It is well known that offshore wind farms tend to be more efficient. This is because the sea experiences higher and more consistent wind speeds, requiring fewer turbines to produce the same amount of energy as onshore versions. The openness of the sea also allows for larger-scale projects – the more turbines you have, the more clean energy you’re generating.The problem is that offshore wind farms are more expensive to build and maintain, as they need more complex infrastructure to support them. At the same time, the conditions that make them excellent electricity generators also make them a challenge to access when repairs are needed. They are also often owned by larger corporations, rather than local corporations, so there is less local oversight of them.Onshore wind farms, in contrast, are easier to construct, they create fewer emissions, and the lands surrounding them can still be farmed. They are cheap to build and maintain, and their overall contributions to the grid can help lower electricity bills. At the same time, large-scale construction operations also provide more high-skilled jobs within the energy sector.However, aside from them generating less power than their offshore counterparts, many people object to onshore wind farms for environmental and aesthetic reasons. The former relates to the fear that these structures pose a threat to birds and bats.There is still debate within the scientific community over the extent to which this is the case. It appears that, although birds are killed by wind turbines, this number is significantly lower than the annual number of birds killed by housecats, other buildings, or even fossil fuel operations (the things wind farms seek to replace). The bat situation has also considerable concern and has split the environmentalist community who, on the one hand, want clean energy to help combat climate change, but also don’t want to risk the lives of already endangered species of animals.However, there are ways for onshore wind farms to be built to coexist with the surrounding wildlife. A decade of research has allowed wind turbine designers to find ways to make them visible to animals. At the same time, wind farms do not need to be constructed in areas where bats are nesting or swarming.But this is only one solution. The problem with bats is they are actually drawn to wind turbines – they may be seeking nesting sites or trying to find insects – which has often led to their deaths. To combat this, the times and conditions that wind turbines are operated under can be shifted to accommodate bat behavior.In particular, as light, fluffy, adorable things, many of the vulnerable species of bats killed by wind turbines cannot fly when wind speeds are above certain levels. By limiting turbine use when wind speeds are low, it is possible to dramatically lower bat mortality.But the aesthetic objection is the most common one raised by the opponents of wind power. The concern is that the construction of wind farms in rural locations will be a blight on the landscape and will ruin its “natural” beauty. Although this is a short-sighted objection, considering the overall damage unchecked climate change will do to the environment for future generations, it is also weirdly recurrent. Once upon a time, people objected to windmills for similar reasons, and now they are essentially iconic symbols of the same bucolic sentiments that underpin resistance to wind turbines today.What is needed to make these new energy-generating structures palatable to aesthetic interest in the long run is a shift in the collective and local engagement with them as features of the landscape, rather than just corporate possessions that make money.

Observations by the JWST have revealed exciting hints of an Earth-like atmosphere on a planet orbiting a relatively nearby star. The planet is likely to be cooler than Earth, but still warmer than Mars and possibly well-suited to life.The planet LHS 1140b has been causing excitement ever since it was discovered in 2017, having been dubbed the “Best place to look for life beyond the Solar System”. However, there are a great many tests a planet needs to pass to have good prospects for hosting life we can detect. LHS 1140b got the title by initially meeting a few of the requirements. Further observations have now confirmed some suspected aspects and provided the first positive signs for others.LHS 1140b is larger than Earth, with a radius about 70 percent greater than ours. That puts it near the point where it could be a super-Earth, composed of a mix of rock and ice and water, or a sub-Neptune, composed of gas at least until a depth where the pressure would crush you. However, its density is not that far below Earth’s and observations made by the JWST last December show no sign of the hydrogen-rich atmosphere expected of a gas planet. The most likely explanation for the lower density is that 10-20 percent of its mass is water, with the rest being rock and metal like Earth. The water would probably be a mix of liquid and ice; although the ratio is unknown, that’s a good place to start when looking for life.LHS 1140b is of such interest not only because of its intrinsic features but because it transits across its star from our perspective, allowing us to get a spectrum of an atmosphere as it blocks the starlight, if just an atmosphere exists. The JWST watched this happen twice last year.Although seekers of life want a planet that is not all gas, they do want one with some, enough to keep an ocean liquid and give something for lifeforms to breathe. The latest results suggest LHS 1140b hits that sweet spot."LHS 1140b is one of the best small exoplanets in the habitable zone capable of supporting a thick atmosphere, and we might just have found evidence of air on this world," said Professor Ryan MacDonald of the University of Montreal in a statement. The spectrum collected most closely matches a predominantly nitrogen-based atmosphere, like Earth’s, but as the uncertainty in MacDonald’s statement indicates, other explanations remain possible. The JWST will need to observe LHS 1140b passing between us and its star on more occasions for confirmation."This is the first time we have ever seen a hint of an atmosphere on a habitable zone rocky or ice-rich exoplanet. Detecting atmospheres on small, rocky worlds is a major goal for JWST, but these signals are much harder to see than for giant planet atmospheres," MacDonald said. Although LHS 1140b is thought to resemble Earth, at least approximately, in composition and temperature, it is very different in one way. It’s almost certainly tidally locked, with one side always facing the red dwarf star LHS 1140, and the other pointing outwards towards endless night. Were its star brighter, this might make one side of the planet too hot to inhabit and the other permanently frozen, leaving a narrow ring where liquid water could survive. However, unless the atmosphere is also rich in powerful greenhouse gasses, it’s more likely most of LHS 1140b is icy, with a liquid ocean directly facing the star, making it look like a creepy eyeball. The ocean is estimated to be about half the size of the Atlantic, and its center, where the star is directly overhead, might be around 20°C (68°F)."This is our first tantalizing glimpse of an atmosphere on a super-Earth in the habitable zone. Compared to other known habitable zone exoplanets, such as those in the TRAPPIST-1 system, the star LHS 1140 appears to be calmer and less active, making it significantly less challenging to disentangle LHS 1140 b's atmosphere from stellar signals caused by starspots," Macdonald said. “While we need more JWST observations to confirm the nitrogen-rich atmosphere, and to search for other gases, this is a very promising start."The other attractive feature of LHS 1140b from our perspective is its location 49 light-years away. TRAPPIST-1f and g, aside, this is the closest transiting planet at a temperature suited to liquid water.Even if there is no water at LHS 1140b’s surface, recent research suggests it could be well placed to have an internal ocean like Europa, but many times bigger.By chance, one of the JWST observations also caught LHS 1140c, a smaller but much hotter world, in the act of transiting.Although LHS 1140b orbits 15 times in an Earth year, many of its transits can’t be observed; for example, because the Sun is in the way. If we want to collect enough data to settle questions about the composition of its atmosphere before the JWST runs out of fuel, observing the planet for longer is required.The study has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, and a preprint is currently available on ArXiv.org. 

As much as we all might wish otherwise, COVID-19 just doesn’t want to go away. It keeps changing to survive and with that change, adds to the list of possible symptoms. Trouble is, some of those symptoms might be mistaken for something else doing the rounds at the moment – hay fever. So how can you tell the difference?There’s a lot of scope for confusion; over 25 percent of adults in the US were diagnosed with hay fever in 2021 and unfortunately for those people, pollen levels have been particularly high and early this year.At the same time, there are new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, circulating that have typically milder – albeit still unpleasant – symptoms that can overlap with seasonal conditions like hay fever.There are, however, some key differences, between the most common symptoms of hay fever and the estimated most prevalent COVID variant circulating in the US right now, KP.3.While some people have been experiencing nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting as symptoms of the newer variants, a pollen allergy isn’t likely to trigger the same effects.On the other hand, a persistent cough is still a mainstay symptom of COVID, but though pollen might give you enough of a tickly throat that you feel the need to cough, it’s not likely to be the same extent as that with COVID.Sticking with the throat, you might also get a sore one with both COVID and hay fever, but it’s generally not so common to get one with the latter. If it doesn’t go away after spending a while away from pollen and getting relief from other pollen symptoms, it’s more likely to be caused by an infection.As for losing your sense of taste and smell, do you also have a blocked nose? If yes, then it’s possible that your inability to fully enjoy food and drink is from hay fever bunging you up.The newest symptoms of COVID-19 come courtesy of the so-called FLiRT group of variants – of which KP.3 is a member – which have become particularly widespread. All are offshoots of JN.1, an Omicron spin-off that popped up and caused trouble earlier this year.These variants are rather less saucy than they sound; the name comes from the amino acid mutations they’ve picked up in the spike protein, the part of the virus that latches onto the cells in our bodies and allows it to infect them.The immune system can learn to recognize spike proteins – either naturally or through vaccination – and get rid of the virus, but by evolving into slightly different forms, the virus can evade destruction.Though not always, viruses can often end up triggering much milder symptoms through this process – and that kids, is how we wound up in this confusing place.All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.  The content of this article is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.