The discovery is far older than the researchers were anticipating

'Big showy interview'

'What are your solutions?'

The trailer is simple but says a thousand words

'She's not gonna take tough questions'

A post shared on X claims 2024 Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump wasn’t taken to the hospital after an attempted assassination. So yesterday I learned Trump wasn’t taken to the hospital after the “assassination” attempt and the shooter was killed by a LEO and not the counter sniper. I wonder how much more of […]

News The First Exorcist The First Exorcist Goes Way Back to Create an Exorcism Origin Story Calling firsties on exorcisms By Molly Templeton | Published on August 27, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Exorcisms, like everything else, had to start somewhere, and the latest exorcism-centric horror movie is interested in just where—and when—that was. The First Exorcist, Deadline reports, is coming from writer-director Greg McLean (Wolf Creek, pictured above), and is set in Biblical time. Deadline has this to say about the plot: The First Exorcist is billed as a “spellbinding fusion of religious and supernatural events set in Biblical times,” in which a mother goes on a harrowing quest to save her daughter from demonic possession. Plot reads: “As their lives descend into a nightmare, the mother learns of a mysterious healer with the power to expel demons, and embarks on a dangerous race against time – encountering hostile Roman authorities on her perilous mission to find the healer and save her daughter’s life.” McLean has recently been directing mostly TV, including episodes of La Brea and the Australian spinoff Wolf Creek series. His last film was Jungle, which starred Daniel Radcliffe. The Last Exorcist will film in Australia, using “cutting edge virtual production tech in Victoria to bring epic ancient cities and locations to life,” Deadline says. Casting has not yet begun, but as the film begins shooting in 2025, there will likely be more news on that front soon.[end-mark] The post <i>The First Exorcist</i> Goes Way Back to Create an Exorcism Origin Story appeared first on Reactor.

Books QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany Recently named one of the best sci-fi books of all time, Delany’s opus is both fascinating and frustrating. By Bogi Takács | Published on August 27, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Note: I’m resuming this column after several years’ hiatus due to my life circumstances in the pandemic. My work situation has stabilized in the past year and now I teach full time at the University of Kansas (my opinions, of course, only represent me and not my employer). I’m catching up on everything and I’ve written a few articles already, which will publish on an monthly basis. If you’re new to this column, make sure to read the intro post where I explain what I’m going to include, why, and how. Today we’re taking a look at Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, often considered one of the great American novels and most recently included in Esquire’s list of the 75 best sci-fi books of all time. My local SFF book club recently read Dhalgren over a period of two months, and the discussion that follows owes plenty to our two meetings. We had to split the book in half, because Dhalgren is just over 800 pages long in my edition, typeset with tiny font; I’ve seen translated versions where the publisher opted to release it as multiple volumes. Dhalgren is set in a mysterious city whose name is not Dhalgren but rather Bellona, ostensibly located in the American Midwest; but as a Midwesterner, it seemed more East Coast to me. While the rest of the US goes on with business as usual, some kind of apocalyptic event has hit Bellona, covering it under perennial clouds of smoke. The city also constantly changes shape, streets are renamed, buildings burn down and reappear intact the next day. Most people have fled, but there is also a continuous trickle of newcomers, curious to see what is going on in Bellona, escaping the draft, or visiting for reasons they might not even understand themselves. The protagonist might fall into the last category. He arrives in Bellona not remembering his name, having lost most of his memory, and receives the name “the Kid.” He looks much younger than his age, he is a mixed-race Indigenous person who appears racially ambiguous, and he only ever wears one shoe, keeping his other foot bare. (This is a recurring motif in some of Delany’s other work as well, like in Nova.) The Kid finds a notebook and decides to write—poetry, memoirs, or something else? He also finds himself in a street gang, the scorpions (with a lowercase s), who are notable for wearing holographic projection chains which can create large, shimmering images of various creatures. The novel covers the Kid’s meandering adventures trying to make his way in Bellona, a city where money has lost its value, where television and radio no longer work, and where strange lights appear in the sky. He comes into contact with a wide range of characters, from a former middle-class family who try to maintain their previous lives even if this requires considerable self-deception, to a Black man accused of rape who becomes a community icon and eventually his own planet, to the self-defined gatekeeper of Bellona, a white queer man and ex-Nazi who attempts to have sex with newcomers. Kid eventually ends up in a romantic and sexual triad with a woman running a school and a teenage boy. People assume that Kid is a teenager himself, but instead of 17 he’s in fact 27, something that leads to several uncomfortable scenes—not only sexually, but in other senses as well. For instance, another poet accuses him of being popular because his readers assume he’s some kind of child prodigy, and not on the merit of his work. (We never see Kid’s poems, though we do see some of his thought processes.) This leads to some of the most intriguing sections, like the discussion with this poet and its aftermath; but some of the sections of Dhalgren I found the most frustrating are also related to this aspect of the text. It is painfully obvious that the age gap between the partners is too large; the characters reflect on it too. Yet the narrative still runs with it and dwells on it endlessly. Here’s an adult man and an adult woman—who runs a school!—who have a lot of sex with a teenage boy. There is a lot of sex, though it is written almost in a way to make sure we aren’t titillated—this is true of all of the sex in the book, not just the scenes involving Kid’s triad. I thought maybe it was just me, as an asexual-spectrum person (who is otherwise not sex-averse, though), but people in our book club seemed to agree. Yet, this still means that the reader will have to go through many pages of turn-off sex in a configuration that in itself might be a turn-off, to put it mildly. The narrative keeps returning to it. And maybe that’s the goal, but I’m not sure why. I try to avoid spoilers, but this is really more of an inverse of a spoiler: something the book does not do, so I’ll put it here. At one point I built a theory for myself that one of the reveals would be that Kid really is a teen, he just cannot remember his own age. However, this did not bear out. Kid’s unstable and uncertain perceptions do become important in the course of Dhalgren, though—just not in that specific way. A major theme of the novel is mental illness. Kid is mentally ill and has previously experienced psychiatric hospitalization. He’s never sure that the bizarre phenomena he witnesses in Bellona are a product of his own mind, and he repeatedly queries other people about whether they’re seeing and experiencing the same thing—to which they generally respond in the affirmative: If Bellona exists, it is strange to all. Bellona also has no government and everyone can do however they please—of course this leads to clashes between people about what ought to be done. The scorpions go on “runs” where they… yell at people and act scary. Their weapon of choice is the “orchid” (the genital allusion is, I think, deliberate), a set of blades that can be strapped to one’s wrist, to curl over the fingers. The scorpions avoid firearms, but the white supremacists holed up in a department store have guns, and lack inhibitions about using them. The whole ambience owes a lot to no-holds-barred American Libertarianism—my edition comes with an endorsement from a Libertarian venue, and that seems on target. Another aspect of the social organization that I keep on thinking about is mentioned in this review by Kara who described Bellona as a post-scarcity society, and it is! Even though it seems like people in Bellona don’t have anything and live in crushing poverty as scavengers, when they actually need something, it just turns up: even grocery stores which had previously been looted auto-magically restock themselves. Dhalgren has very strong atmosphere and it expresses the forced idleness, the aimlessness, extremely well. Yet this itself makes the text difficult to read. It’s 800 pages of people hanging out, punctuated by occasional moments of extremely intense experiences, like having to drag a corpse out of an elevator shaft. In a sense it’s like being a soldier, in the sense of “interminable boredom punctuated by moments of terror,” as the old adage goes. A soldier of what? And who is the soldier here—the Kid, or maybe us? Reading this novel definitely takes discipline from the reader. I would probably have given up if not for the fact that I was looking forward to our book club discussion—even though there are so many gems to discover in the text. A lot of small details fit together in Dhalgren. Just a handful of examples, not involving major spoilers: I kept on waiting for the Labry Apartments, the middle-class family’s living place, to be called The Labrys, and it happened! At one point the author himself seems to appear in the book, at least in a reflected form. The beginning and the end also tie together neatly. Strangely enough, different editions of the text also manifest minor changes like having different street names—further illustrating the nebulous, dreamlike spatial organization of Bellona. But some mysteries are never revealed, including one I was hoping to find out up until the very last page. Maybe I missed something? Just a cursory revisit of earlier sections has already proved rewarding. Possibly even more rewarding than the first read, because being able to build these connections is what gave me the most enjoyment. For that I had to get through 800 pages first—I think this would make Dhalgren an exemplar of ergodic literature, and now that I search for this, I see Hal Duncan has made a similar argument. It’s also reminiscent of knowledge games like Outer Wilds where you piece the narrative together—or not. Is it worth the effort? While I generally enjoy engaging with narratives in this way, in the case of Dhalgren I’m not sure. I certainly prefer Delany’s other work; when I first read Nova in my early twenties, I felt it did cyberpunk better, and earlier, than some of the canonical genre greats. Delany’s short stories have a scintillating intensity that only surfaces for moments in Dhalgren—though those are memorable moments. Next time we’ll take a look at a space opera novel with nonbinary aliens that’s much shorter, but only the first volume in a longer series—in the meanwhile, you can share in the comments your thoughts on Dhalgren, and what was the longest SFF novel you have ever read! I’m not sure Dhalgren is mine, but it definitely has to be in the top five by length…[end-mark] The post QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics: <i>Dhalgren</i> by Samuel R. Delany appeared first on Reactor.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Heritage Action for America is treating the Defining Male and Female Act, a bill that would define sex based on biology, as a key vote in scoring how lawmakers stand on issues of concern to conservatives. Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., introduced the legislation at the end of July to establish in federal law that there are only two sexes: male and female. “God created man with XY chromosomes and woman with XX chromosomes, and no left-wing politician has the power to change that indisputable fact,” Miller told The Daily Signal. “The Biden-Harris administration is trying to force the American people to deny reality by allowing biological men to participate in women’s sports through its illegal rewrite of Title IX.” “The Defining Male and Female Act will prevent any future administration from jeopardizing women’s safety, and I am pleased to see Heritage Action scoring a key vote on this critical legislation,” the Illinois Republican said. When Heritage Action issues a key vote, legislators are notified that their position on the legislation at issue will affect their score on the Heritage Action Scorecard. In this case, lawmakers who cosponsor the legislation will receive credit on the scorecard. Miller intended the bill to combat the Biden-Harris administration’s Title IX rule change, which adds “gender identity” to the list of sex-based protections, allowing males to share female spaces and participate in female sports. “Men and women have distinct biological differences that are obvious to everyone except the Left,” Janae Stracke, vice president of outreach and advocacy at Heritage Action, said in a written statement. “The safety, spaces, and opportunities of women and girls across the country are now under constant threat, thanks to the Biden–Harris administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX and the relentless push to force radical gender ideology in America’s schools.” The U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 5th and 6th Circuits granted preliminary injunctions on the change Aug. 16, blocking the new rules from going into effect in those areas. Heritage Action praised Miller for introducing the bill. “While it is unfortunate that legislation to accurately define sex is necessary, Heritage Action applauds Rep. Miller for taking up this fight to defend science and safety,” Stracke said. “She has the full support of Heritage Action’s grassroots army and the vast majority of Americans who accept the biological fact that men cannot be women.”  The post EXCLUSIVE: Heritage Action Scores Bill Defining Male, Female as Key Vote appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—China is planning to restrict exports of a key mineral needed to make weapons while a U.S. company that could be reducing America’s reliance on foreign suppliers is languishing in red tape, energy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Chinese government announced on Aug. 15 that it will restrict exports of antimony, a critical mineral that dominates the production of weapons globally and is essential for producing equipment like munitions, night-vision goggles and bullets that are essential to national security, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Perpetua Resources, an American mining company, has been navigating red tape for years to develop a mine in Valley County, Idaho, that could decrease reliance on the Chinese supply of antimony, but the slow permitting process is getting in the way, energy experts told the DCNF. It can take years to secure all the necessary approvals and permits to develop a mine like the one Perpetua Resources is trying to operate. One of the key permitting laws in place is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which also applies to federal land management actions and the construction of certain public infrastructure projects like highways. “After six years of planning and early engagement, we began the [NEPA] permitting process in 2016. We are now eight years into NEPA,” a Perpetua Resources spokesperson told the DCNF. The company is hoping to extract antimony from the largest known deposit in the U.S., and Perpetua Resources’ development could also produce millions of ounces of gold as well. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, argues that the Perpetua Resources mine poses real environmental considerations that should be addressed, but production in the U.S. is almost certainly cleaner than production that takes place in China. Moreover, depending on China for raw materials needed to produce key defense equipment poses a clear national security risk, Furchtgott-Roth said. “The United States has the highest environmental standards in the world for its mines, as well as for some other things, too,” Furchtgott-Roth told the DCNF. “It’s a huge national security risk. Given what we’ve seen with Russia cutting off supplies of natural gas to Europe, we know that countries can cut off important supplies to other countries.” She added: If the administration wants to pursue policies that push electric vehicles, green energy and other mineral-intensive technologies, it should look to streamline the permitting process across the board rather than selectively pursuing reform for some favored types of development and not for others. Steve Coonen, a former Department of Defense official who focused on technology exports to China, agreed that relying on China for raw materials needed to produce crucial technologies presents a clear national security risk. “The United States has all the rare earth elements it needs, not too dissimilar from its energy requirements,” Coonen told the DCNF. “However, Democrats have enchained U.S. industry by prohibiting the extraction of these materials for misplaced and ill-informed ecological reasons at a significant risk to national security and the United States’ long-term economic health.” China is responsible for just under 50% of the world’s antimony production, and it is also the source of 63% of the U.S.’ current antimony imports, according to the CSIS. The U.S., meanwhile, did not mine any “marketable” antimony in 2023, according to CNBC. China’s recently announced export restrictions for antimony will take effect on Sept. 15, according to CNBC. To many in the industry, China moving to curb antimony exports would have come as a surprise just a few months ago, so the country’s decision to take action comes across as “quite confrontational in that regard,” Lewis Black, CEO of Canadian mining company Almonty Industries, told the outlet. In addition to antimony, China has also flexed its muscles by restricting exports of other critical minerals that it dominates globally, such as germanium and gallium, since 2023. “The United States has some of the highest permitting standards in the world, and that’s something to be proud of. But NEPA gets criticism for being inefficient, and much of that criticism is justified,” the Perpetua Resources spokesperson told the DCNF. “When we are talking about minerals we need for America’s national and economic security—not to mention our clean energy future—we need an efficient regulatory process that still maintains robust protections for communities and the environment.” The company is anticipating that the process—from initial deposit identification to the beginning of mineral extraction from the mine site—will take 18 years, the Perpetua Resources spokesperson told the DCNF. However, the spokesperson added that NEPA has been beneficial for transparency with the public and allowing stakeholder communities to weigh in about the project. Nevertheless, Perpetua Resources “absolutely supports a commonsense, bipartisan approach to permitting reform” because “good projects should not wither in red tape.” The antimony curbs may be even more pressing, given existing concerns about the strength of America’s defense-industrial base amid wars in the Middle East and Europe, as well as rising tensions with China over Taiwan. Many experts have cautioned that the U.S. is allowing itself to become too dependent on an adversarial China’s mineral supplies at a time when those minerals are playing a much larger role in the American economy, thanks in part to the Biden administration’s massive green energy agenda. “In the mid-20th century, domestic mining accounted for 90% of the U.S.’s antimony consumption. Today, the U.S. no longer mines antimony; instead, it relies on China, its chief geopolitical rival, for over 60% of its antimony imports,” Quill Robinson, an associate fellow in CSIS’ Energy Security and Climate Change Program, told the DCNF. “Effective China de-risking requires reducing reliance up and down the value chain.” “Yet, increasing domestic resource extraction, such as critical mineral mining, has proven far more politically challenging than building new solar module factories,” Robinson added. “Addressing this issue will require specific policies, like permitting reform, but also a broader commitment from lawmakers to support the safe, environmentally responsible extraction of the U.S.’ natural resources.” Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.Va., and Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., teamed up to introduce a major permitting-reform bill in July, designing the package to simplify the regulatory hurdles that major infrastructure and development projects must clear and expedite timelines without totally defanging regulators’ ability to ensure that environmental concerns and considerations are addressed. That bill has not yet come up for a vote in the Senate. “There are legitimate environmental challenges that need to be mitigated for projects like this,” Arnab Datta, the Institute for Progress’ director of infrastructure policy, told the DCNF. However, government agencies are more strongly incentivized to avoid legal challenges of their reviews from third parties than they are to thoroughly review the more significant environmental concerns, meaning that regulators tend to chew up lots of time on those minor points and ultimately extend the timelines for permitting, Datta explained. “The uncertainty from permitting and litigation compounds the challenge of reaching production in what’s often a volatile and uncertain market environment for these commodities,” said Datta, who also works for Employ America as a managing director of policy implementation. “These companies need a process with certainty and reasonable timelines and also support that helps mitigate the volatility that arises from China’s actions in the market.” Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post China Set to Cut Off US Military From Key Mineral as America’s Own Reserves Remain Buried Under Red Tape appeared first on The Daily Signal.