Biden has three options

'You've been operating illegally'

Books We’re All Mermaids in the End: Seanan McGuire’s “Sister, Dearest Sister, Let Me Show You To the Sea” There will be fairy tales, Disney princesses wrestling with Andersen and Grim levels of bitter violence… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on June 12, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Seanan McGuire’s “Sister, Dearest Sister, Let Me Show You To the Sea,” first published 2018 in Ellen Datlow’s The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea. Spoilers ahead! Summary “Inch by inch, I shuffled barefoot toward the parking lot, barely noticing and not caring at all when I stepped on the bits of glass and broken shell that littered the pathway.” Tracy’s mother died when she was seven and her sister Maya was three. To make her mother’s memory linger, Tracy keeps her childhood bedroom as Mom decorated it: a “pink princess fantasy” of taffeta and silver sparkles. One night she goes to sleep cradled in goose down, to be awakened by salt water slapping her face. A dream? No. She really is lying incapable of movement in a rocky tide pool off Olympia Beach, with the icy water rising around her. There’s no use wishing on the brightest star above for her mother’s aid. She knows that when “mothers die, they die.” She howls for help between waves. Maya answers from above. Does Tracy remember the panic attack Maya threw over a recent dental procedure? They gave her a drug-cocktail to send her “off to la-la land,” but Maya palmed the pills and earlier that evening mixed them into Tracy’s bedtime chocolate milk. Aren’t dental drugs amazingly incapacitating? Maybe Maya should become a dentist herself and just kill people on the side. That’s how Maya dragged Tracy unprotesting into the car and to the beach. The why’s more complex. Tracy’s always resented Maya for being the product of a pregnancy that masked their mother’s cancer symptoms until treatment was ineffective. And the “Remembering Mom Society” she and her father formed has always excluded Maya, too young to remember details. She hasn’t factored in Maya’s additional resentment for the overtures Tracy’s rejected, or recognized Maya’s sociopathic tendencies. “Never think I didn’t try to learn to love you,” Maya says from her safe vantage. But, she continues, Tracy is “unlovable.” The tide swallows Tracy, and “the weight of the ocean” drags her down. Suddenly, something slices through the dark water, not a shark but a huge eel, “a silver razor of fins and scales and gaping jaws” that wraps around her. A voice whispers: Hello, little mermaid. You seem to have found yourself in a pickle. Would my little mermaid like to live? Tracy has no breath to speak. She can only nod. They always want to live, the voice purrs, and three more eels begin to circle Tracy. You will owe me. You will be mine forever, but you will live. Do we have an accord? Imagining Maya a triumphant only child, Tracy nods harder. The first eel bites her throat. The others plunge through billowing blood into her mouth and down her throat, tearing at her tongue, finally settling in her chest. The witch-goddess voice says It is done. Before the first eel can join its fellows, Tracy blacks out. Hours later she wakes in an emptying tide pool. She’s recovered enough to peel off Maya’s gauze bindings. Her mouth and tongue burn, so badly torn she can’t speak. The eels nestling in her chest have become her “kin and kind.” She makes it from the beach to the freeway. Someone reports a bedraggled, bleeding girl, and police and ambulances arrive. So does her father, and Maya, who hangs back. Maya doesn’t go to the hospital, where the doctors try to repair Tracy’s shredded tongue but fear she’ll never speak again. How their high-tech equipment misses the eels in her rib-cage, she can’t guess. It’s as the sea-witch ordains, leave it at that. Tracy wonders if her living-drowned condition is the secret that Hans Christian Andersen wove into his fairy tale. Back home, her father reassures her that police will find her attacker. Tracy’s saddened that he’s about to lose both his daughters, but the tide must flow back to collect what it’s stranded. Late that night, Maya slips into Tracy’s room. How, she asks. Tracy answers with the eels’ hissing voices: “I found another way.” Impossible, Maya pouts. Tracy can’t be here, can’t be real. In Maya’s petulance, Tracy hears the little girl who wanted no more than her mother’s embrace, but what must come…. Comes as the eels boil out of Tracy’s mouth and strike Maya before she can scream. They bite off her nose and lips and rip her throat open “like a flower.” The pink princess room turns red, as Tracy struggles for air. One eel slips back down her throat, restoring her breath. Tracy drives to the beach and carries her still-twitching sister to the tide pool, another gift for the sea. The eels have left Maya’s eyes, so she can see the incoming waves. Tracy can’t respond to their pleading. A voice whispers Little mermaid, come home. It sounds like a mother’s voice, calling her not into pink fantasy but the black sea. Her lung-eels breathe in “salt and surrender” as she walks into the water. Behind her Maya struggles to scream and “everything was right, everything was true, everything was ever after, and [Tracy] was going home.” What’s Cyclopean: The eels are silver razors; the Sea Witch’s voice is “the sound that seashells echoed in their oceanic screams”. And Tracy, after meeting her, speaks only in “the language of scar and scab.” The Degenerate Dutch: Tracy falls quickly into the tropes of her genre around beauty and ugliness, scarred mouth turning her into a “horror”. Not just that it looks horrible—that she’s become something different and monstrous. Libronomicon: Tracy speculates about Hans Christian Andersen’s inspirations, whether there was just a drowning girl and a bargain to be “spun into… sugar and morality and seafoam”. Madness Takes Its Toll: Maya, it turns out, does not have a dental phobia. Ambitions of becoming a mass murderer, on the other hand… Ruthanna’s Commentary Seanan McGuire writes in rhymes, in verses and choruses. There will be fairy tales, Disney princesses wrestling with Andersen and Grim levels of bitter violence. There will be mermaids—maybe Deep Ones, maybe Discovery-Channel monsters with sharp teeth, but creatures of water and wishes. There will be curses and deals. There will be moments when all the genre savviness in the world won’t save you, only offer the knowing irony of tragic prophecy. In this particular chorus, we’re playing with The Little Mermaid, both Disney and Andersen versions. It took me a moment, because the beginning seemed very Bonny Swans, but only a moment because I did recognize those eels. And the lost voice. And the broken glass. And then the direct citation, just in case you lost your way. Here, genre savviness is important not because it helps you avoid unpleasant tropes, but because it tells you what rules you’re working with. Once you’ve met not-officially-Ursula, if you still handle your sister trying to drown you by writing out an accusation for the police… what would happen? Would it be like trying to float in a gravity field, or would you just get in trouble with the sea witch? Would you end up one story over in McGuire’s Indexing? As with ballads, get too close and the story has its own gravity field; better to cooperate with the reigning physics. Even if stories, like elder gods, follow their own goals that may have little overlap with human happiness and survival. Another question: how long has Tracy been in a fairy tale? Did it start when her mother put stars on her ceiling, or when she died—or when the stars stayed up to take on a half-life of their own? Maybe it started when her sister fell into the resentful patterns of a trope-ish stepsister. Or maybe there was nothing offering deals under the sea until all those things came together to invoke them. Every fairy tale has a long prologue of day-to-day pain that could split off in any number of directions, right up until the first “once”. Has Maya been in a fairy tale for longer? Sibling rivalry sometimes results in homicide, but not so usually in mulling over the delights of future and less personal murders. Something—someone?—persuaded her that it was better to be the villain. Given the subtle shout-out from her career plans to the Little Mermaid musical team’s previous major work, I’m going with a man-eating alien plant. They do say the meek shall inherit, and who’s more meek than a cute toddler? Ursula the Sea-Witch versus Audrey II, coming soon to a theater near you. Of course, Audrey II is a mean green mother only to her own spore-children—whereas the Sea Witch seems willing to adopt her new-made mermaids. Whether she’s a good mother is another question. Tracy recognizes an “ever after”—no adverb included. Maybe there’s wonder and glory and lots of friendly eels, but maybe there’s the drudgework of a Cinderella or the protective prison of Rapunzel’s tower. I wouldn’t care to bet. I do wonder if there’s an actual verse and chorus behind the story here: both this title and “Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves” have scansion that might ultimately mesh into a larger ballad. And McGuire does moonlight as a filksinger with an extensive catalog. Then again, if you both write lyrics and write as many short stories as McGuire does, there will be enough lyrical titles to make a ballad whether you will or no. “With Graveyard Weeds and Wolfbane Seeds” and “In Silent Streams, Where Once the Summer Shone”, probably part of the cryptid McGuire ballad. “The Great Tarantula Migration of 1972”, probably not—though you never know. Anne’s Commentary Here I was, assuming from the title that this story would be about the tender reunion between two Deep One sisters, the elder metamorphosed, the younger beginning her change. Instead McGuire’s given us siblings that more or less hate each other’s guts. Tracy is the lesser hater; she merely looks forward to the day when she and Maya leave home and have to endure each other only at holidays. Maya hates more intensely. She plans to kill Tracy without getting caught, and while allowing herself time to monologue at her victim until drowning doesn’t seem so bad—at least the water will muffle Maya’s petulant-toddler whine. But there are more deities than Dagon and Hydra and Cthulhu under the sea. There’s also a sorceress so powerful she might as well be divine. Hans Christian Andersen calls her simply “the sea-witch,” while Disney dubs her Ursula, a fine villainous name. Andersen’s sea-witch has a pet toad and fat water snakes. Ursula has moray eel minions, which are what McGuire opts for. Few sea creatures look more sinister than morays, plus you can imagine them being sinuous and slimy enough to squirm down a person’s throat. How they might serve as amphibious lungs would be a good dissertation topic for a marine cryptozoologist. All three “little mermaid” stories agree that the sea-witch’s fee is the boon-seeker’s voice. Andersen’s witch wants the little mermaid’s voice because it’s the sweetest in the undersea world and the best thing she possesses. She also believes the mermaid means to charm her terrestrial prince with her singing, which could read as her wanting the voice-deprived mermaid to fail. But she wouldn’t gain anything by that failure—Andersen’s merpeople don’t have souls, at least not the immortal ones humans possess. Ursula, on the other hand, does want Ariel to fail with her prince, because then she could plant Ariel in her polypous garden of “poor unfortunate souls.” She takes Ariel’s voice knowing that Eric can only recognize his rescuer-from-shipwreck via hearing, having never seen her clearly. Andersen’s witch has a polyp-garden as well, but its monstrous growths are “natural” in her domain, not twisted souls. I wouldn’t be surprised if McGuire’s sea-witch has a polyp-garden, one of rich biological diversity more likely than one of trapped spirits. She doesn’t claim it’s Tracy’s soul she’s after—unless that’s implied in Tracy becoming hers forever. It is uncomfortably Ursula-like for her to expect Tracy to surrender autonomy, maybe what her lost voice represents. With her vocal organs shredded, Tracy can speak only through her resident eels, which evidently speak for the sea-witch. Ursula is clearly Disney’s villain, though her torch-singer stylings and quippy malevolence give her a certain roguish appeal until she goes all Elemental Mayhem at the climax. Andersen’s witch also has bizarro charm, as when she ties her water snakes into a ball to scrub her cauldron clean. She drives a hard bargain with her mermaid, but she warns her in advance of the prices she’ll pay in exchange for human form. I’d call her amoral rather than evil. I’m unsure how much Andersen’s contemporary audience would have differed, but there’s been much debate about how he ended his story with the mermaid’s resurrection into a “daughter of the air,” an earthbound ethereal capable of entering heaven as an immortal soul after three hundred years of good deeds. That denouement has always felt off to me, especially when in the last paragraph he adds that exposure to good children will knock a year off the air-daughter’s “sentence.” Whereas each tear the “daughter” sheds over bad children will add a day. Kids, you better behave! Otherwise it’s on you that the mermaid has to waft around for who knows how much longer before escaping her ethereal gig. Andersen’s mermaid and Ariel share the admirable motive of wanting to go two-legged in order to explore the terrestrial world, but that motive takes second place once that cute two-legged prince falls off his ship. Love at first resuscitation! Not my favorite trope. Whereas Tracy’s motive for accepting the sea-witch’s deal is to STAY ALIVE. You don’t get a more understandable goal than that. As the sea-witch purrs, “They always want to live.” Still, the first thing that goes through Tracy’s oxygen-starved mind, on hearing the sea-witch’s conditions, is how Maya will win if she’s out of the picture, inheriting the perfect life she’s always envied. These sisters have some complicated shit going on. Understandably, given their mother’s death when they were so young. Given Mom’s possible favoring of Tracy—that princess bedroom! Given Dad’s much stronger attachment to Tracy after their loss. Given Maya’s emotional instability (personality disorder?). Given how Tracy nurses her resentment of Maya for causing Mom’s death by rejecting Maya’s overtures of sisterly affection. Is Maya right that Tracy is unlovable? Tracy denies it. Is her popularity superficial, with a darkness beneath the shiny surface that makes her reply to questions about the princess-pinkness of her room with: “My mother chose the color. My dead mother.” And she thinks this answer is “quick and clean and easy.” At any rate, Tracy has met her match in the sea-witch, a being “deeper and older and wilder” than herself. The voice whispering for its little mermaid crosses a “rippling black sheet of the sea” that’s “a far cry from [her] pink princess fantasy.” Nevertheless, it sounds like home, like the voice of a dark mother who’s not confined to the “hazel tree” of death but who ripples free and broad forever. Maybe from pink to black isn’t such a bad bargain after all? Next week, we go deeper into Louis’s “nightmare” in chapters 16-18 of Pet Sematary.[end-mark] The post We’re All Mermaids in the End: Seanan McGuire’s “Sister, Dearest Sister, Let Me Show You To the Sea” appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. To accelerate its central bank digital currency (CBDC) development, Israel is pushing forward with the digital shekel initiative. The Bank of Israel (BoI) is set to collaborate with a range of service providers to create a sophisticated digital payment system based on this new currency. Central Bank Digital Currencies have sparked significant controversy, particularly concerning privacy and civil liberties. One of the primary concerns is the potential for increased surveillance. Unlike cash transactions, which offer a high degree of anonymity, CBDC transactions could be meticulously tracked and monitored by central banks. This capability to log and trace every transaction made with CBDCs could severely undermine financial privacy, allowing governments to gather extensive data on individuals’ spending habits and personal financial activities. Related: Fed Governor Admits CBDCs Pose “Significant” Privacy Risks Moreover, the enhanced government control over the money supply that CBDCs could provide raises further issues. With CBDCs, authorities might more easily freeze or seize assets without due process, potentially misusing this power to target political opponents or suppress dissent. The concept of programmable money, where the government could dictate how, where, and when money can be spent, also poses a risk. While this could be utilized for beneficial purposes such as directing stimulus funds, it also opens the door to excessive control over individual financial behavior. Israel’s central bank outlined its plans in an announcement, revealing the launch of the “Digital Shekel Challenge.” This initiative, inspired by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub’s “Project Rosalind,” aims to explore advanced API prototypes. The BIS project, conducted in partnership with the Bank of England, serves as a model for this Israeli endeavor. Within the framework of the challenge, the BoI will offer a sandbox environment equipped with an API layer. Participants will compete to develop real-time CBDC payment solutions designed for widespread public use. Related: Biden Signals Plan To Destroy Financial Anonymity With CBDCs Shauli Rejwan, managing partner at Masterkey Venture Capital in Tel Aviv, shed light on the program’s structure in an interview. He described the challenge as a three-phase process: initial applications and presentations, subsequent access to the new network for selected projects, and a final presentation to a panel of judges, many of whom are prominent figures in the crypto community. “This initiative is a significant step for the Israeli ecosystem, potentially bridging the gap between the web3 industry and government, even though DeFi, ZK, and permissionless solutions are not yet being considered,” said Rejwan. Invitations for participation have been extended to entities from the private sector, public institutions, and academic circles. The central bank emphasized a preference for innovative and original uses within the payments domain, whether these are enhancements to existing systems or entirely new applications. The initiative also allows participants to tailor their solutions to specific niches and unique scenarios, despite the universal applicability of CBDCs. Critics also worry about the implications of CBDCs on financial inclusion and freedom. While proponents argue that CBDCs could help provide banking access to the unbanked, the same technology could be exploited to exclude or discriminate against certain groups. This could lead to situations where access to financial services is restricted based on compliance with government policies, thus eroding personal freedoms and potentially integrating into social credit systems where financial privileges are tied to behavior. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Israel’s Central Bank Pushes Digital Shekel appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

He Assaulted a Jewish Student at Harvard; Now He Works As DC Public Defender

The results of the 2024 Vaquita Survey are in, and it’s a mixed bag for the world’s rarest mammal. According to Sea Shepherd, who conduct the annual survey, the data shows 6 to 8 vaquita porpoises were sighted during the survey, a decline from 2023 when 8 to 13 individuals were observed. There were no newborns seen in 2024 either, but one healthy yearling vaquita porpoise was seen.“While these results are worrying, the area surveyed represents only 12 percent of the total area where vaquitas were observed in 2015,” said Dr Barbara Taylor, leader of the comprehensive evaluation, in a statement.The estimate of 6 to 8 individuals is also the minimum estimate, with a 75 percent probability, while there’s a 25 percent probability that the actual number is more like 9 to 11. These estimates come down to the methodology used, called Expert Elicitation, and that the study area focused on the Zero Tolerance Area and Extension Area of the vaquitas’ known hangouts.“Since vaquita move freely within the Vaquita Refuge, we must extend the survey using acoustic detection to determine where the vaquitas are going. Vaquitas outside the sanctuary provided by concrete blocks with hooks will need protection from ongoing gillnetting, vaquitas only threat.”The survey occurred on May 5 to 26, 2024, led by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in a small region of Mexico’s Upper Gulf of California. Having been issued an extinction alert by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) – the first in 70 years – it’s a critical time for vaquita porpoises, who are estimated to have as few as 10 individuals left in the wild.“Sea Shepherd's commitment to the Vaquita's survival is absolute,” added Pritam Singh, Chairman and CEO of Sea Shepherd which has been protecting the Vaquita since 2015 through Operation Milagro in partnership with the Mexican Government.“Along with the Mexican Government, we will re-double our efforts to protect this species, and in the coming weeks we will support [the Natural Protected Areas Commission of Mexico] CONANP as they deploy new technologies to help find Vaquita, bolstering our ability to defend the most endangered marine mammal on earth."The survey has been running annually as an independent scientific investigation into the surviving population of the vaquita porpoise, Phocoena sinus. It’s conducted in the UNESCO-recognized Vaquita Refuge, a federally protected area where gillnet fishing is banned – one of the biggest threats to these animals.According to Sea Shepherd, illegal fishing gear in the Vaquita Refuge has been pivotal in their downfall, and since 2015, they have been working with Mexican authorities to remove all traces of gillnets. As air-breathing mammals, vaquitas can drown when they get ensnared in human rubbish, and gillnets are particularly dangerous when it comes to getting tangled.The survey is now being extended into July and August, as announced by CONANP, including an extension into a recently favored vaquita habitat. The teams will deploy 30 acoustic detectors to listen for vaquita in areas where vaquita were acoustically and visually detected in 2015, with hopes there are more healthy individuals out there.

South Australia’s Yorke and Fleurieu Peninsulas host some unusually colored beaches. The pink color was already known to be pulverized garnet, but an attempt to find the source has revealed a very unlikely location buried in ice and thousands of kilometers away.South Australia is known for pink things, including its famous lakes and the shorts of its former premier. Somewhat less well known are the pink sands on the peninsulas either side of the Gulf of St Vincent. On some beaches these pink grains are rare enough to be barely noticeable, but others are predominantly pink.Identifying the sand as being from garnet smashed against other rocks is relatively easy, but finding the source is harder. The conditions to produce garnet have not occurred often in Earth’s history. Scientists decided if they could work out where the garnet came from, unraveling the path by which it reached these beaches could teach us a lot about the geologic history of the area.South Australia had two known sources of garnet. One occurred 514-490 million years ago when the Adelaide Fold Belt was formed nearby. The other was much earlier when the Gawler Craton, which now makes up the middle of the state, was built between 3.3 and 1.4 billion years ago. The University of Adelaide has pioneered a method for using lasers to perform lutetium-hafnium dating. Using this they were able to show that some garnet grains on the state’s beaches come from each of these events. However, the most abundant garnet grains have an age of 570-590 million years.“The garnet is too young to have come from the Gawler Craton and too old to have come from the eroding Adelaide Fold Belt,” said University of Adelaide PhD student Sharmaine Verhaert in a statement. “Garnet requires high temperatures to form and is usually associated with the formation of large mountain belts, and this was a time when the South Australian crust was comparatively cool and non-mountainous.”Verhaert and Dr Stijn Glorie needed to look further afield, but knew prolonged time in marine environments destroys garnet so it probably wouldn’t be too far.They realised that the Cape Jervis Formation, which overlaps with the Fleurieu Peninsula, contains garnet mixed rock and other sands. When the rocks of the Formation erode, the garnet escapes and can end up on nearby beaches. Moreover, testing revealed this garnet as 590 million years old, close enough to what they were looking for.This, however, only pushes the question one step further up the chain. If South Australia was too inactive at the time to produce its own garnet, how did it get into the Cape Jervis Formation, from which it has since eroded?The answer, Verhaert, Glorie and co-authors conclude, is that it came from Antarctica when it was joined to Australia as part of Gondwana. For obvious reasons we don’t know a lot about Antarctica’s rocks, but garnet of the right age has been found in an outcrop of the Transantarctic Mountains that divide East and West Antarctica. It’s likely there is a lot more buried under the ice where we can’t reach it.“It is conceivable that millions of years of ice transport eroded the bedrock underneath and transported this cargo of garnet north-westwards, towards the conjugate Antarctic-Australian margin,” said Glorie.The authors think the garnet was formed during a period of crustal thickening in east Antarctica that represented the first stage of a major mountain-building event.The garnet was arriving in South Australia around the same time its hills were recording the impressions of some of the earliest complex life forms, whose epoch is named after a location there.From there, the garnet deposits would have been stored in glacial sediments for hundreds of millions of years until erosion allowed them to escape, to be washed up on nearby beaches.“We have effectively uncovered a major mountain building event that redefines the timing of the onset of convergence in the Pacific Ocean,” Glorie said.The study is published open access in Communications Earth and Environment.

This Cauliflower Salad is only a few ingredients and absolutely delicious. It’s even better the next day so you can easily make it in advance! If you love simple salad recipes, check out this Easy Shrimp Salad! It’s delicious and wonderful with Ritz crackers. ❤️WHY WE LOVE THIS RECIPE We love how simple it is—only...

Special counsel David Weiss made an eyebrow-raising comment on Tuesday after Hunter Biden became a convicted felon.After deliberating for just three hours, a jury of Hunter Biden's peers found him guilty of three felony crimes stemming from his decision to lie on an ATF 4473 form about his drug use when he purchased a handgun in October 2018.'... we have additional trials and investigative work to be done.'In a short statement after the verdict, Weiss rebuffed the narrative that tried to stir up sympathy for the first son."This case was about the illegal choices defendant made while in the throes of addiction, his choice to lie on a government form when he bought a gun, and the choice to then possess that gun. It was these choices and the combination of guns and drugs that made his conduct dangerous," Weiss explained. "No one in this country is above the law."But it was his concluding remark that investigative reporter Catherine Herridge called the "most important 10 seconds" of Weiss' statement."As you know, we have additional trials and investigative work to be done, so I will not entertain questions at this time. Our work continues," the special counsel told reporters. Did you catch that?Weiss declined to answer questions from the media because his team needs to focus on additional trials — as in, more than one.But as it stands — publicly, at least — Hunter Biden only has one additional pending trial for multiple felony tax crimes in California. That trial is scheduled to begin on Sept. 5.The innocuous comment raises the question: Is Weiss preparing to indict Hunter Biden in a third case, potentially related to the Foreign Agent Registration Act? — (@) Hunter Biden's potential FARA violations for not registering as a "foreign agent" when conducting overseas work for companies in Ukraine and China have been a significant part of the Justice Department's years-long investigation into him.In fact, when Hunter Biden's sweetheart plea deal blew up last summer, prosecutors confirmed they might charge the first son in the future with FARA violations. To date, Weiss has not charged Hunter Biden with anything besides the firearm and tax crimes.Meanwhile, the first son may be acting proactively. Last month, Hunter Biden hired an attorney with a history of representing high-profile clients in cases involving foreign agent crimes.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!