Do you ever seem to have one of those days when everyone’s on your case, from your teacher all the way down to your best girlfriend? Wait a second—I think I have heard that somewhere before. Well, you know what I’m talking about.  It’s one of those days when your head is pounding because you’re aggravated by everything the day has brought you. Everywhere you went all day, people were just being annoying—from the dude that works in the pizzeria to the clerk at 7-Eleven, to the people you work with, and especially that person driving 30 miles an hour The post 10 Songs That Will Cure Headaches appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

News We Need Diverse Books This April, Celebrate the Inaugural “We Need Diverse Books Day” By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on March 18, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share The non-profit We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) is turning ten this year, and to celebrate the occasion—as well as highlight the importance of reading books that reflect our beautifully diverse world—the organization is launching an official “We Need Diverse Books Day” on April 3, 2025. On that day, WNDB will recommend titles for all ages and will also share resources on where to find them. Photo Credit: We Need Diverse Books The event comes at a point when book bans are increasing across the country. An estimated four million children are affected by the bans, which often target books that discuss race, racism, and LGBTQ+ identities. Librarians are also affected, with a quarter of school librarians saying they have experienced harassment over books. We Need Diverse Books Day will celebrate all voices. “We invite you to pick out and read a diverse book today—because diverse books are for everyone and these stories ought to be shared and celebrated,” WNDB Board Chair Dhonielle Clayton said in a statement. WNDB is also donating 10,000 titles this year to schools and libraries across the country and is continuing their work to diversify books in the publishing industry at large.   Photo Credit: We Need Diverse Books You can find out more information about WNDB and the upcoming We Need Diverse Books Day by heading to diversebooks.org. [end-mark] The post This April, Celebrate the Inaugural “We Need Diverse Books Day” appeared first on Reactor.

Books book review Murder by Memory Sees Author Olivia Waite Confidently Shift Genres Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple in this sci-fi ode to the cozy mystery, helmed by a formidable no-nonsense auntie of a detective. By Jenny Hamilton | Published on March 18, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Olivia Waite’s Murder by Memory arrives at a peak time for SFF murder mystery, and even more particularly for space murder mystery. If you love this genre as I do, you know that we’ve been blessed with a proliferation of fantastic books along these lines: Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes, Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven, Victor Manibo’s Escape Velocity, and S.A. Barnes’s Dead Silence, to name just a few. Murder by Memory enters a thriving field with confidence and aplomb.  Our detective, Dorothy Gentleman, is accustomed to waking up in a fresh body. As a traveler aboard the generation ship Fairweather, she shares certain privileges with the other passengers. Their memories and consciousness will be regularly backed up into memory books, stored in the ship’s library. When they inevitably succumb to old age (or die in some other way), their consciousness will be downloaded into a freshly produced copy of their original body, and they can proceed with another iteration of their life. If they prefer to take a break from living—as who wouldn’t, now and then?—they can elect to keep their consciousness stashed away in the memory book for a few years. After a painful loss, that’s exactly what Dorothy has done. So it’s a bit of a shock to find that she’s been downloaded into a new body ahead of schedule. Worse, it’s not even her body. Worst of all, the person who had the body before her is probably a murderer. A woman called Janet—the long-time business partner of the body Dorothy finds herself in—is found dead in the aftermath of a magnetic storm that rattled the ship’s systems. Janet appears to have drowned herself in a bathtub full of memory liquor. But Dorothy doesn’t buy it, and her chief suspect is the person whose body she’s walking around in, a woman named Gloria Vowell who had absolutely no business wandering around the ship in the midst of a magnetic storm. Olivia Waite made her name in historical romance, and she now comes skipping across genre lines with a clear love and enthusiasm for the spaces she’s now writing in: Our detective recalls Dorothy Sayers by name and Miss Marple by nature (complete with a beloved nephew), and a yarn shop—cozy mysteries’ favorite type of business establishment—features prominently. On the SFF side, our background is a generation ship riddled with the morally gray queer folks of which contemporary SFF is so fond. Too, Waite’s got a wonderful eye for details to make her imagined world feel lived in: Our detective remarks that although no light comes in through the windows of each cabin, all the passengers—refugees from Earth—still tend to put their desks below the window, “as if we were careful to leave space in our lives for the weather we never experienced on board ship.” Buy the Book Murder by Memory Olivia Waite Buy Book Murder by Memory Olivia Waite Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Despite its brief length, Murder by Memory feels instantly welcoming, its setting and characters at once familiar and unique. Waite’s fully invested in the speculative elements of her novel. The trope of the generation ship is a longtime favorite of mine, because I love it when the characters are stuck with each other and cannot leave (see also: boarding school). Waite has put a fun spin on it by making all the passengers functionally immortal. Imagine being on a very large road trip that lasts your entire life, and then you die and you can finally get away from all those damn people you’re tired of, and then you wake up alive and do the whole thing all over again. And again. And again. Being honest, I’d probably do a murder, too. My defense at the murder trial would be the same defense I use for everything: I am an introvert and a Taurus. No jury on earth would convict. The biggest clue that Waite is coming from the romance genre is how vividly interested she is in her characters’ experience of embodiment. Dorothy Gentleman keeps being brought up short by her discomfiture at finding herself in a body other than her own. “Imagine going to the washroom to be sick and having someone else’s sick come out,” she thinks, upon first awaking. “I came very close to making this more than a metaphor.” Later, when she realizes that someone has properly, actually, forever died, their memory book wiped from existence along with their working consciousness, she has an acutely physical reaction to the idea. “My stomach—[her host body’s] stomach, oh god—lurched. I had one very bad moment when it felt like my body and my mind were fighting to tear apart from each other.” On the more pleasant side, if you are into mind-altering experiences (I am not), is the alcohol of choice on board Fairweather, a thing called memory liquor. It was invented as a way to retain specific memories and experiences, even small ones, that might be lost or degraded over the years of travel. “Memories of Earth, the kind we couldn’t make on board the Fairweather, sorted by type and distilled into distinct colors and flavors. You could mix them like any cocktail.” When mixed well, memory liquor creates a distinct somatic experience, more vivid than the kind of memory that takes place purely in the mind. “This,” Dorothy thinks after drinking a cocktail made by a particularly skilled mixologist, “felt like the kind of memory the body carried. ” Murder by Memory is quite a linear mystery, without much in the way of red herrings or side quests. Dorothy follows clues as they arise and unravels the mystery without too much trouble—though Waite cleverly includes a little spike at the end, to complicate what we thought we knew about some of the characters. But the book leaves alluring hints at what’s to come future installments in the series. We still have plenty to learn about memory liquor, Dorothy’s nephew and his partner, and the yarn shop proprietor—among others—and it’s clear Waite knows more than she’s telling. Wry, strange, and generous, Murder by Memory is a fantastic series opener, with a vivid setting and intriguing characters that leave readers wanting more.[end-mark] Murder by Memory is available from Tordotcom Publishing. The post <i>Murder by Memory</i> Sees Author Olivia Waite Confidently Shift Genres appeared first on Reactor.

Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, two American astronauts who have been stranded on the International Space Station since June, are scheduled to touch down on the Gulf Coast near Tallahassee, Florida, at 5:57 p.m Tuesday. Their successful rescue will be another example of a promise kept by President Donald Trump. The president has made returning the astronauts to Earth a top priority, and he is using Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX to do it.  The astronauts were unable to return to Earth after their regularly scheduled eight-day mission after their Boeing aircraft’s propulsion system was deemed too unsafe for their return trip. The mission has now stretched out to 285 days.  Reacting to the SpaceX rocket launch, Daily Signal President and Executive Editor Rob Bluey said on Monday the Democrats’ criticism of Musk had reached the point of absurdity, given the good that Musk is trying to do, not just with rescuing the astronauts, but also streamlining the federal government. Democrats have reached the point of absurdity with their attacks on @elonmusk.Sadly, they can’t even offer a hint of praise for @SpaceX’s rescuing stranded astronauts.@jakejakeny and I are appreciative! pic.twitter.com/iGSQw6T6i2— Rob Bluey (@RobertBluey) March 17, 2025 Boeing is the primary contractor of the Space Launch System for NASA’s Artemis program. The program has cost the American taxpayers $23.8 billion since its creation in 2011 to its first test flight in 2022. Unlike Musk’s rockets, the Artemis megarocket is not reusable and costs about $4.1 billion for every launch. The astronauts finally left the ISS on Tuesday in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, named Freedom. The returning pair are joined by another American astronaut, Nick Hague, and the Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. The Biden administration failed to bring the astronauts home and was accused last month by Trump of not paying enough attention to the matter.  “[Then-President Joe Biden] was going to leave them in space,” Trump told the press in February. In the same interview, Musk said he expected to bring the astronauts back in about four weeks at the request of the new president.  Trump followed up his remarks in early March. “Biden was embarrassed by what happened, and he said, ‘Leave them up there.’ I would have said, ‘If you’re embarrassed, you got to get them out.’ Elon is right now preparing a ship to go up and get them,” Trump said in the Oval Office.  As for what the astronauts are excited about doing once they get back to Earth, Wilmore hopes to continue ministering as an elder in his Baptist church and smelling freshly mowed grass. In an interview in the ISS, Wilmore praised God. Astronomical faith! CBS News reporter Mark Strassmann to astronaut Butch Wilmore: What is your life lesson or takeaway from these nine months in space? “My feeling on all of this goes back to my faith. It's bound in my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He is working out His plan… pic.twitter.com/uTYDUBi0wt— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) March 17, 2025 Williams is also known for her faith, having brought the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, up to space. She has said she is looking forward to taking long walks with her dogs and swimming in the ocean.  The post Down to Earth: Trump, Musk Bringing Stranded Astronauts Home appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Biden-Harris administration’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act will cost up to between $936 billion and $1.97 trillion over the next 10 years, according to a new study from the Cato Institute. Democrats in the House and Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, said to cost $891 billion at the time, without a single Republican vote. Then-President Joe Biden said the measure would lower inflation, as well as fight climate change, but critics say the opposite has been true. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, estimates that the energy subsidies in the act will cost between $936 billion and $1.97 trillion over the next 10 years, and between $2.04 trillion and $4.67 trillion by 2050. Those numbers are well above the original estimation. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimated the energy-related subsidies in the legislation would cost about $370 billion when Congress passed it. Goldman Sachs later estimated the Inflation Reduction Act’s 10-year cost would be $1.2 trillion. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Day One in office pausing funding on the climate and clean energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump’s Jan. 20 directive “unleash[es] affordable and reliable energy and natural resources.” The order “ensure[d] that no federal funding be employed in a manner contrary to the principles outlined in this section, unless required by law.” Biden called the Inflation Reduction Act “the most important climate legislation in the history of the world. It commits more public spending to addressing climate change than any other single piece of legislation or other government action. The post Biden’s ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ Will Cost Up to $2 Trillion by 2035, Study Estimates appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Your hard-earned tax dollars don’t just fund the salaries of federal bureaucrats, they also support public-sector unions who negotiate sweetheart deals between the bureaucrats and management. Federal bureaucrats feverishly renegotiated those deals just before President Donald Trump entered office, attempting to block his reforms. Now, the Trump administration is demanding that each agency provide an accounting of just how much money it spent negotiating collective bargaining agreements with unions. The Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal government’s workforce, sent a memo Monday to agencies across the bureaucracy, demanding and account of the dollars and cents taxpayers spent for collective bargaining agreements. (Collective bargaining refers to the process by which a union negotiates with management to secure employees certain benefits, such as raises, more paid time off, and other forms of compensation.) “During the Biden administration, federal agencies spent millions bargaining sweetheart collective-bargaining agreements that imposed significant costs on the American taxpayer while impeding effective and efficient agency operations,” acting OPM Director Charles Ezell wrote in the memo. “Agencies paid for both the costs of their and their unions’ bargaining teams.” While the federal government has previously tracked “official time”—the time government employees spend working for the union but for which they get paid by the taxpayer—Ezell noted that the government has not systematically tracked the specific cost of federal collective bargaining negotiations. Collective bargaining negotiations may cost a great deal. “The Social Security Administration, for example, reported that it cost the agency over $1.8 million to negotiate [collective bargaining agreements] with two of its bargaining units,” Ezell noted. This number did not include the cost of another round of bargaining in the middle of the time covered by the agreement. OPM directive on collective bargaining and official timeDownload Ezell’s memo directs federal agencies to submit by April 18 a report detailing the expenses for collective bargaining and the current status of collective bargaining agreements. The report must include the compensation paid to agency employees to negotiate collective bargaining agreements, to process grievances related to the agreements, to engage in mediation, and other things. It must list travel and lodging expenses for agency staff and union staff to negotiate the agreements, expenses paid for retaining experts in the bargaining, costs of administrative support for negotiating and maintaining the agreements, and “the fair market value of agency office space provided to labor unions,” among other things. The report must also outline all collective bargaining agreements currently in force at the agency, the time each agreement came into effect and when it will expire, and how much time each agreement took to hash out. After Trump won the 2024 presidential election, federal government unions negotiated new collective bargaining agreements in an attempt to prevent the incoming president from changing civil service rules. “In the final days of the prior administration’s tenure, it purposefully finalized collective bargaining agreements with federal employees in an effort to harm my administration by extending its wasteful and failing policies beyond its time in office,” Trump wrote in a Jan. 31 memo restricting collective bargaining in the final days of a president’s term. “Such last-minute, lame-duck [agreements], which purport to bind a new president to his predecessor’s policies, run counter to America’s system of democratic self-government.” The memo cites a Department of Education agreement negotiated on Jan. 17, three days before Trump took office. Martin O’Malley, commission of the Social Security Administration under Biden, made an agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees in December 2024 guaranteeing that the agency’s 42,000 employees would not have to work in the office during the Trump administration—after Trump had announced that he would require in-office work. Now, the American Federation of Government Employees has filed multiple lawsuits to block Trump’s reforms. The post How Much of Your Tax Dollars Bankrolled the Deep State Union Efforts to Block Trump’s Reforms Before He Entered Office? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Finland has come out with a plan to expand the use of biometric data, with a new a new proposal from the country’s Interior Ministry. Even as the push to introduce various forms of advanced biometric surveillance, including that incorporating facial recognition, is gaining momentum in countries around the world – so is the pushback from civil rights and privacy campaigners, which ensures that such initiatives these days rarely fly under the radar. Finland’s Interior Ministry announced on its website that the proposal aims to amend existing rules on biometric data stored by the police and the immigration service – stored, that is, in Finnish citizens’ ID cards, and registers containing biometric data of foreigners. The government says the intent is not only to strengthen crime prevention – but also to “improve the conditions for using biometrics in law enforcement.” In addition to the collection of data captured by facial recognition devices, the proposal includes DNA samples and fingerprints taken from suspects. The process is then to attempt to match this biometric data with other types already contained in the law enforcement’s databases – for “crime prevention and investigative purposes.” The groups keeping a close eye on this development are warning about some of the issues that crop up time and again around similar legislative efforts: the wording that allows for future “mission creep”- as well as unsatisfactory level of provisions that would guarantee against any abuse of such highly sensitive personal information. Currently, the Finish proposal is yet to be presented to the lawmakers – the Interior Ministry is seeking comments before this can happen. And while the announcement of the proposal goes into the intent driving it, it is short on detail regarding the elephant in the room – privacy safeguards. The Ministry’s website says that if amended, the biometric data regulation “could” be at the disposal of law enforcement in order to “prevent significant danger to life, health or freedom and to prevent, uncover and investigate the most serious crimes.” The proposal is something of a masterclass in vague wording – so many things can fit just into defining a danger as “significant” – and such broad categories like, “freedom.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Finland’s Big Bet on Biometrics: Crime-Fighting Tool or Privacy Nightmare? appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

The Progressive Base Wants Chuck Schumer Gone

These are young giant planets, so the carbon dioxide is definitely not coming from burping cows or a civilization burning fossil fuels, but it confirms theories of planetary formation.

If you want to get to know the blue-headed quail dove, you better do it quick.