Books SFF Bestiary Desperately Seeking Cryptids: Roland Smith’s Chupacabra Monster hunting for the all-ages crowd By Judith Tarr | Published on May 28, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share For the purpose of this article, I am twelve, and I picked up this book at the school book fair because I wanted to read about the chupacabra. I saw that it was Book 3 of a series called Cryptid Hunters, which made it even better, I thought. If I liked it, I’d go back and get the other volumes. Because cryptids. I settled in to read it, and after a big chunk of “What Happened in the Last Two Books,” right there on the first page of the Prologue, there it was. “In the darkness of his wooden den the chupacabra sensed everything….” He’s trapped and there’s a goat he can’t get at, and he’s so hungry. There’s a nasty woman screaming at him, and an even nastier man with a long stick. The chupacabra is smart. He knows how to hunt. He knows how to scare the man, too, and that’s almost as sweet as the goat’s blood. Yes! That’s what I’m here for! And then we’re out of the prologue and it’s a whole different book-universe. We have two whole previous books’ worth of backstory to go over (and over). Everything that happens, we stop for a catch-up and a summary and a reminder about who is who and what was what. I won’t need to read the other books after all. They’re all here. With every twist and turn and in and out and all the family drama. There are cryptids. But they’re baby dinosaurs from another book. We see a whole lot of them. Smell them, too. They fart. A lot. I am twelve. I do not mind fart jokes, even fart jokes that go on and on. And On. Or rhino pee all over one of the mega-annoying kids, either (Go, Team Rhino!). But that’s not why I’m here. Where’s my chupacabra? Finally, after a whole lot of running around and screaming, he shows up. He’s being held captive deep inside Evil Grandpa’s wildlife sanctuary/preservation zoo/research facility/secret evil-overlord lair. Evil Female Scientist has wired him for mind control, and Evil Grandpa orders her to use him to track down the kids who have infiltrated the lair. That’s cool enough, though maybe not worth waiting hundreds of pages to get to. What’s cooler is that he’s part of Evil Grandpa’s latest evil plan to scam the world into thinking he’s a great conservationist hero. Evil Grandpa has a television show in which he presents himself as a wildlife biologist and pretends to protect endangered species (but what he’s really doing to them is absolutely evil). The chupacabra is called CH-9, or Nine, because he’s the ninth of his kind. He’s a genetically manipulated mutant, created in a lab and gestated by a female jaguar. The previous eight were failed experiments, mostly for being too aggressive and too difficult to control. He has an implant in his brain, which is supposed to solve that problem. His whole existence is a fraud, just like the rest of the operation. Evil Grandpa and his minions read up on the literature. Researched the legend. Figured out that the so-called physical evidence consists of coyotes with mange. Then created a beast based on the Latin American variety: dark grey, with glowing orange eyes, overly long hindlegs, three-toed forelegs, a ridge of spines along its back, and huge fangs. He hunts by night, and he feeds on blood. He’s especially fond of goats. He is also extremely intelligent. He’s capable of thinking for himself, when he’s allowed to. He’s a dangerous predator, and Evil Grandpa orders him turned loose in the secret lair. But this is a kids’ book, and there’s a hard and fast rule in kids’ books. The kids always win. They outsmart the evil adults, trap the hunting beast, and fly off to their own secret island with the help of the good adults, including Super Cool Dad (who happens to be Evil Grandpa’s son-in-law). Buy the Book Chupacabra Roland Smith Cryptid Hunters Book 3 Buy Book Chupacabra Roland Smith Cryptid Hunters Book 3 Cryptid Hunters Book 3 Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The last we see of the chupacabra, he’s locked up tight in a cabinet, but doing his best to break out. And so we leave him in this book, but I wonder if he’ll show up again. Versions Ten and Eleven are in the works (maybe in two of the jaguars on exhibit); we may hear from them as well. We’re only halfway through the series, after all. There are still three books to go. Evil Grandpa has a plan for his custom cryptid. He is going to do what he calls Release and Catch, which is turn his chupacabra loose to rampage through a town in Texas. Then he’ll sweep in with his camera crew, capture the beast, and heroically, on national TV, save the people of the town. That probably won’t happen now he’s been outed as a fraud. But he’s still at large, and he’s if anything more evil than ever. I’m betting he’s not done with his chupacabras yet, especially now the kids have abducted his baby dinosaurs. He’ll need something to make a big splash with, if he wants to get his own back. The question is, will the chupacabra be brought back under control and forced to play along? Or will he find a way to escape? And if he escapes… what will he do? I can venture a few guesses. I’m sure you can, too.[end-mark] The post Desperately Seeking Cryptids: Roland Smith’s <i>Chupacabra</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Furiosa Furiosa Tells Its Own Story Without the Usual Pitfalls of Prequels Furiosa expands George Miller’s post-apocalyptic Wasteland in new and interesting directions By Leah Schnelbach | Published on May 28, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” When a director has a character deliver a line like “Do you have it in you to make it epic?”, it kind of feels like they’ve thrown a gauntlet down: to themself, to their actors, to the audience. A bold move! When that line is included in the trailer for the movie, that could be catastrophic, right? What if the movie doesn’t live up to the hype it’s creating for itself? What if it falls on its face? But what if, by some moviemaking miracle, by the time the character says the line the movie has already proved itself to be more than epic, and the line adds even more layers to a character who is already a fucking phyllo dough of a person? What if that gauntlet leads to a perfect ending?   When they announced Furiosa I was not happy about it. I love Fury Road. The more years roll out behind me, and the more current films I see, the more I’m astounded that it even exists. Why were we getting yet another prequel to a story that doesn’t need one? The whole point of the Mad Max stories, at least since Road Warrior, is that they’re fables being told by people who are not Max (or, later, Furiosa) and can be totally standalone! We don’t need to know how Furiosa met Immortan Joe! We don’t need backstory about Rictus Erectus! We have imaginations! Why does every single mystery need to be explained these days??? And then, reader, I watched Furiosa. IT’S SO GOOD. I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW THIS FILM IS SO GOOD. I think George Miller might be the messiah?  How is he making these beautiful weird violent movies about hope and art in the face of oblivion? How does he still have so much faith in human creativity? Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Furiosa is quite different from Fury Road, in both structure and tone, but it works beautifully both as a prequel and as its own thing. It doesn’t explain anything away. It fills in some backstory, but always in service of the story its telling. And the one time I would say it gave an origin story for something (I’ll avoid saying which thing to keep this spoiler-free) it gives that object a meaningful origin story. Furiosa expands Miller’s post-apocalyptic Wasteland in so many directions we could get a dozen more films just from the ideas raised in this one, and I hope we do.   It also gives the world multiple scenes of a person monster-trucking their way out of sticky situations. I don’t know if humanity deserves such a gift, but I’m glad George Miller (and his co-writer, Nico Lathouris, and the stunt drivers) gave it to us. I’ve loved Anya Taylor-Joy in everything I’ve seen her in, and she’s excellent as a younger Furiosa. And it’s not even that she’s laying groundwork for the character Charlize Theron played—you see her as a younger person, a bit foolhardy at times, reckless, and still hopeful for the future in a lighter way than Theron’s grim determination. She only has a few lines of dialogue throughout the film, but she holds whole worlds of emotion and character in her eyes. And to go back a few more years, Alyla Browne is excellent as Youngest Furiosa—and again, she isn’t just imitating the older actors. She has to weather some terrible trauma and she is utterly believable. If she had seemed hammy or over-the-top for any of it the movie would have come crashing down, but every second she’s on screen feels true. The new characters are excellent. As ever in this universe, all the small characters with incredible names like The Octoboss and Chumbucket get moments to shine, weird flair affixed to their bikes, horrifying wounds, and stylish headgear. The History Man, played by George Shevtsov, might be my new favorite character in the entire series (yes, even more than the Feral Kid) because here is a person who has known a different life, watched as society collapsed and burned around him, and broke himself again and again to stay alive. To make himself useful. Was it worth it? We get to see a few more of the Vuvalini and they more than live up to the stories Furiosa told in Fury Road (a special shout to Charlee Fraser as Mary Jo Bassa), and we meet one of Furiosa’s mentors, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). The guys next to me in the theater pointed out his resemblance to Road Warrior-era Max, and Hideo Kojima himself pointed out the resemblance to Snake. He packs so much history and tragedy and, somehow, warmth into his eyes—I just, this man needs to star in a lot of stuff. Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures And now, I get to talk about Chris Hemsworth. Remember how Chris Hemsworth is a great actor? ‘Cause George Miller certainly did, and he gave him a gorgeous role. Dementus is a villain, but this is a Mad Max movie, so he also has a complicated backstory that we only get hints of. He contains operatic sadness. He’s grand and loves making speeches. He is, in his way, loyal. He thinks he’s a great hero, and he thinks that life is a meaningless void that can’t hold heroes anymore. At all points he thinks he’s the good guy in a story unfolding around him, and that he’s doing what he has to in order to survive. (Also he’s fucking named DEMENTUS. That’s how much George Miller loves us.) I’ve seen a lot of people talk about the Avenger-to-villain pipeline over this weekend, but it holds up: Chris Evans was perfect as Ransom in Knives Out; Mark Ruffalo was hilarious as Duncan Wedderborne in Poor Things; Robert Downey Jr. was transcendent as Lewis Strauss in my beloved Oppenheimer; now Hemsworth is a goddamn delight as Dementus. Again, about the prequel-ness: I hate to pick on Solo specifically… but I’m going to. With all due love for Alden Ehrenreich aside, the movie explained away far too much of the character’s mystique. The arc of him being a fake bad boy who actually just wants love works well because he constructed the bad boy persona—finding out that he didn’t name himself, that someone else gave him the gun, that he has a romantic type that Leia eventually slots into perfectly, seeing the Kessel Run instead of just hearing about it—none of that makes the character larger. Filmmaking is not copyediting. Movies are not games of spot-the-reference. Leave us some goddamn room! Furiosa doesn’t do any of that. Miller keeps with the tradition of having someone else tell Furiosa’s story. This is one possible version of what happened, maybe. Someone else could tell a different version and it would be just as possibly true. (My great hope is that George Miller appoint a legion of successors to keep telling these stories, but I genuinely don’t know who could keep this going.) There are gaps and holes and time-skips, and that’s fine. It doesn’t have to fit perfectly with the other films. There is no one defining thing that explains Furiosa away—she’s a whole person. Everything that is done to her shapes her, and what’s more important are her responses. And even when an iconic thing does get an origin story, that origin deepens the importance of the object, rather than making it feel like a prize in a scavenger hunt. When I left Fury Road the first time back in 2015, I was vibrating. I wanted to run and scream and punch things in a good way. I settled for yelling “It’ssogoodyouhavenoidea!” at the gentleman waiting in line for the next show, who wanted to know what my friends and I thought. He looked nervous. He clearly loved these films, and he lit up as I yelled at him. I really hope he had as good a time as I did. This time was different. The film itself is slower—not more layered, but layered in a different way. Where Fury Road only covered a couple days, the action here takes place over years. James Baldwin once said that the goal of writing was to write a sentence “as clean as a bone”. Fury Road, to me, felt like a bone-clean film, and I do revere Mr. Baldwin, but there’s something to be said for the shredded muscle and sinew that George Miller and his collaborators have left on Furiosa. Rather than making a film that tells its story through one protracted action sequence, here Miller takes the slightly more traditional path of giving us action set-pieces with quieter character-building moments between them. But never fear, all of the action scenes are fucking ASTONISHING. There’s one long sequence on the War Rig that might be even better than anything in Fury Road. There were points where I laughed out loud because I couldn’t contain my delight anymore—and that was before the monster truck showed up. And the quiet character-building moments work beautifully, because these are real people Miller and Lathouris have written, not the person-shaped cardboard cutouts with interchangeable tragic backstories so many movies are throwing at us these days. Another thing I loved, and I don’t think this is a spoiler: this movie about Furiosa’s growth. She’s a little kid at the opening of the story, and she’s not some magical child that can wave all the threats away. Maybe it’s superhero fatigue talking, but it was a relief to watch the movie knowing that she’d have to respond to threats like a real person. It goes without saying that this is a brutal film, but there’s actual, protracted torture in this one. (Not always onscreen, but sometimes the off-screen stuff is worse.) I have a lamentably strong stomach, but there were a few points when even I wanted to look away. We also see into the home of the women Immortan Joe has enslaved, and we see why some of them might choose that life of horror over a life of horror at the base of the Citadel. But also, as in the other films, this world is not some simple binary—the women can be just as ruthless and cutthroat as the men. (There’s also the fun nuance that women appear to be equal in Dementus’ gang, as long as they’re willing to be bastards, which makes for an interesting contrast with Immortan Joe’s world, where women are used only for their womb or their milk.) Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Where Fury Road is rich with layered symbolism and the interplay of water, blood, milk, and gasoline, Furiosa is a little more straightforward. The story is a circle that plays with imagery from Roman culture, Greek myth, and the Hebrew Bible, and a cape that’s kind of a dark twist on Superman. And where its predecessor/successor is essentially one long chase, this is a slower epic about how brutality and hopelessness twist people into shapes they can’t imagine. While no, you don’t gotta hand it to Immortan Joe, he at least has some organizational skills compared to Dementus. Joe is your bog standard tyrant—he wants society to function as long as he and his family can be at the top of it. Dementus is more like if you set Christopher Nolan’s version of the Joker loose on the Wasteland. He is also a dark mirror to Max Rockatansky. Aren’t we all just one bad day away from starting a death cult in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? The phrase “Hope is a mistake” became a standard part of my repertoire after I saw Fury Road. I’m usually saying it with at least a light dusting of irony. Furiosa takes that line, chains it to a steel table, and interrogates it for 148 minutes without even offering it a styrofoam cup of shitty coffee. This movie is about hope. It’s about how hope is enacted when there is no reason left to do so. It’s about finding a way to keep your humanity when everyone around you wants to take it away. It’s about how to shape your own self and story in a world that wants to twist you into a dead-eyed object. It’s about what hope costs, and whether it’s worth that cost. Is it worth it, to tattoo words onto every inch of your skin and become a History Man to people who only keep you around to feed their own sense of importance? Is it worth it, to fight for love? Is it worth it, to keep promises to the dead? There’s already talk of this film being a flop, which, I’d say call no movie a flop until all the people who are going to go multiple times have gone multiple times. (It’s me, I’m all those people, I can’t fucking wait go again this weekend.) If you can possibly safely see Furiosa on a large screen, do it. If you can see it IMAX, all the better. Like its predecessor/successor, it’s not just the epic action film the trailer promises, it’s also an important film with something to say—and it says it with harpoon guns and monster trucks.[end-mark] The post <i>Furiosa</i> Tells Its Own Story Without the Usual Pitfalls of Prequels appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Sign Up To Keep Reading This post is for Reclaim The Net supporters. Gain access to the entire archive of features and supporters-only content. Help protect free speech, freedom from surveillance, and digital civil liberties. Join Already a supporter? Login here If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Lawsuit Analysis: Uvalde Families Blame Call of Duty, Meta For “Grooming” Gunman appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Schumer: Yes, We Want to Make All Illegal Migrants Into Voters

Tarantulas might be an arachnophobe's greatest fear – but who could resist the power of an electric blue tarantula? Three species are particularly famous for having an electric blue hue, and while they might be the stuff of nightmares for some, they are pretty dreamy to behold. The Cobalt Blue TarantulaOur first blue species is the cobalt blue tarantula (Cyriopagopus lividus). Unfortunately, little is known about the ecology and habits of all of our three popular species and most of what is known is mainly learned from hobbyists and pet owners. This species is a popular pet and originates from the tropical rainforests of Thailand and Myanmar. Despite its popularity as a pet species, the tarantula has a reputation for being aggressive and can even deliver a painful bite. They spend much of their time in burrows The Electric Blue TarantulaThe second species in our list is a relatively new one. Only officially described last year, the electric blue tarantula (Chilobrachys natanicharum) is native to Thailand, and researchers found it on a tree in a mangrove forest. “The secret behind the vivid blue coloration of our tarantula lies not in the presence of blue pigments, but rather in the unique structure of their hair, which incorporates nanostructures that manipulate light to create this striking blue appearance.” researcher Dr Narin Chomphuphuang said in a statement at the time. The Greenbottle Blue TarantulaThe greenbottle blue tarantula (Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens) is again a popular pet and hobby species because of its attractive coloration. Endemic to Venezuela, this species has blue legs but more of a green-colored carapace, hence the name. Citizen science has helped researchers learn more about the distribution of this species.Image Credit: NATTHAWAT101/Shutterstock.comWhy Are Some Tarantulas So Vividly Coloured?It’s long been a puzzle to scientists why species like the cobalt and electric blue tarantulas possess such vivid colors when they are largely nocturnal or crepuscular species. There has even been the suggestion that the species themselves do not possess true color vision, or could tell colors apart. However, research from 2020 showed that the tarantulas could perceive the bright blue tones on their bodies. The team also suggested that the color had nothing to do with defense, but rather was to attract potential mates. "While the precise function of blueness remains unclear, our results suggest that tarantulas may be able to see these blue displays, so mate choice is a likely potential explanation.” Said Dr Saoirse Foley from CMU in a statement. 

On the morning of June 3, look to the East. Just before sunrise, you will get six out of seven planets nicely aligned. Venus will be a bit too close to the Sun to be visible before the Sun appears. The alignment will give you great views in the order Jupiter, Mercury, Uranus, Mars, Neptune, and Saturn. And for good measure, you will be getting a Moon crescent too, just near Mars in the sky.Uranus and Neptune can’t be seen with the naked eye so you will need a telescope or high-powered binoculars for that. If you care more for the presence of planets than their arbitrary alignment, then any day is now good to see Venus too before it gets too close to the Sun. But hurry! If you look tomorrow or the day after, the order will be slightly switched. Mercury is currently not very near the Sun, and while its maximum elongation is months away, the littlest planet is clearly visible.Since we are approaching the summer solstice, there are places in the Northern Hemisphere where dawn will be in the middle of the night (maybe do not go to sleep?) or will require a very early rise. So do not worry if you miss this one. Planetary alignments of this type are not extremely rare.The eight planets all orbit the same plane in the Solar System (plus or minus a handful of degrees), so they often end up in this kind of alignment. They do orbit at different speeds though, so there is the occasional switch between who’s on one side of the Sun or who’s on the other. Alignments of three or four planets are fairly common.Six is a bit rarer, but you can have multiple days in a calendar year where at least six are visible in the night sky. Venus and Mercury move pretty quickly around the Sun, so they do get round again. Although the other planets might have stretched to the other side of the celestial vault by then, it is a long arc that connects the planets.If you are not particularly a morning person, worry not. A seven-planet alignment is coming next year, best seen in late February 2025 after sunset!

New research has challenged one of the most widely accepted theories about the function of sleep: that it allows the brain’s waste clearance system to take out the trash in the form of harmful toxins that build up while we’re awake. It’s something we all absolutely have to do, yet scientists know surprisingly little about the function of sleep. It must be important, or else evolution wouldn’t have allowed us to spend several hours a day in a state of such vulnerability, completely unaware of that hungry sabertooth purring just outside the cave. One theory that’s gained a lot of traction, especially in the last decade, is that sleep provides a vital opportunity to “clean” the brain ready for a new day, via the glymphatic system. However, as the authors of the new study write in their paper, “How metabolites and toxins are cleared from the brain is unresolved.” And their recent findings are calling some assumptions into question.What did the study find?Through experiments in mice, the team at Imperial College London found evidence that glymphatic clearance was actually less efficient during sleep and under anesthesia. They applied fluorescent dye to the animals’ brains so they could watch the clearance happening in real-time. In mice that were asleep, clearance was reduced by about 30 percent. In anesthetized mice, the figure was more like 50 percent. “The field has been so focused on the clearance idea as one of the key reasons why we sleep, that we were very surprised to observe the opposite in our results,” commented study co-lead Professor Nick Franks in a statement. One of the hypotheses that arose from the glymphatic clearance theory is that impaired sleep, and therefore impaired waste removal, might cause or accelerate the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. The new results don’t necessarily dispute the fact that poor sleep and dementia go hand in hand, but they might suggest a different underlying mechanism at work.“It may well be that having good sleep does help to reduce dementia risk for reasons other than clearing toxins,” said study co-lead Professor Bill Wisden.     What’s the reaction to the study?The study attracted a lot of attention when it was published in mid-May 2024, as you might expect for results that offer a counterpoint to such a widely held theory. Speaking to Science, University of California Santa Barbara biologist Stephen Proulx, who has done similar work looking at cerebrospinal fluid flow in the brain, called the study’s methods “very clever.”However, not every commenter was quite so complimentary.“You can’t just come in and do something that’s completely different and say all the old data is wrong. I’m actually shocked that this paper was published,” neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard told Science, mentioning plans to write a letter detailing concerns about the study to Nature Neuroscience, the journal that published it. Nedergaard led the seminal study, published in 2013, which originally demonstrated the clearance of β-amyloid – of Alzheimer’s disease infamy – from the mouse brain during sleep. Much of the controversy surrounds particular methodological choices in the new study. The fluorescent dye was injected directly into the brain, which critics say risks creating unreliable data by damaging tissues and increasing intracranial pressure. Speaking to The Transmitter, Nedergaard was strident in her critiques: “They are unaware of so many basic flaws in the experimental setup that they have.” Other examples of the issues, as Nedergaard sees it, include the fact the animals weren’t in natural sleep, that steps were not taken to ensure the dye successfully reached the tissue, and that the measurements of glymphatic drainage were not taken in optimal locations. For Franks’ part, he admitted to the Guardian that, like many others, he’d supported the glymphatic clearance theory. “It sounded like a Nobel prize-winning idea,” he said. “The idea that your brain is doing this basic housekeeping during sleep just seems to make sense.”The team’s self-confessed surprise at their results has only made them keener to investigate further. Wisden commented in the press release, “The other side to our study is that we have shown that brain clearance is highly efficient during the waking state. In general, being awake, active and exercising may more efficiently clean the brain of toxins.”However, it was in part because of the inevitable contention the work would cause that the team opted not to present it at any conferences. “Step back from it. Publish your paper, do the best you can, and then see what happens,” Franks told The Transmitter.What happens, in this case at least, is a debate that is no doubt as charged as they suspected it might be. And the best, maybe the only, way to resolve it is to do even more research to try and get to the root of why we spend a third of our lives in peaceful slumber.Or not so peaceful, as the case may be. The study is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. 

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Progressivism is a multipronged deviation from the straight and narrow that talks — or takes — people off the path to the New Jerusalem and toward false secular utopias. In this loose coalition, these otherwise unreconcilable strays are drawn in by a lack of gratitude and the sense that "better" must be anywhere other than here and anyone besides those present. And they're kept together by a Procrustean vibe – and what they've turned their backs on. The arch-conservative Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn emphasized in both “Leftism” and “The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large” how the left – a term that encompasses the progressive movement – takes after Procrustes, the legendary highwayman of Attica. This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change. In Greek mythology, Procrustes, also known as Damastes, "tied his victims upon an iron bed, and, as the case required, either stretched or cut off their legs to adapt them to its length.” Like Procrustes, progressives have a habit of socially, legally, or literally hacking away at those parts or wholes of human beings that fail to fit into their preconceived systems. The 20th century is full of atrocities in which millions of innocents were cut up because progressives in the Soviet Union, Germany, Cambodia, and elsewhere, with an eye to purportedly better futures, desired that all bodies and minds fit the lengths of their Procrustean beds. This tendency is clear also in other progressive subgroups, such as the eugenicists and transsexual activists, who both seek to cut away at biological realities they find undesirable. This Procrustean verve is, however, becoming especially pronounced among the transhumanists of our day. Before noting some of the ways the transhumanist movement is working to carve up a new mankind, it is important first to note the other tendency that unites progressives. Progressives share in common a prideful rejection of the primacy of God, the goodness of His creation, and the worth of the humanity Christ endured and elevated with his suffering, death, and resurrection. Simply put: Progressivism is Luciferian. In the garden, the serpent — who cannot create but can only distort and destroy — told Eve of eating the forbidden fruit, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.” Eve was enticed not to emulate or follow the one true God, but to follow Satan’s example and seek divinity besides and without God, contrary to His will. This lack of humility and the desire to be independent of God not only resulted in the fall of mankind, but has ever since stained progressive efforts to achieve immortality and to escape the humanity that was evidently valued enough by God for Christ to take on and save. C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity," “People often ask when the next step in evolution – the step to something beyond man – will happen. But in the Christian view, it has happened already.” He went on to write, “In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.” Technological and political innovations aside, the apex of humanity and the superlative by which the comparative “progress” should be measured was nailed to a tree two millennia ago. The Christian understanding is that the pursuit of God and true progress means trying to follow Christ and fit the cross. After all, on the cross are perfection and immortality, which entail the very suffering and death the transhumanist seeks to eliminate. The transhumanist endeavor, ultimately, is to pursue godhood by rejecting the cross and setting oneself down on Procrustes’ bed, cutting off anything resembling the Son of Man. In this sense, transhumanism is the epitome of regression. Artificial wombs, brain implants, virtualization of everything in the anti-sacramental Metaverse, transsexuality – these transhumanist drives away from our humanity each substitute parts of what makes us human and human life worth living. What’s more, they amount to sterile shortcuts off the path to the New Jerusalem that cut away at the travelers who take them. A video from Yemeni “science communicator” Hashem Al-Ghaili entitled “EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility” recently went viral, discussing the so-called “bioreactors” that may soon supplant mothers and enable investors to “genetically engineer” prospective children, reported the Christian Post. The mother and the bond she enjoys with her baby, unborn and newborn, appear not to fit the transhumanists' Procrustean bed. EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility youtu.be Rather than improve the ways we teach or understand, the transhumanists appear keen to change the raw material that is taught or comprehended. The brain implants that may one day soon help the blind to see and the lame to walk will in short order be also used – along with some version of OpenAI's ChatGPT – as stand-ins for the common man’s common sense. The promise of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is that we can skip the messy, real interactions between human beings that we have long enjoyed, at least up until the pandemic, and instead stream into false realities remotely. The new humanity need not risk adventure or moral consequence in the world of flesh and bone that God deemed good. These experiences will join our common sense and the other cuttings at the foot of Procrustes' bed. G.K. Chesterton reminds us in “Orthodoxy” — the book that helped set the militant atheist and World War I infantryman C.S. Lewis on his way to Christian conversion — “You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.” The transhumanist prong of the progressive movement is doing precisely that: freeing us camels of our humps. This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change, as opposed to the will and moral reflexes of the immortal, albeit imperfect, persons animating it. “If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive,” wrote Lewis. The progressive coalition and all its Procrustean subgroups, transhumanism in particular, appear to have taken a wrong turning and are desperate for us to go with them, bereaving us of our proverbial humps along the way. For all their hacking and dreaming, their efforts to go forward have not brought them anywhere nearer the place where we all ought to be: not like gods, apart from God, but with God in Christ.

The Federal Reserve may be the central bank of the United States — but it’s a private corporation that actually has nothing to do with the federal government. Not only is it a private corporation, but Thomas Massie believes it’s what’s causing America’s skyrocketing inflation. “What they did during COVID is they created trillions of dollars out of thin air,” Massie explains to Glenn Beck. “Congress spent those trillions of dollars, but it’s the Fed that enables it and it’s the Fed that pulls it off.” “The Fed acts like they’re the firefighters, but they are the arsonists,” he continues, adding, “The Fed starts out as the arsonist, then they come in and they do the firefighting by raising interest rates, and then they go in and bail out the couple of banks last year. So, they’re causing the problems that they come in and allegedly solve.” While inflation impacts millions of Americans negatively, the Fed doesn’t care — because it’s only the rich who matter to them. “They make sure that the rich people can survive through inflation. The poor people can’t, or even the middle class can’t,” Massie explains, telling Glenn that while the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency, it may not be for long. “No politician in any other country is going to take responsibility for their own fiscal madness. Everybody’s going to blame it on the United States because we were greedy, grotesque, and took on so much debt that we devalued the dollar, and it’s going to affect the entire world,” Glenn agrees. This is why Massie believes it's time to end the Federal Reserve. “They’ve been asking me, ‘What if you get rid of the Fed? What do you replace it with?’ That’s like saying if you take out a tumor, what do you replace the tumor with,” he says, adding, “The serious answer is we go back to stable currency that the government can’t manipulate.” Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.