A post shared on social media purportedly shows a cleaning crew working at a hotel that was housing asylum seekers. Verdict: False The claim is inaccurate. The video was originally posted by a cleaning company and does not mention asylum seekers. Fact Check: Protests have taken place across Ireland against the government’s immigration policy, Fox News reported. Immigration has […]

Eight people reportedly died at the scene, while 45 people were injured and taken to local medical facilities. Eight of those injured are reportedly in critical condition

A video shared on X claims to show the granddaughter of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a dress. Khamenei’s granddaughter is in New York, wearing a dress. Protesters are calling her out: “Look at what Khamenei’s granddaughter is wearing while our daughters are being killed because of the hijab in Iran” Every mullah and their relatives […]

'California is likely to experience slower but positive growth'

For this reason, I am introducing bipartisan legislation

'Apparently, for some unknown reason, the lawnmower went over an embankment and rolled over'

Our Top 10 Three Dog Night Deep Tracks digs deep into the band’s catalog and looks at the songs that weren’t hits but were fan favorites. While Three Dog Night lead singers Corey, Chuck and Danny got most of the visible credit throughout the years, one must remember that Three Dog Night was a great band. Unlike many late ’60s and early 70s bands like The Grass Roots and others who utilized the Wrecking Crew crew on their recordings, Three Dog Night was a band that performed live and in the studio. Musicians such as Mike Allsup on guitar, Joe The post Top 10 Three Dog Night Deep Tracks appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Featured Essays Humor A Love Song to the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever, on the Occasion of Its 20th Anniversary The funniest bit Conan O’Brien has ever done is the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on May 14, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Last month Twitter became briefly good again because Conan O’Brien went on Hot Ones and fucking crushed it. Gosh that’s a fun sentence to write. This led to a lot of Hot Ones’ younger viewers discovering the joy that is Conan for the first time, seemingly. A swarm of GenX and Elder Millennial people dropped everything to share clips and indoctrinate the youth, which led to a cavalcade of Conan remembrances, which in turn apparently led to friends of his thinking he’d died. Which is fucking hilarious. I am a person whose tastes and television habits aligned perfectly so that when Conan took over from David Letterman he was my guy. (i.e. I was a weird night owl little kid who loved absurdity, didn’t sleep, and was way too invested in late night comedy by middle school.) The slightly queasy retro Depression-era furniture of Conan’s original set? My jam. Artie Kendall, Bigoted Ghost Crooner? Hitlery-hoo indeed! (And one of the inspirations for my novel, actually.) That whole amazing series of Fake Confirmation figurines? Obviously. Any given interaction with Sona Movsesian or Jordan Schlansky? Of course. The pitch-black existentialism of WikiBear? Sign me the fuck up. But out of all of the years and iterations of Conan’s shows, the comedy bit that is still, to my mind, the funniest thing that anyone has ever done, is the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever. Imagine my joy when in the midst of this Conanpalooza, I realized that it was the Lever’s 20th anniversary this past weekend, May 12. I thought I’d waste a minute of our time waxing rhapsodic about it. First, some context! To my mind, the Lever was part of an important thread in ‘90s pop culture that spilled over into beginning of the ‘00s, best summed up with MST3K, Beavis and Butthead, and a lot of Adult Swim, in which writers took actual cultural items of a past era—Hanna-Barbera animation, cheesy 1950s sci-fi movies, pompous music videos—and overlaid ironic commentary. The gap between the sincerity of the original work and the irony of the program recycling it created a fun mental fizziness. Conan’s style was a little different—he used a lot of trappings of 1930s and ‘40s culture in his set, his bombastic old school theme song, and his penchant for talking like a newsie, and mashed that up with humor that was either really absurdist or really, really dark. With the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever, Conan and his writers applied that spirit of absurdity not to a piece of bygone pop cultural ephemera, but to a show that had just gone off the air a few years earlier, and was still running constantly in syndication. Which is an interesting choice! It’d be like if next year Seth Meyers introduced a remote control that played episodes of The Young Pope whenever he clicked it. Which, to be clear, he should do. One of the fun things, looking back, is seeing that they threw a few more obvious things at the wall along with the Lever—the show debuted the “Axel F” Button (a large red button that played “Axel F”, the synth theme from Beverly Hills Cop), and the Knight Rider Chain (a chain that, when pulled, played random clips from Knight Rider)—but neither of them stuck the way the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever did. The other two gags offered a chance at nostalgia for the early ‘80s, which given the nostalgia-addled decade, you’d think one of those would have been a hit, too? But no, it was the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever that had staying power, to such an extent that Conan brought it out during live shows and revived it for his Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour. The Walker, Texas Ranger Wikipedia page even has a subsection about the Lever. The Lever itself is simple: a red pole with a yellow cap. It sits behind Conan’s desk so he can reach it easily, at an angle where the audience can see that it’s there, lurking. In later appearances we see that its base is slightly more ornate—like something you’d see in an arcade or a traveling carnival. For the first few days, the Lever was hidden beneath a black velvet cloth so it could have a dramatic reveal, but later in the series, the Lever is carried out to Conan, who comments on the fact that it’s clearly a prop and isn’t attached to anything. Here, as in so many sketches, Conan embraces the spirit of Brecht and invites us all into the artifice of the show. That’s important, but I’ll come back to it.  Conan’s attitude toward the lever is complex. He regards it, at first, as an indulgence, or even a nuisance. He stresses that he has “a lot of show to get through”, and that there’s no time for the silliness of the Lever. But then, inevitably, he’s drawn back. The Lever seems to call to him, and he either makes a big deal out of egging the audience on, so it’s their idea to pull the Lever, or he acts like pulling the Lever is clandestine, forbidden, a wild, inescapable urge. As the bit goes on, Conan will sometimes act as though the producers want him to move the show along, until he and the audience become a united front, screaming for more Walker, Texas Ranger clips against the wishes of The Man. (The Man being Conan’s producer Jeff Ross, who is presumably very much in on the joke.)  Yes, many jokes are made about the various entendres of “pull the lever”. Yes, they’re stupid, and they make me laugh every time. Conan tends not to comment too much on the clips themselves. Sometimes he dings the acting, but usually, endearingly, he responds like he’s just seen a clip from a documentary— e.g.: “That old chef is pretty tough!” about Walker’s mentor, Ranger-turned-cook C.D. Parker, or “I don’t know much, but I know you don’t hit a guy in a bear trap!” when Walker does, in fact, punch a dude who’s already caught in a bear trap. Sometimes he treats it almost as though he’s an anthropologist investigating a previously unknown culture, e.g. the “Kid Hits the Ground” clip: “The ones without Walker are the most scary in a way. He’s not there to make sure those things don’t happen…when you don’t see Walker in the clip you know something terrible is happening.” His best form of commentary is purely physical: he’ll stand and applaud when a plane explodes, he’ll hide his face when something especially gruesome happens, he’ll stand and pace the stage if a child is hurt, or if a pigeon is kicked. He often invokes gambling, saying that pulling the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever is like sitting down to a table in Vegas: you have to quit while you’re ahead. Occasionally there are guest pulls: Andy Richter, Bruce Willis, and my personal favorite, a female audience member who’s invited up as an apology for a clip where Walker punches a woman in the face. When the ensuing clip sucks, Conan blames the audience member and sends her back to her seat. The conceit in all this is that Conan is watching the stuff for the first time, and we’re seeing an instinctual reaction. This is how a sane, reasonable person responds when presented with the phantasmagoria that is Walker, Texas Ranger—horror and “I shouldn’t be enjoying this” inextricably tangled in fist-pumping adrenaline as each goon is roundhouse-kicked in the head. You can often hear the audience laughing as soon as a clip starts, and I would guess that sometimes there are audience members who have seen the episode and know what’s coming. But Conan doesn’t seem to have any familiarity with the wider world of Walker, Texas Ranger. He often asks who the characters are after the clip plays, but he doesn’t seem to want an answer, and no one in the audience ever yells a character name up to him or anything—they just scream “Pull it!” a lot. The ongoing joke here is the gap between the earnest absurdity of the clip and Conan’s shocked reactions. The core of the bit it that none of us know the show, and we’re all coming to it, together, as pure spectacle. We are offered a space to laugh at Walker, Texas Ranger. The very first Walker, Texas Ranger Lever segment is made up of clips from “The Return of LaRue”, in which the villainous LaRue stalks D.A. Alex Cahill, tries to rape her, and dumps a bucket of scorpions on Walker to try to kill him. (Don’t worry, LaRue gets kicked out a window.) Sometimes the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever was the star of the post-monologue, pre-guest liminal space. Once Conan actually moved the show along, he’d usually return to it at least once. One time, special guest Saddam Hussein requested more of the Lever. My actual favorite might be this one because it includes a clip from “A Matter of Faith” Walker, Texas Ranger’s batshit Christmas episode. When they attempted to retired the bit a month after it premiered, a series of accidents and coincidences ensured that the Lever would be pulled, implying that Fate Itself wanted more Walker, Texas Ranger clips. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the most iconic clip, which doesn’t actually feature a Lever pull at all. It’s from a two-part episode, “Lucas Part 1” and “Lucas Part 2”, and it features Haley Joel Osment giving one of the greatest line deliveries in television history: The scene is presented as part of a clip show, and the Lever isn’t actually onstage—Conan explains that they didn’t include it during the Lever’s actual tenure because they were afraid to show it. It demonstrates the segment’s power and lasting popularity that the clip is received with rapturous applause even though the Lever, in this case, is unseen. All right, so, that’s the sketch. Now, why is it important? Aside from being really funny? I think it might be that this skit is a giant shining symbol of everything that’s wrong with this country.  As Conan explains in the first appearance of the Lever: NBC merged with universal, making them NBCUniversal. Because of this merger, Late night with Conan O’Brien, an NBC show, can now show clips from Walker, Texas Ranger, a Universal show, for FREE. This is 20 years ago. 2004. This is an early entertainment merger—a harbinger, if you will. NBC, a giant at the time, home of The Tonight Show, sitcom juggernauts from Cheers to Golden Girls to Frasier to Seinfeld to Friends to Newsradio (the best one ever) and Law & Order, already in its four hundredth season, had Voltroned with Universal, home of E.T., Jurassic Park, all the Universal Monsters, Back to the Future, a theme park, etc.. This is bad. It’s bad when only a few companies become the gateway to cultural production. But rather than making a self-serious speech about why mergers are bad, Conan and his writers used it to their comedic advantage, by taking out of context clips from Walker, Texas Ranger and gleefully mocking corporate synergy by playing clips and crowing about how they didn’t have to pay for them. But wait, there’s more. Walker, Texas Ranger was part of a CBS stable that included Touched by an Angel, JAG, Diagnosis: Murder, Nash Bridges, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, and assorted CSIs. These shows tended to, um, reinforce the status quo, let us say. They were retro in the opposite way to Conan’s show—rather than using any sort of irony gap to comment on the values of the past, they upheld the idea that we lived in an orderly universe, that some combination of law enforcement, military, or kindly elderly doctors (usually white, usually male) would step in to fix societal ills, and that if all of them failed, kindly female angels would step in as needed. I have a theory on that. It’s anecdotal. I think a lot of people who loved Conan then were staying up ridiculously late to watch him, or taping him and watching the next day. A lot of these people were young, in middle school or high school, and they were subject to the tyranny of whomever they lived with—parents, foster parents, grandparents, uncles (like Walker himself), group home house parents—whatever. If those adults were anything like a lot of the adults I knew (not my own parents, fortunately) Walker, Texas Ranger was appointment television each week. The Walker, Texas Ranger Lever acted as a release valve for kids who were surrounded by an adult world that gave them ridiculous platitudes and couldn’t see the absurdity of, for instance, a Very Special Christmas Episode that was chock-full of explosions. Walker, Texas Ranger’s whole conceit is its earnestness, its sincerity, and you’re mean to get emotionally involved. Walker, Texas Ranger acts like all revenge drama: show your audience a helpless innocent menaced or violated in some way, rile the audience up into a frothing rage at the injustice, and then use good violence to combat the bad so the audience is flooded with endorphins. In Walker’s case, legal or cosmic justice is then offered to the audience as a form of aftercare. Our heroes are Walker—a man of Cherokee and white heritage who is raised by his Cherokee uncle after his parents are murdered by white supremacists. He’s raised with Cherokee traditions, but he also becomes a Texas Ranger. He is the “cowboy” and the “Indian” in one man. He’s also a Vietnam vet who has PTSD flashbacks occasionally, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t criticize war in general or even that war in particular. His partner is James Trivette, a younger Black man, who is a former football star—the only thing that can match “war veteran cowboy” in this show’s vision of masculinity—and a huge fan of The Lone Ranger. The two dole out “justice” in the form of slow-motion physical violence, then release the bruised and unconscious bad guys into the actual justice system represented by Alex Cahill, a pretty, blonde, white, female DA, who also happens to be Walker’s love interest,  who also happens to have a traditionally masculine nickname. There aren’t many jokes in Walker, Texas Ranger. There is obvious, sometimes slapsticky youth pastor humor, but generally things are taken straight. A sort of gooey “Native American spirituality” is honored, but the Christian God directly intervenes in the events of the show on at least two occasions that I’m aware of. Walker communes with wolves and a special relationship with his horse. People attend church solemnly, take vows seriously, respect their elders. Women are treated with that particular tone of awe and condescension that implies that they’re inherently better than men, but also need to be protected by men, usually from men. You’re supposed to take it seriously. No matter how many times Walker dives from a plane into a car without hurting himself. No matter how many times helicopters are shot down from the sky. What the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever does is give us space to laugh at the self-seriousness of it all. It pokes a hole in the endless cycle of injustice and violent vengeance. Walker, Texas Ranger aired on CBS from September 1993 to May 2001—most of the Clinton years, and those first couple months under Bush II when most people thought life in the U.S. would continue unchanged. (Have I given entirely too much thought to the kinds of episodes that might have happened, had the show had still been on the air in autumn 2001? I have. Have these imaginings added centuries to my inevitable term in Purgatory? One has to assume so.) In the years after, culture in the U.S. took an extremely conservative turn. By the time Universal was airing it multiple times a day in reruns, and the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever premiered, the United States was in a very different mood.We’d been embroiled in a multiple front war for around three years, we had a Yale graduate who pretended to be a cowboy in the white house, Evangelical kids’ books about the End Times were flying up the bestseller charts, and menus in New York City offered “freedom fries” rather than french fries. I think it could be argued that the Lever allowed people who maybe didn’t entirely buy into that prevailing mood a space to laugh at the show’s simplistic view of life, but also offered a mental break from living in a society that wanted the show to be a documentary. Conan’s gleeful artifice is the exact antithesis of Walker’s whole deal. But at the same time, it’s artifice based in joy. It’s not a show that masquerades as upholding wholesome family values while also encouraging its audience to cheer some poor sap getting roundhouse kicked in the face—it’s a show that tells you up front: this is fake. This lever isn’t attached to anything. I wanna pull the lever as much as you want me to. Jeff Ross isn’t really mad, and he’s not really running this show—we’re all in this together. Conan’s responses encourage us to laugh at the stupidity and violence while also acknowledging that explosions are kinda rad. He actually does take the side of the underdog in these clips—best evidenced by his response to “the kid hits the ground” clip. And here’s the other thing. It would be easy to see Conan and his audience as snotty elites, making fun of Real America. Again, I’d argue strenuously against the idea that one of them is somehow more pure than the other. But setting that aside, the first summer of the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever included a visit from Chuck Norris on September 8, 2004, when he got to pull his own lever, revealing a backstage knife fight with Conan—which Norris handily won, of course. Conan invited the object of the bit into his space, and allowed himself to be made the object of a larger, meta joke, where a different prop-that-isn’t-actually-attached-to-anything is used to make him look like a fool. Even though the Lever was brought back the following year, and, as I mentioned, revived a few times during live shows, in a way this was the culmination of the arc. By turning the mockery on himself, Conan proved that the important thing was the spirit of absurdity, not cheap snark at someone else’s expense—even if that someone else once literally kicked a bad guy into the sun. [end-mark] The post A Love Song to the <i>Walker, Texas Ranger</i> Lever, on the Occasion of Its 20th Anniversary appeared first on Reactor.

Books Front Lines and Frontiers Of Relatives and Relativity: Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein Heinlein leans into Einstein’s theories (with a twist of telepathy) in this tale of twins and space travel. By Alan Brown | Published on May 14, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement. The figure of Albert Einstein casts a long shadow across science fiction in the 20th century. Perhaps no single person impacted the imagination of science fiction writers more than Einstein, with his theory of relativity. So it is no surprise that Robert Heinlein, whose juveniles often examined some scientific development or puzzle, would use the theory as the basis of one of his novels. One of the thought experiments popularized after Einstein’s paper on special relativity examines the idea of time dilation caused by travel near the speed of light by looking at the impact it would have on a pair of twins—one who traveled and one who stayed home. Heinlein uses this exact premise for Time for the Stars, while adding the twist that the twins were linked by telepathy. But while the book has its moments, I have always ranked it as the least of Heinlein’s juveniles. When I first reviewed a Heinlein juvenile a few years ago, I simply picked my favorite (Have Spacesuit—Will Travel), having no intention to review them all. But after looking at a few more, chosen for a variety of reasons, I decided it would be fun to cover the entire series, and started reviewing the unexamined books in chronological order. And now I am left with two, Tunnel in the Sky and Time for the Stars. The first is my second favorite Heinlein juvenile, and the latter my least favorite. So today I am looking at Time for the Stars, and saving the better book for last. For this review, being unable to find a paperback copy and or to order it through the local interlibrary loan system, I used a Science Fiction Book Club omnibus edition entitled Infinite Possibilities. As I recollect, I had read a library copy of the book when I lived in Northern Virginia back in the early 1980s. I remembered that the book involved a pair of twins and relativity, but otherwise I’d been singularly unimpressed with it. Looking at reviews on the internet, I find this book has generated a broad range of opinions. Some people call it their favorite Heinlein juvenile, while others (like me) consider it one of the weakest. Many of the juveniles generate strong opinions from readers, but I suspect this one is among the most polarizing. About the Author Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) was one of America’s most widely known science fiction authors, frequently referred to as the Dean of Science Fiction. I have often reviewed his work in this column, including Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, “Destination Moon” (contained in the collection Three Times Infinity), The Pursuit of the Pankera/The Number of the Beast, and Glory Road. From 1947 to 1958, he also wrote a series of a dozen juvenile novels for Charles Scribner’s Sons, a firm interested in publishing science fiction novels targeted toward young boys. These novels include a wide variety of tales, and contain some of Heinlein’s best work (the books I’ve already reviewed in this column contain links to the relevant article): Rocket Ship Galileo, Space Cadet, Red Planet, Farmer in the Sky, Between Planets, The Rolling Stones, Starman Jones, The Star Beast, Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Have Spacesuit—Will Travel. This is not the first time Time for the Stars has been discussed on Tor.com, as Jo Walton reviewed it back in 2009. Einstein’s Theories and Science Fiction The science fiction genre has always, by definition, drawn from science and technology for its plots and settings. Electricity, aviation, rocketry, communications, astronomy, and many other fields have become fodder for the imaginative projections of science fiction authors. And no one person has influenced and inspired more science fiction stories than physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955). His theory of relativity, presented in two parts in 1905 and 1915, transformed the way we looked at the universe, and upended some of the foundations of Newtonian mechanics (and if I get any of the following wrong, please be gentle with me; I’ve forgotten almost all of the math and physics I learned in my younger days). The first part of his theory describes special relativity, which looked at the electrodynamics of moving bodies. Among other findings, the theory suggested that the speed of light was an absolute limit, and that time would appear to slow down on an object moving at speeds nearing the speed of light. It also gave birth to the famous equation E=MC2, which showed that the conversion of matter into energy could release huge amounts of power. The theory of general relativity expanded this concept, adding gravity to the model, and posited that gravity was a kind of warping of spacetime, and could actually bend the motion of light. The idea of time dilation when traveling at speeds near close to the speed of light gave rise to a thought experiment called the “twin paradox,” first put forth by French physicist Paul Langevin. He pointed out that if one twin stayed on Earth while another traveled interstellar distances at near light speed, the returning twin could have experienced a period of perhaps months, while the twin at home could have experienced a period of perhaps decades. And this is precisely the situation at the heart of Heinlein’s novel, making an examination of that supposed paradox the central part of his story. This attention to physics is somewhat undermined by the idea that the twins are telepaths, able to observe the changes as they occur rather than waiting for the end of the journey. The idea that telepathy might exist, and that it might involve instantaneous communications over long distances, is of course more fantasy than science fiction, even though paranormal mental powers have long been a favorite topic for writers who otherwise play within the rules of physics. Einstein’s theories have also given rise to a cottage industry of schemes that would allow science fiction characters to exceed the speed of light, because it is far more exciting to imagine visiting other stars rather than simply observe them from afar. In the early days, when Einstein’s theories were still being debated, as we see in works like E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Skylark of Space, characters could simply scoff at what was still unproven, push their throttles forward, and zoom around the galaxy at many times the speed of light. By the 1960s, however, when I was first reading science fiction, authors were more creative in developing at least semi-plausible ways to travel faster than light, whether their spacecrafts would travel through subspace, hyperspace, other dimensions, or through wormholes. And while it is not as central to the plot, Einstein’s idea that the total annihilation of matter could release vast amounts of energy is central to the concept of Heinlein’s “torchships,” which use this energy to accelerate for extended periods of time and reach tremendous speeds. This hypothetical energy source, which dwarfs anything we can produce by either nuclear fission or fusion, was also used by Heinlein to power the terraforming process described in his juvenile Farmer in the Sky. Time for the Stars Heinlein introduces the readers to Tom and Pat Bartlett, identical twins born into a family already too large for an overpopulated world, forcing their family to pay governmental penalties. They are discovered by the Long Range Foundation, or LRF, a nonprofit organization that has amassed enormous wealth by funding basic research without an eye toward short-term gains (Heinlein throwing in a plug for the funding of science for science’s sake). The LRF is building its own space program, sending ships to nearby stars. But the first ship has been lost, and the LRF is looking for a way of communicating with their explorers. This has led the organization to study telepaths, and they’ve discovered that the ability sometimes manifests between twins. Offering the Bartlett family a great deal of money, they conduct tests on Tom and Pat, and the boys find that their secret form of whispering is actually unintelligible to others, and they have been communicating telepathically for years. The twins are offered a chance to work as LRF communicators, with one staying on Earth and the other traveling to the stars. The exploration effort is part of what is called Project Lebensraum, a program to ease overpopulation through colonization. Heinlein’s use of that German term has distasteful connotations to me, as it is the word used by Hitler and the Nazis to describe a program of clearing territories in eastern Europe to make room for German expansion. Pat is the more dominant of the twins, and is soon in training to go into space. This seemed to me an interesting narrative choice by Heinlein, as the book is told from Tom’s perspective. But Pat is paralyzed by a skiing accident, and soon it is Tom that’s being sent out on the torchship Lewis and Clark, nicknamed the Elsie. The ship launches from the Pacific as its power plant is highly radioactive, which raises the question of why it isn’t kept in orbit. Tom is glad to find one familiar face aboard—his uncle Steve, a space marine who leads the security detachment. The readers are introduced to the crew, which is ethnically diverse, a notable and progressive feature of many of Heinlein’s juveniles. And, unlike other male-oriented Heinlein juveniles, there are even women onboard the Elsie, serving in science roles and as telepathic communicators. The book introduces the reader to shipboard life in a section that feels rather perfunctory. Two subplots, involving Tom’s trouble with a young and spoiled roommate, and his romantic feelings for a female telepath whose domineering twin on Earth squashes the relationship, are dealt with almost as soon as they are introduced. In a first sign of the effect of relativity, he finds his twin on Earth celebrating their birthday days before the event occurs aboard ship. One element I did enjoy in this part of the book was Tom working with a psychologist to come to terms with the fact that he doesn’t particularly like Pat, who has bullied him all his life, and the psychologist reminding him that while you should tolerate members of your family, you do not have to like them. Coming to this realization, Tom finds that he gets along better with his distant brother. There is a welcome narrative jump that takes the ship to its first destination. One of the things I like about Heinlein stories is his attention to detail. When he tells you how long a journey takes, you know he worked out the math. And his stars are real stars; the planetary systems are plausible, given the scientific knowledge of the day. He even takes the time on one planet to describe the skies, and how far-away stars are in familiar places, but stars closer to Earth have visibly moved in their position. The first planet the Elsie visits proves to be an excellent candidate for colonization, with ecology compatible with human life (although how that occurred is not explained), and no intelligent life to clash with. The torchship takes on water as fuel and departs. The crew, however, is thinned by a disease that breaks out after they leave, despite considerable precautions. They find that telepathic communication when nearing lightspeed is nearly impossible due to time dilation—and telepathic links can be lost forever during that period. Fortunately, they discover that telepaths can develop new links with the descendants of their original twins/partners, and by the end of the journey, Tom is communicating with his grandniece, Vicky. The second system they visit has no Earth-like worlds, and they take on ammonia due to the lack of available water. While the last planet they visit appears attractive, they find it populated with hostile aliens, and even more crew members are lost. They soon find themselves being led by a backup Captain who wants to press on with their mission despite a crew barely capable of keeping the ship functioning, and a cadre of telepaths so depleted they may lose contact with Earth. Mutiny is brewing among the demoralized crew. And now I will move into spoiler territory, so skip down to “Final Thoughts” if you want to avoid learning the ending of the book. SPOILERS FOLLOW While the Elsie has been voyaging, Earth has developed faster-than-light travel, and a ship meets them to install a drive so that they can return home immediately. This saves them from the almost certain doom of following an inflexible captain on a voyage they are not capable of completing. It also brings Tom into contact with his now much older twin brother. After all, a book examining the “twin paradox” would feel incomplete without a comparison of the two after the relativistic journey. What is a surprise is that Tom’s grandniece immediately proposes marriage to him upon his arrival. This was foreshadowed when someone during the journey mused that by the time they arrive home, the descendants who will be their peers will be so genetically removed from the travelers that they will be at most like distant cousins. But Tom’s decision to marry a relative, however distant genetically, whom he has known telepathically since she was a young child just feels distasteful to me. Heinlein’s practice of exploring incestuous relationships is something I feel marred much of his later work, and I never expected to find it showing up in one of his juvenile novels. I could find nothing on the internet addressing the topic, but I wonder how that ending made it past Heinlein’s usually cautious editor for the juveniles, Alice Dalgliesh. Final Thoughts Time for the Stars, at least in my opinion, spends too much time being a thought experiment, and not enough time being a compelling narrative. While it has some powerful scenes, they do not hang together as well as they do in Heinlein’s other novels. It seems like he loses interest in the idea of exploring other worlds, shortchanging readers on the journey, and rushing to bring the tale to its conclusion. And the twist that brings the story to a close is not one that I found appealing, to say the least. And now I look forward to hearing from you, and your thoughts on Time for the Stars in particular, or Heinlein’s juveniles in general. Did you find the “twin paradox” thought experiment a good foundation for a story, or did you find that it detracted from the narrative?[end-mark] The post Of Relatives and Relativity: <i>Time for the Stars</i> by Robert A. Heinlein appeared first on Reactor.

Second in a five-part series. Read part 1 here. Societal rot is a choice. The In-N-Out Burger chain was begun in California in 1948 in the Baldwin Park area of Los Angeles and has expanded to more than 400 eateries in eight states and 287 cities. Until March 24, the company had never closed a restaurant.  However, on that day, the location in East Oakland shuttered because of “ongoing issues with crime,” according to Denny Warnick, the chief operating officer of In-N-Out. Employees at the now-closed burger joint had to deal with “car break-ins, property damage, and armed robberies.” Did Pamela Price, the George Soros-funded Oakland County district attorney, fail to prosecute the thieves and armed robbers who repeatedly ravaged the In-N-Out Burger? Yes. Was this an inexcusable policy choice on her part? Yes. Can the former customers and employees of this restaurant, and others that have shuttered because of rampant lawlessness, fairly blame Price for her pro-criminal policies? Absolutely. Is it common sense for an elected prosecutor to refuse to enforce the law? No.  Are the results of this rogue approach entirely predictable? You bet. That’s why the voters are seeking to recall her.  Societal rot is a choice.  Tomorrow: The deadly consequences of so-called sanctuary cities. The post SOCIETAL ROT, Part 2: In & Out Burger Restaurant a Casualty of Prosecutor’s Failures appeared first on The Daily Signal.