Movies & TV Star Trek: Prodigy “It’s time for one of my cockamamie plans!” — Star Trek: Prodigy Season Two By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on July 3, 2024 Credit: CBS Studios / Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: CBS Studios / Netflix Back in October of 2021, I declared Star Trek: Prodigy to be the best of the new Trek series. Since I made that declaration, the competition has gotten stiffer, as Discovery aired its best season, Lower Decks aired its two best seasons, and Strange New Worlds debuted and gave us two fabulous seasons as well. And, um, Picard seasons two and three also happened. Having just finished watching all twenty episodes of Prodigy’s sophomore season, I stand by what I said three years ago. This show is fantastic. [Spoilers follow for season 2 of Star Trek: Prodigy] The second season picks up nicely from the first. What’s more, the main characters are all in Starfleet now, as warrant officers and Academy candidates, which means the show can embrace the greater Trek universe more aggressively. In particular, the show feels very much like a Voyager spinoff, as evidenced not only by the presence of both Admiral Janeway and hologram Janeway (yes, she’s back even though the Protostar was destroyed—more on that in a bit), but also with the addition of the Roberts Beltran and Picardo to the opening credits as Chakotay and the EMH, respectively. Plus, a big chunk of the action of this season takes place on a newly commissioned Voyager. (The original having been established in both LD’s “Twovix” and Picard’s “The Bounty” as being a literal museum piece now.) Credit: CBS Studios / Netflix And the driving force of the beginning of the season is to rescue Chakotay. The wormhole created by the Protostar’s destruction at the end of last season is still there, and they got a distress call from Chakotay 52 years in the future on Solum. Voyager is undertaking a covert mission to take an experimental ship, the Infinity, into the wormhole to rescue him. They have security footage retrieved from the Protostar that shows that Chakotay and his first officer, Adreek, sent the Protostar back in time to keep the Federation safe. The result of that action was for the Protostar to wind up on Tars Lamora decades in the past, to eventually be found there by Dal and Rok while slaving away for the Diviner, and eventually getting the whole show started. However, Admiral Jellico puts the kibosh on the mission and orders the Infinity to be destroyed, since it violates several Federation laws and treaties (for one thing, it’s cloaked, which is illegal, as established in TNG’s “The Pegasus”). But, since this is a TV show about precocious kids trying to get into Starfleet, and because they have a predilection for stealing ships that started with the Protostar, most of our heroes steal the Infinity and go through the wormhole. That wasn’t their intent, mind you, it was just to move the ship so that the other cadets on board, who weren’t read in on the mission wouldn’t find out about it. (Dal and the gang only found out by accident, mostly because the EMH is a lousy liar.) But the ship has a preprogrammed navigation sequence, and it buggers on through the wormhole to the future. Most notably, they go without Rok—who wants nothing to do with their breaking rules—but they are accompanied by another cadet who tries to stop them. Maj’el, a Vulcan woman voiced by Michaela Dietz, is an excellent addition to the cast. It’s funny, this is the second time a Trek animated series has added a Vulcan woman to the cast to good effect, but Maj’el is nothing like LD’s T’Lyn. Indeed, Maj’el starts out as an antagonistic character, trying to stop them, but the moment they’re through the wormhole, she focuses entirely upon the mission of rescuing Chakotay. (The character, obviously, is a tribute to the late great Majel Barrett, Gene Roddenberry’s widow, and who played Number One in “The Cage,” Christine Chapel on the original series, and Lwaxana Troi on TNG and DS9, and voiced Starfleet computers for, um, a very long time.) The mission goes horribly wrong, because—thanks to the Infinity crew’s help, posing as “galactic raiders” who’ve been abducted by the Vau N’akat—Chakotay and Adreek don’t just send the Protostar back in time, they accompany it. Now the timelines are all borked, because history has been altered into a paradox. Chakotay and Adreek being on the Protostar means it doesn’t wind up on Tars Lamora in the past and Dal and the gang don’t find it and everything is different. Gwyn goes out of phase with history—though the EMH is able to whip up a stabilizer for her—and they are soon told that this particular timeline is likely to be wiped out by creatures called the Loom, who don’t just kill you, they wipe you from history. (We see this in action when the Loom kill Middleton, a red-uniformed member of Voyager’s crew, while on an away mission with Tysses and Maj’el. When Tysses beams back to Voyager, nobody has any idea who Middleton is. It’s the redshiritest death in the history of redshirt deaths, as he didn’t just die, he was retconned!) Credit: CBS Studios / Netflix We find that out from someone who’s been giving hints to the kids as to what to do to save people: The Traveler Formerly Known As Wes Crusher! Wearing a big leather duster over the peach sweater he wore in TNG’s “Where No One Has Gone Before” (the episode that introduced the concept of the Travelers), Wes is hilariously scattered, with Wil Wheaton doing a superlative job of voicing the Traveler. (Eric Menyuk also makes a vocal cameo as the Traveler he played on TNG in “Where No One…” “Remember Me,” and “Journey’s End.”) We see that the Travelers continue to work to guide the universe, as established in Wes’ prior appearance, Picard’s “Farewell,” which retroactively established that the Travelers were the ones behind Gary Seven and his mission in the original series’ “Assignment: Earth.” (We even have a room in his headquarters that is a re-creation of Gary Seven’s New York apartment in that 1968 episode, complete with the Beta 5 computer.) However, Wes is going against the wishes of his fellow Travelers. They want to abandon this timeline to the Loom, as it’s broken, but Wes—ever the engineer—wants to fix it. To that end, he’s been guiding our heroes—he’s the one who sends them to Icila, the desert planet where Chakotay and Adreek crash-landed the Protostar. And he’s the one who guides them more overtly on the road to fixing the timeline. Wes’ presence in this season is a joy. (It also adds Wheaton to the growing list of people who’ve played the same role in three or more different Trek TV shows.) He’s obviously operating on a different level of understanding, and it makes it hard for him to communicate properly to the “lower” beings. But he’s also determined to save this timeline. (“This universe is my home. My mom lives here! I’m not gonna let it die.”) But Wes is also just a catalyst for the plot. The main characters are still the gang of kids who stole the Protostar last year, which sent them on an odyssey that resulted in their being warrant officers and Academy hopefuls. Every one of them has a wonderful journey to go on this season. Dal gets several hard lessons in the realities of command, including the rather boring academic side of things. (A hilarious running gag through the early episodes is Dal constantly being asked, “Haven’t you read Temporal Mechanics 101?” He finally does read it, and in a delightful touch, it’s narrated by an animated version of the show’s science advisor, the magnificent Dr. Erin Macdonald.) He also realizes that there are times when he needs to step back and let other people take charge. Notably, at one point he’s recruited to replace a cadet who’s been injured (said cadet is a Lurian, and in an amusing touch, she never gets any dialogue) to pilot a support ship, where he works nicely as part of the team. And in the end, he defers to Gwyn as captain, accepting the role of first officer. One of the people Dal learns from is Chakotay, and that goes both ways, as Dal helps remind Chakotay of what being a captain means. By the time our heroes find Chakotay, Adreek has died and Chakotay has been alone for a decade with only holo-Janeway for company. He’s mostly given up, especially since Protostar can’t take off. But the kids in general and Dal in particular enable him to get his groove back. Gwyn starts out going to Solum in the hopes of preparing the ground for Federation contact in a way that won’t result in a civil war. Unfortunately, Asencia got there first, and has already poisoned the Vau N’akat against the Federation. Gwyn challenges her to a ritual that she can’t possibly refuse, because alien species always have a ritual challenge that you can’t possibly refuse, and Gwyn loses. She manages to escape Solum, thanks in part to her father—who is now just Ilthurian, a Vau N’akat astronomer, not yet the Diviner (with John Noble using his sweet-old-man voice instead of his evil snarly voice). Eventually, she is able to defeat Asencia thanks to help from her fellow Starfleet warrant officers, Voyager, Wes, and, best of all, her father and the younger version of Asencia, who is disgusted by her older self and does not want to age into that. And in the end, Gwyn—who has proven herself to be a much more able leader than Dal—winds up in charge. Credit: CBS Studios / Netflix Rok has become the quintessential Starfleet officer, and she isn’t even a Starfleet officer yet! “I love science so much!” she says at one point, echoing Spock’s words in Discovery’s “Perpetual Infinity.” She’s the one able to come up with the brilliant solution to the problem, the source of many a great moment in Trek, from Spock and Scotty to Data and La Forge to Dax and O’Brien to Janeway and Torres to T’Pol and Tucker to pretty much the entire Discovery crew. One of the best bits in the season is when Rok is trying to figure out a way to reverse-engineer some genetically engineered tribbles that a Klingon scientist has accidentally turned into predators. Dal excitedly says, “I love this part! She gets that look when she’s close to a breakthrough!” which prompts Gwyn to say, “Shh! She’s hypothesizing!” I particularly love that Rok is insistent on following the rules far more than her teammates. (Though one wonders if that was in part done to limit the amount of time the underaged Rylee Alazraqui has to work.) She doesn’t go with them to steal the Infinity, for one thing. And on top of that, when one of their crazy-ass plans go wrong, it’s Rok who’s able to come up with the solution because of her nature. The gang has created hologram duplicates of themselves so they can steal the Infinity (again) without anyone noticing that they’re gone. But the holograms are too good—they think they’re the real thing, and so they try to steal the Infinity and stop the “holograms” from getting in their way. All the gang work against their duplicates—except for the two Roks who, of course, work together in perfect harmony and come up with a solution together… Zero has the most tragic journey to go on, as his suit is damaged beyond the ability of the crew to repair when they encounter a crazy AI (because it wouldn’t be Trek without a crazy AI, in this case one that takes over a Kazon maje and a Borg transwarp hub). But they come across a world filled with non-corporeal beings who have managed to acquire bodies for themselves. This gives us a classic Trekkish tale, as one of the themes of the franchise from the very beginning has been the dangers of letting one evolve so far past standard humanoid life that you lose the ability to feel and sense and take joy. (See in particular the Talosians in “The Cage,” whose telepathy allowed everything else about them to atrophy, or the way aliens in human form succumbed to the joy of sensation in “By Any Other Name” and “Catspaw,” or the actions of Sargon, Thalassa, and Henoch after they got bodies for the first time in forever in “Return to Tomorrow.”) Zero does get a body, which he loves, but there’s, as always, a catch: he can’t leave the planet. If he does, the body will break down. As indeed happens in fairly short order, to the point that Zero is back in a new suit by the end of the season. (Though he sacrifices his corporeal body to save everyone, as is fitting.) Jankom was able to build him a new suit, though, one that enables him to feel. Speaking of Jankom, he’s the only one who doesn’t have much of a journey to go on. He starts out the season trying to be polite and generally behave in a manner befitting an officer, and also following engineering regulations. This goes very badly for him, and he soon realizes that being a loudmouth who uses percussive maintenance to get stuff done is really his brand, and he needs to embrace it. However, he continues to be the quintessential Starfleet engineer, albeit one who’s a bit rougher around the edges. Still, he’s worthy to be in the pantheon of miracle workers alongside Scotty, La Forge, O’Brien, Rom, Nog, Torres, Tucker, Reno, Billups, Rutherford, Hemmer, and Pelia. Murf continues to be Murf. Murf is the best. That is all. The storyline for the season flows beautifully. It works as a marathon watch, it works as individual episodes, and the storyline doesn’t feel padded or rushed at any point. In an era where so many shows try to find the sweet spot in the right number of episodes to do for a particular plot and failing, the Hageman Brothers and their team of writers have done a spectacular job of finding a storyline that actually fits perfectly in twenty half-hour installments. Credit: CBS Studios / Netflix The show also embraces its place in the Trek universe seamlessly and without overdoing the fanwank. Sometimes it’s something small, like a time-twisting device created by Wes that references Boreth (home of time crystals, as seen in Discovery’s “Through the Valley of Shadows”) and the Bajoran Orb of Time (introduced in DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations”), or Maj’el referencing DS9’s “Past Tense” two-parter and First Contact as examples of time travelers becoming part of history, as it were, which is what the gang does this season. Besides Jellico returning, we also twice get Beverly Crusher, voiced by Gates McFadden, in an appearance that tracks nicely with her backstory established in Picard season three. (In a lovely moment, Wes visits his Mom for the first time in far too long, and Crusher introduces Wes to his infant half-brother, who will grow up to be Ed Speleers…) When taking on the Loom—who are giant floating insectoid creatures—Janeway is seen wearing the same tank top she wore the last time she took on giant floating creatures, in Voyager’s “Macrocosm.” Tysses at one point utters, “Great Uvazeh,” which is an Andorian deity created for the tie-in fiction, and which made my little heart proud. And, best of all, the EMH at one point says of our heroes, “I haven’t seen a crew this dysfunctional since the Cerritos,” which I hope presages an appearance on LD by the good doctor. Plus, the EMH is still writing holonovels, and from the descriptions, they’re still pretty terrible… We get plenty of Trek standbys besides those mentioned (evolved beings wanting senses, an insane AI, science-ing the crap out of a situation), including a redo of Voyager’s “Shattered,” in which Voyager has been subdivided into several different quantum realities. The solution is right out of TNG’s “Parallels,” and it even includes a visit to the Mirror Universe, as well as another appearance by the eyepatched Okona (whom the kids encountered last season, again voiced by Billy Campbell, reprising his role from TNG’s “The Outrageous Okona”). In an amusing touch, Mirror Janeway has a Borg implant over her left eye just like the one Seven of Nine has in the mainline universe. And, just like LD, Prodigy takes advantage of being animated to provide us with Voyager’sCetacean Ops! And while Gillian the humpback whale navigator (obviously named after Gillian Taylor from The Voyage Home) isn’t quite as fabulous as Kimolu and Matt from LD, she’s still pretty amazing (and wonderfully voiced by the great Bonnie Gordon, who also voices the ship’s computer and various other roles). Plus, we even get to see Gillian’s evil Mirror Universe counterpart! (Prompting the plaintive cry from Jankom, “Even the whales are evil?”) The best thing about this show is that it works at everything it attempts. As a Star Trek show, it’s magnificent, embodying the optimistic, compassionate future created by Gene Roddenberry and developed by so many over the past six decades. As an animated series, it takes full advantage, giving us some glorious aliens (the Loom, the Nazamon, the bodies created for non-corporeals) and some spectacular landscapes. As a kids’ show it never loses sight of the fact that these are young people trying to find their place in the galaxy, without ever once talking down to them. Credit: CBS Studios / Netflix In the end, our heroes get into the Academy, and we see them taking classes and learning things (including attending Dr. Erin’s Temporal Mechanics 201…). But then the synth attack on Mars happens (as dramatized in the Short Trek “Children of Mars,” and the fallout of which was seen in various flashbacks in Picard season one). A new Protostar was built for exploration, but the fallout from the synth attack is that Starfleet is cutting back on exploration. Janeway—who had retired—comes out of retirement and convinces Jellico to not mothball the new Protostar, but instead have it be a combination training/exploration vessel. Dal, Gwyn, Rok, Zero, Jankom, Murf, and Maj’el are given field promotions to ensign and assigned to the new Protostar, and they’ll be assisted by an Emergency Command Hologram—yes, holo-Janeway’s back! And in the role that the EMH pioneered in Voyager’s “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy.” Our heroes then fly off in the Protostar—which they didn’t even have to steal this time!—and get ready to explore strange new worlds, and all that good stuff. Let’s hope that we get the third season that this show absolutely deserves to see those adventures. It’s, frankly, despicable and revolting that we live in a world where it makes more financial sense for a production company to not produce a TV show and take a tax writeoff than it is to actually produce a damn TV show. It’s absurd that Prodigy isn’t on Paramount+ with the rest of the Trek stable, and good on Netflix for rescuing it from a capitalistic oblivion. Prodigy is still the best of the new Trek shows.[end-mark] The post “It’s time for one of my cockamamie plans!” — <i>Star Trek: Prodigy</i> Season Two appeared first on Reactor.

A watchdog group on election law with success opposing mail-in voting provisions has joined two key congressional Republicans from New York in a case before the state’s highest court.  The Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a friend of the court brief Tuesday in the New York Court of Appeals supporting Reps. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, and Rep. Claudia Tenney, co-chair of the Election Integrity Caucus, in challenging New York’s universal mail-in voting law.  The Public Interest Legal Foundation previously led litigation that stopped expansion of mail-in voting in President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware. Stefanik and Tenney, the plaintiffs in New York, contend that universal vote-by-mail systems, in which ballots are mailed to all voters, are unconstitutional. In a 2021 referendum, the state’s voters agreed, rejecting a proposed state constitutional amendment.  “Expansion of mail voting was rejected by New York voters,” Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams said in a written statement. “Now, the New York [State] Legislature has unconstitutionally passed a law to allow every registered voter to cast a ballot in the mail.”  After voters defeated the proposal in a referendum, both chambers of the Democrat-controlled New York State Legislature passed a bill allowing all Empire State voters to vote by mail, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, signed it. The lawsuit is called Stefanik v. Hochul.  Section 2 of the New York Constitution limits mail-in voting to those who are traveling or sick or have a disability, specifically stating that “qualified voters who, on the occurrence of any election, may be unable to appear personally at the polling place because of illness or physical disability, may vote” and have their ballots returned and counted. “The plain text of the New York Constitution prohibits the expansion of mail voting,” Adams said. “If New York lawmakers want to expand mail voting, they need to pass a constitutional amendment.” As noted in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” mail-in voting traditionally has been the largest avenue for adjudicated cases of election fraud. Mail-in voting opens the door for increased ballot harvesting, a controversial practice that has led to overturned elections.  New York has experienced problems with mail-in voting and getting timely results.  The plaintiffs are appealing a May ruling by Justice Michael C. Lynch of the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division’s Third Judicial Department. Lynch wrote in that decision: “The fact remains that, in its current form, the NY Constitution contains no requirement—express or implied—mandating that voting occur in-person on Election Day.” Meanwhile, Hochul and Democrats contend that their goal is to make it easier for more New Yorkers to vote. The Public Interest Legal Foundation successfully sued Delaware in 2022 to stop a law that allowed universal mail-in voting because the Delaware Constitution included similar provisions. The Delaware Supreme Court ruled that expanding voting by mail violates the state constitution. The post Election Watchdog Pushes Back on New York’s Mail-In Voting Law appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Though Bidenomics will likely increase the price of your cookout, July 4th is still a celebration of everything that made America great—namely, our dedication to the defense of freedom and our other God-given natural rights. Regrettably, that’s a dedication not shared by all. Though Washington has always had its share of demagogues, they have increasingly turned their attention toward destroying our way of life. Specifically, this movement is focused on maligning wealth, property, and those who pursue a better way of life through innovation. Listening to these policymakers, you could be forgiven for thinking that our national wealth mostly consisted of gold bars sitting in a safe on a yacht bound for the nearest tax shelter—a collection of idle idols. As such, much of the policymaking debate in Washington has zeroed in on taxing, regulating, and redistributing wealth. This mindset couldn’t be further from the truth, however. The wealth of American households overwhelmingly reflects the value of productive assets, such as factories, office buildings, delivery trucks, and your favorite corner restaurant. But there is another important component of wealth— the intangible value breathed into these productive assets by innovators and entrepreneurs. Their work, aided by investors who vet new ideas, brings these productive assets together in ways that make the total truly greater than the sum of its parts. When innovators and entrepreneurs are free to make new discoveries and harness them into new production methods and products, they enrich our lives. Not only do their inventions and businesses extend our quality and length of life, but they also free our time of tedious labor and allow us to fill them with purpose. Societies with more productive assets (capital) at their disposal produce more output per worker. This leads to higher wages and more flexibility over your time; that is, more time to spend with your family and in your community. Conversely, when nations strangle the formation of capital, they suppress productivity and with it, they suppress wages and force people to spend more time on a treadmill at work and in an impoverished state, deteriorating the fabric of civil society. These are the rotten fruits of anti-wealth policies. The new anti-wealth agenda in Washington stands at the crossroads of willful ignorance and malicious disregard for this delicate process that is the foundation of our prosperity. They obscure a critical fact: Wealth and innovation drive each other and enable both material prosperity and our ability to free our time to live purpose-filled lives. Only 11.8% of the assets of the wealthiest 0.1% of American households are made up of real estate and consumer durables, which include houses, cars, and other personal items. The other 88.2% of their assets are made up of stocks, bonds, and other assets that are directly tied to businesses and the economic engines that reduce prices for consumers and that increase wages for workers. The net worth of the wealthy is often discussed purely in dollar terms, as if that is their wealth—something that could be easily picked up and redistributed. This misses the point disastrously. Their wealth isn’t cash or money that is tied up in a company. Their wealth is the company itself and its capacity to produce. The broad categories of assets that cover yachts, private planes, and Rolexes, represent only roughly 0.5% of household assets—$1 out of every $200 of household assets. These categories also cover every single motorcycle, bicycle, recreational vehicle, motorboat, watch, wedding ring, collector coin, etc., in the entire country. To boot, almost all the cash that’s actually sitting in a safe is held by the Federal Reserve banks. Almost all of the rest is circulating around the economy. The truth is that almost all the assets of Americans are themselves directly linked to the productive engines of the economy. If every customer of Amazon switched overnight to a competitor, virtually all of Jeff Bezos’ net worth would dry up overnight as well. The market value of Amazon is simply an approximation of the real value created by the company for its customers, workers, and the small businesses that sell through Amazon. Bezos’ net worth reflects a portion of the value created by Amazon, of the value created for tens of millions of people through his innovative business model. Every time you walk into a restaurant or a store to buy something, you are using the wealth owned by the wealthy. You don’t need to own the factory that made your grill in order to have it for your July 4th barbecue. Henry Ford personally used very few of the millions of cars his factories produced. The use of the wealth he owned went to the millions of American families that could now afford a car. Wealth is, ultimately, impossible without the work of innovators and entrepreneurs to generate prosperity for the rest of society. Their work very much creates productive wealth that is in service to others. Our Founders understood this process—that among the many blessings of a free society is the freedom to innovate and to pursue the good life for ourselves and the rest of society. Our national commitment to these principles allowed us both the material and political freedom to lead purpose-filled lives and to strengthen and enjoy our strong civil society. Free of government interference, that’s exactly what innovators and entrepreneurs do. The stark reality is that to regulate or tax the creation of wealth, or to attempt to redistribute it, is an act of destruction. It simply removes assets from their productive application—or prevents their creation in the first place. The anti-wealth storm clouds in Washington do not ultimately threaten the wealthy. They threaten  everyday Americans. They threaten the abandonment of the principles of a free and natural rights-respecting society. They threaten the very foundations that have made America, for more than two centuries, the center of innovation and wealth generation, and with it, the engine of global prosperity. Rejecting this anti-wealth demagoguery, and embracing our innovators and entrepreneurs, will ensure that our kids and grandkids can celebrate a prosperous America on every July 4th for generations to come. The post July 4th: Celebrating a Nation Founded on Protecting Freedom, Wealth of Its People appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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A school bus driver is the first person parents trust with keeping their students safe in the morning. Carrying such precious cargo is a lot of responsibility, and school bus drivers are always more than up for the task. But have you ever wondered what life is like for them? How do they organize the kids during the drive? What do they do when school is in session? How much do they work during the... Source

We've been told since elementary school that the victors write our history. While that statement may be partially true, even the victors often spread myths that somehow turn into well-known "facts." Did Paul Revere ride through the streets to warn the colonials that the British were coming? Did the Pilgrims host the first-ever Thanksgiving? These are just a few examples of facts about history that... Source

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. NewsGuard co-founder and co-CEO Steve Brill has published a book, “The Death of Truth” – but he’s not taking any responsibility. On the contrary. Namely, Brill’s “apolitical (misinformation) rating system for news sites” as NewsGuard is promoted to customers, is often blasted – and currently investigated by Congress for possible First Amendment violations – as yet another tool to suppress online speech. But corporate media sing his praises, presenting him as a “media maven.” A censorship maven more like it, critics would say. And while getting his book promoted, Brill managed to add his name to the steadily growing list of governments, NGOs, and associated figures who are attacking online anonymity. Along with end-to-end encryption, the ability to interact anonymously is a cornerstone of the internet, but these two key elements that ensure not only privacy but also the security of individuals, companies, etc., have become the two main targets for authoritarian (labeled as such or acting in that spirit) governments. Brill’s contribution: a set of practical solutions that includes “banning anonymous posting online and funding media literacy programs.” The problem that this is supposed to fix is, essentially, that social media platforms are not yet fully under control, and therefore neither are their users (and voters). If anonymity were to be taken out of the equation, Brill is reported as saying – then it would be “easier to sue tech companies for the false content posted on their platforms,” as well as “waging legal campaigns against social media companies for violating their own terms of service.” There’s another snippet of a veiled threat aimed at tech companies, in terms of what might happen to them if they “misbehave,” (such as letting up on the already extraordinary levels of censorship), especially during a campaign season. Reporting about Brill’s Washington DC garden party to promote his book and the efforts to “clean up the internet and bring truth back to life” – the Washington Post repeatedly mentions “bad information” as that ominous source of “divisions” and “polarization.” We’ve been hearing about “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and even “malinformation” that must be fought tooth and nail. But what is “bad information” – could it simply be information that one doesn’t like? Whatever it is, Brill and his ilk seem willing to dismantle the internet itself, in order to get rid of it. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post NewsGuard Co-Founder Advocates Banning Anonymous Social Media Posts, Enabling Lawsuits Against Tech Firms for “False” Content appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

U.N. Panel Concludes WSJ Reporter Detained Arbitrarily

BREAKING: NYT Reports Biden Mulling Withdrawal -- If ...

In recent years, we have observed some stars acting seriously strangely. The classic example is KIC 8462852, better known as Boyajian's star, or just the "alien megastructure" star. In 2016 and 2017, the star dimmed in unusual ways, leading some to suggest it could have a "Dyson sphere" around it, created by some advanced alien civilization.It turned out to be dust obscuring our view of the star, which is of course disappointing to anyone hopeful of detecting advanced alien life. But it is not the only star that has astronomers' attention. One – HD 101065, or "Przybylski's Star" – has pretty much all other stars beat for its weirdness. Even if it isn't aliens (and we should assume that it is not, until all other natural explanations are exhausted), it could be doing something almost as cool.HD 101065 was first discovered in 1961, by Polish-Australian astronomer Antoni Przybylski, and was immediately noticed to be unusual. The star, thought to be a little hotter than our Sun, is known as an "Ap" star, meaning a type A star that is chemically peculiar. A-type stars themselves are pretty strange. Unlike stars such as our Sun, hot A-type stars usually do not have a magnetic field to slow their incredible rotation speeds imparted on them as they were formed. As a result, they usually retain their incredible spin, making it difficult to analyze their spectra. But AP stars are different. They do have a strong magnetic field, and rotate slowly. This allows us to get a really good look at the chemical makeup of their atmospheres, Jason Wright, professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Eberly College of Science at Pennsylvania State University, explains in a blog post on the topic. When we do analyze the light from these stars, it shows that they contain abundances of silicon, chromium, strontium, europium, and other rare Earth elements in their upper atmosphere.But Przybylski's star is stranger still, and appears to contain elements it really shouldn't, at least by any mechanism we have come across in nature. "It is believed to be an extreme member of a class of stars whose surface chemical peculiarities are generally thought to be a consequence of chemical separation," one team wrote of the star in 2004. "This theory alone, however, would not account for the presence of elements with no long-lived stable isotopes. For instance, it appears to contain promethium. This is really weird. No known isotope of promethium has a half-life longer than 17.7 years, meaning that it must be produced by some continuous process if we are to see it in Przybylski's star. Further analysis showed it contains actinium, protactinium, neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, and einsteinium. These are difficult to confirm because they do not occur in nature (except, it seems, in Przybylski's star). "Unfortunately, these spectra have been poorly studied," one team, which found short-lived elements in the spectra, explained. "For example, the wavelengths of only 22 lines are known for the singly ionized californium, which has been relatively well studied. Virtually all tables of spectral lines contain no data on technetium, promethium, and elements with atomic numbers Z > 83, save for thorium and uranium."Einsteinium was first discovered in 1952 during the first detonation of a hydrogen bomb and is considered a synthetic element, or one that could only be created by humans, and we have not produced a lot of it – and yet it has been tentatively detected in the star. Californium is also considered a synthetic element and was only discovered as a product after bombarding curium-242 with helium ions. Meanwhile, iron – usually one of the clearest lines seen in the light from stars – is barely seen at all.So what the hell are these elements, many with short half-lives on astronomical timescales, doing in abundance in the atmosphere of an already unusual type of star? Despite over 60 years of knowing about the star, and some big leaps in astronomy techniques, we still do not know what's going on. There are a few ideas, some sensible but weirdly unlikely, and a few very exciting explanations indeed. One possible explanation proposed was that the star has a neutron star companion, which bombards the upper atmosphere of Przybylski's star, causing reactions that produce the elements we observe. But the star does not look like it has such a companion, which leaves us with a few other (far more exotic) explanations.             One, which is outlined in a 2017 arXiv paper, is that the unusual elements are the result of the decay of undiscovered heavy elements in the hypothetical "island of stability" predicted by physicists, where elements could be stable once more."Spectral lines belonging to the short-lifetime heavy radioactive elements up to Es (Z=99) have been found in the spectra of the Przybylski’s star," the paper explains. "We suggest that these unstable elements may be decay products of a 'magic' metastable nucleus belonging to the the island of stability where the nuclei have a magic number of neutrons N = 184."The team suggests that this could have been produced in a nearby supernova. If correct, and more study would of course be needed, that would be pretty awesome. But there is another suggestion – whispered about, according to Wright – that it could be the sign of intelligent life. There have been suggestions in the past that alien species could dispose of waste on the surface of their stars, which could be an explanation, though that seems unlikely. But it has also been suggested by Carl Sagan and Iosif Shklovskii that advanced alien civilizations could purposely put unusual and clearly manufactured elements into their stars in order to attract attention. Sending signals out into the cosmos is energy-expensive, and given the distances involved, you do not know whether your signal will reach a civilization you believe could be there based on your observations, or a civilization that died in the interim. It might make more sense instead, for a civilization bored of being alone, to simply place unambiguous signs that any other civilizations who have done their science will know is a sign of tampering. Why spend energy contacting every possible star, when you can simply place a huge sign saying "We are here" or, at least, one saying "Take a closer look at this star, something interesting is going on"?That's pretty speculative of course, and there will very likely be a natural explanation, such as the island of stability. More study, as always, is needed, but there's no doubt we will learn something pretty cool.[H/T: Cool Worlds]