'Full steam ahead'

'radical and wasteful'

Ongoing

This is a large part of the reason why we love hockey

A video shared on Facebook claims to show an artificial waterfall in China. Verdict: Misleading The video is from Dubai, not China. Fact Check: Social media users are claiming to show an artificial waterfall in China. One user wrote, “Step into the breathtaking world of China’s artificial waterfall experience—a marvel of engineering and creativity. This stunning attraction combines […]

'Living martyrdom'

News The Handmaid’s Tale The Handmaid’s Tale’s Final Season Begins in April This show has been running since 2017. By Molly Templeton | Published on February 12, 2025 Screenshot: Hulu Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Hulu “The revolution is here” proclaims the teaser for the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale. Said revolution is not very visible in this first teaser, though. In voiceover, as the red dresses of the handmaids are created, Elizabeth Moss’s June Osborne says, “They believed that these garments that they put on our bodies told the world who we are. To mark us, they put us in red—the color of blood. They forgot that it’s also the color of rage. The dress became our uniform, and we became an army.” The rest of the dialogue is a brief string of clichés: “Something big is about to happen.” “If you want to fight, let’s fight together.” And, for good measure, a classic: “Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil.” This season’s synopsis, via Variety, says, “June’s unyielding spirit and determination pull her back into the fight to take down Gilead. Luke and Moira join the resistance. Serena tries to reform Gilead while Commander Lawrence and Aunt Lydia reckon with what they have wrought, and Nick faces challenging tests of character. This final chapter of June’s journey highlights the importance of hope, courage, solidarity, and resilience in the pursuit of justice and freedom.” Hulu and showrunner Bruce Miller have wrung five seasons out of Margaret Atwood’s novel; while this sixth season is the end for this series, Hulu is also working on an adaptation of the sequel The Testaments. That series was announced all the way back in 2019, but as recently as last year, Disney Television Group president Craig Erwich said it was still in development. Along with Moss, The Handmaid’s Tale stars Yvonne Strahovski, Bradley Whitford, Max Minghella, Ann Dowd, O.T. Fagbenle, Samira Wiley, Madeline Brewer, and Josh Charles. The final season begins with three episodes on April 8th; episodes will then drop weekly until the show ends on May 27th.[end-mark] The post <i>The Handmaid’s Tale’s</i> Final Season Begins in April appeared first on Reactor.

Books book review Making Big Life Choices in The Rainfall Market by You Yeong-Gwang A review of You Yeong-Gwang’s new fantasy novel By Jenny Hamilton | Published on February 12, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Serin feels stuck. She lives in an apartment block that’s slated for destruction; her sister blew town without a backward glance; and she’s never better than okay at school, or friendship, or her hobbies. Out of desperation, she submits a letter of application to the Rainfall Market. The stories say that if your letter stands out, you’ll receive a ticket to the Rainfall Market. Once there, you can choose a new life—whatever you desire. Serin only half-believes in the Market, until she receives a golden ticket, ordering her to come to a certain address on the first day of the rainy season. She can stay in the market until the end of the rainy season, by which time she must have chosen her new life, contained within a magical Dokkaebi Orb. But wait, there’s more! Serin is the one lucky duck from among the ticket-holders who has a special Golden Ticket (shades of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a very much darker piece of fiction), meaning that she can try out however many lives she wants before choosing the one she wants to keep. Yet as she moves through the Rainfall Market, peering into futures that could be hers, she always finds something lacking from them that she can’t live without. Worse, she begins to realize there’s something badly wrong in the market; and if she doesn’t figure out what it is, her life could be in danger. You Yeong-Gwang’s The Rainfall Market (translated by Slin Jung) reminds me of a video game—one of the dreamy, indie ones from Annapurna that would win acclaim for its art design and people would admit on social media that it made them cry. It has a video game’s quest-like structure: Serin conceives of a life she’d like to live, asks her magical cat Issha to bring her to the relevant Dokkaebi Orb. Then she has to accomplish some small, weird task for the orb’s keeper before she’s allowed to look into the future it contains. If it were a game, you’d be solving small, whimsical puzzles in between cut scenes that are kind of a downer, taking breaks in between to pet the kitty. (The kitty is very good. We love the kitty.) You Yeong-Gwang is clearly having a ball with Serin’s mini-quests. At every stop, the resident dokkaebi identifies the human experience they seek and consume: One takes away serenity, another takes words from human hearts, and a third takes from humans desire to keep themselves clean. Some of these traits matter to Serin’s brief encounter with that dokkaebi. More often, they don’t. Coherent world-building isn’t really the point, because Serin is building agency, not expertise. The unpredictability of the tasks she’s given requires her to think on her feet, consider new ideas, and find greater trust in herself (and Issha) that she’ll be able to handle the next weird, unexpected thing that’s thrown at her. While video games let the player bring their own tastes and experiences to the character we play as, a novel requires more investment in the protagonist. And this is where The Rainfall Market really lost me. As the only Golden Ticket holder, Serin doesn’t have any travel mates who could chat to her and help bring out aspects of her character through dialogue. (Her only companion is Issha, who is a very good kitty but who cannot talk.) As a window shopper for possible lives, she isn’t trying to form lasting connections with the denizens of the market, nor with the occupants of the lives she visits. By design, Serin is a bit of a blank, existing in the world of the Rainfall Market mainly to react to what’s happening around her. Buy the Book The Rainfall Market You Yeong-Gwang Buy Book The Rainfall Market You Yeong-Gwang Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget As such, this book has the quality of parable. Don’t we all feel stuck, and isolated, and beaten down by our circumstances? Don’t we all wish for something different, even before we manage to articulate what that might be? The lesson Serin learns in the end isn’t quite that of It’s a Wonderful Life, although she does come to realize that the life she wants to leave behind was more valuable than she had initially supposed. I thought of it more like the lesson of “The Fisherman’s Wife,” a fairy tale that I love despite how much it comes off like “women, amirite?” Serin’s life is not necessarily the best of those she samples. But she does begin to see the burdens that other people’s lives—glamorous and desirable as they may seem from the outside—have placed upon them. We are all looking for an escape, but escape isn’t always quite the, well, Golden Ticket that it may seem. The Rainfall Market rests comfortably in the genre of healing fiction, which has begun to reach English readers after many years of success in Korea and Japan. Serin’s journey is episodic and lightly fantastical, with a magical cat for company (don’t worry; the cat will be okay), and she’s able to win out in the end with the help of the friends she makes along the way. That she and her friends are thinly drawn is perhaps beside the point. Serin’s escape from her life feels as universally relatable as does her ultimate desire to slip back into it, albeit with a renewed belief in herself and a sense of hope for her future. It’s an open question whether healing fiction would work better for me, a dog person who recently lost her dog, if the magical cats were magical dogs. As it is, I tend to finish these books feeling a little unsatisfied. Certainly that was true of The Rainfall Market. I expected it to be gentle and silly and life-affirming—and it’s all of those things. But it turns out that I want even my comfort reads to have a little sharpness to them, and The Rainfall Market keeps its claws resolutely sheathed. A fun, harmless debut for fans of The Midnight Library and The Cat Who Saved Books.[end-mark] The Rainfall Market is published by Ace. The post Making Big Life Choices in <i>The Rainfall Market</i> by You Yeong-Gwang appeared first on Reactor.

Lawfare hasn’t stopped since Donald Trump became president again, but has been repackaged into civil litigation to stop his second term agenda—and most of the civil lawfare can be traced to groups affiliated with a coalition known as Civil Service Strong.   Members of the coalition scored federal court wins in recent days to temporarily block Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, to delay a federal employee buyout, and to halt the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The member groups have also been involved in numerous other lawsuits against the Trump administration, including challenging the Schedule F executive order on civil service protections; a suit to block the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative from accessing information; and a lawsuit to prevent disclosure of FBI information.  “The Left is very good at collaborating. Since the election happened, these organizations have been planning which policies to sue over,” Parker Thayer, investigative researcher with the Capital Research Center, a think tank that monitors nonprofits, told The Daily Signal. “They have been in the lab for a while trying to prepare.” Civil Service Strong is a project of Democracy Forward, where leading Democrat lawyer Marc Elias is chairman of the board. Elias has been known primarily for election-related litigation and for his role in initiating the discredited Russia collusion investigation during President Donald Trump’s first term.  Democracy Forward, in a post on X, boasted of filing nine lawsuits against the Trump administration and winning four court orders.  The groups joining Democracy Forward in Civil Service Strong are two federal unions (the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Federation of Federal Employees); two nonfederal unions (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the American Federation of Teachers); three political lawfare groups (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sued to block Trump from being on the 2024 ballot; the State Democracy Defenders Fund; and Protect Democracy), and two whistleblower-protection groups (the Government Accountability Project and the Project on Government Oversight).  The managing director of Civil Service Strong is Rob Shriver, appointed as acting director of the Office of Personnel Management under then-President Joe Biden.  The Daily Signal reached out to each of these organization for this article, but none responded as of publication time. The Civil Service Strong website identifies “some of the organizations,” and lists 10 groups, which suggests other, unidentified organizations or individuals are part of the coalition. “I don’t expect the Left’s litigation machine to slow down at all,” the Capital Research Center’s Thayer said. “In Trump’s second term, they are taking him more serious. It’s less about show impeachments and media hoaxes, and more about stopping him in court.”  On Wednesday, in federal district court in Maryland, Democracy Forward is arguing on behalf of clients suing to prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from entering houses of worship in pursuit of illegal aliens being harbored there. On Monday, a federal district court in Massachusetts sided with the AFGE and AFSCME, both listed as coalition members, as well as the National Association of Government Employees to pause the Trump administration’s buyout offer to federal employees. Democracy Forward represented the unions in the lawsuit.  Under the proposed buyout, the Office of Personnel Management offered to pay federal employees through Sept. 30 and provide them with full benefits if they agreed to take the buyout by Feb. 6. A judge already delayed the deadline until Monday, making that the second interim ruling until making a determination on the legality of the buyout offer. Separately, Democracy Forward and the Public Citizen Litigation Group represented the AFGE and the American Foreign Service Association in a ruling Friday to temporarily halt closing USAID.  Federal unions are funded through employees’ mandatory dues.  Lawfare nonprofits groups are funded through private donors. Among the biggest contributors to Democracy Forward was the Sandler Foundation, which provided $2.5 million, according to the most recently available financial information. The Sandler Foundation has been a longtime donor to organization such as the liberal Center for American Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union, and ProPublica. The Susan Thomas Buffett Foundation gave $2.14 million to Democracy Forward in 2023. It was established in 1964 by investor Warren Buffett and named after his late first wife.  On Monday, Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit in a federal district court in Virginia to stop DOGE from accessing government data. A similar lawsuit was filed by another group in the Civil Service Strong coalition, Protect Democracy, which made a complaint the same day in federal court in Maryland against DOGE.  In a separate lawsuit, Protect Democracy sued on behalf of the Government Accountability Project—also part of the Civil Service Strong coalition—as well as the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association to stop Trump’s executive order to recategorize thousands of career employees to be political employees, which would mean no more civil service protections.  Protect Democracy was founded in 2017 by Ian Bassin, a former associate White House counsel in the Obama administration.  In 2023, one of the biggest donors was the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a left-of-center grant maker, which contributed $3 million to Protect Democracy. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation has donated to other liberal organizations, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Brennan Center for Justice.  Another coalition member, the State Democracy Defenders Fund, scored its own win Monday, teaming with other organizations in a lawsuit in a New Hampshire federal court to block Trump’s executive order revoking birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born in the U.S.  On Friday, a federal judge in the District of Columbia sided with States Defending Democracy Fund to block the Justice Department from releasing the names of FBI personnel involved in the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol protest.  On Feb. 3, the State Democracy Defenders Fund joined the Public Citizen Litigation Group to represent the AFGE, the Alliance for Retired Americans, and the Service Employees International Union in a lawsuit to prevent the Department of the Treasury from sharing confidential data with DOGE staff investigating government waste. The State Democracy Defenders Fund was founded in 2024 by former Obama White House ethics czar Norm Eisen, who Obama later named as U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. An author of at least three anti-Trump books, Eisen was also a former special counsel in 2019 to the House Judiciary Committee for the first impeachment of Trump.  In a recent MSNBC interview, Eisen called Trump an “autocrat” and asserted “the lawsuits we’re bringing, I’m planning 100 this year.” Other countries have peacefully evicted autocrats & the US can too!I explained how we are working together w/ allies to do that in the court of law & of public opinion @TheWeekendMSNBC ? pic.twitter.com/HwcbA8bgNH— Norm Eisen (#TryingTrump out now!) (@NormEisen) February 9, 2025 Eisen was also a founding member in the early 2000s of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which is also a member of the coalition.  For its part, CREW—part of multiple lawsuits against the first Trump administration—is representing the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, in a lawsuit challenging the Trump executive order on “Schedule F,” which recategorized thousands of federal employees from civil service to political appointees. That’s applicable to employees who have a role in implementing policy. The post LAWFARE: Web of Leftist Groups Working in Tandem to Tie Up Trump Agenda in Court appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used the AI Action Summit in France to warn against what he says are dangerous uses of this technology that people are worried about – including, but not limited to, “cunning disinformation.” With a directly opposing view of the US Vice President JD Vance, other instances of “misuses” of AI Trudeau spoke about are the possibility it may result in driving citizens “further towards cynicism, populism, hopelessness, and hatred.” And his remedy is to have governments and the private sector team up and take action along with civil society, to deal with these presumed harms. Not least because of his track record, one way of interpreting what Trudeau is describing, and the direction of the push he is making towards tighter control of the tech (with governments and private companies enmeshed) – is to make sure AI’s use is curtailed when it comes to expressing dissenting viewpoints that are slated for censorship. “Governments and businesses are facing new challenges, new disruptions, but also new opportunities,” he said, adding, “That’s why the path forward must be working together with like-minded partners as we maintain the competition that is healthy for innovation, but keeping in mind the requirements to keep people safe.” Trudeau repeatedly played the wealth inequality card to drum up support for this approach to future AI development, asserting that unless done “the right” way, it would create a greater divide “between the haves, the have-nots, and the have-yachts.” More attempts at garnering backing for his “vision” by invoking social issues are made when Trudeau speaks about the middle class needing to be that segment of society that benefits the most from AI, instead of “only the rich”; he also mentioned that positive effects from incorporating the technology into everyday life and the economy should be “equally shared” and enjoyed by workers and small and medium-sized firms. The Canadian PM is resolute that in order to avoid what he sees as the worst outcome and at the same time allow what he considers to be the good sides of AI to flourish, the situation must be under (government) control – AI can impact the world positively, he said, “but only if we choose to shape it that way.” But he at the same time made the obligatory nod to the need to avoid “too heavy-handed” legislation around AI – so as not to stifle innovation. Trudeau used this point to reiterate his ideas about “partnerships” between governments, companies, researchers, etc. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Trudeau at AI Action Summit: AI Must Be Controlled to Prevent “Disinformation” and “Cynicism” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.