'Egregious Federal Overreach': Red State Files Major Lawsuit That Could Diminish Federal Control Of Public Lands

'Get-out-of-jail-free card'

'I don't think you are supposed to eat this'

I'm loving the creativity, but it's just a bit ... umm ... weird

A pair of Virginians who found themselves habitually dismayed by the amount of floral waste they saw over a series of weddings and funerals decided to launch a small nonprofit to reuse them. Friendly City Florals delivers flowers to hospice care homes, hospitals, and other events like funerals and weddings to make sure that the […] The post Virginia Pals Save Flowers From the Landfill, Redeploying Them to Bring Joy appeared first on Good News Network.

News Y2K Nineties Nostalgia Goes Hard in the Trailer for Kyle Mooney’s Y2K It’s the end of the world as we definitely didn’t know it. By Molly Templeton | Published on August 20, 2024 Screenshot: A24 Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: A24 Once upon a time, in the 1900s, a mysterious threat descended upon the world: The Y2K bug. Maybe—maybe!—when the clocks all struck midnight on the last day of the century, computers would freak out. Everything would go haywire! The end of the world! Or at least a moderate amount of chaos. It didn’t happen. That New Year’s Eve was as anticlimactic as any. But maybe if it did, it might have looked like Kyle Mooney’s Y2K, a horror comedy that—in the trailer, at least—is light on both the laughs and the horrors, leaning instead on references, Can’t Hardly Wait vibes, and Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping.” The summary is brief: “On the last night of 1999, two high school juniors crash a New Years Eve party, only to find themselves fighting for their lives in this dial-up disaster comedy.” One of those juniors is a boy (Knives Out’s Jaeden Martell) who has a crush on a girl (West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler). The rest of the cast includes Julian Dennison, Lachlan Watson, Alicia Silverstone, director (and SNL alum) Kyle Mooney, and… Fred Durst. Given the references packed into this trailer—Tamagotchi! Tae bo! AOL! Varsity Blues!—one can only assume there are an assortment of era-appropriate cameos hidden away until the movie’s release. For now, we get teens, screaming, and some rather clever little robotic creations that do murders as best they can when they are only a foot or so off the ground. Bigger robots appear as the trailer goes on, along with a lot of chaotic wiring. (If there isn’t a Hackers joke at some point, what are we even doing here?) Y2K is written by Mooney and Evan Winter (the music video director, not the fantasy novelist). It’s in theaters December 6th.[end-mark] The post Nineties Nostalgia Goes Hard in the Trailer for Kyle Mooney’s <i>Y2K</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News Ruiner Ruiner Video Game Adaptation Is in the Works With Maze Runner Director It is unclear at the moment whether this will interfere with Ball’s work on the Legend of Zelda adaptation. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on August 20, 2024 Credit: Reikon Games Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Reikon Games Universal Pictures has won the rights to adapt the Ruiner video game for the big screen, and is wasting no time getting the project going. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio has already tapped Wes Ball, the director behind the Maze Runner films as well as the recent movie, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, for the project. Michael Arlen Ross (Oracle) is also on board to write the adaptation of the popular game from Reikon. Ruiner, which came out in 2017, is a cyberpunk shoot ‘em up game that takes place in 2091 in a dystopian city called Rengkok. The main player is a masked mercenary who, according to the game’s official synopsis,  is a “wired psychopath who fights against a corrupt system to uncover the truth and retrieve his kidnapped brother. Under the guidance of a mysterious hacker, he battles through a world of brutal violence and cutting-edge technology, inching closer to the dark secrets hidden within the city’s neon-lit streets.” The project is still in its early days, and there are no details as to whether Ruiner will supersede Ball’s work on another video game adaptation: The Legend of Zelda. That project is produced by Nintendo and Sony Pictures Entertainment, and it’s not clear if this deal with Ball takes precedence over the Ruiner project at Universal. Whatever comes first, it looks like Ball will be video game adaptation business for the foreseeable future. [end-mark] The post <i>Ruiner</i> Video Game Adaptation Is in the Works With <i>Maze Runner</i> Director appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts space horror Read an Excerpt From Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s This World Is Not Yours There’s more than one way to be eaten alive. By Kemi Ashing-Giwa | Published on August 20, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from This World Is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa, an action-packed space horror novella about a toxic polycule consumed by jealousy and their attempts to survive on a hostile planet—publishing with Nightfire on September 10th. After fleeing her controlling and murderous family with her fiancée Vinh, Amara embarks on a colonization project, New Belaforme, along with her childhood friend, Jesse.The planet, beautiful and lethal, produces the Gray, a “self-cleaning” mechanism that New Belaforme’s scientists are certain only attacks invasive organisms, consuming them. Humans have been careful to do nothing to call attention to themselves until a rival colony wakes the Gray.As Amara, Vinh, and Jesse work to carve out a new life together, each is haunted by past betrayals that surface, expounded by the need to survive the rival colony and the planet itself. 036 In the far reaches of space, a verdant planet becomes a world. The world observes the life It has made and, perceiving the life to be very good, is pleased. But a critical piece is missing. Life is so very precious, so very fragile. How best to protect it? Walls can be scaled and poisons can be purged. All it takes are the right tools. No, the world needs something else. Something… more. The world takes care of Its own. Before She has two hours. That’s how long the grunts gave her. After that, anything’s fair game. They didn’t say those words explicitly, but she’s been in the security industry for a while now. She completed the same “information extraction” tutorials as the local station officers. She knows what the thin smiles and blank eyes meant. She’s not proud of every scattered fragment of her past, of the things she had to do on the only jobs she could score. But these are the hardest orders she’s ever had to follow. It takes about two minutes to pack. She’s always refused to call the duffel she stowed under the marble tiling in the foyer a go bag, but that’s what it is. She told herself, over and over, that the extra changes of clothes, the ration packs, the flashlights and guns and solar chargers were for them. But the shirts are two sizes too large for her girlfriend, and there’s only enough food to last one woman for long. Amara doesn’t know the first thing about gun safety, anyway. Buy the Book This World Is Not Yours Kemi Ashing-Giwa Buy Book This World Is Not Yours Kemi Ashing-Giwa Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Leaving takes an eternity. She takes one last look at her world before she goes. She has to. There’s the satin-bound stack on the living room bookshelf, stuffed with every mortifying love note she wrote Amara when they first started dating. There’s the tiny flower Amara plucked from the palace gardens, pressed under a stack of books and presented to Vinh (so fucking proudly) two weeks ago, sitting on the coffee table. Hidden behind the cheap print Vinh scrounged up savings for is the newly installed safe Amara thinks Vinh doesn’t know about, with a little velvet box Amara also thinks is a secret. They’ve laughed and wept in every room, bathed in the light of countless stars. They built a life here, together. And now she has to leave it. Leave her. Forever. She’s almost died twice. Those long, agonizing moments pale in comparison to this. She sees two final texts from her girlfriend before she wipes her talkglass, snaps it in half, and lobs it down the trash chute: What do you want for dinner? I’m thinking we can order in? Closely followed by: Let me know. Love you so much!! :) Amara will be fine. She’ll even be better off, and someday she’ll find someone who actually deserves her, as soon as she realizes she always could’ve done better. Hot tears blur the room. But it’s okay. Vinh steps out of their apartment for the last time, the engraved steel doors rolling shut behind her like a tombstone. 035 They’ve been planning this for months, almost since they got back together a year ago. Amara leans out the window of the helicraft, pointing toward the land below with the hand that isn’t currently holding Vinh’s. The ground is so bright with foliage it burns the eye just to look at it. Amara has taken so much for granted over the course of her thirty (conscious) years, but one thing she’ll always deeply appreciate is the smell of life—the rich scent of fertile soil and the fresh perfume of flowers and the odor of animal sweat. The air on her family’s residences, scattered across hundreds of orbiters and ships and stations, and even on the capital planet, is painfully pristine. It smells like nothing. This planet, their new world, is so different from everything she’s ever known. Vinh’s eyes go wide. Amara watches as her girlfriend’s gaze slides past the verdant forest flying by underneath them, latching onto the undulating, semitransparent thing moving toward the trees. It oozes over the red grass in an unstoppable, shapeless, swallowing tide. “What the hell is that?” Vinh whispers into the microphone tip of her headset. Her fingers grip Amara’s tighter. Amara laughs, the wind whipping her dense brown curls about her face. She knows it’s the same giggle that made Vinh turn around in that club forever ago to get her first good look. “Come on, I’ve shown you every picture I took for the council reports,” says Amara. “Actually, I was worried you’d be bored if I took you here.” “Bored?” Vinh lets out a broken chuckle, pulling on a lock of straight black hair—an old nervous tic Amara hasn’t seen in years. “Bored? Sweetheart, I’m terrified. The Gray— everything about it seems wrong.” Vinh is never scared. She’s almost literally fearless. Bravery is action in the face of terror, certainly, but Vinh doesn’t even need the courage her fellow security officers do. She just acts without fear, without a shred of hesitation or self-doubt. It’s what makes her the settlement’s best protector and the enemy’s worst foe. The rival outpost of Jacksonhaven hasn’t attempted a raid since she took over the security force. Amara theorizes Vinh’s problem here is that you and your forces can fight off a couple hundred grunts trying to steal food or fabricators, but you could fire a thousand rounds from a plasma cannon into the squirming mass below, and all you’d have is a busted cannon. If the Gray comes for them, there’d be nothing Vinh could do. All her training, all her skills— everything she is and everything she’s worked for would be for nothing. Amara lays her other hand over Vinh’s in gentle reassurance. “I know it looks monstrous from a certain angle, but see?” She gestures toward the land below with a wide sweep of her palm. “The trees are untouched. If not for this loud hunk of metal, you’d still be able to hear all the animals.” She smiles, almost fondly, as she surveys the sap-slow flood. “This is just the planet’s self-cleaning mechanism. We could swim around in it and come out better than we went in. You can even breathe the Gray. In fact, the only time I’ve ever seen it attack two species at once was when they were in the same taxonomic tribe.” Vinh’s mouth contorts into a grimace. “So what’s it cleaning this time?” “An invasive fungus from one of the other continents. We think Jacksonhaven brought it over from one of their surveys. Idiots.” Amara smirks. “One of these days the planet’s just going to get rid of them, I swear.” “Hm.” Vinh’s eyes flick up to the nearest hollow. It’s a low, conical rupture, much like a squat volcano. But the planet’s guts aren’t solely magma. Instead of lava and toxic gas, hollows spew out the Gray. If Jesse were here, which he isn’t, he’d probably point out that there are, in fact, a number of genuine volcanoes in the sector. Their number and semi-frequent activity are part of the reason why the land is so fertile. Over the last several thousand years, their eruptions have showered the region with volcanic “ash”—nutrient-rich rock, mineral, and glass particles. “But you said it never kills animals?” “If that were really impossible, I probably would’ve been out of a job this past year,” Amara says. “As far as I know, it hasn’t. There’s a chance the Gray could be a threat someday, but as long as we’re careful, the probability of that happening is basically zero.” The Gray works across limited areas between hollows, hunting down the intended target with a ruthlessness Amara has to respect. As New Belaforme’s head biologist, her job is to ensure the settlement is never seen as a contaminant, never perceived as the invasive species they technically are. She’s taken thousands of samples, spent every day since being pulled from her sleep-cradle on Landing Day studying the digestive proteins that make up the Gray. They’re fascinating molecular machines, flawlessly designed to reduce their targets to nothingness. Every week, she submits a report to the Council on everything they need to do to ensure the people of New Belaforme live in nothing less than perfect harmony with the planet. It’s hard work, but critical. She’s proud of herself, of every step she’s taken without her family’s power and privilege paving the way for her. “It’s sort of beautiful,” says Vinh, pulling Amara from her thoughts. Her voice sounds very far away. Amara hums her agreement. She’s always thought so. The Gray isn’t really gray; it’s opalescent. In direct sunlight, its surface glitters with every color on the visible electromagnetic spectrum. A herd of ungulate-class, ectothermic creatures run through the Gray, kicking up scintillating globules with their six hooved limbs. The herd leader shakes her arrowlike head, fluffing her magnificent striped mane. She throws open her tripartite, shell-piercing beak to let out a trill, the sound cutting through the helicraft’s hum. Both women flinch and laugh. “I’ve only heard that call in field recordings,” Amara says, awed. One specimen tucks in his legs, sits beside one of the arms of Gray creeping toward the forest, and starts sipping the fluid as the sun warms his hide. “I know this is our life now. I know that being here, on this world and with you, is the new normal, but… I’m going to remember this trip for the rest of my days,” says Amara, warmth swelling in her chest. She loves Vinh so much it hurts. Vinh says nothing. For a moment Amara thinks she hasn’t heard. Or maybe she’s just so absorbed by the Gray. Amara understands the feeling— Vinh sits back. Her cheeks, a few shades lighter than true copper, glow with a faint blush. Her eyes meet Amara’s. “Do you want to get married?” Before In a richly appointed private chamber, Amara weeps into Vinh’s shoulder. “I’m not even a person to them,” Amara sobs. Her shoulders shake under three layers of gold-threaded silk. “Just another pawn, just another vessel for their dynasty.” “I know,” murmurs Vinh, carding her fingers through Amara’s hair. Her braids flow freely across her back, a rare sight; normally they’re pulled up into an intricate coiffure. “I know. I’m so sorry.” They’ve been hiding away on a remote family estate, a diamond-shaped orbital station circling a turquoise gas giant at the edge of the system. Five minutes ago, Amara’s family formally ordered her to return to the capital planet, where she will wed the politically advantageous match selected for her. Vinh is expected to disappear somewhere along the short journey. If she does not, there will be dire consequences for them both. “I wish they could love me,” Amara whispers. “Or… I wish I could just escape them.” They both know she wouldn’t, even if she could. Amara’s family is a supermassive black hole, each member orbiting around it like a blazing star. Together they form a galaxy, but even the greatest of them are helpless in the face of the singularity’s thrall. Vinh can’t change that. But she can comfort Amara. “It’s okay. You have me.” Amara lifts her forehead from Vinh’s collarbone. Her eyes meet Vinh’s. “Promise?” she asks. They both know it’s not a request. Vinh’s onyx-black eyes reflect the starscape outside with cutting clarity. A thousand suns glimmer in unshed tears. She brings a hand up to Amara’s jaw, her thumb dragging gently across the other woman’s cheek. “I promise,” she says. They both know it’s not really an answer. Excerpted from This World Is Not Yours, copyright © 2024 by Kemi Ashing-Giwa. The post Read an Excerpt From Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s <i>This World Is Not Yours</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Last month, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, warned voters not to be complacent and told the Lone Star State’s delegation to the Republican National Convention that “Texas is a battlefield.” In other words, Republican House and Senate victories aren’t guaranteed in a state that has voted for the GOP presidential candidate for 40 years.  Cruz, a constitutional lawyer, seeks a third six-year Senate term Nov. 5 and is challenged by Rep. Colin Allred, a Democrat and former pro football player first elected to the U.S. House in 2018. Cruz and Allred differ on issues central to the 2024 presidential election, with border and immigration policy no exception. The two hold fundamentally different positions on the border wall, the “Remain in Mexico” and “catch and release” policies, and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Border Wall Allred, a former NFL linebacker-turned-politician, opposed a border wall before he entered the House of Representatives in 2019.  “Slipping funding for a wall we don’t want or need into a bill to fund our military is disgraceful,” Allred wrote on social media in July 2017, President Donald Trump’s first year in office.  Slipping funding for a wall we don't want or need into a bill to fund our military is disgraceful. #NoWall pic.twitter.com/TdxupTuKVC— Colin Allred (@ColinAllredTX) July 27, 2017 During his campaign for the House in 2018, Allred referred to Trump’s border wall as a “racist wall.”  In 2019, he voted for a version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act that his congressional website said included provisions that prohibit “any funding in the bill to be used for the construction of a wall, barrier or fence along the southern land border.”  At the beginning of his second two-year term, Allred wrote on the social media platform X: “Building a wall is, and has always been a failed policy that won’t solve the issues we face at the border.”  Building a wall is, and has always been a failed policy that won't solve the issues we face at the border.Now more than ever Texans need real leadership that is focused on keeping the lights on and hospitals open — not a divisive political stunt. https://t.co/XFSG1pGQoM— Colin Allred (@ColinAllredTX) June 30, 2021 Instead, the House Democrat believes in ensuring that “we secure our border and our ports of entry using 21st-century technology to tackle the complicated problems we face,” according to his congressional website.  In contrast to Allred’s opposition to completing a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, Cruz repeatedly has voiced support for the wall and backed legislation to fund its construction. President Joe Biden halted Trump’s building of the wall after taking office in January 2021. In May 2023, Cruz and several Senate colleagues introduced the FINISH IT Act, which his office says would “require the federal government to use previously purchased and unused border wall panels to extend the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border or to transfer them to state governments to be used for wall construction.”  “We need to build a wall to secure our southern border,” Cruz said in a press release announcing the bill.  Cruz voted in February against a Senate spending bill because, he said, it lacked “real, substantial additions to bolster border security.” ‘Remain in Mexico,’ ‘Catch and Release’ On May 11, 2023, the House passed a border security bill, HR 2, called the Secure the Border Act of 2023. It passed largely along party lines, with only two Republicans voting “no” along with all Democrats, including Allred.  If signed into law, House Republicans’ measure also would end “catch and release,” the policy of arresting illegal aliens at the southern border and then releasing them into the interior of the U.S. while their asylum claims are processed. It would reinstate the Trump-Pence administration policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” which requires asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until their immigration court date.  Cruz is a vocal supporter of bringing back “Remain in Mexico” and ending “catch and release.” In September 2023, Cruz introduced the Senate version of the Secure the Border Act, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has yet to take up the bill. DACA Recipients  Allred’s website says the House Democrat “believes strongly that people who were brought here as children and are covered by DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] should be protected.”  Illegal aliens brought to the U.S. as children can qualify for DACA, created by President Barack Obama, and be protected from deportation.  Allred and other Democrats often refer to these beneficiaries as “Dreamers.” In July, Allred introduced the AmeriCorps Access for Dreamers Act, a bill that would make DACA eligible to receive the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award. This monetary prize may be used to repay student loans or pay for higher education.  “Our Dreamers know no home other than America and should have every opportunity to serve our nation, and this bill ensures that they have more pathways to do just that through AmeriCorps,” Allred said in a press release announcing the bill.  In 2019, Allred was an original co-sponsor of and voted for a bill called the Dream and Promise Act, which aimed to provide DACA recipients with permanent resident status. The House passed the bill, but the Senate didn’t. Cruz, on the other hand, has voiced concerns over the legality of the DACA program.  When Trump sought to end DACA after taking office in January 2017, the move was met by lawsuits and the case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 18, 2020, the high court ruled 5-4 against Trump’s actions. That same day, speaking on the Senate floor, Cruz called the Supreme Court’s ruling “disgraceful.”  The Supreme Court holds “that the Trump administration can’t stop implementing a program that is illegal,” Cruz said of the ruling, which allowed DACA to continue.  The post Allred vs. Cruz: 2 Opposing Visions for Texas’ Border With Mexico appeared first on The Daily Signal.

More than 100 years ago, the Supreme Court recognized that the right to direct the care, education, and upbringing of one’s children is both fundamental and predates the Constitution itself. In 2000, it reiterated this premise, saying that the parental right was perhaps “the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests” ever recognized by the court. In education, though, one would be hard pressed to find school districts that recall the preeminence of this right. Roughly 11.5 million students attend nearly 20,000 schools in 1,100 school districts across the country that have instituted policies hiding a minor’s gender identity from his or her parents. Schools require parental permission for field trips, sports participation, and dispensing Tylenol. But somehow, in what has become the upside-down world of American education, they can hide critical mental health information from parents simply on a minor’s say-so. Catering to a minor’s subjective self-identification at the expense of parental guidance and involvement makes actions like Huntington Beach City Council’s “Parents’ Right to Know” ordinance even more necessary. In a piece written by the Los Angeles Times called “Doesn’t Huntington Beach have something better to do than harass transgender kids?” the editors write that “teachers have enough to do. It is not their job to interject themselves into potentially sensitive family matters.” Yet that is precisely what they have done. They have broken the bonds of trust between parent and child and relegated parents to uninformed bystanders in the development of their children’s very identities. Policies like this are—as some federal courts have noted—“as foreign to federal constitutional and statutory law as [they are] medically unwise.” Whether in Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California or elsewhere, parents of minor children have a right to—and must—be involved in matters as fundamental as how their children self-identify. This is especially the case when data indicates that up to 62% of those children expressing a divergent gender identity have co-morbid mental health diagnosis that can often be missed in the rush to “affirm.” The Supreme Court has long recognized the diminished capacity of children, having written that they “are more vulnerable…to negative influences and outside pressures,” and have “limited contro[l] over their own environment…. because a child’s character is not as well formed as an adult’s, his traits are ‘less fixed.’” Children are vulnerable. And in our “trans-obsessed” age, they need their parents more than ever. Huntington Beach should be commended for recognizing that. The post What LA Times Calls ‘Harassing’ Trans Kids is Simply a Request for Parental Involvement appeared first on The Daily Signal.