'It's a dangerous place'

'This thing was a disaster'

After nearly 15 years, the original lineup of R.E.M. reunited for a poignant performance at the Songwriters Hall of Fame Ceremony in New York this past Thursday. The band, comprising Michael Stipe on vocals, Peter Buck on guitar, Mike Mills on bass, and Bill Berry on drums, delivered a stirring acoustic rendition of their iconic 1991 hit, “Losing My Religion.” The evening was marked by a deep sense of reverence for the ceremony, as well as a visible camaraderie and enduring connection among the band members. They expressed heartfelt gratitude to their fans, family, and friends, acknowledging everyone who supported The post R.E.M. Performs In Public For First Time In 15 Years appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Forever earnest Brian Stelter tweeted out his late-night appearance on CNN with Abby Phillip. “MSNBC’s Maddow is right to be thinking aloud about the possible repercussions of a second Trump term,” he typed. “Other media types and political veterans are doing the same thing. What might “retribution” look like? What are the pressure points that Trump could target?” In a softball email interview with Maddow, CNN’s Oliver Darcy warned about the MAGA crowd: “… Some of his extremist allies even talking about jailing their fellow Americans. You’re one of his most notable critics on television. Are you worried that you could be a target?” It’s like he doesn’t know Peter Navarro is in jail, and Steve Bannon is scheduled for jail over refusing to testify to the Pelosi-Picked Panel on January 6. Maddow implied something about Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations: “For that matter, what convinces you that these massive camps he’s planning are only for migrants? I’m worried about me — but only as much as I’m worried about all of us.” Trump and his closest lieutenants have openly talked a big game about taking revenge on anti-Trump media outlets, so that concern is legitimate. It’s the crazy talk about prison camps for cable-news hosts that sounds cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. But Stelter thinks it’s right to “be thinking aloud.” That’s the pattern of the anti-Trump media. Since 2015, they have constantly “thought aloud” about the wildest conspiracy theories. Trump is a Russian agent. Trump paid Moscow hookers to urinate on a bed the Obamas used. Trump is Hitler, or Mussolini, or whatever autocrat you can find. Trump will kill millions more people than Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined. (Stelter rolled out the red carpet for that last insanity on his CNN show. Even PolitiFact couldn’t avoid flagging that.) Right now, the anti-Trump, pro-Biden media is projecting panic about a second term, and imagining nothing about what a second Biden term would look like — especially whether Biden’s mental decline will reach a crisis point. But wait — consider the first half of Stelter’s interview with Phillip. She played a series of clips of conservatives complaining about top Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo joining the Manhattan district attorney’s prosecution of Trump. How hard is it to connect dots here? Easier than the nonexistent “pee tapes” CNN promoted. Stelter said this amazing thing: “I think they’re trying to make sense of a complex world. Conspiracy theories help simplify complexity. But they do so by taking shortcuts. And in the real world, in real life, with real-world thinking, there are no shortcuts. These guys are trying to take shortcuts, trying to use code words and buzzwords and propaganda in order to satisfy an audience by taking shortcuts. And there are no shortcuts in this real, complex world.” This is coming from Stelter, who also touted on X his fanciful New Republic article imagining everyone but Fox and Newsmax is banished from the White House. That article was a nut pie of conspiracy theories. Finally, the irony of Stelter imagining IRS audits or White House media access bans under Trump ignores the fact that Stelter and his pal Darcy have openly campaigned for Fox News and other conservative outlets to be deplatformed from television. It’s not about “freedom of speech, but freedom of reach.” It’s not frightening that Stelter has written two books attacking Fox News as a poisonous presence on TV. Because the conservative media is never “news.” CNN and MSNBC are “news.” Their crazy conspiracy theories are treated as facts, and conservative facts like Colangelo’s connections become crazy conspiracy theories. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Maddow and Stelter Concoct Crazy Theories on Trump’s Revenge appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The reaction to the rescue of four Israeli hostages from Gaza is a microcosm of the past 70 years of this conflict. Every time Palestinians pay the price for acting out in some horrific, irrational, self-destructive, violent way, their defenders want to rewind history to a more convenient moment — this time to Oct. 6, 2023. Sorry, that’s not how life works. Hamas, the chosen political entity of Gaza — the overwhelming choice of Palestinian civilians, in fact — launched this round of the conflict by massacring, sexually torturing and kidnapping Israelis whose only sin was attending a music festival. Palestinians took hundreds of these hostages back to the Gaza Strip — a place Arabs have political autonomy over for nearly 20 years — and held them in the middle of densely populated areas hoping to dissuade Israel from liberating them, or, if it did, to create as many martyrs as possible. Critics of Israel now ask the usual dishonest question: Are four lives worth the alleged 200-plus Arabs who were lost rescuing them? Israel is the only nation on earth that is tasked with protecting its own people and its enemies. Every innocent lost life is, of course, a tragedy. But if you don’t want to be placed in harm’s way, don’t hold hostages in your homes and neighborhoods, and don’t cheer and support a government that puts your life in constant danger for a lost cause. This is the reality of the world. Now, if reports are correct, Hamas — and perhaps “civilians” (it’s difficult to tell because terrorists are often dressed as noncombatants) — opened fire on the rescuers. The Israelis, who do not indiscriminately target civilians, fired back, as they should. Whatever the specifics, every lost life is Hamas’ fault. But, as always, it also needs to be stressed that the casualty numbers that are endlessly repeated by the establishment media are fiction — as everyone in those newsrooms is surely aware. So, we must assume outlets like The Washington Post and CNN — which also detestably contends that the hostages had been “released” — are fellow travelers. One BBC interviewer even asked an Israel Defense Forces spokesman if Israel had warned Palestinians of their sting operation. Then again, even if there were over 200 dead, it is also surely the case that many of the dead were members of Hamas or holding hostages of their own volition or helping those holding hostages. Avoid doing so if you value your life. The “Health Ministry” makes no distinction between terrorists and civilians, and in this case there might be little difference. Among those holding the Israelis hostage in their homes in Nuseirat, for instance, were a “journalist” (who apparently worked for Al Jazeera and the U.S.-based Palestine Chronicle, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit) and a “doctor.” The entire neighborhood was ostensibly under U.N. control. We already know that U.N. workers had likely participated in the Oct. 7 kidnappings and UNRWA schools are used by Hamas bases of operation. Even now, there’s a (terrible) cease-fire deal on the table being pushed by President Joe Biden (still chumming for antisemitic votes) that Hamas continues to reject. Would we not expect the United States to act the same way as Israel if some homicidal cult had our people? In the end, of course, this could all end today if the hostages were returned and Hamas would unconditionally surrender. Israel haters, who fashion themselves peaceniks, will blame everyone — Netanyahu, Biden, colonialism, racism, etc. — but the Islamists who are the cause of this war. Then again, the entire conflict could end if the Palestinians would stop turning to nihilistic theocrats to lead them and accept Israel’s existence. David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books — the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.” His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post If You Don’t Want To Be Killed, Don’t Take Hostages appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Marilyn Mosby Beginning House Arrest

Milwaukee Has Crime - Film at Eleven

There are a lot of surprisingly long-lived species out there, from the Greenland shark that can live to around 400 years old, to a clam that could have survived much longer than its 507 years if it wasn't accidentally killed. Now, scientists have discovered the world's oldest known marine plant, and it’s a whopping 1,400 years old. Found in the Baltic Sea, the plant in question is a seagrass clone of the species Zostera marina, also known as eelgrass. The team used a ground-breaking genetic clock to discover the age of the marine plant.  The seagrass clones produce ramets, individual members of a clone that can separate and become capable of independence. "Vegetative reproduction as an alternative mode of reproduction is widespread in the animal, fungal, and plant kingdoms,” explained research leader Dr Thorsten Reusch, Professor of Marine Ecology at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, in a statement.Genetic variation within these ramets can be used to age them. During the growth of the main body of the organism, mutations can occur and these can end up becoming fixed and accumulating in the descendant ramets. The clock works by comparing the plant that is to be aged and the descendant ramets, and aging it based on their differences.The team had access to a 17-year-old seagrass clone that had been kept in a lab and was used to calibrate the genetic clock for use on the wild sample. The differences between the two revealed that the clone was 1,402 years old, making it the oldest known marine plant. Testing out the new method also identified multiple other clones that were several hundred years old.Eelgrass can cover a vast area; Z. marina is a widespread species found in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. The term eelgrass, however, encompasses many other species too, which may also reach impressive ages.“We expect that other seagrass species and their clones of the genus Posidonia, which extend over more than ten kilometers, will show even higher ages and thus be by far the oldest organisms on Earth,” concluded Reusch. "These will be the next objects of study," added fellow study author Dr Benjamin Werner.The researchers suggest that the clock might also be useful for other species such as raspberries and reeds, but also in the conservation of corals.The paper is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

There’s something rotten in the kingdom of Great Britain. One of the smelliest plants on Earth is about to bloom in London. Not in the street, but in the tropical rainforest glasshouse of Kew Gardens, which hosts the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Among the gems of this collection is an absolute stinker (said with love), so we popped down to see it for ourselves, and to ask the experts about this one-of-a-kind plant.Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum), whose Latin name translates to misshapen phallus due to how the flower looks before it blooms, has the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world, but its notoriety doesn’t come from its size alone – it comes from the smell it produces when it opens. There's a reason it's called the "corpse flower". It smells "like there is a dead rotten animal somewhere," Solène Dequiret, Princess of Wales Conservatory Supervisor at Kew Gardens, told IFLScience. But there’s a fantastic evolutionary reason for it. Titan arum comes from Sumatra, an island in Indonesia, and is not a particularly common flower. In fact, the nearest titan arum in the wild might be kilometers away.“ [Titan arum] has to be quite big and pungent in order to attract a pollinator, which would be a fly that has visited a previous flower kilometers and kilometers away, in order to have the cross pollination,” Dequiret told IFLScience. “It takes a lot of energy to share that smell across the island. And it needs a lot of energy to be that big.”   The large spike-like spadix of the plant acts "like a chimney," Dequiret tells us, "so it heats up and that helps to spread the smell even further."The life of this flower is quite ephemeral. It comes from a tuber from which a bud develops. When the bud is out of the ground, it can go in one of two directions. "They always keep us guessing," says Dequiret. It can become an enormous leaf, so big and peculiar that it is easily mistaken for a tree, an approach developed to dissuade herbivores from snacking on it – most of the time, the tuber results in a leaf. But once every seven years or so, it grows into a flower. And it grows fast. When we have to do the pollination ourselves, we do have to go and stick our head right in there when it's smelly with the pollen.Solène DequiretTitan arum grows about 10 centimeters (4 inches) per day, getting to a height of around 2 meters (6.6 feet), and that’s in a matter of weeks in some cases. Then it will open, releasing its noxious gas for all the carrion-eating insects of Sumatra to smell. Or in a botanical garden, for the workers to rush in and collect the pollen. "When we have to do the pollination ourselves, we do have to go and stick our head right in there when it's smelly with the pollen we've collected from our previous flowers," says Dequiret.Rushing is key – the flower stays fully open for a day, begins closing the next, and within a few days it collapses."It's all that effort and that momentum for just an opening, and then a collapse," Dequiret told IFLScience. While the flower is endangered in the wild, botanical gardens work hard to protect this species and make it thrive. Kew Gardens has several titan arum plants in its collection - "We need to bring them [into the glasshouse] when they're a bud because if not they can't go through our doors!" – and they tend to get at least one flowering every year. But this year was a particularly good one – just last week one of their specimens flowered, with a second due to bloom any day now.If you want to smell it for yourself you better get to Kew fast (or check if your closest botanical garden has one if you are not in London). 

This week on Break It Down, elephants have names, the ISS just scared the bejesus out of everybody, how to Benjamin Button yourself in space, grolar bears remain extremely rare, “alien signal” from Mars finally gets decoded, and why London’s Kew Gardens are about to reek of corpses. Available on all your favorite podcast apps: Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Podbean, Amazon Music, and more.Sit back, relax, and let’s Break It Down…           LinksElephant namesISS audio whoopsieBenjamin Button’ingGrolar bearsMars “alien signal”Corpse flowerCosmic ray factoryCURIOUS magazineSign up for CURIOUSA Little Gay Natural HistoryQueer animals talk