Among the possible origins for the asteroid Bennu, which recently became the first asteroid ever sampled by a NASA mission, a surprising indication is that it may have come from a water world. The development arose after researchers analyzed the mixture of rocks and dust from bodies beyond Earth, collectively called ‘regolith’, scooped up from […] The post Scientists Studying Asteroid Sample Say it Could Have Come from Ocean World appeared first on Good News Network.

Excerpts post-apocalyptic Read an Excerpt From Benjamin Liar’s The Failures A scattered group of unlikely heroes traveling across their broken mechanical planet to stave off eternal darkness. By Benjamin Liar | Published on July 3, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Failures by Benjamin Liar, a genre-breaking blend of apocalyptic sci-fi and epic fantasy—available now from DAW. Welcome to the Wanderlands.A vast machine made for reasons unknown, the Wanderlands was broken long ago. First went the sky, splintering and cracking, and then very slowly, the whole machine—the whole world—began to go dark. Meet the Failures.Following the summons of a strange dream, a scattering of adventurers, degenerates, and children find themselves drawn toward the same place: the vast underground Keep. They will discover there that they have been called for a purpose—and that purpose could be the destruction of everything they love. The end is nigh.For below the Keep, imprisoned in the greatest cage ever built by magicians and gods, lies the buried Giant. It is the most powerful of its kind, and its purpose is the annihilation of all civilization. But any kind of power, no matter how terrible, is precious in the dimming Wanderlands, and those that crave it are making their moves. All machines can be broken, and the final cracks are spreading. It will take only the careless actions of two cheerful monsters to tip the Wanderlands towards an endless dark…or help it find its way back to the light. THE KILLERS In The Beginning, An End “A misspent youth can be recovered from. A glorious one can never be.”—Corazon Li, ‘Revelis’ – 1 – Sophie Vesachai was burning butterflies again. They weren’t hard to catch; they swarmed around the balcony cafe where she stood smoking, leaning against the stone balustrade and watching the bustle of the Rue de Paladia below. The tiny mechanical creatures were attracted by the curls of smoke and scents that rose from the balcony café, the warm smells of roasted chûs and burning pepper. Sophie caught another, snapping her wrist in a practiced motion and snaring the small creature. It fluttered in her hand, its tiny gears straining. It was a minute marvel, a tiny work of art. It had beautifully patterned wings and gearwork that was so fine and precise it could hardly be seen, even held up to the eye. Sophie drew a deep drag on her slot and blew smoke into the cage of her fingers, setting the little silver-made machine into frantic motion. She wondered, idly, what purpose this little creature had been made for. How old was it? How long had this device been fluttering around the Keep? She wondered, as she smoked and waited for the evening to come, if it had once been free in some other place and had, over the course of the slow millennia, found its way down through the endless leagues of rock and abandoned stone rooms above their heads, following the scent of chûs and burning pepper to find itself here. Here, in a cage. Sophie considered this; no. Not just any cage. It found itself in the grandest cage in the whole world. The Keep. She took another deep drag on her slot, the ember at the tip flaring brightly, and held it to the struggling creature’s wings. The brightly stained paper caught fire, and she tossed the butterfly over the railing, watching it try to fly with burning wings. The flight traced a parabola of thin smoke in the still air above the Rue de Paladia, joining several others that were slowly unwinding in the quiet afternoon air. She watched it struggle, doomed to fail but too stupid to stop, until it landed on the street below. “My, my.” Hunker John observed, from behind her. “The Capitana is feeling bloody.” Bear looked up from the book he was reading and grimaced at the new trail of smoke, joining several others. Bear hated it when Sophie burned the little creatures. “Yeah, no shit.” Buy the Book The Failures Benjamin Liar Buy Book The Failures Benjamin Liar Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Hunker John did not have Bear’s delicate disposition, and shrugged. He yawned and went back to paring his already perfect nails with an enameled knife. Sophie yawned herself—it was the late hours of the afternoon, the slow time before the revelries of the night kicked in—and flicked the remainder of her slot down onto the street below. She pulled another, scraped the tip alight against the stone balustrade, and sucked in a heavy draw of smoke. She expelled this into the quiet air, causing more mechanical butterflies to swarm above the cafe. Gods above, she felt tired. She tried to remember the last time she’d had a decent night’s sleep, one not polished by drugs or drink or disposable love, and couldn’t place it. She grimaced, making the small scar that cut across her lower lip and part of her chin pull, and took a drag on her slot. She had other scars, too, a fine patterning that ran down her forearms. Nobody talked about those scars. If you knew what they were, you wouldn’t dare, and if you didn’t, she would have a fist in your mouth before you got the second word out. Sophie Vesachai didn’t think about those scars, much. The only consistent part of her look was long-sleeved jackets. Sophie heard a viola tune-up, down-Rue, a sweet and lonesome sound that wound its way through the quiet bustle of the street below. It made her chest ache, adding a dark undercurrent to her mood. If she had been a different sort of person, she could have looked inward and tried to discover the source of that feeling. But she wasn’t, so she took a drag on her slot and watched the shopkeeps on the street below start closing up their carts for the day. Lazily, she caught another butterfly. The Rue de Paladia was the heart of the Keep and one of the grandest places in it. Though she would have resisted acknowledging such sentimentality, it was her favorite place in the whole world and had been since she’d been a little girl. The Rue was a winding boulevard paved with cunningly engraved stones that made intricate patterns when looked at from above. Long ago, someone had planted cherrywhistle and terra in huge pots along the center of the avenue, and when these bloomed, the Rue became a river of blue and orange fire. Flocking birds roosted everywhere in these, and when one of the nearly-as-ubiquitous cats decided to pounce, these all took flight at once, filling the air above the Rue and scattering the butterflies. It was a wide street, wider than most in the Keep, and whoever built it had expended unimaginable amounts of effort to make it lovely. Every surface was a patterned stone of nearly infinite variety, ancient woodwork delicately carved, or wrought metals the like of which no one living could still craft. It was a winding street, overlooked by stepped balconies that held cafes, restaurants, dancing parlors. There were even a few residences, high above and majestic, for those with the coin to afford them. The Rue was illuminated by huge columns of lit-stone, which glowed bright and warm during the day and dimmed down to a pleasing ember at night. Much more recently—but still a long time ago—huge bronzed bowls of oil and char had been erected high above the street, and once the night-lights dimmed down, stilted technicians would make their way down the Rue, lighting the braziers and filling the street with a warm flickering fire- light. Over all of this stood a sturdy ceiling of arched mosaic, tabs of colored glass that reflected the light in a shimmer during the daytime and sparkled at night—legend said that these were meant to evoke the long-forgotten sky, so far above. Sophie Vesachai wasn’t sure that she believed in the sky, though she had seen it once in a dream. The Keep was an immense cylinder of stone, hollowed and tunneled through with too many rooms and halls and streets to count. But above it, past the Gap, was only more stone. This was tunneled and carved, too, long-dark rooms and halls and passageways; a whole vast dead civilization carved out of rock, and hanging above their head. It might make a less jaded person shiver to think of; it just made Sophie flick ash from her slot onto the street below. Sophie had been outside the walls of the Keep, which few could claim, and she’d seen for herself what lay past the Gap, above and to the sides. It was easy to describe: Darkness. Outside the Keep there was little light, and if you pressed too far into the empty halls and rooms, you would find the true Dark, where the light failed utterly. And in that Dark, you would find monsters. Sophie shivered and scratched unconsciously at the scars on her arms, her mood growing more sour. She examined the captive butterfly, still whirring frantically against her fingers, and dragged on her slot. She was thinking about a certain young girl, a girl from a long time ago, who had no scars on her arms. A girl who used to dream of finding out where these butterflies came from, a girl that hadn’t yet acquired a famous name and a tar-black heart. She brought the little captive creature close. She took a hard drag, flaring the tip of the slot brightly. “Wish you wouldn’t do that,” Bear muttered, then shifted uncomfortably in his leaned-back chair, as if already regretting speaking. Sophie glanced back, amused. It was curious that her chief enforcer, the cheerfully violent and quite large Bear, was so protective of small things. “Oh yeah? How come?” “It’s gonna bring the Practice up,” Bear said, lamely. Sophie knew he hated criticizing her, but she enjoyed teasing him, so she just lifted an eyebrow. He scratched big fingers through his close-cropped and tightly curly hair, peppered with silver. Bear had boyishly good looks and a smoothly dark olive complexion, but the gray hair marked him as the oldest of the Killers. Of course, no one knew exactly how old he was. One of the few rules The Killers had was that they didn’t talk about where they came from. “The Practice Guard can suck a dick,” Sophie said finally, blowing smoke at the butterfly. “Yeah, well,” Bear settled his hat down over his eyes again. “Some of us have paper.” Sophie raised her eyebrow again. “Like I don’t?” Hunker John snorted, giving this comment the respect it deserved. Nobody in the Practice Guard was going to fuck with Sophie Vesachai, and they all knew it. Every member of their gang had lists of infractions as long as their arms, and Sophie’s was as long as Hunker John’s entire body. The truth of it, however, was that the unfortunate Practice Guard that tried to arrest Sophie Vesachai on anything but the Queen’s own orders would end up in lock themselves. She considered the trapped, frightened creature in her hand. Maybe she’d let it go; maybe she’d go home and get some sleep; maybe she’d turn over a new leaf, stop drinking so much, and get into charity work. Her mouth twisted. She closed her hand, the frail little creature snapping into shards against her palm. Bear winced. “We all go into the dark.” She brushed the still-twitching fragments over the side of the balustrade. “Better now, eh?” “Twins, damn, Sophie,” Bear sat up in alarm. “You are bloody today, aren’t you?” “I’m something, all right,” Sophie scrubbed her face with her hands, trying to wake up. She turned fully and considered her friends with a frown. Their gang—the very unconvincingly named Killers—was understaffed at the moment. “Where the fuck is Trik, anyway? We’ve got business to be about. I got somebody to meet about a job.” “She’s out running some grift.” Hunker John yawned and tossed down his paring-knife. He sniffed at a half-warm cup of chûs, one of the many that littered their table, and instead popped a candied olive into his mouth. “Loves her grift, does our Trik.” “She is a hustler.” Sophie allowed. She looked up at the mosaic arch overhead, thinking about old stone and inevitability. Bear eyed her. “Speaking of grift…” “Speaking of debauchery,” Hunker John yawned again, “We getting into any trouble tonight, Capitana?” Sophie brought her attention down from the dark spaces overhead and gave him a nod. She watched her friend sniff a long-cold cup of chûs and discard it in favor of something stronger. As she did sometimes, she drank in the spectacle of Hunker; there was only one sight quite like it. Hunker John was a grandiose fop, a layabout, a degenerate. He had a long face and twinkling almond eyes that accepted all, forgave all, winked at all. His wavy and brightly colored hair might have been sculpted by a genius of the form, and he’d offset this majestic coif with a little fake goatee that made him look like a stage villain. He was one of those fortunate androgynous individuals that provided prospective lovers a fascinating puzzle as to what might lay hiding underneath his perfectly ornate tunic; from all the tales Sophie had heard, by the time an interested individual found out, they no longer cared. “Well, Capitana?” Hunker lifted an eyebrow. “I started this night with some fun in mind,” She said, finally, “And I mean to have my due.” Hunker clapped delightedly, and Bear stifled a groan. The big man was a good soldier, though, and would follow her into any desperate fight—or wild debauch—with little hesitation. Sophie saw movement behind him, a tall girl winding her way through the sleepy cafe towards them. Bear straightened up. “Triks!” He called, pointing at Sophie. “Capitana is feeling bloody!” “Oh, wonderful,” Trik growled, approaching the table. “I haven’t stopped drinking in a fucking week.” “Fasten your breeches up tight, dear Triks.” Hunker John said. “We are in for a dark road!” “Dunno when a girl is supposed to goddamn sleep.” Trik made a great show of sighing, and settled herself carefully into a chair. She was tall and dark, with tattoos all over, and a great cloud of kinky black hair that certain members of the Killers had drunkenly confessed to a desire to sink their fingers into. Bear still had all of his fingers, though, so he presumably never had. Trik looked up at Sophie, eyebrow raised. “Well?” She said, with a sigh. “What madness comes, Capitana?” “First we need to collect Ben,” Sophie yawned, trying to rouse herself past her fatigue into action, “And then I need to see a man about a job. And then I propose we rampage through the Keep in a drug-and-booze-filled orgy of sex, violence, and madness until we find an answer for the unceasing and depthless darkness within.” “Great,” Trik said, “Same as normal, then?” Bear tipped his hat back, getting into the spirit of the thing, and gave Sophie a passable grin. “Well? Killers Unite, I suppose.” Sophie grinned back, all teeth. “Just so, Bear. Killers fucking Unite.” Excerpted from The Failures, copyright © 2024 by Benjamin Liar. The post Read an Excerpt From Benjamin Liar’s <i>The Failures</i> appeared first on Reactor.

July's most famous historic event is the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or Independence Day on July 4th. Of course that's not the only event in history to have occurred during this summer month. From famous birthdays to the moon landing, there are many important July dates that have greatly impacted the country. For those who are history buffs or are just curious... Source

As the wind slowly goes out of the sails of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, it’s worth noting just how much purveyors of this nonsense have peddled their ideology under the false premise of data, science, and research. The Wall Street Journal published an article Friday about how the consulting firm McKinsey announced in 2015 that it had “found a link between profits and executive racial and gender diversity.” This research was “used by investors, lobbyists, and regulators to push for more women and minority groups on boards, and to justify investing in companies that appointed them.” It certainly has paid big dividends for peddlers of DEI. Within five years, there was a massive shift in how many companies hired and conducted their business. In 2020, the DEI ethos metastasized. Companies not only embraced the “racial reckoning,” they began to implement full-scale—and almost certainly illegal—racial quotas. The study gave corporations air cover to promote ideologically motivated diversity programs while saying that it was simply “good for business.” It wasn’t. What it was good for was transforming the world of Big Business into an outpost of academia. In that sense, it worked. But the original pro-business justification has turned out to be a scam. According to The Wall Street Journal, “academics have tried to repeat McKinsey’s findings and failed, concluding that there is in fact no link between profitability and executive diversity.” The only thing that the study found was that profitable companies ended up with more diversity—after they had succeeded, not before. That makes sense in a lot of ways. Big companies that are highly profitable could more easily afford to simply promote DEI with fewer consequences. A company that’s scrambling to launch itself doesn’t have that luxury. The authors of the McKinsey study say they’ve found a way to prove correlation between DEI programs and profitability, but even that is in doubt. The Wall Street Journal noted that McKinsey won’t release the names of the companies it used for the study, and it was unable to show benefits from diversity on a large range of metrics. There was just no link at all between diversity and corporate success. Now, that may not seem like a big deal. What’s one sham study among many other spurious studies? One would think it would take more than one study to persuade companies with billions of dollars on the line that using race, gender, and identity over merit is a risky proposal. But in this case, it matters a whole lot. Not only did many companies adopt the research as true, but the most powerful financial and governmental institutions with vast powers over the market picked it up and used it to foist DEI on corporate America. From the Journal: McKinsey’s research figures first in BlackRock’s references for supporting a board diversity target of 30% in its proxy voting guidelines.  It featured prominently among studies used by a Securities and Exchange Commission commissioner in 2020 to explain why she supported corporate disclosure of diversity metrics. Nasdaq cited it as evidence when the exchange applied to the SEC for a rule requiring companies it lists to have minimum diversity on boards, or explain why they don’t.  It has been cited by dozens of campaign groups pushing for rules to support consideration of social issues by pension funds and others, too. BlackRock, according to the Journal, cited the study as evidence that diversity created financial benefits when it created an exchange-traded fund that tracked a diversity index. That index has done quite poorly, “returning about 55% against more than 70% for the global index without diversity conditions.” BlackRock has gotten into hot water over its corporate practices and has announced that it is stepping away from environmental, social, and governance investing. We’ll see if that continues. What’s been clear to me from the beginning is that DEI is not merely about “diversity” in the general sense. It’s about ensuring a certain mindset. Paradoxically, the DEI industry is about creating a conformity of worldviews where every institution, every CEO, every employee is roped into the same left-wing beliefs and swims in the same direction. Those who dissent are punished and ostracized. There is now a growing counter movement to prevent this full-scale transformation. And it’s getting harder for businesses to justify their ideological commitments when they are bleeding money. Nevertheless, the DEI ethos has dug deep into America’s powerful institutions—and that includes corporate America—despite its increasing unpopularity. Don’t count on its purveyors to suddenly give up after real world failures. They undoubtedly will say that true DEI hasn’t been tried and will find new ways to impose their ideology on the American people. The post The Bogus Study at the Heart of Corporate DEI appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The world (and the US with it, with the current US administration pretty much leading the way) has for the last few years witnessed what has obviously been a concerted effort to make “AI-powered deepfakes” a thing. Specifically – a thing that can negatively shape up an election, or even break a democracy. Anyone, especially apolitical people but those with even a cursory knowledge of the “deepfakes” tech and how long it’s been around in all sorts of media, might have been confused as to why this rhetoric is happening, and why now? Well – now – months before a US presidential election, we’re starting to get answers. President Joe Biden is trying to remain in office – and now the White House is giving the world an indication of why the “deepfakes” scaremongering was launched in the first place (and then dutiful picked up by certain – or let’s say, most – corporate media.) “Confused and disoriented” is a (believe it or not) nicer way to describe the situation with President Biden and his public appearances; the latest, and at this time, the most important, concerns his performance during debates last week. Instead of trying to prop their candidate up (figuratively and literally) in some credible way, the current White House decided to label the media showing clips of Biden “malfunctioning” as, in addition to being “disinformation, misinformation” – also “cheap fakes.” But what in the world is that? Is it a video that somebody just happens to dislike, so it’s branded in a way deceptively invoking the dreaded “deepfakes”? White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre was certainly working hard to earn her salary when she tried to explain this one. “Not at all,” Jean-Pierre said, when quizzed if there was regret over criticizing the media for “clips showing the president appearing to be confused, freezing at times, and you (White House) called it ‘cheap fakes,’ misinformation, disinformation.” “At the end of the day, they were fakes,” the press secretary asserted. “And the cheap fakes didn’t come from me, I didn’t coin that. That came from the media… I don’t regret it at all, it was just the facts.” https://video.reclaimthenet.org/articles/kjp-cheap.mp4 If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post White House Defends Labeling Critical Biden Videos as “Deepfakes” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Even the New York Times looks like it’s treading somewhat lightly while publishing articles aimed at dismantling the very concept of the First Amendment. An opinion piece penned by an Obama and Biden administration adviser, Tim Wu, is therefore labeled as a “guest essay.” But was it the author, or the newspaper, who decided on the title? Because it is quite scandalous. “The First Amendment is Out of Control” – that’s the title. Meanwhile, many believe that attacks on this speech-protecting constitutional amendment are what’s actually out of control these days. Wu takes a somewhat innovative route to argue against free speech: he painstakingly frames it as concern that the universally mistrusted Big Tech might be abusing it, with the latest Supreme Court ruling regarding Texas and Florida laws, (ab)used as an example. When the government colludes with mighty entities like major social platforms – the First Amendment becomes the primary recourse to defend speech now expressed in public square forums forged through the pervasiveness of the internet. So despite Wu’s effort to make his message seem unbiased, the actual takeaways are astonishing: one is that the First Amendment is an obstacle for the government to protect citizens (for being invoked as a tool restraining censorship?) But this means that the First Amendment, designed to protect citizens from government censorship, is doing its job. In the same vein, contrary to the sentiment of this “essay,” the amendment is there not to protect “national security” – nor does free speech undermine that, in a democracy. You don’t like TikTok? Let’s just ban it…but the pesky First Amendment stands in the way of that? What Wu ignores here is that the bill that allows banning TikTok is so ambiguous it can be used to get rid of other, for whatever reason, “disliked” apps. Wu also doesn’t like that the amendment is used to counter privacy and security-undermining age verification laws, like California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code. “Suicide pact” is how Wu referred to the impact of the First Amendment in the 1949 dissenting opinion in the Terminiello v. City of Chicago “riot incitement” case. As has lately become the norm with the First Amendment detractors: this is lots of words, most of them empty, some dramatic, but overall, free speech-unfriendly. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Former Biden Advisor Claims “The First Amendment Is Out of Control,” Hinders Government Action appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

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The internet is buzzing with delight over a unique and captivating video featuring Badu, the singing cat. Badu, a beautiful black cat, has captured the hearts of millions with his soulful blues singing. This charming feline lays comfortably on his owner’s music camp, where a magical musical interaction unfolds, creating a heartwarming scene that has... The post Dad plays the Blues but watch his cat hilariously transform it into a duet appeared first on Animal Channel.

In Petaluma, California, a one-of-a-kind beauty pageant unfolds each year, drawing crowds and canine contestants alike. This isn’t your typical dog show – it’s the world-renowned competition aimed at finding the “world’s ugliest dog.” The event celebrates the unique appearances and stories of various dogs, showcasing their charm and resilience. Amidst the excitement and wagging... The post Pekingese is crowned ‘World’s Ugliest Dog’ but wait till you see his adorable face appeared first on Animal Channel.