A Daily Signal senior reporter became Amazon’s bestselling author for LGBTQ books after releasing her book last week. With a five-star rating on Amazon, Mary Margaret Olohan’s “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult” shares the stories of individuals who “transitioned” into the gender opposite their biological sex, later regretted it, and then began the process of reversing the effects of transitioning.  “Detrans” surpassed gender studies scholar Judith Butler’s book “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” and a true crime novel about teen lesbiansim titled “Cruel Sacrifice” in Amazon’s “LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies” book section.  Olohan has made numerous TV and podcast appearances to speak about “Detrans” in recent weeks. She spoke with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on his weekly news and talk show “Huckabee.” She also appeared on Newsmax personality Sebastian Gorka’s “America First” podcast, and on the Catholic news show EWTN News Nightly.  Olohan told Huckabee that the stories of detransitioners represent “the strongest weapon in combating gender ideology.” “I felt like it was really important to talk to the detransitioners — the young people who tried to do the unthinkable and change their gender — and put their real, raw stories in a book that can go out to the world,” Olohan said.  Outlets like the Washington Examiner and The Daily Caller have written positive reviews of Olohan’s book.  “Perhaps the most fascinating part of ‘Detrans’ is learning about the thought processes that led each of these women to question the choices they had made,” wrote the Washington Examiner’s Ben Appel. Daily Caller Deputy News Editor Dylan Housman called Olohan’s book “one of the most powerful books anyone will ever read.” The descriptions of the procedures and the lies told to the victims “will make the reader’s heart sink and trigger a shudder,” he wrote. Conservative figures such as Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire and Riley Gaines have posted on X promoting “Detrans.” Gaines said she’s “learned so much” from Olohan “on this issue.” Gaines added that Olohan is “the reporter who first broke [her] story and helped [her] feel confident in speaking out.” I got my copy! ?? I've learned so much from @MaryMargOlohan on this issue. Not to mention she's the reporter who first broke my story and helped me feel confident in speaking out. Get her book, Detrans, today!!! https://t.co/i27bj6dZM0 pic.twitter.com/XfNcdn8XCa— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) May 29, 2024 Olohan’s book also became Amazon’s top new release in “Government Social Policy,” overshadowing books like “The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers” and “Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America’s Poor.”  Top figures in the conservative movement are reading “Detrans.” Join the conversation by purchasing a copy on Amazon.com. The post Pride Month Success: Daily Signal Reporter’s Book Tops LGBTQ Charts appeared first on The Daily Signal.

It’s not every day that a pro-Second Amendment group gets a resounding victory at the Supreme Court, with a unanimous opinion authored by a justice who thinks there’s no individual right to keep and bear arms, no less. And yet, last week, that’s exactly what happened, with the nation’s highest court handing the National Rifle Association a resounding 9-0 win against the state of New York—not over the state’s gun laws, but over its attempts to suppress the NRA’s pro-Second Amendment views. The NRA had alleged that Maria Vullo, the now-former head of the state’s Department of Financial Services, violated the First Amendment when she coerced several insurers to cut ties with the group over its advocacy against restrictive gun control. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit dismissed the NRA’s claims, the Supreme Court last week overturned that decision, effectively allowing the organization’s lawsuit against Vullo to continue.  The court’s opinion is a win for the NRA and for broad free speech protections. But it also underscores an unsettling reality: The war for the Second Amendment often involves battles waged on a First Amendment front. This is far from the first time that gun control activists have attacked the lawful gun industry and lawful gun owners by threatening their right to speak freely.     Consider California’s passage of AB 2571 in 2022, which essentially prohibited any person or organization remotely related to the “firearms industry” from “promoting” even the lawful and supervised use of firearms by minors. The law’s reach was so broad that it effectively forbade youth sport shooting groups and youth hunter safety programs from advertising their existence. At the same time, however, the law would not have prevented the publication of messages advocating against those same groups or activities. The state argued that the law was necessary to keep these “dangerous products” out of the hands of “impulsive, risky, [and] thrill-seeking” young people, who were apparently enticed and lured by attractive advertisements or promotions to illegally purchase firearms and use them for criminal purposes. (Never mind that the state couldn’t provide a single example of a minor being “lured” to unlawfully purchase a gun because he or she saw an advertisement for a youth sport shooting group.) This was, of course, just a cover for the state’s real goal; namely, stamping out pro-Second Amendment viewpoints and traditions by preventing them from being readily passed down to future generations. Fortunately, California’s efforts to prohibit truthful speech about lawful activities involving guns went too far for even the 9th Circuit, an appeals court notorious for finding ever new and creative ways to uphold restrictive gun-control laws. In September, a three-judge panel determined that the law was likely unconstitutional and granted a preliminary injunction that stopped it from being enforced—for now, at least. To this day, California continues actively defending the law during ongoing litigation. California’s use of advertising regulations as a club with which to coercively eliminate pro-gun viewpoints from public discourse is not unique: Illinois passed a similar statute last year, which is also being challenged in federal court. It’s also not limited to state governments, either. In 2010, the Phoenix Public Transit Department rejected a contract selling advertisement space on bus shelters to a company promoting its marksmanship and gun-safety classes. The Arizona Court of Appeals later determined that the city unconstitutionally misapplied its own standards and advertising regulations so that it could quash a disfavored viewpoint about guns.     More than a decade later, just up the road from Phoenix, the city of Flagstaff, Arizona, finds itself in hot water, legally speaking, over similar attempts to suppress pro-Second Amendment viewpoints, rejecting an advertisement for a firearms training center by claiming that its “representation of shooting sports” violated the city’s policy against displaying “violence or anti-social behavior.” That’s right. Telling lawful gun owners how they can responsibly exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms is inherently violent and anti-social behavior. Not all attacks on the free speech of lawful gun owners are so direct and overt. No, sometimes the suppression of pro-Second Amendment voices is quite subtle. After the Supreme Court struck down New York’s incredibly restrictive framework for issuing public carry permits in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen, the state responded with a new framework that was, in some respects, even more concerning than the previous one. Not only were these new permits spitefully expensive and difficult to obtain, but applicants were required to disclose all of their social media accounts to law enforcement. Ask yourself how freely you would speak online if the exercise of your Second Amendment rights depended entirely upon the whims of a government official in a historically anti-gun state, that is breathing down your neck as you type? Moreover, because many social media accounts are maintained under pseudonyms, compelling a person to disclose those accounts means that they forfeit their anonymity. Imagine conditioning the exercise of one constitutional right on the forfeiture of another! Fortunately, the 2nd Circuit—though unwilling to strike down all aspects of New York’s post-Bruen “spite laws”—recognized the chilling effect of the social media disclosure requirement, so, at least for now, that requirement cannot be enforced. While we should take comfort in the fact that, thus far, most federal courts have been willing to uphold the First Amendment rights of Second Amendment groups, the fact that such legal intervention is necessary underscores how bad the situation is becoming. Gun control activists know that the closest thing they have to a winning argument is a silent opposition. They want your guns so badly that they’ll take your voice, too. The post NRA’s Latest Court Win Underscores Gun Control Zealots’ Bid to Silence Opposition appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Sign Up To Keep Reading This post is for Reclaim The Net supporters. Gain access to the entire archive of features and supporters-only content. Help protect free speech, freedom from surveillance, and digital civil liberties. Join Already a supporter? Login here If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Ad Tracking Data Is Fueling The Intelligence Community appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Biden Takes his Campaign to France

Black holes are weird. Predicted as a result of Einstein's general theory of relativity, they contain an outer region known as the event horizon – from which nothing, even light can escape. As well as this, they are predicted to have an infinitely dense point where our understanding of physics breaks down, and nothing makes any sense.That's before we even get into the black hole information paradox. If a black hole has mass (and they have a lot of it) then they should have a temperature according to the first law of thermodynamics, and in line with the second law of thermodynamics, they should radiate heat. Stephen Hawking showed that black holes should emit radiation – now termed Hawking radiation – formed at a black hole's boundary. "Hawking then pointed to a paradox. If a black hole can evaporate, a portion of the information it contains is lost forever," French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet explains in a 2016 review. "The information contained in thermal radiation emitted by a black hole is degraded; it does not recapitulate information about matter previously swallowed by the black hole. The irretrievable loss of information conflicts with one of the basic postulates of quantum mechanics. According to the Schrödinger equation, physical systems that change over time cannot create or destroy information, a property known as unitarity."In short, we're probably missing something. Physicists and mathematicians have attempted to come up with ideas that do away with these problems, and ended up with some pretty strange results. Some have even suggested that the universe could be holographic, with the universe we know and love really being the result of interactions at the infinitely distant boundary. We told you black holes were weird.And yet, we have definitely observed objects that appear to have the properties of black holes, including (but far from limited to) the image of the black hole M87*. But what if they don't exist at all?One idea is that black holes are actually "gravastars", a portmanteau of gravity, vacuum, and stars. First proposed in 2002 by Pawel O. Mazur and Emil Mottola, the idea is that at some point during the collapse of a large star the intense gravity transforms its matter into a new state similar to Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). BEC occurs when atoms are cooled to such low energy states that they begin acting like a single "super atom". In gravastars, the team suggested that as the star collapses to the point of the event horizon its matter is transformed into a new state, which exerts outward pressure and prevents the star from collapsing into a physics-defying singularity. In gravastars, this heavily-warped (but familiar) spacetime is surrounded by an ultra-thin, ultra-cold, and ultra-dark and virtually indestructible shell."Since this new form of matter is very durable, but somewhat flexible, like a bubble, anything that became trapped by its intense gravity and smashed into it would be obliterated and then assimilated into the shell of the Gravastar," Mottola said in a statement following the first paper on gravastars.  One of the main appeals of gravastars is doing away with messy event horizons and singularities. But though interesting as an idea, they also have to explain what we observe, and we have certainly observed objects that look like black holes. "This shadow is not caused by the trapping of light in the event horizon, but by a slightly different phenomenon called the 'gravitational redshift,' causing light to lose energy when it moves through a region with a strong gravitational field," João Luís Rosa, a professor of physics at the University of Gdask in Poland and author on a new study of gravastars told Live Science. "Indeed, when the light emitted from regions close to these alternative objects reach[es] our telescopes, most of its energy would have been lost to the gravitational field, causing the appearance of this shadow."Like with black holes, things get messy when you add in rotation, and there are (contested) suggestions that gravastars would not be stable as they rotate. And they are a little weird too (hey, this is the universe we're talking about). There are suggestions that the interiors of gravastars could contain a series of thicker shells, known as nestars.They aren't perfect, and there is a lot of work to be done on modeling how they work. It's also possible that both black holes and gravastars exist. A big problem is that it is difficult to distinguish between the two, though some models suggest that they should emit very different gravitational radiation, allowing us to know whether we're looking at gravastars or traditional black holes, and all the headaches they entail.Rosa and colleagues' new study is published in Physical Review D. 

On June 5 at 10:52 am ET, Boeing's Starliner Calypso took to the sky carrying NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station (ISS). This was the third and final test for the commercial vehicle and its first crewed test to demonstrate that Starliner is a safe way to ferry astronauts to and from the space station.It was a long road getting here. Boeing had originally planned its first crewed test in 2017 but it was postponed time and time again. The latest delay moved this crewed test from last August to May 2024. This was necessary to resolve issues with the parachute system and wiring harnesses among other less significant issues.   Then the May 6 launch was scrubbed two hours before liftoff. It continued to be delayed due to a helium leak in the service module. Another attempt was planned for Saturday, June 1. The scrubbing took place just 3 minutes and 50 seconds before launch after a faulty power supply caused a computer to register a loss of redundancy.But now Starliner is up in orbit, launched on top of the powerful Atlas V rocket. Wilmore and Williams are expected to be in space for about a week. While on the ISS, Starliner will be tested as a "safe haven" – a protected environment within the space station that could be used in case of emergency. This will be useful in the future when the capsule will stay attached for up to seven months.The plan is for Starliner to fly back down in the American Southwest. During the descent, it will deploy a parachute that will slow the capsule down to 6.4 kilometers (4 miles) per hour. The landing will be cushioned by the deployment of six airbags.Starliner can be reused up to 10 times and will be used just like SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, to bring people and cargo to the ISS. SpaceX’s first crewed mission was in 2020.

R/P FLIP, the FLoating Instrument Platform, was a true one-of-a-kind, but it now lies in pieces at a undisclosed scrapyard.Measuring 108 meters (355 feet) long, FLIP was an oceanic research platform designed to be towed out to sea horizontally, just like any conventional seafaring vessel. Upon command, it would be partially flooded and flipped by 90 degrees, allowing it to stand vertically in the water with over 90 meters (300 feet) of its body submerged.As you can see in the video of its flipping below, which features some fabulously 80s "muzak," it pulls off this incredible maneuver in just 20 minutes with its crew of hardy scientists onboard. The giant upright instrument was developed in the post-war era by researchers at Scripps' Marine Physical Laboratory and operated by Scripps Oceanography on behalf of the US Navy. Its maiden flip was carried out on July 23, 1962, in a quiet fjord in Washington State. After proving its worth in a series of tests, it was towed to San Diego to start operations in September 1962. The axis-changing platform spent much of its working life in the Pacific, venturing as far as Hawai'i, but it even had one deployment in the Atlantic. FLIP was used for over 60 years to gather vital observations about oceanic and atmospheric phenomena. One of its specialties was acoustic research, uncovering the many ways in which sound waves are influenced by variations in the ocean, such as changes in temperature or salinity. It even helped scientists learn about the depths to which whales dive and the properties of the Earth's ever-changing crust.                   Like many great things, FLIP fell victim to government spending cuts in the wake of COVID-19 and the ensuing global economic downturn. Following some tough financial decisions, the US Navy pulled the plug on the platform.“It would cost about $8 million to make FLIP useable for another five or 10 years, but that funding could be better used elsewhere. We came up with lots of creative ideas, but there wasn’t enough inertia or funding to keep it going,” Rob Sparrock, a Program Officer at the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research, said in 2021, according to Sea Power Magazine.Sparrock added that he hoped FLIP would be put on display in a museum setting, given its scientific and engineering significance. However, it was ultimately scrapped. In August 2023, FLIP made its final journey towards a dismantling and recycling facility where it was taken to pieces.“R/P FLIP has existed for more than half the length of the institution’s entire history,” Scripps Oceanography Director Margaret Leinen said in a statement in 2023 about its retirement.“It was an engineering marvel constructed during an important phase of new technology for ocean exploration following World War II. The many discoveries from FLIP help set the stage for ongoing cutting-edge science to understand our ocean,” added Leinen.RIP FLIP. Gone, but not forgotten.

In a heartwarming tale of courage and compassion, a woman performed a remarkable act of kindness by saving a starving whale using her bare hands. This incredible story highlights the power of human compassion and the special bond that can form between humans and animals. The encounter began when a whale swam up to a... The post Diver sees struggling and choking whale and immediately uses ‘bare hands’ to save him appeared first on Animal Channel.

President Biden's newly announced pseudo-crackdown on illegal immigration caused the Associated Press to worry if it would help him: "Will Biden’s new border measures be enough to change voters’ minds?" AP reporters Jill Colvin, Stephen Groves, and Adriana Gomez Licon wrote Biden addressed "a major liability for his reelection campaign by taking executive action to significantly restrict asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border." But the labeling was comical:  Biden has shifted far to the right on immigration since his winning campaign four years ago, when he criticized Trump’s immigration priorities and promised he would restore asylum protections. Biden's almost Full MAGA?? And yet, when you are "far to the left" of Trump on border control, you're merely an "immigration advocate" to the AP linguists.  Sue-Ann DiVito, a 61-year-old realtor from the Philadelphia suburb of Jenkintown who became an immigration advocate during the Trump administration, says Republicans have been successful at spreading anti-immigrant messages in communities like hers, making some of her friends who are Democrat worry about the high number of people arriving in the U.S “I think that’s why we see people who would normally support immigrants are now more quiet,” DiVito said. The AP article ends with the "immigration advocate" warning that whatever Biden does on the Border, Trump will be "a million times worse."  Surprise! Sue-Ann is a Democrat donor.  At least the AP trio acknowledges the polling on immigration is brutal for Biden -- 56 percent of Americans say Biden’s presidency has hurt the country on the issue of immigration and border security, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in April. That’s far higher than the number (37%) who said the same about Trump’s time in office. Even among Democrats, only about 3 in 10 say that Biden’s presidency has done more to help the country on immigration and border security, while about the same share say it has hurt.  Hispanic adults are also more likely to think Trump’s presidency helped the country with immigration and border security, compared to Biden’s. About half of Hispanic adults in March said that Biden’s presidency had done more to hurt the country on immigration and border security — a potentially alarming number as Trump’s campaign works to chip away at Democrats’ advantage with Hispanic voters. Hence, he had to disappoint the radical left open-borders crowd:  “President Biden had no choice. He saw what was going on at the border. The numbers were higher than ever in terms of people trying to come here to seek asylum, and he knew he had to do something,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist. The radicals were quoted, if not exactly labeled, to highlight splits among Democrats:  Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she was “profoundly disappointed.” During a news conference with immigration advocates outside the Capitol, Jayapal pushed the administration to take action that would provide relief for immigrants already in the U.S.

True to its nature, the Biden administration has been emphasizing the need to combat “misinformation” in the media. But the administration is not alone. The United Nations is also cracking down any narrative that draws its own into question. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has adopted a concept in its “Disinformation Primer” called “prebunking.” According to them, “prebunking” is “an offensive strategy that refers to anticipating what disinformation is likely to be repeated by politicians, pundits, and provocateurs during key events and having already prepared a response based on past fact checks.” “Prebunking is drawn from Inoculation Theory, which seeks to explain how an attitude or a belief can be protected against persuasion and people can build up an immunity to mis/disinformation,” the primer explains. Glenn Beck is horrified. “We are dealing with people manipulating every aspect of your mind. This is beyond 4D chess. This is a psychological weapon being developed and promoted by our own government,” Glenn says. “They decide what is true, and then they will inoculate you and manipulate you so if you hear something else that disagrees with that, you’ll dismiss it,” he adds. Those behind the manipulation hope to keep people from adopting “extremist views.” “What are those views? I would imagine views like mine,” Glenn says. “Now, in a sane world you could see how a tool like this might be a good thing in helping to disrupt recruiting efforts by actual terrorists. But no, they’ve redefined what terrorists and what extremists are.” “The real danger here is who gets to decide what needs redirecting or ‘prebunking,’ and after they really master this, will you even know you’ve been manipulated?” Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.