'There’s still time to minimize the damage'

63 in the first quarter

A post shared on X claims that three U.S. troops were injured by mortar fire in Gaza. ???Update: US Military under attack in Gaza!! 3 US troops hit by mortar fire and injured in US Gaza base. One is hospitalized in Israel in critical condition!!??? pic.twitter.com/XR8p0BWryw — US Civil Defense News (@CaptCoronado) May 24, 2024 Verdict: Misleading […]

So it's no surprise that the man behind the scenes is none other than John Boehner

'Dangerous conspiracy theory'

'What he said a tournament doctor told him was the maximum dose of pills allowed'

We all have our favorite rock bands and artists. However, I would argue that for the majority of classic rock fans, Steely Dan is at least in everyone’s top 10. They are a unique group in rock and roll history. Fueled by witty lyrics, superior musicianship, production, and brilliant songwriting, Steely Dan released a catalog of albums that redefined what quality recording meant in the music business. There’s no filler, no nonsense. They merged the best of rock and roll and jazz into a sound that was original and inviting. Can’t Buy a Thrill  – “Dirty Work” Steely Dan’s debut The post Steely Dan’s Best Song On Each Of Their Studio Albums appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Books new releases All the New Fantasy Books Arriving in June 2024 Meet Raven Knights, vampire kings, and a rag-tag pirate crew in this month’s new fantasy titles! By Reactor | Published on June 4, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Here’s the full list of the fantasy titles heading your way in June! Keep track of all the new SFF releases here. All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher. Release dates are subject to change. June 4 Tidal Creatures (Alchemical Journeys #3) — Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom Publishing)All across the world, people look up at the moon and dream of gods. Gods of knowledge and wisdom, gods of tides and longevity. Over time, some of these moon gods incarnated into the human world alongside the other manifest natural concepts. Their job is to cross the sky above the Impossible City—the heart of all creation—to keep it connected to reality. And someone is killing them. There are so many of them that it’s easy for a few disappearances to slip through the cracks. But they aren’t limitless. In the name of the moon, the lunar divinities must uncover the roots of the plot and thwart the true goal of those behind these attacks—control of the Impossible City itself. Daughter of the Merciful Deep — Leslye Penelope (Redhook)Jane Edwards hasn’t spoken since she was eleven years old, when armed riders expelled her family from their hometown along with every other Black resident. Now, twelve years later, she’s found a haven in the all-Black town of Awenasa. But the construction of a dam promises to wash her home under the waters of the new lake. Jane will do anything to save the community that sheltered her. So, when a man with uncanny abilities arrives in town asking strange questions, she wonders if he might be the key. But as the stranger hints at gods and ancestral magic, Jane is captivated by a bigger mystery. She knows this man. Only the last time she saw him, he was dead. His body laid to rest in a rushing river.  Who is the stranger and what is he really doing in Awenasa? To find those answers, Jane will journey into a sunken world, a land of capricious gods and unsung myths, of salvation and dreams made real. But the flood waters are rising. To gain the miracle she desires, Jane will have to find her voice again and finally face the trauma of the past.  Mirrored Heavens (Between Earth and Sky #3) — Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press)Serapio, avatar of the Crow God Reborn and the newly crowned Carrion King, rules Tova. But his enemies gather both on distant shores and within his own city as the matrons of the clans scheme to destroy him. And deep in the alleys of the Maw, a new prophecy is whispered, this one from the Coyote God. It promises Serapio certain doom if its terrible dictates are not fulfilled. Meanwhile, Xiala is thrust back amongst her people as war comes first to the island of Teek. With their way of life and their magic under threat, she is their last best hope. But the sea won’t talk to her the way it used to, and doubts riddle her mind. She will have to sacrifice the things that matter most to unleash her powers and become the queen they were promised. And in the far northern wastelands, Naranpa, avatar of the Sun God, seeks a way to save Tova from the visions of fire that engulf her dreams. But another presence has begun stalking her nightmares, and the Jaguar God is on the hunt. June 11 Running Close to the Wind — Alexandra Rowland (Tordotcom Publishing)Avra Helvaçi, former field agent of the Araşti Ministry of Intelligence, has accidentally stolen the single most expensive secret in the world—and the only place to flee with a secret that big is the open sea. To find a buyer with deep enough pockets, Avra must ask for help from his on-again, off-again ex, the pirate Captain Teveri az-Ḥaffār. They are far from happy to see him, but together, they hatch a plan: take the information to the isolated pirate republic of the Isles of Lost Souls, fence it, profit. The only things in their way? A calculating new Araşti ambassador to the Isles of Lost Souls who’s got his eyes on Avra’s every move; Brother Julian, a beautiful, mysterious new member of the crew with secrets of his own and a frankly inconvenient vow of celibacy; the fact that they’re sailing straight into sea serpent breeding season and almost certain doom. But if they can find a way to survive and sell the secret on the black market, they’ll all be as wealthy as kings—and, more important, they’ll be legends. The Fall of Waterstone (Black Land’s Bane #2) — Lilith Saintcrow (Orbit)Solveig and her shieldmaid have finally reached the fabled Elder sanctuary of Waterstone—a city of healing, restful beauty hidden from the Enemy’s gaze. Yet whispers race through the palace halls, and those they have come to tentatively trust have hidden intentions. For not only is the city a refuge for an elementalist, her protector, and a mortal prince, it also holds a great weapon, one that only Solveig’s kind may wield. Yet Sol’s faith in her own magic is perilously fractured. She can rely only her wits and skills of negotiation to be heard, or she will become a pawn in a dark game played by Elder and Enemy alike. The lord of the Black Land is mighty; treachery slithers amid Waterstone’s many wonders, and time is growing short. Before the darkness finds a way in, Sol must decide who to trust, where to turn for aid, and if she will take up a power she cannot hope to control. Even the right choice may doom not just the home she has left behind, but the entire world. The Fire Within Them (Soulfire #2) — Matthew Ward (Orbit)For the first time in a millennium, the kingdom of Khalad is divided. The Battle of Athenoch has fanned the spark of Bashar Vallant’s rebellion to a raging flame. Tyzanta, jewel of the east, has declared for his cause, and other cities have followed. Vallant, the people’s hero, may soon be powerful enough to challenge Caradan Diar, Khalad’s immortal king. But such power demands great personal sacrifice. Afflicted with omen rot after channeling the Deadwinds to save Athenoch from the koilos army, Kat searches for a means to stop the disease killing her as it did her mother. Her journey will uncover secrets long since buried—secrets concerning her past, her family and the kingdom itself. Eventually she’ll learn that the past never stays buried in Khalad—and that the truth can cut deeper than any blade. June 18 The Witchstone — Henry H. Neff  (Blackstone Publishing)Meet Laszlo, eight-hundred-year-old demon and Hell’s least productive Curse Keeper. From his office beneath Midtown, he oversees the Drakeford Curse, which involves a pathetic family upstate and a mysterious black stone. It’s a sexy enough assignment—colonial origins, mutating victims, et cetera—but Laszlo has no interest in maximizing the curse’s potential; he’d rather sunbathe in Ibiza, quaff martinis, and hustle the hustlers on Manhattan’s subway. Unfortunately, his division has new management, and Laszlo’s ratings are so abysmal that he’s given six days to shape up or he’ll be melted down and returned to the Primordial Ooze. Meet Maggie Drakeford, nineteen-year-old Curse Bearer. All she’s ever known is the dreary corner of the Catskills where the Drakeford Curse has devoured her father’s humanity and is rapidly laying claim to her own. The future looks hopeless, until Laszlo appears at the Drakeford farmhouse one October night and informs them that they have six days—and six days only—to break the spell before it becomes permanent. Can Maggie trust the glib and handsome Laszlo? Of course not. But she also can’t pass up an opportunity to save her family, even if it means having a demon as a guide. Thus begins a breakneck international adventure that takes our unlikely duo from a hot dog stand in Central Park to the mountains of Liechtenstein, a five-star hotel in Zurich, and even the time-traveling vault of a demonic crime boss. As the clock ticks down, tough-as-nails Maggie and conniving Laszlo will uncover a secret so profound that what began as a farcical quest to break a curse will eventually threaten the very Lords of Hell. June 25 The Daughters’ War (Blacktongue) — Christopher Buehlman (Tor Books)Galva—Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill—has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind. The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted—not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk. Foul Days (Witch’s Compendium of Monsters #1) — Genoveva Dimova (Tor Books)As a witch in the walled city of Chernograd, Kosara has plenty of practice treating lycanthrope bites, bargaining with kikimoras, and slaying bloodsucking upirs. There’s only one monster she can’t defeat: her ex, the Zmey, known as the Tsar of Monsters. She’s defied him one too many times and now he’s hunting her. Betrayed by someone close to her, Kosara’s only choice is to trade her shadow—the source of her powers—for a quick escape. Unfortunately, Kosara soon develops the deadly sickness that plagues shadowless witches—and only reclaiming her magic can cure her. To find it, she’s forced to team up with a suspiciously honorable detective. Even worse, all the clues point in a single direction: To get her shadow back, Kosara will have to face the Foul Days’ biggest threats without it. And she’s only got twelve days. But in a city where everyone is out for themselves, who can Kosara trust to assist her in outwitting the biggest monster from her past? The Court of Miracles (Vampyria #2) — Victor Dixen, tr. Françoise Bui (Amazon Crossing)The vampire King Louis XIV reigns supreme over a terrorized France, determined to protect his empire at any cost. When a mysterious renegade vampire named the Lady of Miracles ascends to power in an underworld Parisian court and claims the city for herself, Louis feels threatened for the first time in centuries. His secret weapon to fight back? Mademoiselle Diane de Gastefriche, a young baronette who earned the king’s trust through her own cunning and wit. He sends Diane to squash the new threat to his power. But King Louis has no idea that this feisty girl’s real name is Jeanne Froidelac: she is an infiltrated commoner, whose secret mission is to destroy him and rid the world of the vampiric tyranny. Caught between a vengeful king and a ruthless rival, Jeanne embarks on a quest that could alter the kingdom’s destiny—and expose a powerful secret that she will do anything to protect. The Bound Worlds (Devoured Worlds #3) — Megan E. O’Keefe (Orbit)Naira and Tarquin have found a new home on Seventh Cradle. But the peace they’ve built is short-lived as mysterious assailants ambush the settlement and Naira is haunted by visions of a monstrous future. Catastrophe strikes when Tarquin uncovers a plot to bring about the end of the universe. As humanity races against the clock to prevent their extinction, old secrets come to light and loyalties fracture, and Naira realizes she may be the key to saving the world—or ending it. The post All the New Fantasy Books Arriving in June 2024 appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays horror movies Immaculate, The First Omen, and the Rise of the Pro-Choice Horror Film Two recent horror films reflect growing cultural anxieties surrounding women’s bodies and reproductive rights. By JR. Forasteros | Published on June 4, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share It’s not every day you get a Catholic-themed horror film that outspokenly supports a woman’s autonomy over her body. But 2024 is the year we get not one, but two of these films, released a week apart. The two films—Immaculate, starring and produced by Sydney Sweeney, and The First Omen, a prequel to the 1976 film about the birth of the Antichrist—are shockingly similar. Both feature a mild, American novitiate—Sweeney’s Sister Cecilia and Nell Tiger Free’s Sister Margaret—recruited by a priest to come to Italy. They arrive to work among the less fortunate; Cecilia in a hospice for nuns and Margaret in an orphanage. They each befriend another nun who is more sexually experienced (Sister Gwen and Sister Luz, respectively). Another nun, who is strangely obsessed with them, jumps to her death. The priest turns out to be manipulating the main nun into giving birth to a child, and as both women (now mysteriously pregnant) seek to unravel the mystery of what’s happening, they encounter numerous deformed babies. In the end, both women give birth, very much against their will. Films with similar themes hitting theaters around the same time is nothing new—I’m old enough to remember the summer of Deep Impact/Armageddon, followed by the release of both Antz and A Bug’s Life a few months later. But the similarities both large and small between these two recent films is even more profound. And coming as they do just 18 months after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the federal protection for abortion rights, the films arrive as visceral manifestations of the deep anxieties that decision has unleashed in the US. Author Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a pioneer of “monster theory,” holds that horror fiction plays an important role in how a culture understands itself, particularly in relation to our fears and anxieties. He warns that societal tensions, traumas, and disruptions that create anxiety in a culture will manifest itself “symptomatically as a cultural fascination with monsters—a fixation that is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens.” (Monster Theory, p. 60) In other words, when we experience anxiety at a cultural level—for example, widespread fear about a woman’s access to safe medical treatment and whether she’ll retain autonomy over her own body—we should expect those anxieties taking the form of a monster we can domesticate (on the silver screen, for instance). We saw this in the 1970s in the wake of passing Roe vs Wade. Not quite two years after the landmark decision, the proto-slasher Black Christmas (1974) arrived in theaters. The film takes place at a sorority house at a university—notable because Harvard had only started admitting women to its undergraduate programs a decade earlier; many other Ivy League schools didn’t start until 1969. Final girl Jess personifies the fears of those who demonized women’s liberation: she is an independent, unmarried young woman who is pregnant and informs her boyfriend at the opening of the film she plans to get an abortion. One of the reasons Black Christmas is considered a proto-slasher is that Jess doesn’t embody the virginal values endorsed by conservative culture, and she’s not “punished” with a grisly end for her “transgressions.” She is the hero. Even still, the anxiety around her pregnancy—and particularly how it affects her boyfriend—drives the central mystery of the film. The Omen (1976) tells the story of a US ambassador who secretly adopts an infant after his wife gives birth to a stillborn child. The boy turns out to be the Antichrist and proceeds to kill his adoptive father, mother, and unborn sibling. Adoption has long been presented as an easy solution to unwanted pregnancies by anti-abortion activists, but The Omen reflects anxieties, however baseless and irrational, about the adoption process—can an adoptive parent really know the genetic heritage of their adopted child? What do they really know about the child they’re bringing into their home? What if the innocent baby turns out to be some kind of monster? (Yes, the question itself feels so monstrous it’s difficult to voice—which is why it ends up being sublimated into spectacle-filled horror films.) The decade ended with the (ahem) mother of all films about the fear of unregulated pregnancy: Alien (1979). The xenomorph attacks and impregnates humans by forcing its ovipositor down their throats and implanting a fetus in the chest cavity. All seems well, until the matured fetus suddenly bursts from the chest of its host, killing them. The xenomorph’s reproductive cycle is a funhouse mirror of human fertility, twisted into monstrous form. The titular alien is the embodied fear of fertility that’s not carefully controlled—and opponents of abortion rights argue that readily accessible abortions incentivize women toward sexual activity, since a pregnancy no longer need result in the birth of a child (those same opponents rarely extend this logic to men). All these films in one way or another express or explore anxieties around pregnancy unleashed by the federal guarantee of abortion rights. At the same time, another powerful cultural force was shifting in reaction to Roe: religion. Catholics have been the most historically consistent on abortion. Before 1973, Protestants saw abortion mainly as a Catholic issue—going back at least to Augustine, Catholic theologians categorized abortion as a sexual sin. It wasn’t until 1965 the Catholic Church categorized abortion as the taking of a life. Evangelicals, the other stridently pro-life group who’ve played an active part in the discussion around Roe, have traced a similar trajectory in recent decades. Southern Baptists before the 1980s wrote little about abortion. The Church of the Nazarene (the denomination in which I have my ministerial credentials) had no statement in its governing manual until 1976 (the Manual is updated quadrennially, so the 1976 edition is the first post-Roe Manual), and the statement in 1976 begins by permitting abortion when the life of the fetus or mother is threatened before going on to protest “abortion on demand.” The Southern Baptist Convention passed its first resolution on abortion in 1971—two years before Roe. The resolution called for the protection of fetal life but also called for legislation to protect the right for abortion in cases as varied as rape, deformity, and “damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” A professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary argued that “God is pro-choice.” The pastor of First Baptist Dallas, W. A. Criswell, said in reaction to Roe, “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” These statements stand in stark contrast to the positions held by the current leaders of those same institutions, reflecting a greater overall shift as abortion (and its increasing politicization) became a mobilizing issue for conservative evangelicals. The same anxieties about unregulated pregnancy that manifested in ’70s horror caused a sea change in American religious attitudes toward abortion legislation—especially among evangelicals. Professor and historian Kristen Kobes Du Mez observes that, by the end of the 1970s, abortion had become linked with second-wave feminism in the cultural imagination (as films like Black Christmas illustrate). Feminism presented a real challenge to evangelicals. As Du Mez stated in an interview with NPR: [F]or evangelicals, conservative evangelicals, gender difference is really foundational to their understanding of the social order. And they believe that God created men and women to be very different, even opposites. And the women’s primary calling is that of wife and mother. And so abortion also really severs that kind of biological or social relationship or threatens to do so. And for that reason, also, abortion is such a priority for evangelicals because it kind of strikes at the heart of their understanding of women and men and their understanding of how God has ordered society. Fast-forward to 2024. The US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, ending federal protection for abortion rights. Thirteen states immediately enacted “trigger laws,” written to go into effect the moment Roe was overturned, and thirteen more moved swiftly on legislation to ban abortions. Enter the twin terrors of Immaculate and The First Omen. The monster in these two films are the priests who parade as loving father figures but who really seek to control the innocent, pious young female bodies for their own ends. Specifically, both priests orchestrate pregnancies without the consent of the young nuns in their charge. They abuse their religious authority to exercise control over the womb of the young women—an act both films depict as monstrous and deeply wrong. Both films’ endings highlight the protagonist’s reassertion of her autonomy over her own body and her womb (though admittedly it works better in Immaculate, since it doesn’t have to bear the burden of a 40-year-old sequel). Fifty years ago, our culture created films to process our collective fears about what reproductive freedom could mean for women. Fifty years later, the world hasn’t ended and no Antichrists have been born (to my knowledge). With the overturning of Roe, however, new anxieties have come to the surface: Who do we trust when we can’t trust those in authority? Still trapped in a patriarchal system, what must a woman do for men to hear her? Will women ever truly have autonomy over their own bodies? If the 1970s are any indication, Immaculate and The First Omen are only the first wave of films that incarnate not an Antichrist, but the very real anxieties contemporary women experience over the way powerful men continue to wield religion to control women’s bodies and reproduction.[end-mark] The post <i>Immaculate</i>, <i>The First Omen</i>, and the Rise of the Pro-Choice Horror Film appeared first on Reactor.

Biden: Israel May Have Committed War Crimes, and Netanyahu Wants War to Keep Power