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Classical Egypt was controlled by the Roman Empire for 600 years, and in the excavations of a pet cemetery, archaeologists from Poland are discovering fascinating insights into the lives of the legionaries who lived there. Alongside the remains of beloved animals, letters on papyrus written by Roman centurions, or commanders, detail trade and military organization […] The post Relics Found in Egyptian Pet Cemetery: Evidence of Monkeys Imported from India and Centurion Letters of Papyrus appeared first on Good News Network.

News Alien: Romulus Another Trailer for Alien: Romulus Is Here to Make Your Ears Ring Place your bets on anyone’s survival now By Molly Templeton | Published on June 4, 2024 Screenshot: 20th Century Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: 20th Century Studios Clever, clever, clever. The new trailer for Alien: Romulus simplifies the classic Alien tagline: forget screaming. In space, no one can hear you, full stop. Well, except that they can, at least while there’s still anyone alive to scream, or hear the screaming. The next trip to Alien space comes courtesy of director Fede Álvarez (Evil Dead), is set between Alien and Aliens, and is full of graphic face-huggers (one might even be tempted to use a different word there) and backlit chestbursters and something in the water. It’s the worst when these bastards are in the water. There’s no more synopsis or description than there was with the last look at the film: “While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.” (Has scavenging ever gone well for anyone in a science fiction film or television program?) Romulus, which was co-written by Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues (based on characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett), has a gaggle of up-and-coming stars, including Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla), Archie Renaux (Shadow and Bone), and Isabela Merced (The Last of Us). Spaeny seems to be the most likely to survive, given the series’ track record, but we’ll have to wait and see what Álvarez has up his sleeve. [ed note: “Romulus” is also the saddest of all the sad Sufjan Stevens songs! Maybe… no one survives?][end-mark] The post Another Trailer for <i>Alien: Romulus</i> Is Here to Make Your Ears Ring appeared first on Reactor.

Books Dissecting the Dark Descent A Year Under the Knife: Reflecting on the First Year of Dissecting The Dark Descent Some highlights and new insights about classic horror fiction from the column’s first year. By Sam Reader | Published on June 4, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post. This column was initially going to be a discussion of Stephen King’s “The Monkey,” but given the egregious use of racial slurs in the story, I have elected not to cover it as part of this column. The use of racist slurs by white authors is never okay, in my opinion, and particularly not the way King employs them here. It is dismaying that such a story was written and published, and it is equally confusing and dismaying that David Hartwell saw fit to include this specific story out of King’s rather prolific output, since he used multiple King stories (and even shouts out Danse Macabre) in the anthology. As “The Monkey” is repugnant and I feel that its inclusion here was a dereliction on both the part of King and Hartwell, I have declined to cover it. Instead, I encourage the commenters and readers to recommend short horror stories by Black writers, with the constraint that the stories must have been published between 1880 and 1987, the time The Dark Descent covers. Should you wish to comment on this article, please consider including those recommendations below. And now, since we’ve just passed the first anniversary of Dissecting The Dark Descent, I hope you’ll join me in looking back on some of what I’ve discovered since starting this project last spring… It has been A Year. Capitalization is kind of necessary, I think. While the day-to-day details of life tend to be similar from one point to the next, looking back on a year can be overwhelming, especially when that year is something of a roller coaster. When I pitched this column, I was sort of between steady work and hustling at a clickbait site writing strategy guides and overedited listicles. Then, with one simple email from Bridget McGovern, my long-time (and long-suffering) editor, that changed. Suddenly my life was 20th century horror stories. That’s a big shift for anyone to go through, and that this wild little idea—which came out of asking “does this massive well-regarded horror anthology I bought as a lit-crit desk reference live up to its reputation?”—lasted a whole year and 20,000 words (and counting!) is frankly astonishing. Given that we’ve been with each other for about a year (and hopefully more), I thought it might be nice to reflect on a couple of my favorite columns, comment on the process of writing them, and share a few of the unexpected things I learned from putting classic horror stories on the dissection table. I hope you enjoy this trip through the past with me… Intro: “The Reach” by Stephen King, and Why Reading Order Matters While it was probably a noble effort for David Hartwell to arrange his work into three distinct streams with a section devoted to each, his attention to ordering his stories was a little inconsistent. This is probably why I focused on the authors more and on the arranger and his commentary less as the column has gone on. Still, since Hartwell repeatedly calls attention to his ordering in the book, what was initially a rambling comment to my dad one early December morning became an essay about how important it is for a short story collection to make a first impression. It’s weird going back to this and noticing how out-of-focus Hartwell eventually became as we’ve worked our way through the Table of Contents. Things became more about the specific authors and an attempt to discuss their work while only occasionally referring to their place in the anthology. I think that’s for the better. Hartwell’s a man of good taste and the works do have a kind of flow, but the stories are the real stars here. Small, Sinister Details: “The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson Somewhere in every story, there’ll often just be a single line or a phrase that’ll throw me. That’s the fun of fiction—you can read something a thousand times and because your brain is essentially processing large batches of words to make up a complex concept, something different might slip through the cracks each time. In this case, while there’s a lot of quiet menace to Jackson’s story, the thing that tied it all together was the opening scene, where the Allisons make fun of the locals. It’s an easy thing to miss, but the mean-spirited joke is an important part of the tableau—how many backwoods horror movies begin with someone making fun of the locals only to end up with a machete in the skull? Jackson’s style might offer a subtler approach to rural horror, but after this article, I started looking more for these small elements, the seemingly minor moments that would shift a story but played along the same kind of familiar tropes. “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Horrors of Hypocrisy and Moral Polarity When I saw “Young Goodman Brown” was on the horizon, Bridget was the one who reminded me of the Kate Beaton comic. Beaton’s work, a Bitter Karella Midnight Pals thread, and my own investigations into Hawthorne’s literary canon led me to think about the way he uses Puritans to construct a critique of guilt and moral rigidity. Two of my unstated goals in tackling this column are to show how horror is a less reactionary genre than people give it credit for, and how throwing a blanket over the past and waving it away as “it was a backward time and everything about it was awful” is an unhelpful oversimplification. Nathaniel Hawthorne wasn’t a man ahead of his time, but this story sees Satan implicating Brown in Colonial-era atrocities and focuses on the very human struggle of needing to be a good person while also processing a national and personal history of monstrous acts. That we’re still struggling with issues and traumas someone wrote about in the 1800s is disappointing, but the fact that someone two hundred years ago managed to get several things right about the human condition speaks to a deeper complexity we should expect and demand from the past. The Call is Coming From Inside the House: “If Damon Comes” by Charles L Grant I am still frustrated by the fact that Charles L. Grant, a man local to my home state (New Jersey being a very strange place), wrote about a suburb based on suburbs in the region where I grew up, and then promptly set the action in Connecticut. “If Damon Comes” was a weird story for me because it felt unnervingly familiar in many ways, which I think is why I like it. I feel like I know this story. It also made it hell and a half to write about until finally I managed to make the Silent Hill connection, as well as Grant’s use of Oxrun Station as a setting for his stories. The idea that something supernatural emanating from a nexus like Oxrun reached out and connected with Frank’s guilty conscience immediately gave the article a focus. There’s a weird undercurrent of processing guilt in the way I interpret a bunch of these stories, and I think it’s because I operate on the idea that the moment someone stops struggling with themselves is the true moment they become a monster. The Rot Goes Deep: “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe At the risk of bringing down the mood, this one felt a bit personal. I can’t play the guitar, I’m nonbinary, and my family tree is suitably genetically varied, so suppose I have the advantage over Roderick Usher.  I can’t deny there’s some self-deprecation going on in the article regarding the story’s focus on Roderick’s loneliness, resistance to change, living in a place where humidity’s an issue, and other concerns along those lines. With myself as a starting point, I just thought about how I’d talk about myself if I had some distance, and charged full speed ahead. Mental illness is a thing that can affect one’s environment and set up a feedback loop if left unchecked, and it’s a persistent worry of everyone who suffers from some form of depression or trauma that they’ll somehow be “stuck like this.” It’s a testament to Poe’s skill as a writer that he was able to weave elements gothic horror and witty potshots at the privileged into grim satire, and still create an honestly very real portrait of mental illness.   And on that note, we’ve made it through a year! I’d like to thank you all for coming along with me as I continue working my way through the horror canon. As you can see from the picture below, we’ve still got a ways to go, so please, join us in another two weeks when we stop by a shopping mall in Michael Bishop’s urban ghost story, “Within the Walls of Tyre.” Let us know if you have any favorite stories or discussions from the last year not covered above, and again, I would please ask that you please recommend your favorite horror story by Black authors (published between 1800 and 1987) that Hartwell could have included in this volume in place of “The Monkey.” See you in two weeks![end-mark] The post A Year Under the Knife: Reflecting on the First Year of Dissecting <i>The Dark Descent</i> appeared first on Reactor.

It’s been said that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist. Most of us remember the national election of 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic, sudden changes to election procedures, mysterious mail-in ballots, allegedly hacked voting systems, and legions of lawyers filing scores of lawsuits. I think we all remember the aftermath in 2021, as well. Thousands of angry conservative voters traveled to Washington, D.C., and entered the Capitol to protest the certification of the election after a surprise upset led to Joe Biden becoming the president. Then came the speculation: Did the Chinese hack voting machines to flip the vote in favor of Biden? Were countless mail-in ballots shoved into voting machines in the dead of night? Was Joseph R. Biden really the most popular presidential candidate in United States history even after running his entire campaign from a basement in Delaware? I’ve prosecuted election fraud cases, but I do not know the answer to any of those questions. That’s not what this article is about. It is about why you should never be afraid to question the results of an election. ‘I’m Not a Conspiracy Theorist, But … ’ Having been in the Texas Attorney General’s Election Integrity Division, I have had more than a few conversations with people who almost seem to feel guilty about talking to me about election concerns. They usually start out with the other person saying, “Well, I’m not a conspiracy theorist but …” That additional qualifier has never surprised me, considering how many risks there are associated with questioning the results of elections.   The moment anyone is in the vicinity of someone who claims an election was stolen, they risk becoming an “election denier.” A few notable attorneys who filed election contests have been threatened with losing their license to practice law and even imprisonment. More than 500 of the 1,265 people who were arrested after marching on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 are—more than three years later—still awaiting trial for what may ultimately amount to a misdemeanor conviction. The rest of us are constantly told by “experts” that there was nothing wrong with the 2020 election. But what if those experts were wrong? Reprimanding Fulton County Recently, the Georgia State Elections Board voted 2-1 to reprimand Fulton County after finding significant issues with the vote tally in the 2020 presidential election. The board’s investigation concluded there had been over 140 separate violations of election laws and rules not only related to how Fulton County tallied the initial vote, but also how it conducted its recount. It should be noted that the only vote against reprimanding Fulton County was from board member Janice Johnston and that was only because she felt the reprimand didn’t go far enough. She wanted a more comprehensive investigation conducted by the Georgia Attorney General’s Office. Out of a plethora of issues in how the election was conducted, the investigation also found that there were more than 3,000 duplicate ballots scanned during the recount. The Georgia Secretary of State’s general counsel declared that it’s inconclusive whether or how many of the 3,000 duplicates were included in the tabulated results. There were also more than 17,000 ballot images that are allegedly missing from the recount.  Keep in mind that Fulton County’s initial hand recount shortly after the election awarded 1,300 additional votes to Trump, and while the current numbers would not change the outcome of the election, an open question of whether there are potentially more than 4,000 votes not properly accounted for in a swing state election that was decided by only 11,000 votes is—to say the least—problematic. The Georgia secretary of state’s position appears to be that the initial count, the hand recount, and the machine recount are all relatively similar and therefore not a cause for alarm. When Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was asked directly about allegations of election fraud, he said, “No, the numbers are the numbers … . The numbers don’t lie.”  That seems like a difficult conclusion to reach when his organization seems to not be sure what the numbers are. It also somehow seems worse to imply that more than 140 violations of election laws were committed by the election administrator’s office for the state’s most populated county by incompetence rather than malfeasance. Compare Raffensperger’s lack of enthusiasm with the efforts to remove Sidney Powell’s law license, or the criminal indictment of former President Donald Trump currently pending in Fulton County, both of which stem from the actions they took (or are alleged to have taken) in response to issues arising out of the way Fulton County ran the 2020 presidential election. In fact, the results of Georgia’s inquiry stand in contrast to the popular talking point that Trump’s allegations were so spurious that even individuals in his own administration refuted his claims of election irregularity. Internal Dissenters’ Willful Blindness For example, Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, who claimed on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”   Not only does it now seem that Krebs was wrong, but less than a month after making that statement, it was publicly reported that Krebs and his agency had been unaware of what could be one of the largest cyberattacks of our national infrastructure in history. There was also then-Attorney General Bill Barr publicly declaring on Dec. 1, 2020, that the Department of Justice and the FBI had not uncovered evidence of “widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the election”—after an investigation he had called for only three weeks prior. In Texas, after we received an allegation of election fraud, our team of investigators and attorneys—who are already familiar with Texas election law—would seek to contact the election administrator for the county the allegation originated from to obtain their records of the election. Those records were often voluminous and would take time to review. We would then make attempts to speak to witnesses, including the voters, to determine whether there had been fraud or irregularities in the voting process. We would investigate whether those who cast suspicious ballots were qualified to vote, whether they typically voted by mail or in person, whether their vote in that election came from their listed home address or somewhere else, whether they are even aware a vote was cast in their name, and sometimes even whether they are alive or deceased. Consider that there were 81,139 votes—in Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, combined—which separated Trump from Biden in the election. Among those four states, there were approximately 12,883,742 total ballots cast. Neither of those numbers would include instances where ballots had been destroyed. The time it took for Georgia to issue its findings on Fulton County alone took three years. At the time of Barr’s statement, the FBI only had a total of 13,245 special agents in the entire bureau, spread out across the United States and other parts of the world. Even if the Justice Department devoted all its resources and limited the scope of their investigations to the largest counties of those four states, it would have taken several weeks just to compile evidence, much less come to a definitive conclusion just for one of those states. There is also the question whether Barr even wanted the Department of Justice to be involved. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, William McSwain, claimed that Barr told him to stand down on investigating election fraud allegations, instead ordering him to refer any complaints to the state of Pennsylvania. While Barr disputes McSwain’s account, other witnesses testified under oath to receiving the same guidance. In December 2020 an “irate” Bill Barr called investigators looking into Jesse Morgan’s claim of hundreds of thousands of completed mail-in ballots hauled across state lines to “STAND DOWN”“‘I told you you need to stand down on this.’“[He was] agitated, to say the least.” pic.twitter.com/orzqQFL245— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) April 4, 2024 So, when Barr said he had not seen evidence sufficient to conclude that fraud would have changed the results of the election, it seems that is exactly what he meant. He hadn’t seen fraud that would change the outcome. That would be difficult to find for someone unfamiliar with election fraud—and not interested in looking for it. So-Called Fact-Checkers’ Echo Chamber Nevertheless, Barr’s statements are a common talking point for media “fact-checkers,” who are adamant that election fraud is a myth.   Take for example how fact-checkers handled allegations of Jesse Morgan. Morgan was a post office contractor who claimed that 288,000 pre-filled ballots had been shipped into the state of Pennsylvania in trailer that somehow mysteriously vanished after being delivered to a post office. As a former prosecutor, the fact that the investigation by the U.S. Postal Service and the FBI only concluded that Morgan’s claims could not be corroborated, while Morgan himself was never charged with making a false statement to a federal agent seems to me to mean that the investigation was inconclusive. That is, neither confirming, nor denying his account. If that’s the case, then we are left with the notion there is no security camera footage, records, manifests, receipts or explanation for a missing post-office trailer allegedly containing 288,000 ballots that was left inside a secured post-office motor pool, or that it was just a shoddy investigation. That didn’t stop the Dispatch and PolitiFact from concluding that Morgan’s allegations were false in their entirety based on the aforementioned sound bite from Barr, and the Postal Service’s largely redacted report. More dubious fact-checks come from The New York Times. It fact-checked 15 separate statements from Trump about the 2020 election. In the interest of brevity, I’d like to go summarize what I personally took from just a few: Trump claimed surprise ballot dumps changed the outcome of the election overnight. The Times fact-checked this as false, because there were just a lot of mail-in ballots that took a long time to count. Trump claimed mail-in ballots were a corrupt system. Times fact-checkers concluded this was false, because experts say voter fraud is rare. Trump claimed the recount in Georgia was meaningless because there was no signature verification. The Times concluded this was also false, before oddly explaining how signatures cannot be verified during recounts because ballots are separated from the carrier envelope that contains the voter’s identifying information. Trump claimed the Pennsylvania secretary of state and the state Supreme Court abolished signature verification requirements for mail-in ballots. The Times said this was misleading, because the Pennsylvania State Election Code never required signature verification in the first place. Trump claimed that in Georgia only 0.5% of ballots were rejected in 2020 compared with 5.77% in 2016. The Times said that was also misleading, because the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes the 5% total increase in accepted ballots was likely just due to the addition of a curing mechanism for Georgia mail-in ballots. Other popular rebuttals stem from the 2020 election contests. The 2020 general election was easily the most litigated in my lifetime. According to some news outlets, Trump and Republicans filed over 60 election challenges, losing almost all of them. The results of the 2020 election cases always seem to be the easy way out of any debate over the election results. Why wouldn’t they be? The judges found there was no election fraud. Case closed. Except they kind of didn’t. Democratic Operatives and the ‘Steele Dossier’ For background, a large bulk of the work against the 2020 presidential election contests was done by the law firm of Marc Elias. Formerly of Perkins-Coie, Elias is notably famous (or infamous) for his involvement with the entirely debunked opposition research against Trump known as the Steele Dossier. Ironically, Elias also thinks Russians intervened in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton. In addition to being at the forefront of litigating election lawsuits on behalf of Democrats, Elias’ law firm also seeks “favorable advisory opinions” from the Federal Election Commission on behalf of Democratic candidates. They are unashamedly pro-Democrat, and to put it mildly, they are very committed to what they do. Elias’ win record speaks for itself, and I’m not discounting his firm’s successes, but the 2020 general election was an easy playing field. In election contests, “the tie goes to the runner,” and all he and his team have to do to win is make sure that none of the allegations of fraud in any of the election contests are considered sufficient to warrant discounting the results. This was made all the easier because judges have a hard time with any case involving an election. Legal Timeliness and Standing Take for example Trump v. Biden, where the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Trump’s suit was barred by the legal doctrine of laches. That is to say that Trump’s allegations were reasonable, but the case had been brought too late for courts to act. To quote the court, “the time to challenge election policies such as these is not after all ballots have been cast and the votes tallied.” Essentially, a candidate shouldn’t wait to get cheated out of an election before they sue over it. A similar result occurred in Kistner v. Simon in Minnesota. In that case, the petitioners filed their lawsuit within days of the postelection review, but the court concluded two claims were barred as they should have been brought before the election, and for the third claim, the court found the petitioners failed to provide service to the other county officials required by Minnesota election laws. In Arizona’s Ward v. Jackson, the Arizona Supreme Court classified instances where a “duplicate ballot did not accurately reflect the voter’s apparent intent as reflected in the original ballot” as a mere error, and held that it did not believe there were enough of these “errors” to overturn the results of the election. Also stated by the court: “Where an election is contested on the ground of illegal voting, the contestant has the burden of showing sufficient illegal votes were cast to change the result.” It is not enough to prove there was fraud, you must prove there was enough fraud to change the outcome. In Donald J. Trump for President v. Way, the New Jersey federal district court declined to hear a challenge to the New Jersey governor’s executive order No. 177, which directed the state to send mail-in ballots to all registered voters and extended ballot counting to all ballots received up to 48 hours after the polls closed on Election Day. After the suit was filed, the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a bill codifying the governor’s decree, thereby making it law. One of the bill’s co-sponsors allegedly claimed that the bill’s purpose was to “undermine the Trump campaign’s lawsuit.” Changing the Rules in the Middle of the Game The court’s ruling in that case was that it would defer to the state on whether to suddenly change election rules in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sidney Powell’s suit in Wisconsin, Feehan v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, was dismissed after the court ruled a Wisconsin voter and potential elector lacked standing to contest the election process in Wisconsin. The federal District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania came to the same conclusion in Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Boockvar. The result was the same in Nevada in Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Cegavske. Also from Nevada is my favorite postelection opinion by far, Law, et al. v. Whitmer, et. al. In that case, the judge stated that he considered witness declarations—typically statements submitted under the penalty of perjury—to be “hearsay of little or no evidentiary value,” citing that per Nevada’s election code, election contests “shall be tried and submitted so far as may be possible upon depositions … .” At the time of this suit, America was still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and many courts were not even permitting contested hearings out of fear that several people in an enclosed space listening to live testimony could spread the virus. That prohibition often extended to requests to take someone’s deposition, which was a hurdle I ran into in some of my own cases. Before reading this opinion, I would have thought that “so far as may be possible” under those circumstances would be broad enough to increase the viability of sworn statements to be presented as evidence. I would have been wrong. Considering the court’s order only gave the contestants from Nov. 17 to Dec. 3 to gather their evidence and granted only 15 depositions to both sides, it’s not clear what evidence the judge expected them to be able to marshal. I’m not insinuating there was bias, but it feels that way, reading the 10 paragraphs devoted to just bolstering the credibility of the defense expert compared to the five paragraphs the judge spends on the why he felt the entirety of the evidence presented by the other side was inadequate. Procedural vs. Evidentiary Reasons The bottom line is, a significant number of the election challenges brought in 2020 appear to have been thrown out for procedural reasons, rather than evidentiary ones. In the few cases where election fraud was discussed, the courts seemed to consistently hold that those bringing the case hadn’t shown enough fraud.  Just don’t tell the fact-checkers at Reuters that. Going into the election of 2024, it’s not even clear who will be able to successfully contest a national election. Neither voters nor electors appear to have standing to contest an election in their own state, and at least a state attorney general and House Representatives do not have standing to challenge elections in other states.  Those who do make it past the standing requirement only have weeks to depose as many witnesses as it takes to prove that enough fraudulent ballots were counted to change the result of the election. If you’re unfamiliar with an election case, that could potentially mean finding thousands of fraudulent ballots in less time than it would take to contest a speeding ticket. Good luck with that.  The silver lining in all of this is that a byproduct of the controversies surrounding the 2020 presidential election is that we are at least talking about it. And the public outcry has been substantial. Once a niche topic, election integrity is now at the forefront of public discourse, and several states—including Georgia—are engaged in massive undertakings to identify vulnerabilities in their electoral process and have already taken steps to pass new laws seeking to prevent election integrity issues.   When Texas ran into hurdles with its high criminal court declaring it was unconstitutional for Attorney General Ken Paxton to unilaterally prosecute election fraud, the voters responded by voting out three of the eight justices who signed on to the opinion, and they were the only three up for reelection. I do not know what happened in 2020, and I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2024. But I do know election fraud exists, and it has been around for a long time. So long as there are ways to cheat the system to obtain power, there will be people seeking to take advantage of them. I also know that behind every successful election challenge, investigation, prosecution, and legislation are individuals courageous enough to come forward and question the results when something seems off. That courage is becoming less and less rare after 2020, and it will be a force to be reckoned with in 2024. That’s why I encourage everyone to never be afraid to question the results of an election when they see something suspicious, and act on those suspicions.   Maybe you win, maybe you lose, but the only way it will change is if you’re not afraid to talk about it. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Many Reasons You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Question Election Results appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Joe Biden’s upcoming executive order on the border is a political ploy to get more votes in the 2024 presidential election, Republican senators said at a press conference Tuesday morning. Biden is expected to announce executive actions on Tuesday to address the southern border crisis, though his previous orders have promoted open borders and allowed more than 8 million illegal migrants to enter the country. Biden had his entire presidency to secure the border, yet he waited to act until right before the election, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said. “When he signs this executive order,” Cruz said, “the only question anyone should ask is, ‘Why didn’t you do this in 2021? Why didn’t you do this in 2022? Why didn’t you do this in 2023? Why don’t you do this last month or the month before or the month before? How many dead bodies is enough?'” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who hosted the press conference with Cruz, said he thinks Biden has no intention of enforcing the order issued just five months before the presidential election. “He’s issued 94 executive orders since he’s been president of the United States,” he said. “But he’s waited until today to actually do what he calls effective action to the border. And my question to him is why did you wait until now, if you’re serious about doing it? The simple answer is he’s not serious about securing the border.” “This is a political cover, and the American people will not be fooled,” Cornyn continued. Throughout his presidency, Biden has demonstrated an unwillingness to enforce the law, Cornyn said. “The numbers of people coming across have just been unprecedented, along with the drugs that have come across that have taken the lives of 108,000 Americans including 71,000 due to fentanyl the leading cause of death among 18- to 45-year-olds,” Cornyn said. “And then there’s the 400,000 unaccompanied children that have been placed with sponsors in the United States and simply lost by the Biden administration.” Cornyn added that former President Donald Trump told him in a phone call Tuesday morning that if elected, he will secure the border and deport hundreds of thousands of illegals. “The only policy change that will work is to have mass deportations because people will stop coming when they see people leaving,” he said. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said the executive order displays Biden’s border hypocrisy. “For three years, President Biden told us all there is no crisis at the southern border for reasons clearly stated on the teleprompter and his plan to deal with the crisis at the border was to pretend that there wasn’t a crisis at the border,” Kennedy said. When the American people woke up to the crisis, Biden tried to say he didn’t have the power to fix it, but the American people saw through him, and he pretended to have an epiphany and become a border hawk, Kennedy said. “This is most one of the most cynical things that I have ever seen a politician attempt to do five months before an election,” Kennedy added. “It is insulting. It is cheap. … The American people see that, and I hope I hope you do, too.” Biden isn’t addressing the crisis, he’s maintaining a catastrophe, Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., argued. Biden discarded Trump-era border policies, which brought immigration to a 40-year-low. “He’s trying to show the American people that he’s taking steps, but we’re not going to believe it,” Ricketts said. “If he were serious, he would implement the Trump-era policies that so successfully brought the numbers of illegal people crossing our border down. He is not serious.” From the first day of Biden’s presidency, it has been clear we have an open border, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., argued. Cruz said the invasion of the southern border is the number one issue in his home state of Texas. Biden inherited the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years when he came into office, but he chose to break the system, the Texas Republican added. “We have not had a week go by when someone is not shot, someone is not murdered, a child is not raped by an illegal immigrant released by Joe Biden and the Democrats,” Cruz said. Ricketts said he was proud to join his Republican colleagues in calling the president to secure the southern border and protect the American people. “He is endangering our country,” Ricketts warned, “and the American people will not buy this political ploy.” The post ‘INSULTING’: Senate Republicans Say Biden Won’t Enforce Border Security Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DePaul University Professor Fired over Optional Course Assignment

Joe Biden Seems Out of Touch With Reality In This Time Magazine Interview

Japan is looking to revitalize its dying whaling industry – and the unveiling of their new “mothership” shows they mean business. Japan’s new whaling factory ship, the Kangei Maru, set sail on its maiden voyage from the port of Shimonoseki on May 21, according to Japanese media.The $48 million ship is a colossus, measuring 112.6 meters (369 feet) long and 21 meters (68 feet) wide, and weighing around 9,299 tons. It’s been designed to travel distances up to a range of 13,000 kilometers (almost 8,100 miles) sufficient to travel to the Antarctic Ocean.The so-called mothership will allow smaller whaling boats to bring back harvested whales to a central hub. According to Kyodo Senpaku, the whaling company that owns the Kangei Maru, the vessel even contains an onboard processing unit where the whale meat is butchered, checked for quality, and frozen. “We will work as one to maintain whaling culture for eternity,” Hideki Tokoro, president of Kyodo Senpaku, told reporters during the ship’s departure ceremony.         The news comes after the Government of Japan announced on May 9 that whalers will now be allowed to hunt fin whales, bringing the number of commercial whaling species in the country to four, along with minke whales, Bryde’s whales, and sei whales. Japan’s decision to ramp up its whaling operations was met with outrage from international conservation organizations who described the move as an “appalling step backwards.” “These new plans to hunt fin whales are incredibly alarming. These are the second biggest whale on earth. Killing whales causes significant suffering due to the size of the animals, not to mention the fact that considerable time often passes between the first harpoon strike and death,” Nicola Beynon, head of campaigns at the Australian branch of the Humane Society International (HSI), said in a recent statement about the launch of Kangei Maru.“All whale species are battling a range of threats in their marine environment including climate change, noise pollution, ship strikes and fisheries bycatch. There is no nutritional, scientific or moral justification for killing these magnificent ocean giants, so the launch of the Kangei Maru is a chilling sight at a time when the imperative to conserve rather than kill whales is so urgent,” continued Adam Peyman, HSI’s director of wildlife programs.Japan resumed commercial whaling in June 2019 after its controversial withdrawal from the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the intergovernmental panel that regulates the whaling industry. Commercial whaling has been banned since the IWC’s moratorium in 1982, although it continued to allow countries to kill whales for special purposes, such as scientific research and Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling.Over 80 nations signed the agreement that came into being in 1986. However, several countries – namely Norway, Denmark/Greenland, Russia, Iceland, and Japan – continued to flout the ban and hunt whales under the guise of scientific research.Japan’s latest push to bring back whaling was accompanied by a savvy PR campaign that attempts to respond to the “one-sided anti-whaling media that dominates the world.” They claim that many whale populations have recovered to such an extent they are a “concern for marine ecosystems, consuming several times more fish than humanity's entire fishing catch.” In reality, some whale populations have recovered in recent decades – primarily because of the IWC halt on whaling – but many have failed to recover to pre-whaling levels. Those that have recovered now face a myriad of new species threats, from climate change and pollution.This is all without mentioning the slow, agonizing deaths that whales are subjected to in commercial whaling hunts.

For Ancient Egyptians, the Nile was the source of life itself: it irrigated their crops and fed their animals; it was a highway and a compass; it even underpinned their religious beliefs. But while some of the Ancient Egyptians’ beliefs may seem naïve – even amusing – to us here in the 21st century, a new study out of the University of Southampton has shown that on this one, at least, they were right on the money.“Although the Nile is one of the largest rivers in the world and played a central role in ancient Egyptian life, little is known about its response to climatic change during the Holocene,” explains the paper.But “climatic and environmental changes have shaped the landscape of the Egyptian Nile Valley over the past 11,500 years, including the civilization of ancient Egypt,” the authors write – to the extent that the river’s evolution over this time may be what allowed the pharaonic society to thrive at all.“UNESCO World Heritage sites such as the Karnak and Luxor temples [are] located east of the present Nile and the royal cult temples and necropoleis [are] on the western desert margin – places that were both physically and mythologically connected to the fluvial landscape,” the authors explain. “In addition, it is possible that the changing environment also impacted the regional agro-economy, which was of critical importance to the success of the ancient Egyptian state.”It’s a big step in the field of Nile-ology. That’s partly because of a lack of investigation at all, the paper notes, with most previous research on the river being carried out in a few select spots, and hardly any concentrating on how the Nile itself shifted and reshaped itself over time. But equally, there’s the technological aspect of such an undertaking: the fact is, the researchers point out, that there’s simply not been enough data so far to make reliable reconstructions of the Nile’s evolution possible.So, the team decided to find the information for themselves. “We drilled 81 boreholes, many by hand, across the whole Nile Valley near Luxor – a genuine first for Egypt,” explained Dominic Barker, a Technician in Archaeology at the University of Southampton and one of the co-authors of the paper, in a statement. “Using geological information contained within the cores, and dating the sediments using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence we were able to piece together the evolution of the riverine landscape.”And what they discovered may hold the key to ancient Egypt’s success. It happened suddenly, they found, about 4,000 years ago, when the Nile underwent a major change in its behavior and environment: after some 7,500 years of significant valley incision, in which the river would have been quite narrow, cutting deep into the bedrock below, it abruptly shifted. Now, large amounts of sediment were being deposited on the valley floor, building up the riverbed and greatly increasing and stabilizing the surrounding floodplain.“The expansion of the floodplain will have greatly enlarged the area of arable land in the Nile Valley near Luxor (ancient Thebes) and improved the fertility of the soil by regularly depositing fertile silts,” explained Benjamin Pennington, a Visiting Fellow in Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton and co-author of the paper.It also marked the start of the evolution towards today’s iconic mega-river – a characterization that didn’t really exist until about 2,000 years ago, the researchers explained. “The Egyptian Nile we see today looks very different from how it would have been throughout much of the last 11,500 years,” said Pennington. “For most of this time, the Nile was made up of a network of interwoven channels that frequently changed their course.”What prompted such a sudden and drastic change? It’s not certain, but the answer likely comes down to the once-lush Sahara desert – and, more specifically, its move towards becoming the sandy expanse we know today. Combined with the impacts of human settlements, this new arid environment would have increased the levels of fine sediment in the river and decreased the volume of water, thus transforming the characteristics of the Nile.And while the case for this being the catalyst for the Egyptian civilization isn’t water-tight, the timing is definitely noteworthy. This major change to the most important river in Northern Africa seems to have occurred roughly exactly at the shift from the Old to the New Kingdom – a time when Egyptian civilization went through a period of never-before-seen prosperity and achievement. “No specific causal links can be inferred between this shift and any contemporaneous social developments,” cautioned Pennington. “[But] the changes in the landscape are nonetheless an important factor that need to be considered when discussing the trajectory of Ancient Egyptian culture.”The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.