'You need an agenda'

'Criminal on the surface, but strategic in effect'

'Absolutely insane'

'Everyone living in my district is my constituent'

Books book reviews Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes is a Fun and Truly Creepy Space Horror In the vast emptiness of space, nothing is emptier than an abandoned ship… By Jenny Hamilton | Published on May 1, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Halley just needs to stay under the radar until her professional troubles blow over. Without government credentials, she can’t turn down a job no matter how shady it sounds—which is how she ends up taking a job on the Elysian Fields. Once vaunted as a holding area for the cryogenically frozen rich and powerful as they awaited a more advanced technology to bring them back to life, the Elysian Fields never fulfilled its promise. In Halley’s youth it was a museum, and now it’s not even that, just a piece of near-forgotten history haunted by the hologram AI versions of its founder’s children. I have to start this review by saying how happy I am that S. A. Barnes is now on her third book of really fun, truly creepy space horror. My space horror bona fides are wobbly in that I still haven’t watched any of the Aliens, so you may have to take it with a grain of salt when I attest that I love space horror and yearn to see more of it. (The only thing more horrifying is deep sea horror, which I am too terrified even to contemplate.) Space horror is always a haunted house story, and I love a haunted house story more than I love hot dinners. In the vast emptiness of space, nothing is emptier than an abandoned ship or planet or space station, and those spaces are exactly where S. A. Barnes thrives. I love it. I will read every single one, forever. No sooner does Halley board the Elysian Fields than she starts seeing things that aren’t quite right. She’s sure at first that she saw something moving—a monster—on one of the lower decks, but her supervisor, Karl, assures her it’s just a glitch in the cameras. And is she noticing real changes to the frozen bodies under her care, or is she losing her mind a lil bit because she never gets more than a couple hours of sleep at a time? The stillness of space provides the perfect canvas for horror, given that there’s nobody else on the ship but Karl (supposedly), and Halley can’t leave. A reader can roll her eyes at characters refusing to leave an obviously haunted house, but for Halley, there’s really no avenue for escape. Barnes allows the true horrors of the Elysian Fields to trickle out gradually, each small reveal building on the last. Cold Eternity leans heavily into the inherent horror of living forever. The Elysian Fields exists because one rich man, Zale Winfield (great name for a rich bastard), couldn’t bear the possibility of mortality. Relentless in his pursuit of a way to circumvent it, he convinced a whole ship full of rich people to gamble on a future technology that might revive them. I personally cannot understand the appeal. I have the depression. It sounds, in this economy, very restful to be dead. But here is a whole ship full of corpses who in life didn’t agree with me, and who had the money to make a desperate final gamble on the possibility of immortality. Buy the Book Cold Eternity S.A. Barnes Buy Book Cold Eternity S.A. Barnes Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The great insight of this book is that people who want to conquer death are simultaneously the most pitiable and the most dangerous people imaginable. (I say this as someone who has read that NYMag article about the vegan cult murders every day for the last several weeks.) Zale Winfield dedicated his life to pushing beyond the boundaries of mortality, and it’s obvious that such a desire is corrosive to society and corrosive to the people who are pursuing it. We see again and again that the seekers after immortality—Zale Winfield, Karl, even Halley’s parents in their own way—destroy the lives of those around them, and ultimately create the conditions for their own loss of self. At the risk of sounding like Emperor Joseph II, I have to say that Cold Eternity contained just slightly more plot elements than it could carry. Halley’s reason for taking the Elysian Fields job involves a hefty dose of political intrigue, involving a lot of off-screen characters and machinations we have to keep track of. This would have been fine, except that Halley also has a set of overbearing, amoral parents whose search for her keeps intruding into her present day and affecting her decisions. The two pieces of backstory together were just that little bit too much, especially because the parents never really became plot-relevant. I’d have much preferred Barnes to give that space to telling us more about Zale Winfield’s three children. Two of them worked for his company, one did not, and all three died unexpectedly before the Elysian Fields set sail. They’re now preserved as AI holograms aboard the ship, forever giving canned presentations on Zale Winfield and his dreams. Their story becomes important to the horrors unfolding on the ship, and I’d have liked to get a better sense of what they’re about—especially Aleyk, the rebellious youngest son. The entities Halley faces are vast and powerful and endlessly greedy, and she is, relatably, but one woman deprived of resources by the capitalist hellscape in which she lives. She can’t fix the problems in her present any more than she could fix the ones she’s fleeing from her past. All the choices available to her are bad ones. None will make the world good. The understanding she must reach is that truth stands outside of financial worries or political expediency. It exists—and has to exist—and will always exist—on its own merit. As we witness the real-world destruction of so many institutions dedicated to the advancement of truth and knowledge, it’s bracing to be reminded that it’s still worthwhile to stand up and say what’s true.[end-mark] Cold Eternity is published by Nightfire.Read an excerpt. The post <i>Cold Eternity</i> by S.A. Barnes is a Fun and Truly Creepy Space Horror appeared first on Reactor.

The Office of Personnel Management announced a proposed rule Thursday morning to stop including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) metrics and end grade inflation on senior bureaucrats’ performance evaluations. The proposed rule aims to reform the Senior Executive Service performance appraisal system. For several years, more than 96% of bureaucrats in the SES, top-level agency employees serving in leadership roles, have received high marks on performance reviews despite documented failures, according to the OPM. SES performance is graded on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “unsatisfactory” and 5 “outstanding.” In 2023, OPM claims, 96% of SES members received a 4 (“exceeds fully successful”) or a 5. Less than 0.5% received ratings below “fully successful.” The proposed rule would also eliminate any DEI component in SES evaluations, in line with President Donald Trump’s initiative to root DEI out of the federal government. As it currently stands, the Code of Federal Regulations requires federal government agencies to incorporate “leadership effectiveness in promoting diversity, inclusion, and engagement” into SES performance grades. The OPM proposed the new rule at the direction of the president. On his first day in office, Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum titled “Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives.” The president specifically called out the Senior Executive Service, and said he intended to “reinvigorate the SES system” and ensure “that SES officials are properly accountable to the president and the American people.” “The American people deserve a federal government led by executives who are held to the highest standards,” acting Director Chuck Ezell said in the OPM release. “This proposed rule restores accountability, rewards true excellence, and ensures senior leaders deliver real results. OPM is proud to take this important step to strengthen performance among the highest levels of the federal workforce.” The post Grade Inflation in Top Bureaucrats’ Performance Reviews? OPM Aims to End It appeared first on The Daily Signal.

HHS Releases 400-Page Report on Gender Affirming Care

On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt held yet another unusual morning press briefing, but this time, her guest was Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to provide barn-burning remarks on what the administration called President Trump’s first 100 days of “Restoring Common Sense.” Miller repeatedly took the liberal media — living in safe, wealthy confines — to task, particularly for choosing dangerous illegal immigrants over American citizens. He hit his crescendo in torching the leftist press when CBS’s Weijia Jiang asked whether the U.S. was doing anything to help bring home (alleged MS-13 gang member) Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Miller first said diplomatic discussions are not for public consumption and then thanked El Salvador for its willingness to take dangerous illegal immigrants out the U.S. But from there, he turned up the heat with a case of bias by omission: You may have seen recently an FBI assessment that was unclassified, that said that the Maduro regime is using and planning to use Tren de Aragua terrorists to carry out assassination plots on American soil. Now, very few in this room covered that. I’ll let you all ask yourselves why you didn’t cover it, and why your editors didn’t assign that story to you. That’s something I think you should think about on your own, but this is a Earth-shattering piece of news. As for Abrego Garcia, he went through the facts about Abrego Garcia the liberal media have ignored because they’re too busy “obsessively try[ing] to shill for this MS-13 terrorist.” Miller next struck at the heart of the liberal media’s obsession with “due process” for illegal immigrants by pointing out the victims of crimes by illegals weren’t granted any mercy. All the while, the liberal media coddle illegal immigrants from their luxurious and safe homes: Miller led off the proceedings with a series of remarks about areas in which he said President Trump has restored common sense. After highlighting Trump stopping “the wave of racial discrimination, so-called diversity, equity, in exclusion policies,” and far-left academia, he arrived at the issue of transgenderism (and then immigration). Watch Miller’s remarks below and you’ll see in the caption that this was greeted by the liberal press corps with crickets as nearly all the questions concerned tariffs: Once he finished extolling the administration’s work on illegal immigration, Leavitt kicked off the Q&A with the “new media seat”: Jiang’s first question concerned Amazon’s embarrassing faceplant when, prior to pushback from President Trump, considered putting a graphic on its Amazon Haul site to show added costs due to the new tariffs. Miller blasted this failed proposal by noting they never did this with the burdensome regulations imposed by California (click “expand”): JIANG: This administration has stressed the need for price transparency for things like health care bills and concert tickets. So why is it a political and hostile act for Amazon to display price transparency on consumer goods? MILLER: Well, I think it’s the wrong way of looking at it, which is why would — first of all, that proposal is gone now. But why would Amazon, of all the different things that go into a theoretical price input — right — for example, does Amazon list the cost of California’s regulations on everything made in California? Anything you make in California, you have a massive price increase because of the health care regulations that are unworkable in that state, because of the labor regulations that are unworkable in that state, because of the subsidies that go to illegal aliens in that state, because of all the bureaucracy. So, anything being produced in California has a massive built in price hike. So, why wouldn’t Amazon have a list saying if you purchase it in California instead of in Alabama, this is the premium that you pay, that you pay? This is a clear attempt by whoever proposed it originally. I don’t know, because Amazon says they’re never going to do it to try to undermine our trade negotiations with China. I make another important point on this, which is that there have been many complaints about the fact that there are a lot of products that are sold on Amazon that are actually rip offs of American products that are then stolen by China, and that they take our IP and they put them into products to try to undersell our manufacturers, so to the extent that we are engaged in labeling issues on Amazon, I would say that would be the most significant one to fix is making sure we’re not undercutting American consumers. It was left to Real America’s Voice’s Brian Glenn to not only close the briefing, but the only one to seek White House comment about former Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech from the night prior: To see the relevant transcript from the May 1 briefing, click here.

Government makes most things worse. Lyndon Johnson launched a War on Poverty; Richard Nixon a War on Drugs. Both had good intentions, but their “wars” do more harm than good. I believed the War on Poverty would lift people out of poverty. At the time I was a naive Princeton student who believed my professors when they said, “It’s wrong that in this rich country, people are poor, so government should fix that. Targeted programs will lift people out of poverty.” Have they? We’ve spent more than $30 trillion so far. Some people were helped. When welfare began, the poverty rate dropped ... dropped for seven years. But then progress stopped. Since the 1970s, the number of Americans living in poverty rose and fell, but the initial success hasn’t repeated. That’s because the handouts encourage people to become dependent. Welfare even discouraged marriage because a single parent gets a bigger check. As a result, welfare created something never seen before in America: a permanent “underclass” -- generations raised without fathers, generations who stay poor and passive. It’s happened because people “are basically told, ‘you can’t take care of yourself’... It doesn’t encourage them to be ambitious,” says Yaron Brook, head of the Ayn Rand Institute, in my new video. “Once you start paying people not to work ... they don’t expect to take responsibility for their own lives.” The War on Drugs also had unintended consequences. “When you launch a war on drugs ... you create huge profits for cartels because there’s so much at stake,” says Brook. That led to more illegal drugs, and “massive corruption among police.” I ask, just “let everybody take whatever poison they want?” “Yes,” says Brook, echoing Ayn Rand, who said it is “the responsibility of the individual not to take the kind of things ... which destroy his mind.” Brook and I disagree about how to protect the environment. It’s one area where I think we do need government. Our air and water are cleaner now because the Environmental Protection Agency set some rules. Brook says we could have accomplished that without the EPA, if individuals filed lawsuits. “You pollute in some way that is clearly making me sick, we have legal redress to deal with that ... But once you give it into the hands of bureaucrats ... they want to regulate and control every activity that we’re engaged in.” He cites California’s wildfires and water shortages as an example of “government gone wild.” (That’s also the title of my new book.) Government has grown wildly. Even with DOGE cuts, it will still grow. It always does. The EPA once imposed useful rules, but regulators always want more. Today, EPA should stand for Enough Protection Already! “Northern California has plenty of water,” says Brook. “In the old days, they used to move massive amounts of water from the north to south. ... These days, there’s still a lot of water available in the north that cannot be moved south because of some tiny little fish.” That’s the delta smelt, protected by the Endangered Species Act. “In the name of some little fish, they’re willing to shut down huge improvements to human life.” If it’s not the smelt, it’s an endangered plant. Power companies wanted to install fire-resistant metal poles. “They can’t widen fire lanes because there’s some plant that they had to uproot,” “They were shut down by environmentalists because of this crazy plant ... (also) they can’t widen fire lanes. The consequence, of course, is the burning down of thousands of homes. ... When you place the value of a plant above the value of human life, that leads to destruction of human life.” Brook’s point is not that people shouldn’t try to help the poor, the addicted, and the planet; it’s that individuals do it better than government ever will. “All these government programs that regulate and control, they institutionalize mediocrity at best.”

According to the left, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon is responsible for a “bloodbath” in the Department of Justice. The ACLU has claimed her record consists of restricting voting rights, transgender rights, and abortion access. Worse yet, the NAACP calls her a “grave threat to democracy.” Glenn Beck of “The Glenn Beck Podcast” couldn’t like her more, saying, “She’s the woman who will wrestle back that one piece of the DOJ from the clutches of wokeness and that has the deep state quaking in its boots.” And considering her stance on the issues the federal government uplifted and protected under Biden, the deep state certainly should be “quaking in its boots.” “We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute police departments based on statistical evidence, or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence. That’s not the job here. The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology,” Dhillon tells Glenn. Dhillon’s been on the job for a little over two weeks, and she’s already put multiple pieces of her plan into play. “The president signed an executive order targeting anti-Christian bias in federal agencies, and that tallies with some of our civil rights agenda, which is to protect the rights of people of faith throughout the United States, whether they’re in federal agencies or not,” Dhillon tells Glenn. “We’re aso going after the notorious anti-Semitic violence and discrimination happening throughout the United States, but specifically on American college campuses. The most elite campuses in the United States are the places where the most egregious violations are occurring,” she continues. Under the Biden administration, elderly and young Americans were also arrested and persecuted for the “crime” of praying outside abortion facilities under the FACE Act, which Dhillon is also taking a hammer to. “One of the first things that was done under the new administration was to dismiss multiple cases in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Ohio,” she explains. “We are not going to be pursuing these FACE Act cases other than an extraordinary circumstance involving death, serious bodily harm, or extreme property damage. And none of the recent cases have any of those fact patterns.” However, pro-life facilities that involve prenatal care have been violently attacked in the last few years. “We will aggressively go after them,” Dhillon says. “There were more than 200 incidents in the last few years of those kinds of facilities where people were counseled about their choices, about adoption, about keeping the baby.” “Those facilities have been violently attacked by activists with no action by law enforcement, federal or state. We will be going after those cases because every woman has a right to go into those facilities and get fair, open, and even, in some cases, religious-inflected advice about their choices with respect to the baby that they are growing in their body,” she adds. 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.