'The 91-year-old legendary star grinned from ear-to-ear as she cemented her hands and feet'

Books Terry Pratchett Book Club Terry Pratchett Book Club: Snuff, Part IV In which we get a lesson in the possibilities offered by retroactive law-making. (Just kidding, we get lectured by our boss.) By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on June 21, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share How do you convince the world that certain people aren’t vermin? With a stage, of course. Summary They unlatch the Wonderful Fanny from the barges behind her once all the goblins are through. Stratford shows up again; he and Vimes begin a life-or-death scrap that Vimes is losing when Stinky shows up and jumps the man. Stratford manages to get Stinky off and stomps him, leading Vimes to knock him out and tie him up. The ship gives a great lurch again and Vimes is knocked out as he’s tossed overboard. He wakes in the Quirm Zoo, where a few Quirmian Watch officers get him up to speed. Everyone is safe, but Stratford has vanished and goblins have been sent on—Vimes insists they get a boat to catch the one carrying them, and Acting Captain Haddock hears that Wee Mad Arthur has been picked up and is looking for Vimes. They all get on board a ship and chase down the ship carrying the goblins (and Stratford, Vimes presumes), which stops without a fight and offers to give up the man they’re looking for. They drag him to the deck; it turns out to be Jethro. Vimes threatens to have the ship impounded and its captain (whose name is Murderer) brought up on far more serious charges if he doesn’t say who paid him to kidnap Jethro and transport the goblins. Jethro asks to fight the first mate, who was cruel to him while he was prisoner on their ship. Jethro lays the first mate out in one punch, and Vimes gets all his names for the next part of this journey; his quarry cannot run at this rate, so he decides to head back to his family with Feeney, aboard the Black-Eyed Susan. Vimes passes out as they chug through the night and wakes to find Nobby waiting on the shore and a temporary clacks tower gone up on Hangman’s Hill. Detritus is up at the house for protection; they’re still waiting on Fred’s arrival. Vimes goes up to the house to talk to Young Sam about milking goats and get thoroughly snogged by his wife, who is very impressed with his heroics. He asks her if she didn’t discuss this trip with Vetinari, and if, possibly, this entire trip hadn’t been his idea from the start, but Sybil insists that she can’t remember, plus they both look out for Vimes, so what does it matter. He takes Young Sam on a walk to see the new clacks, which is being manned by a fellow named Tony and Stinky. A young lady goblin has taken a shine to Nobby. Fred has been cured by a goblin who took the pot off him. Vimes finds Sybil in the rose garden. She tells him about having a conversation with Lady Rust, who tried to get her on their side. She’s furious that Lady Rust thinks they’re the same. They watch the young lady goblin, Shine of the Rainbow, cook snails in front of Young Sam and Nobby, and Sybil suggests that perhaps this might be a good match for Nobbs. Vimes finds that Jethro has been made a copper by Feeney, and has word that more people are confessing to what happened to the goblins years ago. He heads down to the pub, where a local man tries to apologize on behalf of the community. Vimes doesn’t absolve them, but he does open a tab for them all evening. Then Vimes’s family get on the Roberta E. Biscuit to Quirm, and the barman winds up making a drink named after him (which Vimes actually has a few of), and he hears someone note that the barman isn’t the usual man on the boat. That man (Stratford) heads into the room where he assumes Young Sam is sleeping. Vimes is waiting for him. (Willikins made him non-alcoholic versions of the cocktail; he’s completely sober.) Stratford wants to turn king’s evidence, and Vimes agrees to take him to Vetinari. While Vimes shows Young Sam around Quirm, Sybil writes letters to all the right people and begins to change minds about goblins. Sybil and Young Sam head home and Vimes goes back to the manor. A big to-do is happening at the Ankh-Morpork Opera House as Vimes heads into the pub (now the Commander’s Arms), and waits. Sybil presents Tears of the Mushroom, to play before the elite of the city. The Times runs a very poetic piece about the performance. Vimes opens a tab at the pub, but not before letting folks know that the magistrates are being brought up on charges, and that the goblins are their neighbors now and subject to the same laws. Miss Beedle hugs Vimes and thanks him. The Colonel Makepeace approaches, nervous about what will become of his wife, but Vimes tells him not to worry too much and that she probably won’t serve time in prison. As Stratford is being transported from Quirm, he escapes, but Willikins is waiting for him: He’s believes that justice will only be served if Stratford dies, and gives him a chance to fight. Stratford doesn’t make it. Vimes goes to see Vetinari later on, and gets a talking to for creating and acting under laws retrospectively and generally causing a lot of headache for his boss. Rust’s son is going to pay hefty fines and be sent to Fourecks, which doesn’t make anyone happy, but is the best Vetinari can do without causing far worse problems down the line. Sybil insists that Vimes take another vacation in a few months, since this one barely counted. About a year later, they are invited to Emily Gordon’s wedding to an Ankh-Morpork pottery maven and her sister Jane dedicates her first book to Vimes: Pride and Extreme Prejudice. Commentary So… how do we measure sentience? The book lets you gaze down into a chasm here and form your own opinions about what happens. And I think the steps it takes are absolutely essential: Vimes is first. He believes that goblins are sentient probably from the point where he investigates that crime scene. The suffering is what tips him directly onto their side, and that’s consistent for him; people being hurt or derided or thought of as less than. Because he knows what that feels like, and has always felt it was wrong deep down in his bones. Feeney is next because Vimes tells him to get on board. Sybil after that—because of the music. Everyone else after that… because of the music. As with all moments like this in Pratchett’s work, the right thing comes from a bittersweet act. The sweeter side of this is the acknowledgment that art is very often what unites us, teaches us, motivates and connects us. Art is how we communicate, and one of the key markers of sentience as we know it. The drive to create for the pleasure and satisfaction of the act itself, and the need to connect with others through that act. It is how we know who we are. But the bitter is the inverse thought: that someone should have to prove their sentience through an act of personal creation. That without the ability, the chance of any laws being quickly passed to assure their protections and rights could never exist in the first place. Because people know that the emotional appeal is always more successful; we’re emotional beings and that’s what we respond to. Technically—and this is even more important—Felicity Beedle and Jethro Jefferson were first before Vimes. Felicity because she lived among them; she is part of them. She knew that teaching music to goblins would be an avenue of salvation because she was forced to bend to humanity’s rules. And Jethro was willing to stand for them from the beginning. He was the only one, and he was only a kid when he did it. The instant that he was mistreated by those with power, he recognized that hierarchy was a sham, and it changed his entire outlook on life. The resignation Vimes holds in his heart for people, the wish (and fervent hope) that we were all better, and the knowledge that we’re often not, is perhaps one of the most devastating tools of the Watch books. Sam Vimes doesn’t believe that people can be perfect, but he does believe in them. Which makes his disappointment that much harder to bear. As he says to the locals at the pub when one of them tries to explain why none of them stopped the magistrates from shipping the goblins away: “You could have done something. You could have done anything. You could have done everything. But you didn’t, and I’m not sure but that in your shoes I might not have done anything, either. Yes?” Because that’s the other ugly truth in all of this: Vimes knows that what drives him to action are what he perceives as great injustices. He also knows that he’s in a very unique position to solve them. Which makes it a lot easier to do something about it when he comes across them. So he knows the people of the Shires were wrong, but he also knows that without his specific outlook and his helpful rank(s) and his enormous piles of wealth and his connection to an ancient force… he might as well be another face in that crowd. There was one of Jethro and an endless supply of everyone else. And then he gets home and still gets a talking-to from his boss because he did pretty much everything here completely outside the book. Though, in honesty, I think that Vetinari’s real problem is that Vimes did exactly what he wanted in not entirely the best way possible, making his cleanup harder than he would like, and that Vimes also has assets like Sybil to call upon when everything seems impossible. Be fair, Havelock, they’re all ultimately your assets at the end of the day. You’re just cranky about the crossword. But the real check-in is about Stratford in their meeting. In truth, Vetinari is right that Vimes cannot and should not count upon retroactive law in the future because that is a slope so slippery it’s coated in oil and ice, but the murder is what matters most. He needs to be certain that Vimes did not seek revenge against Stratford because that wouldn’t be a clever loophole that he exploited just this once. It would be a betrayal of the clear line they’ve drawn to keep each other accountable all these years. And because Vimes did not cross it—and never truly intended to, importantly—Vetinari lets him go with a warning that he’s about to get written into the history books again. Their checks and balances remain true, and boy are they grumpy about it. And pleased about it. They’re weird like that. With this book we have the last Watch tome. This is one of the few books that makes a significant jump in time when compared to the rest, and that we can see how different some of the characters are, in ways superficial (Vimes trading snuff for smoking most of the time and trying his best to eat healthy for Sybil’s sake) and profound (Vimes is so comparatively relaxed in his book? and so is Vetinari, at least professionally when he’s in front of people he trusts). A nice way to see this group off. Asides and little thoughts Okay, “Stinky don’t need no badges” as a riff on “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges” from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is not where I was ever expecting that to go, but that’s on me, I should have seen it coming. The Rue de Wakening? Are you kidding me? Love the idea of Nobby finding a goblin partner. And I hope Fred internalizes a few things from this experience? In a longterm way. With relevance to the time jump, I feel like we need to talk about the horniness of this book. Because we deal a lot with bodily functions and the rest, but this book is also the only one where Vimes and Sybil are all over each other at points? And it’s so cute? And this might just be down to comfort at writing it, but I like to think that Pratchett is subtly telling us all that some folks get more sensual with age and it’s good actually. Pratchettisms For a moment he thought he saw a naked marble lady tumbling with the debris and clutching her marble shift as if defending the remains of her modesty from the deluge. He’d heard the crack of bones even while airborne, and so what hit Stratford was the full force of the law, and its rage. Captain Murderer would be orientated to the world as seen by Commander Vimes at Commander Vimes’s leisure. “I might be made up of your subconscious mind and momentary case of muesli poisoning occasioned by a fermenting raisin.” Lady Sybil leaned back with her shears poised, and regarded the rose bushes like a bloody-handed revolutionary looking for his next aristocrat. It had been said by someone years before that to see Sybil Ramkin’s upholstered bosom rise and fall was to understand the history of empires. Only the horse, steaming patiently in the mist, saw what happened next, and being a horse was in no position to articulate its thoughts on the matter. “You know, Vimes, sometimes your expression becomes so wooden that I think I could make a table out of it.” We’re gonna take a short break and be back in the second week of July with another pause from Discworld—Dodger! We’ll read Chapters 1–6. The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: <i>Snuff</i>, Part IV appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The European Union (EU) has managed to unite politicians, app makers, privacy advocates, and whistleblowers in opposition to the bloc’s proposed encryption-breaking new rules, known as “chat control” (officially, CSAM (child sexual abuse material) Regulation). Thursday was slated as the day for member countries’ governments, via their EU Council ambassadors, to vote on the bill that mandates automated searches of private communications on the part of platforms, and “forced opt-ins” from users. However, reports on Thursday afternoon quoted unnamed EU officials as saying that “the required qualified majority would just not be met” – and that the vote was therefore canceled. This comes after several countries, including Germany, signaled they would either oppose or abstain during the vote. The gist of the opposition to the bill long in the making is that it seeks to undermine end-to-end encryption to allow the EU to carry out indiscriminate mass surveillance of all users. The justification here is that such drastic new measures are necessary to detect and remove CSAM from the internet – but this argument is rejected by opponents as a smokescreen for finally breaking encryption, and exposing citizens in the EU to unprecedented surveillance while stripping them of the vital technology guaranteeing online safety. Some squarely security and privacy-focused apps like Signal and Threema said ahead of the vote that was expected today they would withdraw from the EU market if they had to include client-side scanning, i.e., automated monitoring. WhatsApp hasn’t gone quite so far (yet) but Will Cathcart, who heads the app over at Meta, didn’t mince his words in a post on X when he wrote that what the EU is proposing – breaks encryption. “It’s surveillance and it’s a dangerous path to go down,” Cathcart posted. European Parliament (EP) member Patrick Breyer, who has been a vocal critic of the proposed rules, and also involved in negotiating them on behalf of the EP, on Wednesday issued a statement warning Europeans that if “chat control” is adopted – they would lose access to common secure messengers. “Do you really want Europe to become the world leader in bugging our smartphones and requiring blanket surveillance of the chats of millions of law-abiding Europeans? The European Parliament is convinced that this Orwellian approach will betray children and victims by inevitably failing in court,” he stated. “We call for truly effective child protection by mandating security by design, proactive crawling to clean the web, and removal of illegal content,  none of which is contained in the Belgium proposal governments will vote on tomorrow (Thursday),” Breyer added. And who better to assess the danger of online surveillance than the man who revealed its extraordinary scale, Edward Snowden? “EU apparatchiks aim to sneak a terrifying mass surveillance measure into law despite UNIVERSAL public opposition (no thinking person wants this) by INVENTING A NEW WORD for it – ‘upload moderation’ – and hoping no one learns what it means until it’s too late. Stop them, Europe!,” Snowden wrote on X. It appears that, at least for the moment, Europe has. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU’s Mass Surveillance Faces Fierce Resistance appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Kennedy Failed to Qualify for CNN Debate, Campaign Will Protest Outside NY Studio

If your nightmares have been feeling a little bland and repetitive recently, don’t worry, we bring you something that’ll be sure to add a fresh smattering of terror – jumping leeches.The existence of leaping leeches has been a matter of debate since Victorian-era naturalists were kicking about, with some providing field notes of encounters with their acrobatics, whilst others said the parasitic worms had likely dropped down on them from above.That over 100-year-old debate has now been settled by footage that researchers Mai Fahmy and Michael Tessler believe is the first conclusive evidence that at least one land-dwelling leech species can jump.In both June 2017 and October 2023, during fieldwork in Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park and the Ivohiboro Protected Area, Fahmy caught video footage of leeches from the Chtonobdella genus – which is widespread across the island, as well as the Seychelles, Malay Archipelago, and South Pacific Islands – “intentionally jumping off a leaf and onto the ground”. The leeches do so in a way that the researchers compare to a spring, pulling themselves back in a way that likely maximizes potential energy before launching themselves toward the ground, keeping their bodies extended as they fly.“Essentially, it executes a graceful jump but with a seemingly hard landing,” said Tessler in a statement.“We do not know how often this may happen or whether these leeches use this ability to seek out hosts, but, given that we caught multiple jumps in two short recordings, this behavior may be common for this species,” said Tessler.Given the wealth of anecdotes from a variety of regions over the years, the duo also posits that it “certainly is possible” that other jumping leech species may exist.Though the widespread existence of jumping leeches might sound like the plot of a Sharknado-esque class of horror film, it’s not something to worry about – as the researchers mention in the study describing the finding, it’s only a small subset of species within the family of jawed land leeches that might be able to jump.There’s also more to these spring-like bloodsuckers than meets the eye; their discovery is likely to prove significant for conservation efforts.“If we can identify how leeches find and attach to hosts, we can better understand the results of their gut content analyses,” Fahmy explained. That can give scientists a better idea of what other kinds of animals are present in the area.Even leeches themselves might be vulnerable. “Leeches are also often overlooked and understudied, and, as a natural part of the ecosystem, leeches themselves may be in need of conservation protection,” Fahmy added.The study is published in Biotropica.

Democrats and their media pals are over the moon over a new poll out from Fox News. It’s the first since October to show President Joe Biden ahead of former President Donald Trump and comes just on the heels of the latest inside-the-Democrat-meltdown story (this time from Axios). But is there true cause for celebration? Not really. Trump is currently up among the voters most motivated to vote in November. That’s crucial and somewhat surprising. Any good news is welcome news when you’re down and out, and your own team is beginning to get jittery (and back-stabby). A decent news cycle on a slow day is always nice. Any real relief, however, is more than a little premature, both in terms of the data actually hiding in the polling, and in the vindication of the Biden campaign’s strategy. First, Trump is up in the swing states, according to an Ipsos poll also released Thursday. And not just one or two, or even four; Trump is ahead in all seven: Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. To put that in perspective, in 2020, Biden won every one of those except for North Carolina. Heck, the Real Clear Politics average has Trump down by only 2.3 points in Minnesota. To put that in perspective, the last time Minnesota went Republican was for President Richard Nixon in 1972. The Land of 10,000 Lakes was the only state in the union to vote against President Ronald Reagan’s re-election in ’84. Second, Trump is currently up among the voters most motivated to vote in November. That’s crucial and somewhat surprising given his historic ability to motivate Democrats to the polls, but it’s true. For all the Democratic rhetoric, voters in the swing states are worried a whole lot more about inflation, followed by immigration, in the regions Biden should be most worried about. (Those in the White House somehow missed that memo, given the president’s Tuesday amnesty announcement. Or maybe they're just so desperate to bring Hispanic men back into the fold they’ll trade broader losses for those married to illegal immigrants.) Then finally, there’s the Biden campaign’s entire “convicted felon” messaging. It’s been three weeks since Trump’s guilty verdict in a Manhattan court, and just a little longer since the White House began its concerted push to use those convictions to move votes. Democrats bet big on this campaign, in part because they need to. How’s that going? With three weeks of incubation and nearly nonstop corporate coverage, we might have our answer: Three points nationally in a poll of registered voters. The news cycle moves fast, and there are few things not already baked in about the president of the free world and the most famous man in it. If this is the apex, Democrats worried about strategy shouldn’t breathe easy just yet. Axios: Top Dems: Biden has losing strategy Daily Caller: Frank Luntz Impressed Trump ‘Making It Close’ In ‘Reliable’ Dem State After Conviction Forbes: Trump Leads Biden In All Seven Swing States—As Inflation And Immigration Top Voter Concerns, Latest Survey Shows Byron York: Can Biden make the election about Jan. 6? Sign up for Bedford’s newsletterSign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford's newsletter.The fire rises: Blaze Original: Inside one Democrat's 20-year crusade to save the world from Anthony Fauci — Part 1: 2001-2014. Most of us knew very little about Dr. Anthony Fauci before 2020. This new head of our national response, we were told in reports and profiles that began to appear in outlets around the country, was a brilliant AIDS doctor, an expert in infectious diseases and outbreaks. He’d know what to do. It would take years before the broader public would catch on to his lies and his games. But there were people who knew the doctor before his big debut. Among them, Dr. Richard Ebright, a fierce critic of the Bush administration’s bioweapons program and a Biden voter who for decades tried to warn the world of the dangerous nature of Fauci’s hubris — and his research. Blaze News’ Leon Wolf reports: For years, Ebright and Fauci carried out a silent war, waged in print, visible mostly only to members of the small community of research scientists who conduct serious chemical and biological research. Over and over again the same refrain played out: Ebright warned the public that this research was making the public less safe, and Fauci insisted it was making the public more safe. As we know now, Ebright was almost certainly right. However, it has taken four years — thanks to the concerted efforts of Fauci and his team — for the public to slowly come around to that realization. But to understand where we are, it is first necessary to understand how we got here.

Despite their routine concern-mongering about threats to democracy, Democrats have worked hard in recent months to eliminate President Joe Biden's rival from contention ahead of the 2024 election. Some have referred to this effort to deny voters a choice and thereby decide the election by undemocratic means as "lawfare." Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) revealed Thursday that such attacks will not go unanswered. Bailey noted on X that he would be "filing suit against the State of New York for their direct attack on our democratic process through unconstitutional lawfare against President Trump. It's time to restore the rule of law." According to the Republican, the efforts of "rogue prosecutor" New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg to "take a presidential candidate off the campaign trail ... sabotages Missourians' right to a free and fair election." Last week, Bailey testified before the House Judiciary Committee. He noted in his written statement that the "left has prioritized its hatred of President Trump above the rule of law." 'The prosecution was politically motivated and replete with legal error.' "Government officials at the federal and state levels have censored President Trump, filed civil suits in order to sanction him, illegally removed him from the ballot, and perverted the law in order to prosecute him," wrote Bailey. The Missouri AG indicated further that Bragg's prosecution of Trump, in particular, "represents one of the most morally abhorrent volleys in the left's on-going barrage of lawfare. The prosecution was politically motivated and replete with legal error." Among the issues Bailey highlighted with Trump's prosecution in New York — which are likely to be raised in his forthcoming lawsuit — were: Bragg's "disqualifying impropriety," reflected in part by his refusal to recuse himself despite an obvious self-interest in the case; the indictment charges' "reference to an unspecified and unidentifiable other crime," which altogether "constitutes a deprivation of due process by denying the defendant his Sixth Amendment right to be informed of the crimes with which he is charged"; the prosecutor's efforts to have Trump silenced with an "unconstitutional gag order"; Bragg's perversion of "the law to meet the facts rather than objectively apply the facts to the law," namely through the expansion of the charges beyond the text of the statute at issue in order to criminalize "that which he does not like rather than that which the law forbids"; and Bragg's failure to "correct the Court's error in instructing the jury that unanimity was not required as to the predicate offense that forms the basis for the fallacious charges." Bailey further highlighted in his testimony the apparent "collusion" between the Biden Department of Justice and the New York District Attorney's Office regarding the initiative to take Trump off the board. Bailey's office expects that lawsuit will go straight to the U.S. Supreme Court and will be titled "Missouri vs. New York," reported Fox News Digital. Extra to announcing that Missouri would be suing New York Thursday, Bailey filed an amicus brief with 23 other red states urging the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, which is overseeing Trump's classified documents case, to reject Special Prosecutor Jack Smith's request for an "unconstitutional gag order" on Trump. Smith asked Judge Aileen Cannon that the conditions permitting Trump to await trial outside of jail should be updated to include a gag order, prohibiting him from commenting about details of his case, particularly about the raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence. Trump's attorneys said in a filing last week, "Like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Smith seeks to restrict President Trump’s campaign speech as the first presidential debate approaches at the end of this month," reported CNN. The amicus brief filed by Bailey and other Republican attorneys general, stressed that fair and free elections "depend on candidates' ability to speak about important issues of the day." "When agents of one candidate seek a court order to muzzle discussion on matters relating to important electoral issues, that restraint raises even more fundamental First Amendment concerns," continued the brief. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Scott Wiener Writes a Check His Butt Can't Cash Going After Riley Gaines and BOY HOWDY Was THAT Ever Dumb

The Left Is Above the Law: DA Bragg DROPS Charges Against Columbia Protesters, Citing 'Lack of Evidence'