Sevendust is an American rock band from Atlanta, Georgia, formed in 1994. Known for their heavy metal and hard rock style, the band has released thirteen studio albums, achieving significant commercial success and a loyal fan base. Notable albums include their self-titled debut in 1997, which set the foundation for their aggressive musical style, and Home, which further established their presence in the metal scene. The band has been recognized with several award nominations, including a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance. Lajon Witherspoon Lajon Witherspoon has been the lead vocalist of Sevendust since its inception in 1994. Known for The post Complete List Of Sevendust Band Members appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

News The Witcher Say Hello to Your New Geralt of Rivia Liam Hemsworth takes over from Henry Cavill in Netflix’s The Witcher By Molly Templeton | Published on May 22, 2024 Screenshot: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Netflix The more things change, the more the wig stays the same. On the heels of leaked photos from the set of The Witcher‘s fourth season, Netflix has released an official first look at Liam Hemsworth as Geralt of Rivia. Entertainment Weekly has the scoop, which includes an exclusive photo and a very short video (below) of Geralt leading his horse, which seems displeased by the blue-grey fog through which they are walking. Geralt turns—slowly, of course—and there you have it: Same witcher, new face. Showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich told Entertainment Weekly, “Cast and crew alike have been struck by the passion, energy, and embodiment Liam has brought to the character from Day 1 — scruffy beard, iconic scar, and all! We’re having so much fun filming season 4 and are excited to welcome fans along on this journey with us.” Hemsworth took over the role after the departure of original Witcher star Henry Cavill, who left the series when it seemed like he was going to step back into Superman’s snug tights. (He is not.) Everything else appears to have stayed the same on the show’s Continent, where Geralt, Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), Jaskier (Joey Batey), and Cirilla (Freya Allan) face constant danger and drama. The upcoming fourth season also features a lot of new characters and actors, including Sharlto Copley as bounty hunter Leo Bonhart and Laurence Fishburne as barber-surgeon Regis. Production on the fourth season began last month, just before Netflix announced that The Witcher will hang up its swords after a fifth season. The final two seasons will adapt three Witcher novels: Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow, and Lady of the Lake. No premiere date has been announced for season four.[end-mark] The post Say Hello to Your New Geralt of Rivia appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird Smucky the Cat, He Was Obedient: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (Part 2) Jud takes the Creeds to the pet cemetery, and Ellie has her first day of Kindergarten… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on May 22, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we continue Stephen King’s Pet Sematary with Chapters 7-10. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! Summary “He had pronounced two dozen people dead in his career and had never once felt the passage of a soul.” The Creeds settle into Ludlow, and into friendship with Jud and Norma. Ellie’s first kindergarten morning is anxious for Louis and Rachel, but Ellie returns eager to detail her adventures. Rachel’s sad glance unsettles Louis; Ellie’s growing up, which means he and Rachel are growing old. As Louis carries Gage upstairs for his nap, he’s hit with “such a premonition of horror and darkness” that he stops cold. Out of nowhere, he remembers his undertaker uncle’s “showroom,” where coffins stood on display. Dump the horrors, he commands himself. The next Saturday, Jud takes the Creeds to the pet cemetery. He wasn’t exaggerating how town kids keep the path mowed. The hill offers a stunning view westward down the Penobscot valley. Jud tells Ellie the path is safe but she shouldn’t venture off it; the surrounding woods stretch north for miles. Louis shares Rachel’s “city-bred” uneasiness at this wilderness on their back doorstep, but Jud reassures them: “You keep on the path and all’s well.” A second hill surmounted, they find an arch of weathered boards bearing the faded legend PET SEMATARY. It guards a forty-foot clearing floored with well-tended grass. Grave markers stand in concentric circles: wood or tin scraps, slabs of slate. Their inscriptions grow increasingly illegible toward the center, the oldest graves. Ellie’s thrilled. Rachel’s “It’s lovely” sounds forced. She’s uncomfortable around anything death-related, an antipathy Louis ascribes to her sister Zelda’s childhood death from spinal meningitis. Even Jud doesn’t know how old the cemetery is. It was there in 1914 when he buried his dog Spot. He had a gang of friends then, to help turn over the rocky soil. Now Jud’s the last of them. Louis isn’t sorry when Rachel wants to leave. Ellie’s started climbing a huge blowdown of trees that blocks the path deeper into the woods. Jud, alarmed, warns her off the tangle. The woods-wise know how easy it would be to break an ankle. The next day Ellie beards Louis in his study. He sees at once that she’s troubled. When Church slouches in to nap on a windowsill, she finally brings up the pet cemetery. Why don’t pets live as long as people, she asks. Louis explains how metabolic time-clocks differ among species. He reassures Ellie that three-year-old Church could live into her high-school years. That’s not time enough for Ellie. She bursts into tearful fury. Church is “not God’s cat! Let God have His own cat… all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all!” But Church is hers. Louis holds Ellie as she sobs over her first true understanding of death’s inevitability. From the kitchen, Rachel overhears Ellie’s outburst, but she waits until the girl’s upstairs before confronting Louis. She doesn’t want Ellie visiting the pet cemetery ever again. The place is unhealthy – she doesn’t want Ellie catching whatever morbid obsession the town kids have contracted. Rachel’s vehemence startles Louis. He realizes they’ve hit one of those rare “pocket[s] of alien strangeness” that even the closest marriages are subject to. When Rachel decries how Ellie now thinks Church is going to die, he blunders into answering that “Church is going to die.” The argument spirals into Rachel sobbing that death is not natural; as a doctor Louis should know that. As a doctor, it’s exactly opposite what Louis does know. He feels for Rachel, but he can’t deny that “In the end there was only the clock, and the [grave] markers, which became eroded and nameless in the passage of time.” Louis visits the Crandalls that evening, knowing Rachel has gone to bed angry. Jud knows the cemetery upset Ellie. He and Norma reminisce about how it gave a boy named Billy nightmares, but when Billy’s dog died, a ceremonial interment there helped him mourn and move on. It’s funny, the difference in attitudes between generations. “We were on closer terms with death,” Jud muses, what with two world wars and diseases doctors now seem to cure by magic. “We knew [death] as a friend and as an enemy… sometimes it took supper with you and sometimes you could feel it bite your ass.” Norma predicts that Ellie will get busy with new friends, maybe help them with the cemetery, and so “start to get that nodding acquaintance with [death.]” Not if Rachel has anything to do with it, Louis thinks. Back home, he finds her and Gage in the defensive curl he anticipated. The memory of his first hard “acquaintance” with death keeps him awake. When his cousin Ruthie was killed in a freak car accident, twelve-year-old Louis screamed to his mother, “SHE CAN’T BE DEAD – I LOVE HER!” Nevertheless, his mother said, Ruthie is gone. Louis gets up. The crux of his and Rachel’s rift is Ellie’s fear for Church. At least Louis can do something to keep the cat safer. He writes a note for Rachel’s TO DO board, with the number of a veterinarian who can neuter Church. His doubts are dispelled by the rumble of a big semi on Route 15. He pins up the note. This Week’s Metrics What’s Cyclopean: King excels at vividly kinesthetic descriptions of fear: “His heart was racing; his scalp felt cool and abruptly too small to cover his skull; he could feel the surge of adrenaline behind his eyes.” The Degenerate Dutch: Louis’s thoughts about women are somewhat… medically shaped. He jumps very quickly to anorexia and menopause as explanations. Meanwhile, Judd says that moose are only dangerous to people from Massachusetts. If you take this seriously, it will put you at considerably greater hazard from moose. Libronomicon: To be fair, Louis also dismisses his own fear with a reference to A Christmas Carol: “You may be no more than an underdone bit of potato.” The fact that Marley was real rather undermines this attempt at self-soothing.  Madness Takes Its Toll: Of Norma’s arthritis, Louis says: “You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.” Later he describes Rachel’s denial of death as “an attitude…so peculiar… that it seemed nearly psychotic.” Anne’s Commentary On its surface, Chapter Seven is a comfortable one. Bumps and bruises and prekindergarten anxiety occur, but the Creeds are adjusting well to Ludlow. Louis is settling in at his infirmary and hanging with the Crandalls. Rachel and Norma have hit it off. Gage is sleeping again. But beneath that everyday life, the monster lurks. It’s the oldest monster of all, the monster with many masks, invisible in itself, noticeable only in its effects. You glimpse the monster whenever you look at a clock or notice the sun’s going down. You know its name. Let’s say it together, with feeling: Time, you monster, we all know where you’re taking us in the end. We just don’t continually acknowledge it. That, as Louis thinks, would land you “in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.” Chapter Seven’s big event is Ellie’s kindergarten debut. She’s only five, but she knows what’s up. Approaching the school bus, she “cast a strange, vulnerable glance back over her shoulder, as if there might not yet be time to abort this inevitable process.” What Ellie sees in their faces “convinced her that the time was gone, and everything which would follow this day was simply inevitable.” In one sentence, King twice invokes two monstrous concepts: Time and Inevitability. Ellie’s courageous to board the bus, whose doors close behind her “with a gasp of dragon’s breath.” Rachel cries. Louis “damn near” does. Only Gage is happy; for once, he has his parents to himself. Ellie returns with a cry of joyous defiance: “We sang ‘Old MacDonald’! Same one as in the Carstairs Street School!” Take that, Time. Some things do remain the same. Louis and Rachel can relax now, right? Yet Louis feels “a moment of terrible panic” and thinks “We’re really going to get old…No one’s going to make an exception for us. [Ellie’s] on her way…and so are we.” Shortly afterwards, a “premonition of horror and darkness” strikes him as he carries Gage upstairs. He almost sees a ghost brush by him, though he believes only in “psychological cold pockets.” The ghost is another of Time’s masks, as is the “cold pocket” that plunges Louis into remembering his uncle’s coffin showroom. It’s a glimpse of Time’s ultimate mask, and the next chapters force Louis into more prolonged contemplations of Death. Jud takes the Creeds to the pet cemetery, a circle of mementos mori bordering the wilderness they hadn’t realized lay so close to their house. The hike takes them first to a hilltop view of the Penobscot River Valley, in all its late summer mellowness. The River is arguably Time’s most cheering mask. It springs to life upland, is swelled by tributaries on its descent, then empties into the sea, which is Eternity. Don’t like the Eternity mask? The River is ever reborn through oceanic evaporation and rain, thus proclaiming that Death isn’t the end. The pet cemetery, with its naive gravestones, is less reassuring, though you could see it as a testimony to enduring love. Ellie’s taken by the place’s novelty. Louis initially finds it amusing. Rachel’s never fooled. She’s hypersensitive to Death, having confronted it too early in her sister’s torturous passing. Louis’s amusement wanes when he sees what lies beneath a marker he wrests out of the hungry earth. He’s further creeped out by the too-convenient blowdown-barrier to what lies beyond the cemetery. Back home, Ellie digests Pet Sematary’s lesson. Death will come even for Church, as it came for those other cats. She’s not reasoned out of her sense of injustice by Louis’s metabolic time-clocks. They’re too impersonal – she needs a Somebody Responsible to howl at. Reason failing, Louis can only hold her while she cries, and trust that her tears will be the “necessary first step” to accepting mortality. Much Ellie’s elder, Rachel hasn’t achieved even an uneasy peace with Death. Unable to bridge this gap in their mindsets, Louis lapses into a condescension he spared Ellie. He and Rachel won’t be hugging it out for a while. Jud and Norma, people from a different time in Time, give Louis perspective. Judd offers this metaphor: Death is a visitor frequent enough to stroll uninvited into your house, where it might sit down for a civil supper or bite your ass. Remembering Jud’s “terrible certainty,” Louis hears the old man’s voice merge with his own mother’s, as she’d sounded when breaking the news of his cousin Ruthie’s death. Ellie and Rachel aren’t the only ones who’ve ever screamed unreasoning defiance at Time’s Death-mask. Because Louis loved Ruthie, she couldn’t be dead! To which his mother replied, with the same terrible certainty as Jud, that Ruthie was gone. Dead is dead, adult Louis thinks. What else do you need? His answer suits his profession: You need to take action while life permits, even if it means condemning Church to prophylactic snipping. Ironically, the bulletin board where he posts his surrender note boasts Rachel’s no doubt humorously intended credo: THINGS TO PUT OFF AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. As if old monster Time would submit to putting things off a millisecond longer than It dictated. Ruthanna’s Commentary My kids’ first encounter with death was a dearly loved friend-of-the-family dog. It wasn’t their last. One of the downsides of a big group household, rarely discussed in platitudes about it taking a village, is that the large number of beloved pets and grandparents and elders leads inevitably to regular mourning of pets and grandparents and elders. It never gets okay – but you do get practice. Rituals and candles and gatherings, honest talk about what death means and what we get to hold onto, gravesites to visit and heirlooms to use daily. It makes an impossibly hard thing not so much easier as doable. Mainstream American culture is very bad at death. We prefer to keep it delicately out of sight, to deny it as long as we can. And this preference was much worse in the 80s. Nowadays if you want to read a book about the realities of mourning and burial, or hire a death doula, or find a meet-up to talk about mortality, those resources exist. But Rachel speaks for the (somewhat) exaggerated mainstream of her culture. Her trauma from her sister’s death – it sounds like not only her first but her only major experience with death – makes sense of her dramatic reaction. And Louis’s experience as a doctor fully justifies his greater willingness to admit that death is inevitable, better to think about and prepare for in advance. I really wish I trusted King not to turn this into a gender thing, with Louis the rational man and Rachel the emotional woman. And Ellie, for all he recognizes her reaction as a reasonable first encounter with an unreasonable concept, “almost menopausal.” Where is he even getting that? Rachel is definitely not menopausal, and speaking of things people didn’t discuss with their doctors in the 80s. And then of course the contrast is enhanced by Louis overcoming his own prejudices about spaying cats. The Sematary is clearly the center of how kids in this town learn to handle death. It’s where they practice mourning, and learn the solemnity and respect that death and the dead deserve. Children need these things: need responsibility and their share of mystery and knowledge, as a compensatory map to living in a world where living stops. Deny them that, and you get, well, Rachel. Why did Rachel agree to go to the Sematary in the first place? In fact, she insisted on it. I can’t tell whether she was hoping it would somehow be okay, or whether she wanted to see it in person so she had standing to object. Or maybe it was okay until she heard Ellie crying, and broke open her own carefully-built walls of denial. This is not, of course, a mimetic literary novel about coming to terms with death, failing to come to terms with death, or how mortality interacts with the breakdown of American marriage. (We were also particularly freaking out about divorce in the 80s, because no-fault divorce had only recently become widely legal.) This is a novel in which we’re going to learn what’s worse than death being an absolute end, and why you shouldn’t build your solemn ritual ground on top of someone else’s solemn ritual ground that you stole. The foreshadowing gets stronger in these chapters, whispering “boo” from the brush on either side of the carefully mown path. There’s the too-convenient blowdown at the edge of the Sematary, which would not seem too-convenient if not highlighted as such. There are two separate nightmare images of the dead coming back, shambling gory corpses that refuse to lie down. There’s Ellie’s furious refusal of theodicy. And there’s Jud and Norma’s long litany of all the different ways animals can die: the cars and the fights and the illnesses, not to mention the wars and pandemics that take humans into other burial grounds. The generational differences in death’s familiarity, how often it shows up at your house and how often it bites your ass. One of my favorite mourning poems is Edna Saint Vincent Millay’s Dirge Without Music: “I know, but I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” I have a feeling we’re going to find out the failure modes of all three of those attitudes in the coming chapters. Next week, join us for another story about the dangers of not letting go: Nnedi Okorafor’s “Dark Home.” You can find it in Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming collection.[end-mark] The post Smucky the Cat, He Was Obedient: Stephen King’s <i>Pet Sematary</i> (Part 2) appeared first on Reactor.

News Vision Star Trek: Picard’s Terry Matalas Is Making a Vision Series for Marvel Paul Bettany will get in the tights once again By Molly Templeton | Published on May 22, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Two weeks ago, Disney boss Bob Iger said that Marvel was going to start making fewer shows and movies. According to Variety, this move is as part of an “overall strategy to reduce output and focus on quality.” So it’s a bit surprising that the first new Marvel show to be announced is… a Vision series, created by Star Trek: Picard showrunner Terry Matalas. This is not the same Vision series that was announced in 2022. At that time, Deadline reported, WandaVision’s Jac Schaeffer was working on a series called Vision Quest, which was about Vision “trying to regain his memory and humanity.” According to Variety, Schaeffer shifted her attention to the Agatha Harkness spinoff, which is currently called Agatha All Along and set to premiere in September. If you cast your mind back years and years, you may recall that Vision (Paul Bettany) was murdered by Thanos in Infinity War. In WandaVision, he was resurrected twice: Once through Wanda’s magic and grief, and once as a robot. The two had a little showdown and then became one, the Magic Vision fading from existence, because Wanda isn’t allowed to have anything nice, ever, since she made the “wrong” choice once and we can’t ever possibly forgive her for that. Anyone who saw Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness knows what happened to Wanda (we did not see a body, but a Marvel book confirmed that she died). And now we’ll find out the answer to the burning question of what rebuilt, re-memoried, creepy all-white Vision has been doing since the WandaVision finale. This new series is, as Variety notes, “Marvel’s first new live-action series pickup in almost two years.” Other than the return of Bettany, no casting has been announced. The show is expected to arrive in 2026. Those of us hoping that Matalas would get to make Star Trek Legacy, will, I suppose, just keep hoping.[end-mark] The post <i>Star Trek: Picard</i>’s Terry Matalas Is Making a Vision Series for Marvel appeared first on Reactor.

As Americans struggle to keep up with the rising tide of prices and feel the squeeze of high interest rates on housing, President Joe Biden continues to claim that the economy is good. “Bidenomics” is working, there’s no recession to see here, so shut up and enjoy the drag queen performances at the White House. That narrative took a hit back in 2022, however, when America experienced two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product—the traditional definition of a recession. In the first quarter of 2022, inflation-adjusted GDP declined in the U.S. by 1.6%, and it declined by an additional 0.6% in the second quarter of that year. The Biden administration responded by simply redefining the word “recession.” The move made a bizarre kind of sense coming from a bureaucracy that has redefined what it means to be a woman. The White House stated in July 2022 that “it is unlikely that the decline of the GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.” The Heritage Foundation, a stick-in-the-mud organization that doesn’t support willy-nilly redefining words to suit the woke movement, decided to get to the bottom of this whole redefining-a-recession nonsense. Heritage’s Oversight Project filed a Freedom of Information Act request in July 2023, asking the Treasury Department for internal communications regarding recessions. (Heritage created The Daily Signal in 2014.) Treasury asked Heritage to narrow the parameters of the request. It did so. Treasury refused to hand over the documents by the time required by law. Heritage sued. Late last month, Treasury handed over some documents. The catch? Most of the conversations in those documents have been redacted. To be sure, we do get little gems like “I’d be glad to discuss tomorrow or Monday,” and “Thank you for forwarding.” These largely meaningless pleasantries are among the few words Treasury apparently deems nonthreatening enough to reveal to the public. Many pages simply feature a large black box redacting the entire page. One email shows Treasury staff discussing a quote from the International Monetary Fund stating that a “technical recession” consists of two quarters of economic decline. “For the United States, some indicators, such as the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow forecasting model, suggest that a technical recession (defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth) may already have started,” Gene Sperling, a senior adviser to Biden, quoted the IMF in an email on July 26, 2022. Treasury redacted Sperling’s own words in his email, along with the substance of every email responding to him. So, Heritage plans to sue again. “The Oversight Project sued the Treasury Department to seek answers on why the Biden administration gaslit the American people into changing the definition of recession,” Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel at the Oversight Project, told The Daily Signal. “We have received multiple document productions from our lawsuit showing that there were a lot of communications about this change, but excessive redactions have hampered our ability to determine the truth.  We intend to challenge these redactions as we progress in the case.”  The Biden administration’s apparent attempt, yet again, to hide the substance of internal discussions about the definition of a recession raises more questions than answers. Did Treasury officials intentionally twist the definition in order to politically protect Biden in a midterm election year? Did they develop strategies for hiding negative economic news that might interfere with the 2024 election? If they weren’t trying to monkey with the definition of recession, why are they so insistent on hiding that fact? Perhaps the Biden administration merely wishes to redefine “transparency,” as well. The post WHAT ARE THEY HIDING? Biden Admin Redacts Its Justification for Altering the Definition of ‘Recession’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

For Iran’s late President Ebrahim Raisi—who died this week in a helicopter crash—the question was not whether terrorism was good or evil, but who perpetrated it against whom. Raisi condemned the terrorist attack that the Islamic State launched this January against Iranians who were commemorating the death of Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in January 2020. Soleimani had commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Forc, which itself engages in terrorism, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “The IRGCF-QF,” says the DNI’s website, “is one of the Iranian regime’s primary organizations responsible for conducting covert lethal activities outside of Iran, including asymmetric and terrorist operations.” “Iran views terrorism,” says the DNI, “as a tool that it can use to support its efforts to deter and counter its perceived foes, assert leadership over Shia Muslims worldwide, and project power in the Middle East.” In its 2021 Country Reports on Terrorism, the State Department described how the IRGC-QF supported terrorist activities outside Iran. “Iran used the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Force (IRGC-QF) to provide support to terrorist organizations, provide cover for associated covert operations, and create instability in the region,” said the report. “[T]he IRGC-QF is Iran’s primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorist activity abroad.” In 2019, the State Department officially designated it as a terrorist organization. This Jan. 3, when a group of Iranians gathered in the city of Kerman on the anniversary of the IRGC-QF commander’s death, two Islamic State suicide bombers infiltrated the crowd. They killed themselves and 89 Iranians. Two days later, speaking at the funeral for these victims of terrorism, Raisi, the Iranian President, praised Hamas for its Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. “Hailing Hamas, Iranian president says October 7 massacres will destroy Israel,” said the headline in The Times of Israel. “Speaking at the funeral, Raisi hailed Hamas for its deadly October 7 onslaught, in which thousands of terrorists attacked more than 20 communities across southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 240 hostages,” said the report. “We know that ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ operation will bring about the end of the Zionist regime,” Raisi told the crowd assembled for this funeral. “The mourners,” reported The Times of Israel, “waved the national flag as well as the yellow flag of Tehran’s ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, along with portraits of Soleimani, amid shouts of ‘revenge, revenge,’ ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel.'” Like the Islamic State and the IRGC, Hezbollah is also a State Department-designated terrorist group—and it is also supported by the Iranian government that Raisi served as president. This “Lebanon-based radical Shia group takes its ideological inspiration from the Iranian Revolution and the teachings of the late Ayatollah Khomeini,” says the State Department’s 2022 Country Reports on Terrorism. “The group generally follows the religious guidance of the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Hizballah is closely allied with Iran, and the two often work together on shared initiatives, although Hizballah also occasionally acts independently.” Then there are the Houthis. “Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and Israel’s military response in Gaza, the Ansar Allah/Houthi movement, an Iran-backed force in Yemen, has targeted Israeli territory and commercial and naval vessels near the Bab al Mandeb Strait, a key maritime choke point,” said a Congressional Research Service report released this month. “In January 2024, the Biden Administration announced that the Houthis would be redesignated as Specially Designated Global Terrorists,” said the report. While promoting terrorism against foreign nations, Iran—during Raisi’s presidency—routinely violated the human rights of its own people. In 2022, as this column has noted before, Mahsa “Zhina” Amini died in the custody of Iran’s “morality police.” “On September 13, police detained Amini for her alleged ‘improper hijab’ while she was visiting Tehran from her home in the Kurdistan region,” the State Department said in its report on human rights in Iran in 2022. She “died after reportedly being beaten while in the custody of the morality police,” said the report.“Authorities claimed Amini had suffered a ‘heart problem’ while in custody and was pronounced dead on September 16,” it said. “A photograph was later circulated showing Amini lying in a hospital bed with apparent severe facial injuries.” Last year, Iran detained Amini’s father and imprisoned her family’s lawyer and journalists who had covered her story. “According to IranWire, on the one-year anniversary of Mahsa Zhina Amini’s death, September 16, Amini’s father Amjad Amini was temporarily detained by authorities and prohibited from visiting his daughter’s grave or leaving his residence,” said the State Department’s report on human rights in Iran in 2023. “In October, the Kurdistan Human Rights Network reported that Saleh Nikbakht, lawyer of the family of Mahsa Zhina Amini, was sentenced to one year in prison for propaganda against the regime,” said the State Department report. “In October, Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, two of the first journalists to report on Mahsa Zhina Amini’s death, were sentenced to 13 and 12 years in jail, respectively,” the State Department said. “They were charged with collaborating with the ‘hostile American government,’ colluding against national security, and spreading propaganda against the regime, according to the government’s judiciary news website.” What did President Joe Biden’s State Department say when Raisi, the president of this tyrannical and terrorist-supporting regime, died in that helicopter crash? “The United States expresses its official condolences for the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian, and other members of their delegation in a helicopter crash in northwest Iran,” said a statement from department spokesman Matthew Miller. “As Iran selects a new president, we reaffirm our support for the Iranian people and their struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” The Biden State Department refrained from stating the fact that Raisi was among those responsible for denying Iranians their rights and freedoms—and it has been justly criticized for it by Republicans in the House of Representatives. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation. The post Legacy of Iran’s Late President: Tyranny and Terrorism appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Have you heard about the “bee-pocalypse?” My new video explains.  Honeybees are dying!  It’s another environmental crisis we’re supposed to worry about.   The media call it “bee-pocalypse” and “bee-mageddon!”  A YouTube video with 15 million views says bee-mageddon “could lead to millions of people starving!”  Even Fox News shrieked, “Do you like to eat? The disappearance of honeybees could have a drastic impact on our nation’s food supply!”  It’s nonsense.  Now, it’s true that, about 20 years ago, many American bees did die. Beekeepers opened hives and found their bees gone. Scientists called it “colony collapse disorder.” No one knows what caused it. After the initial dramatic reports, it’s steadily diminished.   But media hysteria hasn’t.   Beekeepers adjusted to colony collapse. They divided remaining colonies to make new hives. Bee numbers increased by millions.  “We’re not in any way facing an apocalypse,” says Science journalist Jon Entine. “Things have never been better in terms of the numbers of bees.”  Entine runs the Genetic Literacy Project, which challenges scientific misinformation.  I remind him that the media continue to run scare stories.  “Bees are dying at an alarming rate,” says NBC.  CNN headlines: “Bee Population is Dying … the food we eat is at risk.”  It’s so stupid.   “They could have just Googled bee population, and they would’ve seen them going up?” I ask.  “Absolutely,” responds Entine. “It’s farcical.”  In 2013, Time magazine’s cover predicted “A World Without Bees!”   “I don’t remember seeing Time apologize,” I tell Entine.   “Time has not even written a new article that puts this in science perspective,” he responds. Nor did The New York Times Magazine correct its cover story on “The Insect Apocalypse.” They just “skipped on to another ‘crisis.’”  “There’s always a scare,” I point out.  “Catastrophe, exaggeration,” he says. “That gets the clicks.”  Entine complains that the media rarely interview serious scientists for its scare stories.  “They have the Environmental Working Group or Pesticide Action Network framing these issues … . Hysteria generates donations. The oxygen for these organizations is money.”  Sadly, “Many of these [environment] groups harm people.”  How? By convincing gullible politicians to ban fertilizers and new pesticides, even though the new chemicals are usually safer.  For example, even with worldwide honeybee populations at record highs, the European Union prohibited the use of neonicotinoids, a common insecticide, out of fear they might kill bees.  That means farmers use older, more dangerous chemicals that actually do kill bees.  But why use these chemicals at all?  I push back at Entine, “‘Natural’ food advocates say: ‘Organic! You don’t have to have chemicals! Buy organic, and you don’t get them!”  Entine laughs and says, “They use chemicals extensively! It’s not like organic farmers can sprinkle organic fairy dust to get rid of insects and weeds.”   Instead, they use “natural” chemicals “like copper sulfate,” he says, “one of the most toxic chemicals in the world!”  Sri Lanka’s president listened to activists and banned chemical fertilizers.  Suddenly, farms produced much less food. Prices rose 80%.   Sri Lankans invaded the presidential mansion, and the president fled his country.   The new government re-legalized chemical fertilizers. Only then could the crisis end.  “This attack on industrial chemicals,” says Entine, “is really a way for the environmental industry—industry is what it is—to go after what they call big [agriculture], big corporations. It’s an anti-capitalist movement.”  The anti-capitalists oppose genetically modified organisms (GMOs). They’ve persuaded most European countries to basically ban GMO crops.   But genetic modification allows farmers to grow more food on less land. It creates plants resistant to disease and insects. That allows farmers to use fewer pesticides. That’s good for everyone, especially poor people.   In Bangladesh, scientists invented a GMO eggplant.   “It decreased use of chemicals by 85%,” says Entine. “Allowing women and children who do most of the farming to live a much more viable life. We have to be smart about these things!”  “We’re not being smart,” I note.  “No,” he says, “We’re following an outdated, 40-year-old environmental script that doesn’t work in this technologically innovative world. … They hurt the very people they claim to help.”  Modern chemicals and GMOs make our food cheaper and safer.   Deceitful money-hungry environmental groups won’t acknowledge that.  COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC. The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.  The post Consumers Stung by Scaremongers’ Phony ‘Bee-pocalypse’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The US Department of Commerce is seeking to end the right of users of cloud services to remain anonymous. The proposal first emerged in January, documents show, detailing new rules (National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities) for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers, which include Know Your Customer (KYC) regulation, which is normally used by banks and financial institutions. But now, the US government is citing concerns over “malicious foreign actors” and their usage of these services as a reason to effectively end anonymity on the cloud, including when only signing up for a trial. Another new proposal from the notice is to cut access to US cloud services to persons designated as “foreign adversaries.” As is often the case, although the justification for such measures is a foreign threat, US citizens inevitably, given the nature of the infrastructure in question, get caught up as well. And, once again, to address a problem caused by a few users, everyone will be denied the right to anonymity. That would these days be any government’s dream, it appears, while the industry itself, especially the biggest players like Amazon, can implement the identification feature with ease, at the same time gaining a valuable new source of personal data. The only losers here appear to be users of IaaS platforms, who will have to allow tech giants yet another way of accessing their sensitive personal information and risk losing it through leaks. Meanwhile, the actual malicious actors will hardly give up those services – leaked personal data that can be sold and bought illegally, including by those the proposal says it is targeting. Until now, providers of cloud services felt no need to implement a KYC regime, instead allowing people to become users, or try their products, simply by providing an email, and a valid credit card in case they signed up for a plan. As for what the proposal considers to be an IaaS, the list is long and includes services providing processing, storage, networks, content delivery networks (CDNs), virtual private servers (VPSs), proxies, domain name resolution services, and more. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Say Goodbye to Cloud Anonymity? New US Regulations Demand User Identification appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The US House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the disgraced and disbanded Disinformation Governance Board (a part of the Department of Homeland Security, DHS), has decided to release a redacted transcript of a deposition given last April by the Board’s director, Nina Jankowicz. We obtained a copy of the transcript for you here. The deposition was supposed to shed light on how the DHS was handling the avalanche of negative reactions to the board, envisaged as a key component in the current White House’s “anti-disinformation” frenzy, but which quickly got overwhelmed by criticism of being openly biased. One of the DHS tactics, according to Jankowicz, was to avoid transparency even where it concerned on-the-record information about the board. “The guidance from up above was that we were to be as vague as possible, which I found very frustrating,” Jankowicz said. While this may look like an attempt by Jankowicz to protect herself, in terms of her own decisions and actions, it tracks: the censorship playbook that is used far more widely, from government entities to Big Tech, has always relied on different ways to obfuscate. As for this particular “guidance,” Jankowicz pointed the finger at her colleague Jen Daskal as basically the messenger – while the message, she said, was likely coming from elsewhere in the organization. Jankowicz also complained to the Committee about being “thrown under the bus” by the DHS, once the agency realized the magnitude of opposition to the board’s activities. Perhaps the opposition wouldn’t have been so intense if the DHS showed less hubris and picked a less divisive person to lead the Board  in the first place – Jankowicz was a well-known Biden supporter and campaign policy advisor (and, some would say, a Biden apologist) before she became the head of the Board, shortly after “getting thrown under the bus.” However, appearing before the Committee, Jankowicz saw no relevance to her social media posts that revealed her ideological bias, including a jarring example of her trying to prop up the discredited “dossier author” Christopher Steele, and also join voices seeking to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. Jankowicz told the Judiciary Committee that she was advised by her attorney not to answer questions that were “not pertinent.” But, it also revealed how even something with a powerful agency like the DHS behind it can collapse like a house of cards. “We did not provide enough information at the outset. We left a vacuum for people to speculate. And indeed, within hours of the board being announced, the phrase ‘ministry of truth’ – which, again, the board had nothing to do with being a ministry of truth – was trending on social media,” Jankowicz stated. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Vague Directives and Vague Answers: Testimony Highlights More Disinformation Board’s Flaws appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Of Course: Biden Was Plotting With Iran Against Israel