Frank about his daddy issues

Levin is vindictive

Not exactly news, but a beautiful story comes now from the sandy shores of Tasmania, where 25 years ago, the waves brought a life-long friend to resident Diane Charles. Rising early, she tells ABC News AU, was her habit back then—to enjoy the peace of the sea and salute other early risers. One such morning […] The post Message in a Bottle Discovery on Tasmanian Beach Leads to 25-year Intercontinental Friendship appeared first on Good News Network.

Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “A View from the Gallery” Two maintenance workers take center stage as aliens attacks the station. By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on March 23, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “A View from the Gallery”Written by Harlan Ellison & J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by Janet GreekSeason 5, Episode 4Production episode 505Original air date: February 11, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… In hyperspace, an alien ship destroys a probe. Corwin reports to Lochley that the probe was destroyed by the alien fleet that the Gaim warned them about. Lochley puts the station on alert and tells Corwin to set aside a lifepod for Sheridan and Delenn to escape in if necessary. Corwin points out that they won’t go, and Lochley says to leave that to her. Two of the maintenance crew, Mack and Bo, mutter about how they always have to clean up the messes made by the command staff. Lochley and Sheridan pass by Mack and Bo as the latter are working. As Lochley tries to convince Sheridan to use the lifepod if it becomes necessary, Mack and Bo comment on how much they appreciate that Sheridan gets his metaphorical hands dirty, always right there in the action with everyone else. Mack and Bo take their lunch break. Bo has salami, which impresses Mack, as that’s hard to get. Mack is having spoo, and convinces Bo to trade half his sandwich. Bo is revolted by the spoo, while Mack is in heaven getting to eat salami. Bo is sent to medlab to fix a console. He overhears Franklin giving instructions to the medical staff on dealing with casualties. Bo makes a comment about why he bothers to set up to treat the enemy. Franklin tells the story of when his father was a POW, and was treated by an enemy doctor—he would’ve died if not for that alien physician. That was when Franklin decided he wanted to be an MD rather than follow his family’s footsteps as soldiers. Ironically, that alien doctor was killed for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Mack is sent to CnC to fix the secondary targeting console—just as the aliens come through the jumpgate. Mack fixes it—there was an insect inside the console—just in time for it to be needed in the firefight. That was the first wave, and Lochley tells Corwin to be ready for the next wave, while she goes off to yell at Garibaldi. Mack and Bo are riding the lift when Garibaldi and Lochley enter, the latter yelling at the former for the incomplete intel the Gaim provided about the aliens. Bo and Mack continue their maintenance work, and they notice a boarding pod attaching itself to the station hull. The two of them wind up in the middle of a firefight in a cargo bay, but Allan is able to cover them while they get to safety. Safety turns out to be with Byron and his gaggle of telepaths. At one point, Bo mentions that he wishes he was out there in a Starfury fighting the good fight. Byron telepathically links him with a Starfury pilot so he can experience what’s happening. Mack, freaked out by the telepaths, suggests they go to one of the shelters, and leads Bo away to one of the designated shelters. They share the shelter with, among others, Mollari and G’Kar. The former laments that the universe hates him. The latter says that this feels like home to him, as he spent most of his childhood in shelters like this while the Centauri bombed his homeworld. Mollari further laments that he didn’t have a childhood, he had too many responsibilities. They depart the shelter together. Credit: Warner Bros. Television En route to deal with a fire in Red Sector, Bo and Mack come across Sheridan and Delenn. The president orders to the two of them to escort Delenn to a lifepod—he can’t ask security, as they’re all too busy repelling boarders. However, Delenn is able to convince them to let her go with a combination of empathy for their positions and threats to sabotage the pod if they put her in it. The White Stars show up and rout the aliens. Soon it’s all over and the station is safe. Mack and Bo complain that they have to clean up all the messes now, but they pass by Franklin checking the many dead bodies of Starfury pilots, at which point they realize that there are other messes here to clean up that they’re not involved with. In CnC, Mack, while making repairs to damaged consoles, tells Lochley that she’s all right in his book. Later, the pair pass Delenn and Sheridan, and Delenn impresses them by remembering their names. Get the hell out of our galaxy! When Lochley asks Sheridan if he’d do anything different if their positions were reversed, Sheridan has to admit that he wouldn’t. But he also refuses to report to the lifepod when the fighting gets rough. Never work with your ex. Lochley runs the battle as best she can while waiting for the White Stars to show up. Ivanova is God. Mack and Bo discuss the rumors flying about regarding Ivanova’s departure, which is a bit of meta commentary on the rumors flying about fandom regarding Claudia Christian’s departure from the show. The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is apparently just as mediocre at being the head of covert intelligence as he was as the head of security… Credit: Warner Bros. Television If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn likens Mack and Bo to the Worker Caste of the Minbari, and not only asks their names, but later remembers their names, neither of which Bo and Mack expected. In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… As a member of a prominent aristocratic family whose father died when he was very young, Mollari didn’t get much of a childhood. Though it take a thousand years, we shall be free. G’Kar spent his youth in bomb shelters taking refuge from Centauri bombardment. We also learn that the Narn day is 31 hours long. The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Byron is apparently a strong enough telepath to insert someone’s mind into someone else’s so they can experience what the other person is experiencing. Either that or he can put a very convincing illusion in someone’s mind… No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. After Delenn remembers his and Bo’s names, Mack declares that he’s in love. When Bo reminds him that she’s married (indeed, they earlier discussed how much in love she and Sheridan are), Mack shrugs and says they can work something out. Welcome aboard. Joshua Cox—who has been upgraded to a billed-at-the-beginning-of-act-one guest star for this final season—is back from “No Compromises” as Corwin. Robin Atkin Downes is back from “The Paragon of Animals” as Byron. Both of them will be back in “Strange Relations.” Bo and Mack are played by, respectively, Lawrence LeJohn and my fellow Bronx native, the late great Raymond O’Connor. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Trivial matters. The aliens who attack are never identified and never mentioned or seen again. The White Star fleet isn’t immediately available because they were almost all deployed to the Enphili homeworld in “The Paragon of Animals.” One of the things that was promoted during the run-up to B5’s premiere in J. Michael Straczynski’s online campaign to create buzz for the show was the involvement of Harlan Ellison as a creative consultant, also with the likelihood that he would write some episodes of the show. Given that Ellison’s history includes plenty of teleplay writing (The Outer Limits, the 1980s iteration of The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Starlost, the original Star Trek), this wasn’t a real surprise. However, in the end, he only contributed to two episodes, of which this was the first, and in both cases it was only sharing story credit with Straczynski. According to Straczynski, the original concept was Ellison’s. (Ellison’s second story credit will be “Objects in Motion” toward the end of the final season.) Mack’s description of the White Stars as looking like plucked chickens was apparently Straczynski’s initial reaction when he saw the designs of the ship. Byron, for the second time in two episodes, quotes Hamlet, this time the “Alas, poor Yorick” speech. Given that Tom Stoppard’s Hamlet spinoff play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was one of the inspirations for this episode, quoting that play is particularly apropos. The crawler Mack picked out of the console was a Madagascar hissing cockroach with fake wings and a crest. That Bo is, like Straczynski, tall, bearded, and speaks softly but intently and Mack is, like Ellison, short and more outspoken and glib, is probably a coincidence. The echoes of all of our conversations. “We spent our days in shelters we made ourselves. We sang songs, we prayed, we ate, we slept. I spent my life in one such shelter or another. I will tell you the truth, Mollari: this is probably the closest thing I have to a home.” “Yes, well, don’t start singing. You’ll frighten the children.” —G’Kar and Mollari bantering. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “It tastes like chicken.” This is a really promising first draft of what should’ve been a great episode. Which is frustrating to me, because this is the kind of story I generally adore, from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Data’s Day” and “Lower Decks.” J. Michael Straczynski has said that he wrote this script in a single eleven-hour period, and sadly, it shows. It’s possible to write well under pressure, of course, but it’s also very easy to not write well under that same pressure. Some of the dialogue here sparkles. The Mollari-G’Kar scene in the bunker is classic, as exchanges with those characters almost always are, but it’s Mack’s coda that really nails it: “So how long you figure they been married?” Bo’s line about how he understands Sheridan after seeing Delenn smile—“I’d claw my way out of hell and straight through ten miles of solid rock to see that smile again”—is a letter-perfect description of Mira Furlan’s radiant smile. And Franklin’s explanation of why he became a physician is one of Richard Biggs’ best bits in the show’s entire history. Others, though, fall completely flat, from the “grow bigger shoulders” rhapsody in clichés to the awkward colloquy on how the station is bigger than all of them at the very end, which just feels a little too self-congratulatory on the part of the scriptwriter. Sheridan’s convincing of Delenn to go in the lifepod also just rings wrong on every level, and Lochley and Garibaldi’s argument about intelligence providing just feels constructed and fake. Some manage both—for example, Mack and Bo’s discussion of Sheridan gets a little too precious, but it ends magnificently. “I heard he was dead once.” “Yeah, well, nobody’s perfect.” The episode is still mostly watchable, mainly due to the usual suspects of Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik, as well as guests Lawrence LeJohn and Raymond O’Connor, who make Bo and Mack feel real. That “mostly” caveat is due to, once again, Robin Atkin Downes and Tracy Scoggins, who are completely ineffective as Byron and Lochley. This was Lochley’s first real spotlight as the new captain, and she managed to make it perfunctory and somnolent. The one exception, interestingly enough, was at the very end when she gives Mack a bright smile in response to his saying she’s all right in his book. It’s the first time Lochley feels like a person rather than an automaton. Next week: “Learning Curve.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “A View from the Gallery” appeared first on Reactor.

Thanks to the Human Rights Campaign, even conservatives may be helping fund child-mutilating hormones and surgery, mother-and-father loss, and the destruction of embryonic life—not through elections or legislation, but through burrito bowls, chocolate bars, and bronzer. That is the scandal exposed by a new report from Them Before Us, Harming Rights of Children: How the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index Violates Children’s Rights. For years, Americans have treated the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI) as a harmless benchmark for workplace fairness. It is not. It is a corporate pressure system that rewards companies for adopting child-harming policies and punishes those that resist. A perfect score is not an empty symbol. It has a price, and children pay it. At least 70 of the CEI’s 100 points reward practices that directly implicate children’s bodies, identities, or family bonds. Companies earn points for “transgender-inclusive” health coverage; for “family formation benefits” that subsidize IVF, surrogacy, and sperm or egg donation; and for “corporate social responsibility” initiatives that fund organizations like the Trevor Project and Point of Pride, both of which promote the medicalization of minors. Child harm is built into the scorecard. Start with the 10 points for family formation benefits. That means corporate-funded surrogacy, donor conception, and IVF. These arrangements impose losses on children from the beginning. Only 2.3% of IVF embryos survive to live birth. Donor-conceived people report deep identity wounds: 85% say learning the truth about their conception changed who they thought they were, and 48% say seeing friends with their biological parents makes them feel sad. Unlike adoption—which seeks to mend maternal wounds—surrogacy inflicts them intentionally by separating a newborn from the only voice, scent, and body he has known. Then there are the 25 points for “transgender-inclusive” health benefits. The CEI does not specify an age floor, meaning companies may cover puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for dependents, including minors. These interventions carry risks of infertility, cancer, and irreversible physical harm. The 2024 Cass Review found that 30% of transitions ceased within four years and that detransition cases are “no longer negligible.” Yet under the CEI, this is worth a quarter of a perfect score. The index goes further. Under corporate social responsibility, companies earn 15 points for philanthropy and legislative support. That includes funding organizations like the Trevor Project, which received $29 million from corporate partners in 2023, and Point of Pride, which funds chest binders and transition surgeries. The briefing cites an undercover investigation in which the Trevor Project encouraged a caller posing as a teenage girl to leave her home and move in with an adult male who supported her “transition.” The CEI also imposes a 25-point penalty for any company with a “public anti-LGBTQ+ blemish.” In practice, companies that support child protective legislation such as parental rights protections or restrictions on the medicalization of minors risk punishment. The Corporate Equality Index is not a barometer of adult civil rights. It is an indicator that a company has violated children’s natural rights. A perfect CEI score means Starbucks, Amazon, and Microsoft are complicit in child harm. Same with Hershey’s, Procter & Gamble, Kroger, Chipotle, UPS, Truist, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Wendy’s. All household names built on family trust that now fund policies that fracture families and medicalize children. Consumers should be angry. Every time you buy a KitKat, order a Chicken al Pastor burrito bowl, or trust one of these companies with your paycheck or mortgage, you help fund policies that disregard human life at its earliest stages, separate children from their mothers and fathers, and put minors on a path toward sterilization and lifelong medical dependence. Conservatives rightly denounce government policies that harm children. But we have given a pass to corporate America for inflicting those same harms. The good news is that the system is starting to crack. Fortune 500 participation in the CEI collapsed 65% between 2025 and 2026, dropping from 377 companies to 131. Twenty companies representing more than five million employees formally withdrew. Tractor Supply led the way. Walmart and John Deere followed. But leaving the scorecard is not the same as protecting children. That is why public pressure matters now more than ever. If we want to protect children and retake the family, it cannot be only a court or culture fight. It must include confronting corporate America’s role in normalizing and funding child harm. We must pressure companies to stop chasing points and start protecting children. And we must refuse to reward brands that threaten children’s right to life, their right to a mother and father, and their right to intact, unmedicalized bodies. Children are greater than points. That is the standard. It is time to make corporate America live by it. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post How the Human Rights Campaign Makes You Complicit in Child Victimization appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices on Monday seemed particularly skeptical of arguments by the state of Mississippi that mail-in ballots arriving after Election Day should still be counted. Mississippi counts ballots that arrive up to five days after Election Day. At least 17 states and the District of Columbia count ballots that arrive late, with at least two allowing them to arrive up to two weeks after Election Day. The case before the high court is Watson v. Republican National Committee. Mississippi’s Secretary of State Michael Watson is a Republican who oversees state elections.  Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart about the security of mail-in ballots and what prevents someone from designating their neighbor to deliver a ballot.  “That submission to mail to a common carrier is different in kind than, say, submitting it to a relative or a neighbor,” Stewart answered.  “What’s the difference?” Barrett asked, “They’re not government officials.” Stewart followed, “They are impartial third parties that have a duty to deliver what they’re owed without altering it.” But Barrett noted the state law and the state’s brief did not clearly state that line of argument.  “Your definition didn’t say final, as submitted to an impartial third party, or final, as submitted to a common carrier,” Barrett asked. Justice Neil Gorsuch used the corporation Federal Express as an example of a private delivery service, since Mississippi law didn’t require the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots. “FedEx isn’t an election official,” Gorsuch said.  Stewart said, “The recipient is certainly the person you are sending the mail to.” Gorsuch replied, “You submit it to FedEx and they deliver it to an election official. You say it has to be submitted to an election official in your brief. Then you say a common carrier is OK. Those two things don’t add up.” The liberal justices argued against the preemption of state election regulations by courts. States have regulated mail ballots since the Civil War, noted Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “People should decide this issue, not the courts, but Congress, or states and Congress,” Sotomayor said.  Stewart agreed, “That is the history of voting and election law in the country.” Stewart said that in 2020, Mississippi adopted the policy of counting late-arriving ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic.  “There has not been a showing of actual fraud from after-election counting,” Stewart said.  President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order on election integrity included a provision that would deny federal election funding grants to states that continue counting ballots arriving after Election Day. The counting of late-arriving ballots by states does not break along party lines.  Illinois and Utah count ballots arriving up to 14 days after Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, as long as the ballots are postmarked by Election Day. Alaska and Maryland allow ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted up to 10 days after the election.  California, the District of Columbia, New York, and Oregon count ballots arriving seven days after the election. New Jersey counts ballots arriving up to six days post-election, while West Virginia’s grace period is five days.  Nevada and Ohio count to four days after Election Day, while Kansas, Massachusetts, and Virginia count ballots arriving up to three days after Election Day.  Washington state law says that ballots received after the election with postmarks before Election Day are counted, but no deadline is specified for when they must be received, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in October 2024 in the case from Mississippi that federal law requires mail-in ballots to arrive by Election Day. The ruling didn’t affect the election that year. The three-judge panel’s opinion said, “Federal law does not permit the state of Mississippi to extend the period for voting by one day, five days, or 100 days.” In April 2025, U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. of the Southern District of Mississippi ordered a stay on further litigation in the case until the U.S. Supreme Court decides on the matter.  The post Justices Skeptical of Counting Late-Arriving Ballots appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Russia’s government has decided which websites its citizens are allowed to read. The mechanism for enforcing that decision is now operational in Moscow. Since March 6, mobile internet in the capital has been intermittently cut. Some areas are still offline. St. Petersburg residents were warned this week to expect the same. The official justification is protection against Ukrainian drone attacks, which use cell towers for navigation, the same explanation has been offered across Russia for months. What’s actually being tested is a “whitelist” system: a government-compiled list of approved platforms that remain accessible when mobile internet is shut down. Everything not on the list simply disappears. According to local press, only pre-approved Russian platforms, including social media, marketplaces, taxi and delivery apps, telecom services, and government websites, remain accessible when mobile internet is restricted. Foreign news sites, independent media, and anything outside the approved perimeter are gone. The technical backbone is deep packet inspection, or DPI. Telecom providers use it to block most internet traffic while letting approved services through. It’s the same technology that authoritarian governments have used for years to filter the internet at the infrastructure level. Russia has been rolling it out region by region since at least last summer. Moscow is just the most visible deployment yet. The whitelist includes mobile operator sites, pro-Kremlin media, government bodies, marketplaces, and Russian social networks VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Max. Notably absent is anything that might let citizens read something the government hasn’t approved. To get on the list at all, companies must meet strict requirements, including routing traffic through Russian infrastructure, hosting servers domestically, and ensuring users cannot conceal their IP addresses. The structure effectively excludes foreign platforms by design and creates a surveillance requirement for anyone who wants to remain accessible. The whitelists have been working patchily, with some of the approved websites plagued by malfunctions and accessibility problems. According to Monitor Runet, whitelists have so far been introduced in fifty-seven of Russia’s eighty-plus regions, likely because not all telecom operators have yet installed the DPI systems used to configure whitelisting. Russian authorities have not confirmed the rollout. No official from the Ministry of Digital Development, Roskomnadzor, or the telecom operators has made a public statement. A source from the Digital Development Ministry told the RBC business daily that the Moscow internet outages were a test of the ability to block access to sites not on the “white list,” saying: “This testing has been going on in the regions for some time, and it has now reached Moscow.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Russia Deploys Internet Whitelist in Moscow, Blocking Foreign Sites appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Fetterman: Sheridan Gorman Would Still Be Alive Had We Enforced Immigration Law

Physical, technological, and legal hurdles still abound…

Shortly after perihelion, two teams captured very different observations of our interstellar visitor.