In our new series on the top 10 Elton John songs, decade by decade, we’re going to work our way backward, starting with the 2010s. Since the 2020s are not yet over, we won’t include this decade in the list. As all true-blue Elton John fans know, as we go further back in time, it will get tougher to pick only 10 songs for each list. But doing it this way should be fun. Elton John released only two solo studio albums of original material in the 2010s: The Diving Board in 2013 and Wonderful Crazy Night in 2016. However, The post Top 10 Elton John Songs Of The 2010s appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Books QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics: The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh Published in 1981, the novel features neopronouns and a thoughtful, deeply feminist approach to gender. By Bogi Takács | Published on September 18, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share I’ve been meaning to discuss some of C.J. Cherryh’s novels in the QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics series, but I was unsure where to start. Then I realized that her Chanur space opera series was included in my pre-2010 neopronouns in SFF list, and I’d eventually like to review all titles on said list. Even if the pronouns turn out to be a minor part—which sometimes happens with these older works—it is still likely for these novels to contain some sort of interesting approach to gender. This was indeed what I found, in this particular case. The first volume of the series, The Pride of Chanur (1981) does include neopronouns: specifically the stsho, one of the non-human species in the narrative, use the pronoun gtst. “The stsho proffered delicacies and tea, bowed, folded up gtst stalklike limbs—he, she, or even it, hardly applied with stsho—and seated gtst-self in gtst bowlchair, a cushioned indentation in the office floor.” (p. 13) The stsho also have three sexes: “Methodical to a fault, the stsho, tedious and full of endless subtle meanings in their pastel ornament and the tattooings on their pearly hides. They were another hairless species—stalk-thin, tri-sexed and hanilike only by the wildest stretch of the imagination, if eyes, nose, and mouth in biologically convenient order was similarity.”(p. 12) As we might already see here, the stsho are vaguely queer-coded, but they also play little part in the plot of this novel; this might change in the sequels. Instead, the story centers on the hani, fur-covered sentient beings most comparable to lions. (The “pride” in the title thus becomes ambiguous—is it about the emotion, or the group of lions? Most likely both.) Pyanfar Chanur, captain of the spaceship The Pride of Chanur, faces a series of difficult decisions after a strange hairless creature runs onto her docked ship on a busy space station. Pyanfar and her crew soon realize the creature is sentient and capable of speech, but as they try their best to communicate, it turns out that this male of a so-far unknown species has escaped from the kif—another member species of the trade alliance called the Compact, alongside the hani. Pyanfar refuses to surrender the so-called “human” to the kif after the human claims to have been mistreated by them. An enormous mess ensues, with the fate of the Compact itself on the line…while Pyanfar also faces danger on a personal level, as the Chanur are embroiled in a battle over family succession. Cherryh explores multiple aspects of this setup in detail. Various plot points emerge from the communication difficulties not only between the lost human and the hani, but also between different Compact member species. I especially liked that the setting featured automated translation, but it still needed initial data to be fed to it to approximate even a rough translation, which required effort from the characters. It was also interesting to see that there was also a trade pidgin between some—but not all—of the Compact species despite said automation. But for the purposes of this column, it’s probably more relevant to look at how Cherryh tackles gender, sex, and biological determinism in the novel. It is only the women of the hani who travel in space. All ships are gender-segregated. The men are considered too erratic to go to space and behave themselves there; and indeed, they do spend a lot of their time physically fighting each other for dominance back on their home planet. But—and here I’ll have to discuss some developments in later chapters, though I won’t spoil the overarching plot—this strict biological determinism is undermined by Pyanfar Chanur herself, who finds herself wondering if said differences in gender roles are innate, or due to upbringing. I don’t know if I should call this a genderswap when there is so much variation on our own Earth in these kinds of roles. In one of my own cultures, it was traditionally the women who traded and made a living, though for a different reason than the hani: the men were busy with their religious duties. Maybe I could say that the hani are a genderswap of many Anglo-Western cultures, though this would also be an oversimplification: Cherryh crafts her world with her trademark sense for nuance and detail here as well as in her other novels. This is the type of space opera where you find out exactly how docking clamps work, and that also extends to social aspects beyond the technological, like gender roles. Humans still seem to be humans, and their own ideas about gender affects how the hani who come into contact with them proceed to think about their own gender. This is done in a surprisingly gentle way, with Tully the escaped human modeling a kind of masculinity that is as far from toxic as possible, while the narrative also affords him room for vulnerability as someone far from home, an outsider cut off from anything familiar. There’s something intriguing about the premise of a crew that’s single-gender for reasons of chastity (and again, I’ll need to go into a bit more plot detail to discuss this point). When speculative works include this arrangement as part of the plot, I tend to expect the intent to be subverted by showing that same-sex attraction exists. This is what I expected here, especially in a work which already had neopronouns and an interesting approach to gender. But what happened in The Pride of Chanur was altogether different: the presumably-straight man ends up on a ship of straight women, and they all decide to be professional about it and not act on any potential desires. (Despite the difference in species, the question does present itself—at one point, the captain worries that one of her crewmembers might start a liaison with the human.) I found this approach refreshing and it poked against my own preconceptions of what a gender-conscious science fiction book should look like, alongside the portrayal of human masculinity. Is the reader expecting Dudebro—because he is a dudebro, not just a man, but a specific kind of man—to do something catastrophically awful? Most likely, yes. The entire crew certainly expects him to do just that. Captain Pyanfar herself considers this repeatedly, treating the human with caution, and only allowing him increasing leeway by small increments. Does the reader expect some of the women crewmembers to be attracted to each other? Maybe not in 1981 (though I’m not sure about that—the trope existed at that point), but today, definitely so. This doesn’t happen either, and yet gendered aspects of the setting have been destabilized in a way that is deeply feminist. This is much less apparent on the surface than the three-sexed aliens with their neopronouns, who we sadly don’t see much of in this novel, but is more impactful structurally. It also enables Pyanfar to examine her own biases, and act on her realizations. A final note: when I showed the first draft of this review to my spouse R.B. Lemberg, they asked me if I knew whether Cherryh was reacting to Larry Niven’s Kzin stories, which feature catlike aliens who are extremely male-dominated. I’m honestly not sure if this is the case—I looked and I’ve only found fans comparing these works, but no discussion or statement directly from the author. I’m very much looking forward to seeing where Cherryh takes the series next—the following three books form a trilogy, and I’m hoping to cover them in my column as well. They will be interspersed with standalone works by other authors—for next time I have a novel queued up that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. I’m also considering covering more Cherryh after I’m finished with the Chanur books: do you have any particular favorites?[end-mark] The post QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics: <i>The Pride of Chanur</i> by C.J. Cherryh appeared first on Reactor.

A United Nations resolution calling for Israel to withdraw from the West Bank within six months will cause chaos and violence in the Middle East, according to Andrew Tucker, executive director of the Hague Initiative for International Cooperation. “This is a very important and potentially catastrophic decision because it’s going to lead, unfortunately, to chaos and more violence on the ground, putting aside all the other issues about it,” Tucker told The Daily Signal. The U.N. General Assembly voted Wednesday to approve a resolution demanding that Israel unilaterally withdraw its “unlawful presence” in Gaza and the West Bank within a year. The resolution also calls for sanctions and an arms embargo against the country. “It’s the first time in history this has happened, and it’s saying that Israel must withdraw all of its presence, military and civilian, from territories they say belong to the Palestinians,” Tucker said. Tucker said this nonbinding General Assembly resolution is part of a “lawfare” (legal warfare) campaign by the Palestinians. The Arab Group, an organization of 20 Arab nations’ parliaments, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation submitted the draft resolution to the General Assembly. “The U.N. really has become a platform for the Palestinians to be able to access the courts, to use the courts—the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice,” Tucker said. The resolution is “highly problematic for the courts’ own integrity and understanding as an independent judicial tribunal,” Tucker said. Tucker does not expect Israel to be willing to leave the territories as demanded in the resolution. “Palestinians are not governed by a government under the rule of law,” Tucker said. “They are governed by terrorist organizations. Israel knows this reality only too well.” Because Hamas-run Gaza is already on Israel’s doorstep, the Jewish state will not allow another Gaza in the West Bank, Tucker said. “The West Bank is much closer to the heartland of Israel, and therefore, this demand, which Palestinians and the opposers of Israel will say, well, ‘Israel must get out,’ and Israel will say that ‘you can’t,’” Tucker said. “It is really going to lead to more conflicts.” The post ‘Highly Problematic’: UN Resolution Demanding Israel Withdraw From Gaza Will Cause Chaos and Violence, Expert Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Biden-Harris administration is paying to put on a play that portrays God as bisexual, sharply criticizes former President Ronald Reagan, and paints communists in a positive light, all in an effort to push gay rights on Southeastern Europeans, federal grant records show. Earlier in September, the State Department greenlit funding for a showing of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” in North Macedonia, with the agency claiming the production will raise awareness about “LGBTQ+ issues” in the country, federal grant records reveal.  The play follows multiple storylines, among them the ghost of convicted communist spy Ethel Rosenberg antagonizing dying conservative lawyer Roy Cohn and a gay man having sexually explicit visions of heaven as he struggles with AIDS. Prior Walter, the man with AIDS, begins to have prophetic visions in his hospital room after his lover, Louis Ironson, abandons him, according to the play’s text. In one such vision, he finds that angels have “eight vaginas” and are “equipped as well with a bouquet of phalli” and that the universe was created by God “copulat[ing] ceaselessly” with these hermaphroditic beings. Ejaculate from angels “fuels the Engine of Creation,” the play recounts. Walter recounts these visions to a man named Belize, a former drag queen who is tending to him as a nurse. The State Department has committed $20,000 to staging the play in Macedonia, according to grant records. An additional $10,500 in non-federal funding has also been allocated for the production. “In the Manichaean world of Angels in America, everything Reagan stood for (capitalism, etc.) is evil,” a National Review critic wrote of the play’s HBO adaptation in 2003. “The most vocal Republican in the film is Roy Cohn—the unscrupulous gay lawyer who denied his sexuality and AIDS diagnosis to his death. In Cohn, a man ultimately undone by his own lies and hypocrisy, Kushner finds his embodiment of Reagan’s administration.” “Angels in America” portrays Cohn, a real lawyer who was deeply involved in the conservative movement and helped Reagan get elected, as a bigoted hypocrite prone to outbursts of anger. Cohn was instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted in 1951 of spying for the Soviet Union and executed in 1953. Activists long maintained that the Rosenbergs were innocent, however, documents released by the government in the ’90s proved that the couple was involved in a Soviet espionage operation. Rosenberg, portrayed positively in the play, antagonizes Cohn throughout the story, telling him on his deathbed that she “take[s] pleasure in [his] misery.” She later guides Ironson, who is a secular Jew, through a funeral prayer for Cohn, who also had Jewish ancestry, symbolically forgiving him. “We have no system of universal health care, we don’t educate our children, we can’t pass sane gun control laws, we elect presidents like Reagan,” Kushner wrote in his play’s afterword, blaming those purported problems on “individualism.” A gay character, at one point in the play, asks “if [Reagan] didn’t have people like me to demonize where would he be?” “Kushner strips Reagan of any merit, and reduces him fictionally to an anti-gay crusader,” the National Review critic wrote of the play. The State Department’s production of an anti-Reagan, pro-LGBTQ play is not its first exercise in using theatrics for the purposes of social engineering as it spent $120,000 in 2023 to “improve communication at the level of the local community on the social issue of LGBTQ rights and domestic violence via participatory theater” in the African nation of Chad. The new grant isn’t even the State Department’s first theatrical operation in North Macedonia, as it paid to teach the country’s residents about environmental issues through theater and dance in 2023, federal grant records show. “Culture—from music to sports to theater—is a vital component of the United States’ people-to-people diplomacy efforts in Chad and around the world and supports broader U.S. foreign policy goals,” a spokesperson for the department told the Daily Caller News Foundation at the time. The State Department did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post State Department Paying to Put on Play Where God Is Bisexual and Communists Are Good—in Bid to Push LGBTQ Agenda Abroad appeared first on The Daily Signal.

NY Times: Trump is Seizing on These Assassination Attempts

Election Year Odds: Taking Bets on How Far Newsom Is Prepared to Push Illegal Bennies

Indigenous knowledge of palaeontology is often underestimated.

Media and Democrat lies that reelecting former President Donald Trump would bring about the end of the world are inciting violent, disturbed people to try to kill him, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says. “Without question I blame CNN, MSNBC and all the other left-wing outlets,” Sen. Paul told Fox News this week after the latest attempt on the life of former President Trump. Sunday’s failed assassination is the second such attempt to kill the Republican presidential candidate in the last two months. The false, apocalyptic warnings of the Left have successfully ginned up “every crazy person in the world,” Sen. Paul said: "Without question I blame CNN, MSNBC and all the other left-wing outlets for promoting this idea that Donald Trump is going to end elections, that democracy is being threatened, that it's going to be the end of the world – that made it so dire and that so misinformed the public about Donald Trump’s positions that every crazy person in the country now is ginned up.” Leftist media and the Democrats need to tone down their fear-mongering, because they’re responsible for inspiring unstable people to try to assassinate Republican Candidate Trump, Sen. Paul said: “So, CNN, MSNBC, the Democrats in general need to tone it down, because they are inciting this anger that is coming forth through disturbed people or violent people or otherwise, that they need to tone down their rhetoric, without question.”

Tuesday’s White House press briefing provided the clearest indications yet the liberal media and their allies won’t tone down their rhetoric and continue to refer to Donald Trump and his supporters as dangerous and a “threat to democracy” despite the second assassination attempt on Trump in as many months.  Thanks to a slew of softballs from liberal media outlets such as ABC and CBS, they teamed with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to make the case that it’s Trump, running mate JD Vance, and Republicans who must turn down the temperature. And, when challenged on this by Fox’s Peter Doocy, Jean-Pierre told him it’s who he’s being “dangerous”.     Doocy listened until he was the second to last reporter called on and made it count by standing up for sanity: It's been only two days since somebody allegedly tried to kill Donald Trump again and you're here at the podium in the White House Briefing Room calling him a threat. How many more assassination attempts on Donald Trump until the President and the Vice President and you pick a different word to describe Trump other than threat? This led to a sigh from Jean-Pierre before arguing not only did she “completely disagree with the premise of your question,” but argued he was being “incredibly dangerous” for wondering whether the Biden-Harris regime should choose its words more careful. By doing so, she insinuated, Doocy would inspire a disturbed person to put Biden or Harris’s life in danger seeing as how “American people are watching” him.  She also retreated to talking points about January 6 and Paul Pelosi as reasons “the temperature” (by Republicans) must be “lower[ed]”, adding it’s only factual to call attention to the danger the MAGA movement poses (click “expand”): JEAN-PIERRE: What I have said about the President – the former President – about January 6 is facts. That's you all have reported. It is fact. When you have a former President who basically says that the election wasn't the – the – the results of the election were not the results of the election – when dozens – dozens of – more than 60 Republican judges said that it was a free and fair election. Six – more than 60 – said it was indeed a free and fair election. You had more than 2,000 people who were told to go to the Capitol. It was one of the darkest days of our democracy. One of the darkest days. There are people who law enforcement officers who died because of what happened at the Capitol and they were there because the former President told them to go there. I mean, I don't know if that's not a – if that's not a threat in our democracy when it was one of the darkest days of our democracy – January 6 – one of the darkest days. DOOCY: To your point – JEAN-PIERRE: And so, we – we have been very clear from here. Now, we can have a disagreement on policies. We can on issues. That is what we should do. It is important to have those disagreements. It is welcome to have those disagreements on the economy, on healthcare, on foreign policy, but when you start bringing political rhetoric – political rhetoric, that is not okay, and that's what you've heard from us too. You've heard of differences on policies. Doocy finally got another question in: There are people watching at home who might miss the part where you say, let's lower the temperature, and they're just – there are mentally unstable people who are attempting to kill political candidates, attempting to kill Donald Trump and they are still hearing this White House refer to him as a threat. Is there no concern that people are taking that literally? Jean-Pierre grossly stuck to her talking points by screaming about January 6 four times in less than 30 seconds as proof of violence on the right and further demanded Doocy “be careful on how you're asking me these questions” and “people” could react violently to the White House, who are only here to “fight for our democracy” and “freedom”. The softballs began thanks to ABC’s Selina Wang: ABC’s Selina Wang: “Donald Trump blamed President Biden and Vice President Harris for the latest assassination attempt against him. He claimed, without evidence that their rhetoric is causing them to be ‘shot at.’ How is the White House responding to those comments?” KJP: “Well,… pic.twitter.com/ver1gXw7EJ — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 17, 2024 Jean-Pierre wouldn’t expand on her thoughts despite this second Wang softball: “So, do the President and Vice President believe that the kind of language that Trump used in those comments I just said are contributing to the tension and divisiveness you just talked about?”     However, this third one got her going and argued in part that “Biden has been clear-eyed about the threat that the former President represents to our democracy” and thus it’s incumbent upon Biden and Harris “to continue to strongly call out” Trump as a danger to preserve “our democracy”. Reuters’s Jeff Mason threw a softball about Vance that got Jean-Pierre to argue in essence that he’s putting Harris’s life in danger: Watch this answer from KJP, arguing without evidence that @JDVance is trying to get Kamala Harris killed... Reuters’s Jeff Mason: “On the issue of political rhetoric, do you have any reaction to Senator Vance's comments in which he noted that the difference between – in his… pic.twitter.com/2JqdUvb9u5 — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 17, 2024 CBS’s Nancy Cordes actually offered some pushback: KJP says Biden, Harris, the WH *will* continue to talk Donald Trump a “threat to democracy” b/c it's necessary for America to be “clear-eyed” like Biden about the threat he poses to America.... pic.twitter.com/pL8ktsA907 — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 17, 2024 CORDES: I want to follow up on that because Senator Vance appeared to call out specifically one of the phrases that you used earlier, which was threat to democracy. He said, “We cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist, and if he's elected, that it's going to be the end of American democracy.” Now, I recognize that Donald Trump has also used those phrases threat to democracy, danger to democracy, but in light of what has happened and in light of the fact that there are going to be disturbed people who take words like threat or danger literally, is the President and is the Vice President considering avoiding those specific terms, threat to democracy or danger to democracy? JEAN-PIERRE: I mean, look, and I answered this question. The President has always been very clear-eyed about this, about the threat of the former President represents to our democracy. Just think about January 6th. January 6th – we have to be honest with the American people when we see those types of threats when we that type of rhetoric that led to 2,000 people going to the Capitol. We have to call that out. Uh – and – uh – look, let me step back for a second even further. You all, as news organizations have the obligation – right – you are all obligated to cover events like January 6th, as I mentioned before, some of your colleagues were there, some of you were there on January 6th, and you had to report that the way you saw it, the obligation to do that. We appreciate it because I know those were dangerous times. That was a dangerous day to be there and you know, we have to call out any type of refusal of an outcome of an election. Any type of violent rhetoric – and this administration has the responsibility to be honest to the American people. So, look, we are, we can as a country – right – we can have disagreements on issues, on policy issues. It is okay to have that conversation. We had a debate, as I mentioned recently. It is – it is – uh – that is what's beautiful about what we do – right – uh – to go back and forth about our democracy, but once you talk – once there's violent rhetoric, we got to condemn that. And you know, the President is going to encourage all leaders from both parties to do so – all leaders from both parties to do so. Uh – it's not just on one, all leaders on both parties have to make sure that we do not – um – we do not use that type of violent political rhetoric because look what happened January 6th, Paul Pelosi, Butler, over the weekend. We got to be mindful. Of course, April Ryan wanted to throw gasoline on the fire: .@AprilDRyan: “I'm going back to one of your – to an answer that you gave to someone about lowering the temperature when it comes to this divisive rhetoric. It's not just about presidential – uh – division. It's also about lowering the temperature, do you think, when it comes to… pic.twitter.com/55vw0Ordjt — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 17, 2024 Anita Powell of taxpayer-funded Voice of America (VOA) had a softball questioning whether the toxicity in our politics might have the world asking “is democracy dangerous” and hardens the resolve of “American adversaries.” To see the relevant transcript from the September 17 briefing (including Fox Business’s Edward Lawrence asking whether the Biden-Harris administration thinks Americans are better off than they were four years ago), click here.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) expressed his frustrations with the Department of Homeland Security and its unwillingness to hand over information Congress has been requesting regarding the first assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump.“I am reaching the point of total outrage because the response from the Department of Homeland Security has been totally lacking. In fact, I think it’s tantamount to stonewalling in many respects. ... If necessary, I’ll certainly support a subpoena," Blumenthal told reporters on Tuesday.Blumenthal previously said the nation will be "shocked and appalled by our findings as to the lapses and failures on that day,” referring to when Trump was shot while speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Congress' report on the Butler incident is expected to come out shortly.It has been difficult to ascertain the reasoning behind the Butler shooter's attack on Trump since Secret Service agents shot and killed him. While he had been registered as a Republican in Pennsylvania, he also donated $15 through Democrat fundraising site ActBlue. 'I directed state agencies to move expeditiously and provide full transparency to the public.' The lack of answers from the DHS, which oversees the U.S. Secret Service, has been especially concerning in the aftermath of another assassination attempt against Trump while he was on his golf course in West Palm Beach on Sunday.Unlike the Butler shooter, the social media accounts belonging to the alleged would-be shooter in West Palm Beach, Ryan Routh, show he was against Trump and parroted Democrats' talking points about the upcoming presidential election."You should visit the victims in the hospital of the trump rally victims and attend the funeral of the fireman that died; Trump certainly never would. SHOW THE WORLD WHAT REAL LEADERS DO," Routh told Biden on X after the first attempted assassination in July.Due to the lack of answers from the federal government about the first assassination attempt, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) announced the state will be conducting its own investigation into the second attempt on Trump's life, saying the state has jurisdiction over attempted murder since Trump is not a federal official."The suspect ... is believed to have committed state law violations across multiple judicial circuits in this state, Palm Beach judicial circuit, judicial circuits including Martin County, as well as, perhaps, the judicial circuit represented by Broward County. I directed state agencies to move expeditiously and provide full transparency to the public," DeSantis explained. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!