'Recruiting opportunity for terrorist groups'

It has been clear for some time that AST lacks the resources

'I'm just doing my job'

'Hunter Biden was demonstrably guilty'

'strong support for a robust Canadian response'

The post Catster Photo Contest: Cats of the Week Winners (December 12, 2024) by Catster Editorial Team appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com. Click to Skip Ahead Winner Silliest Cutest Most Dignified Most Expressive Best Action Shot Sleepiest Enter Your Cat This Week’s Winner Name: Theo Breed: Domestic shorthair Fun Fact: He loves to flop over and show his belly, but it’s not an invitation to touch it. His nicknames are Theodore Meowsevelt, Mr. Meowzers, loaf, and baby. Silliest Name: Lucy Breed: Domestic Longhair Fun Fact: Lucy is an 11 yo silly cat who loves to meowdel! I love this photo of Lucy because it shows her beauty and silliness. Social: @lucythediabeticcat Cutest Name: Pita Breed: Oriental shorthair Most Dignified Name: Monkey Breed: Domestic Shorthair Fun Fact: We found Monkey under our car when he was 2 weeks old and weighed less than a pound. We named him Monkey, because he likes to climb things and scream (he still does!). His favorite activities are chasing his cat and dog siblings and snuggling with his humans. Most Expressive Name: Chaplin Breed: Domestic Shorthair Fun Fact: Chaplin is a sweet, cuddly 10 year old girl. She moves her eyes to the side a lot often looking like she’s giving disapproving looks :) Best Action Shot Name: Ika Breed: Tortiseshell Fun Fact: Ika is a sweet wee girl, her name means fish in Te reo Maori Sleepiest Name: Worf Breed: Domestic Shorthair Fun Fact: Worf is approximately 13, and he’s the sweetest, gentlest soul and a world-class snuggler. He’s been known to lie like this for hours, but he’s so cute it doesn’t even matter how inconvenient it is. Enter Your Cat Submit your kitty for a chance to be featured! Click here This article is a part of our Weekly Photo Contest View our previous week’s winners here: December 5, 2024 Click here to view our full list of past winners The post Catster Photo Contest: Cats of the Week Winners (December 12, 2024) by Catster Editorial Team appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Lower Decks “I [BLEEP]ing hate the multiverse!” — Star Trek: Lower Decks: “Fissure Quest” This may be the single nerdiest episode of Star Trek ever produced… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on December 12, 2024 Credit: Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Paramount+ It finally happened. Mike McMahan and his band of lunatic writers have finally done it: the single nerdiest episode of Star Trek ever produced. This episode finally brings the dimensional fissure plot to a climax—though not yet to a resolution, as that will come next week—as we finally, for the first time since “Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus,” look in on William Boimler, the transporter duplicate of Brad Boimler, whose death on the Titan was faked and he joined Section 31. Apparently 31 has sent him on a covert mission to find out why these fissures are happening. He’s got a Defiant-class ship, the Anaximander, and he’s got himself a crew of alternate versions of familiar characters, all refugees from the various parallel universes he’s bopped into over the course of this mission. And this is the (first) nerdy part: the crew includes, from various alternate realities, Curzon Dax (who is constantly practicing with his bat’leth on the bridge, to everyone’s annoyance), T’Pol, Garak (who is a Starfleet physician in his reality, though we see evidence of his Obsidian Order background), an Emergency Medical Hologram that is patterned after Julian Bashir, and nine different Harry Kims. To the credit of all and sundry, they got everyone back. Jolene Blalock—credited only as “Jolene”—voices T’Pol, the unexpected, welcome, and triumphant return of the actor who played the only grownup on Enterprise. Garrett Wang voices all the Kims. And Andrew J. Robinson and Alexander Siddig voice Garak and holo-Bashir—and, wait for it, the two of them are married. Reader, I squealed. So many shippers and fanfic writers are gonna watch this episode and jump up and down on their couches. Robinson has already confirmed in the DS9 documentary What We Left Behind that he was totally playing Garak as flirting with Bashir, and to see this particular take on the relationship is a joy. Especially since the Cardassian and the hologram bicker just like a married couple and yet still act exactly like Garak and Bashir. The Anaximander continues to bop through fissures and try to find the origin of them. For his part, Boimler is suffering from a bit of multiverse burnout, which is a spectacularly unsubtle but still hilarious commentary on the proliferation of multiversal storylines in contemporary popular culture. Throughout the episode, Boimler bitches that the different realities are so lazy, just slightly varied versions of his home universe. This is writ large with the Kims, as, with one exception, every single one of them is still an ensign—itself a nice commentary on the absurdity of Kim’s lack of advancement throughout the seven years of Voyager, despite his crewmates getting promotions at various points. And then that’s turned on its ear when it’s the one promoted Kim, a lieutenant, who goes rogue and nearly destroys the whole mission. Before that happens, though, we find the source of the fissures, and it’s not a malevolent one! One of the alternate realities has a Lily Sloane and a Zefram Cochrane who created, not a warp drive, but a trans-dimensional drive. Sloane—wearing a version of the Starfleet uniform from Enterprise—is captaining the Beagle, a ship that is exploring strange new dimensions, seeking out variations on old life and old civilizations. And yes, just when you think they had to have blown the entire budget on the voice actors they already got back, we get Alfre Woodard doing the voice of Sloane. Bliss. We see the Anaximander pick up two new crew members over the course of the mission before they finally find the Beagle. One is Lieutenant Harry Kim. The other is a Beckett Mariner who is an engineer and who absolutely hates away team missions and who prefers to stay quiet and follow orders and tinker in engineering. She’s still Mariner, mind you, but this one obviously focused on engineering at the Academy and likely didn’t have all the trauma the mainline Mariner did. At one point, Boimler bitches Sloane out, saying what she’s doing isn’t really exploring, it’s just rehashing, and Sloane gets to come back with a magnificently Star Trekkish response: seeing the variations in other realities is allowing them to explore the human condition, to see how the people are both different and the same in each reality. And of course, relationships develop. Garak and holo-Bashir are from two different realities, but they’ve found true love. (One of their arguments is over which reality they’ll live in once the mission is over.) Dax and T’Pol have what seems to be a contentious relationship à la McCoy and Spock, the emotional and free-wheeling Dax constantly grousing about the emotion-suppressed Vulcan. That storyline has a sweet, lovely ending involving the Dax symbiote and a mind-meld, beautifully written by scripter Lauren McGuire and performed by Jolene and Fred Tatasciore (who voices Dax, since we never really saw Curzon except in a brief flash in DS9’s “Emissary,” and he had no dialogue). Sloane is also correct that we get insights into the characters we know. For Garak and Bashir, it’s being able to move the homoerotic subtext of their relationship to the foreground—which is more of an out-of-the-box thing with it being easier to portray such on a 2020s streaming service than it was on 1990s commercial television (especially with an executive producer back then who was against the entire idea). For Mariner, it’s simply seeing a version of her that doesn’t self-sabotage, that doesn’t cover her insecurities with banter and lunacy and semi-cruel comments (though she still has plenty of insecurities), and who is a damn good engineer. For Kim, we get the possibility that maybe Janeway had the right idea keeping him an ensign, as the one who was promoted turns out to have let it go to his head, and he almost destroys the multiverse. And we see an extremely unhappy Boimler. While a lot of it is an excuse to bitch about the repetitive nature of multiverse stories (when speculating on who is responsible for the fissures, Boimler angrily says, “they’re probably a hacky evil version of someone we all know! A reverse Picard or a Borgified Kirk or, fuck it, I don’t know, human Worf!”), it also shows that Boimler is not happy as an agent of 31. He would rather be doing proper exploring like his counterpart on the Cerritos. (Not that the Cerritos actually does that much exploring, but the grass is always greener and all that…) Lieutenant Kim’s arrogant stupidity blows up the Beagle and causes a nasty feedback loop that will destroy everything. The only solution is to channel it all into one universe—destroy one rather than destroy all. (The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, cough cough.) Boimler tells Mariner and Sloane to have it be the universe he’s from, because he trusts his transporter twin and his friends, Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford, to figure out how to solve it. That’s a lot to put on four junior-grade lieutenants (five, really, but William Boimler doesn’t really know T’Lyn), but it is their show. Though this is also the second week in a row where those five barely appear. Despite the near-total lack of the regulars, with only alternate takes on Boimler and Mariner and very little of Tendi, Rutherford, and T’Lyn, this may be my favorite episode of LD, simply because, as I said, it’s so incredibly nerdy. Yes, it’s almost entirely fan-service, but that fan-service is also in service of the actual story, which is still very much the best kind of Trek tale. In particular, it follows one of Trek’s most noble tropes: the thing you think is evil and horrible turns out to be not so bad and the problem is solved by people talking to each other and coming to an understanding. In the closing moments, when alerting the Cerritos to what’s happening, William also sends a message directly to Bradward explaining the situation. “He’ll know what to do,” William says confidently. When Mariner expresses skepticism, William adds, “Yeah, as long as he doesn’t freak out.” Cut to Bradward freaking out and a “To be continued…” title card. To be fair, until receiving that message, Bradward thinks William is dead, which William probably didn’t take into account… Looking forward to the grand finale (in more ways than one, sigh) next week. Credit: Paramount+ Random thoughts T’Pol was last seen in Enterprise’s “These are the Voyages…” Curzon Dax was last (and only) seen in DS9’s“Emissary,” though a version of him was seen (merged with Odo) in DS9’s “Facets.” Garak and Bashir were last seen in DS9’s “What You Leave Behind.” Kim was last seen in Voyager’s “Endgame.” Sloane was last (and only) seen in First Contact. The Anaximander is named after the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who was one of the first known astronomers, and who also firmly believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. One of the funniest throwaway lines in the episode: Lieutenant Harry Kim saying, “Whoa whoa whoa—there are more than two dimensions?” We see alternate versions of the Khwopians from “Much Ado About Boimler,” but these are nasty and mean and put our heroes in a jail cell. Boimler’s beard has fully grown in, and now it looks just like the one his alternate-universe counterpart had in “Dos Cerritos.” Also the brief glance we got of Rutherford in “Upper Decks” indicated that he had given up growing his beard, and this episode confirms it, as he remains clean-shaven. Finally, a minor bit of trivial housekeeping. In the comments of my review of “Fully Dilated,” critter42 pointed out that I left someone off the list of people who have played the same role on four different Trek TV series: Wil Wheaton. I totally forgot about Wheaton voicing Wes Crusher in the flashback in “Old Friends, New Planets.” So just add to that list Wil Wheaton as Wes Crusher: TNG (series regular), Picard (guest star), Prodigy (recurring regular), LD (guest star). [end-mark] The post “I [BLEEP]ing hate the multiverse!” — <i>Star Trek: Lower Decks</i>: “Fissure Quest” appeared first on Reactor.

This week, a deranged 26-year-old anti-capitalist allegedly shot to death the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, on the streets of New York. The alleged shooter carried a manifesto with him, decrying the nature of America’s health care system: “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.” The manifesto claimed that America spends more than any other country on health care, and yet “we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” and that this was due to insurance companies that “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.” It is generally useless to argue with the criminally insane—and the alleged shooter in this case appears to have experienced a mental break some months ago due to both drug abuse and severe chronic back pain—but the problem is that the shooter’s view has become shockingly common. Many Americans believe that American health care is uniquely deficient; far more disturbingly, a certain cadre of elite Americans now cheer murder because they’re upset with the health care system. The first claim—that America’s health care system is uniquely terrible—is simply belied by the facts. Health care, like any other service or good, is not free; it obeys the simple laws of economics, which suggest that scarcity is a basic condition of life. Health care is not unlimited, nor can it be made so absent extraordinary spending levels. The United States, as it turns out, follows the same pattern as nearly every other developed country: The more we make, the more we spend on health care. That is just as true for the U.K. or Norway as it is for the United States. Furthermore, spending on health care is subject to the law of diminishing returns: additional moneys spent do not necessarily equate to additional life expectancy. That is true across countries as well. Finally, the United States’ population has a uniquely high proportion of overweight citizens, drug abusers, and car accident victims. This affects overall life expectancy statistics negatively. This doesn’t mean the American health care system is ideal. Far from it. Employer-based health insurance is a holdover from wage controls decades old; health insurers are not actually insurers at all—they are not in the business of assessing possible risk and then insuring against it; insurance regulations are abstruse and absurd, and the government’s subsidization schemes involve low reimbursement rates and shoddy coverage. The problems are myriad. Which is why it is so absurd to lay the problems with American health care at the door of the “profit-driven CEOs.” It turns out that removing the profit margins on business does not make products, goods, or services either more efficient or better. In fact, that precise ideology has crippled a variety of countries over the course of the last century. What’s worse is that ideology often excuses murder. Because, after all, if health insurance CEOs are so cruel that they purposefully murder patients in order to earn a buck, why shouldn’t they be shot? That’s the logic of comedian Bill Burr, who says, “I love that f—ing CEOs are f—ing afraid right now. You should be! By and large, you’re all a bunch of selfish greedy f—ing pieces of shit.” Or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who says, “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far.” This is the devil’s logic. If murder of individuals is justified by dissatisfaction with the system, we no longer live in a republic. We live in an anarchic, Hobbesian world of violence of all against all. It turns out that life is filled with grievances and hardships. If the response to such grievances and hardships is murdering CEOs, what precisely is the limiting principle? Why not shoot bank CEOs for their decision-making? Why not murder oil company executives or hedge fund CEOs? The answer to flawed policy is better policy. But if you wish to see the American system torn down from within, you’re better off advocating bloodlust and murder. And unfortunately, there are an awful lot of Americans who seem willing to tear down the American system itself rather than attempting to discuss rational solutions to intransigent problems. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Devils Are Here appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Wall Street Giddy About Trump

Trump Inauguration, Brought to You By ... ZuckBucks?