'The Biden-Harris government has records that the American public is entitled to see'

A post shared on Threads claims ABC News has purportedly lost $27 million in ad revenue following the presidential debate the network hosted on Sept. 10.   Post by @beverly.b.clyde View on Threads   Verdict: False The claim is false and originally stems from a Sept. 12 article published on the satire website, “SpaceX Mania.” […]

'The lowest level of undecideds'

'It could have been my dad'

RIP

News Time Bandits Time Bandits Will Go On No Further Adventures at Apple TV+ Time’s up for these bandits By Molly Templeton | Published on September 17, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share It’s one and done for Lisa Kudrow and her merry band of bandits: Apple TV+ has canceled Time Bandits, the adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s classic film created by Jemaine Clement, Iain Morris, and Taika Waititi. The series focused on a young boy (played by Kal-El Tuck)—a big history nerd—who finds himself going on adventures through time with a gaggle of thieves, encountering famous figures and swiping valuable treasures. As Deadline notes, Time Bandits was well-received, but didn’t have enough viewers to make it into Nielsen’s top ten streaming charts. NPR said, “Its time travel is the most delightfully playful since Mr. Peabody set his Wayback Machine on Rocky And Bullwinkle,” and in the Chicago Sun-Times, Richard Roeper wrote that the series “finds that sweet spot between simply tracing over the original and straying too far from the source material, the result being a breezy, slyly humorous, rousing adventure suitable for all but the very youngest of viewers.” Time Bandits also starred Charlyne Yi, Tadhg Murphy, Rune Temte, Roger Jean Nsengiyumva, Rachel House, Kiera Thompson, James Dryden, Felicity Ward, Francesca Mills, and Imaan Hadchiti, with Clement and Waititi showing up as Pure Evil and the Supreme Being, respectively. Its first and only season is available to watch on Apple TV+.[end-mark] The post <i>Time Bandits</i> Will Go On No Further Adventures at Apple TV+ appeared first on Reactor.

Books Science Fiction Five SF Books Set in the Future… of 2020 How did science fiction imagine the world of 2020? Let’s look at some of the more entertaining predictions and speculations… By James Davis Nicoll | Published on September 17, 2024 Art by Ron Walotsky Comment 0 Share New Share Art by Ron Walotsky The 2020s were once reassuringly in the distant future, and a popular setting for science fiction; now we find ourselves living in that decade. How prescient were those SF authors of the past? Are their predicted settings anything like current conditions? And how much amusement may modern readers derive from visions of yesterday’s tomorrow? Let’s find out! The End of the Dream by Philip Wylie (1972) The optimism of the 1970s proves unfounded. The decades that follow are a series of escalating cataclysms caused by humanity’s ecological hubris. Great cities burn. Rivers boil. Pollution poisons the air. Billions die. The calamities spare no one. However, calamity brings reform. By June 6, 2023, the few remaining humans have seen the error of their ways. An ecologically prudent world government oversees recovery. Too bad for the survivors that their efforts are just a smidge too belated. This is basically a stupider, much louder version of Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (or given the publication dates, Brunner’s novel is the much-improved version of The End of the Dream). I am a little surprised that this book was never the basis for a disaster film, given that other Wylie works made it to the silver screen. 2020 Vision edited by Jerry Pournelle (1974) There were two desiderata for stories selected for this collection. Stories had to be set in the year 20201. The settings had to be plausible; there would be no tales featuring super-science or pseudoscience unless the author thought those were plausible. Pournelle took the further step of inviting readers to critique the predictions at the 2020 Worldcon, an unusual invitation that for various reasons proved impractical2. So, how does this collection stand up? The stories are a mixed bag but most reward reading. Some imagine a US that has been much reduced, whether conquered by the rascally Soviets or dominated by Japanese commercial prowess. Others imagine a US that is still prosperous. Most of the authors thought crewed space travel would be more developed than it is. For the most part, the stories reflect the anxieties of 1970 more than they do the anxieties of 20203. There are two partial exceptions. David McDaniel’s Prognosis: Terminal focuses on the impact of technological change upon artists; the details are not our details, but the feel is familiar. Dian Girard’s “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry” imagines a world in which women are denied bodily autonomy to the extent that they aren’t even allowed to select their own meals. No doubt she was inspired by the status of women in the 1970s. Nevertheless, it would be easy to find modern analogs to her protagonist’s situation. Rule 34 by Charles Stross (2011) In Stross’ setting, the inexorable march of Moore’s Law has led to impressively capable robots, home fabricators, and powerful software that is insufficiently documented. There are new nations, many of them corruptible. This could be a golden age for criminal innovation… or so the criminal organization known as the Organization thinks. Across Europe, criminals suffer fatal (in some cases NSFW) mishaps. Each might be the product of unlikely, but possible, chance. Taken together, they suggest that some unseen architect is at work, methodically eliminating Europe’s criminals. Will Inspector Kavanaugh catch the mastermind? Will career criminals Anwar and the Toymaker survive the mastermind’s attention? Aside from computers and robotics not being quite as far along as envisioned, the big difference between Stross’ version of the 2020s and ours is this: Stross assumed global scale corruption and criminality would require competence, whereas it turns out that’s an optional extra. Sufficiently determined, well-placed nincompoops can get surprising far. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1993) The United States of America of the 2020s can maintain lunar bases and dispatch expeditions to Mars. What the US cannot do, or chooses not to do because the short-term consequences would be inconvenient, is to address climate change or the slow but inexorable collapse of civilization that results. Absent effective federal or state response, individual Americans are forced to cope with an increasingly dysfunctional society as best they can. Lauren Olamina’s family is comparatively lucky. Their enclave has thus far been secure. Lauren’s father still has his job. Safety is an illusion, alas. Lauren’s relatives are murdered and her home is looted and burned. Lauren herself is forced to search for refuge in a world where the only guarantee is that things will get worse. I cannot help but notice that this series is the only one of the five listed here that I see frequently cited on social media, often with particular attention directed to particular passages. Of what possible relevance to our era could a dystopia driven by greed, fear, and foolishness have? Sadly, I lack the space to address this. Directive 51 by John Barnes (2010) In this setting, the 2024 US presidential election is looming. The US and the world in general appear to face purely conventional threats, such as terrorism. In fact, computer tech has passed an inflection point that allows a few determined, networked amateurs to wreak apocalyptic havoc. On their own, none of Daybreak’s members are significant threats. Together, they can—and do—kneecap civilization. Gigaton explosions bloom across the planet. America’s president and everyone in the line of succession are dead. What survives of the nation is riven by a near civil war between factions led by two surviving senior functionaries, Graham Weisbrod and Cameron Nguyen-Peters4. Barnes offers a much more placid 2010 to 2024 than we actually got, albeit with a significant bill to be paid at the end. The notion that the loser of a presidential election might simply refuse to acknowledge his loss seems more prescient now than it did in 2010. At least there’s no sign of deranged third parties rendering the electoral dispute moot through the use of gigaton nukes—at least so far. 2024 has been a year of surprises… These are only a few of the 2020s that SF authors have imagined. There are many I did not mention. In retrospect, it’s a little odd there were so few that offered optimistic views of our current era. Feel free share your favorites in the comments below.[end-mark] Pournelle’s theme (2020) for his collection was a half-century in the future when he commissioned the stories. The theme was only forty-six years away when the book finally appeared. Blame publishing delays. ︎If there had been a panel about Pournelle’s collection at the 2020 Worldcon, that would have been fun. Too bad no one took this notion and ran with it. Or at least, they did not so far as I know. ︎More re: Pournelle’s book: readers may want to skip Poul Anderson’s story “The Pugilist” and they most definitely want to avoid even a description of the Van Vogt. ︎It is pretty clear that the US succession rules were never play-tested by disruptive, hostile rules-lawyers. In the US’s defense, I can think of an analogous order of operations issue in Canada’s Westminster-style settler governments. So far as I know the issue has never been properly clarified in the Canadian context: what happens when the PM and Governor General dismiss each other simultaneously? Aside from hilarity, I mean. ︎The post Five SF Books Set in the Future… of 2020 appeared first on Reactor.

Understandably, we want to blame someone besides the 14-year-old who murdered four people Sept. 5 at Apalachee High School in Georgia. People are shocked and upset that the father taught the boy to shoot and hunt, and bought the boy a rifle for Christmas. But that doesn’t mean it made any sense for police to arrest the father the day after the school shooting on two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children. This isn’t the first time that parents have been held liable for their children’s actions.  Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to prison for 10 to 15 years after their son perpetrated the 2021 Oxford High School shootings in Michigan. Their crime? Letting their son have access to the father’s pistol, which was used in the murders. The problem here is that there are a lot of mistakes to go around, and all too frequently, many fail to identify these murderers before they commit their crimes. As I will discuss later, the question is, what policies do you put in place when you know that we won’t identify these killers before they strike? Georgia police interviewed the boy in May 2023 after he used the Discord communication platform to threaten to shoot up a school. Making a threat to murder people is a crime. But police concluded they didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest. The boy claimed he had stopped using the platform months earlier and “promised I would never say something [like that].” Because the police couldn’t directly tie the boy to the messages, the bodycam footage of the interview reveals an officer saying: “I gotta take you at your word.” But why he says that is a mystery. The police knew the IP [internet protocol] address of the home where someone made the posts, which is how they found the boy. And although the boy and his father had recently moved from there, all the police needed to know was the posts’ dates to see if the boy lived in the house at the time. The officers didn’t even need the level of proof required in a criminal case. If a judge finds that someone is a danger to himself or others, there is a range of options, including outpatient mental health care. Gun confiscation or involuntary commitment may also be options. If law enforcement officers took the Georgia boy at his word, how can we blame the father for doing the same? If anything, the boy’s mother should be commended. Thirty minutes before the attack, she called her son’s school to warn of an “impending disaster.” “I told them it was an extreme emergency and for them to go immediately and find [my son] to check on him,” the mother said in a screenshot of the message that she sent to the boy’s aunt. But the high school didn’t act. Isn’t the school mainly at fault for that? Red flags are always easier to notice in hindsight. Indeed, since 1998, 51% of mass public shooters were seeing mental health professionals before their attacks. But none of the mental health professionals ever identified these murderers as a danger to themselves or others. In many cases, people had raised concerns about these killers before they carried out their attacks, but the professionals never recognized the threat. If experts miss the danger signs, how can we blame a parent for not seeing them? Should the families lock up their guns so only adults have access? Not surprisingly, crime rates rise when governments prevent people from defending themselves. When people are required to lock up their guns, criminals more frequently invade people’s homes and then are more successful in murdering or otherwise harming their victims. If locking up guns could have prevented all five of the mass shootings committed by minors since 2000, including this latest shooting, there would have been 25 fewer deaths and 19 fewer people wounded. Of course, these killers may very well have obtained weapons in other ways. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that all those attacks simply would not have occurred. The number of lives saved would still be only about 1/14th of the number of lives lost in just a single year because mandatory locks kept people from getting to their guns in time. The horrific deaths and injuries from school shootings rightly get a lot of attention. But we don’t hear about the deaths that occur because people can’t readily access guns to protect themselves and their families. Those deaths are no less horrific.  The national media rarely mention defensive gun uses, even when young children use guns to save lives. But dozens of recent cases have been reported by local news outlets.  >>> Related: Defensive Gun Use Shows Second Amendment Remains Necessary, Even After Tragedies Fortunately, there was a security officer at the school, though Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ presidential nominee, has argued for banning all guns from schools, even for law enforcement. But even when school resource officers are in the right place at the right time, they have a tough job. Uniformed guards may as well be holding neon signs saying, “Shoot me first.” Attackers know that once they kill the security officer, who is the only person with a gun, no one else can stop them. Having armed teachers carrying concealed firearms takes away that tactical advantage.  Twenty states allow this under a variety of rules. Outside of suicides or gang violence in the middle of the night, there has not been one instance of a death or injury from an attack at a school that has armed teachers.  Not surprisingly, the attacks in Georgia and Michigan both occurred in schools that banned teachers and staff from having guns. Other schools in Georgia have armed teachers, but not Apalachee High School. We could blame law enforcement, schools, mental health experts and the parents. But, politically, it seems to be easier to blame the parents instead of the “experts.” The bottom line is that if we keep failing to identify these murderers, what is the backup plan? Let’s take real action to protect our schools and arm teachers. This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire The post Don’t Jail Parents for School Shootings. Arm Teachers. appeared first on The Daily Signal.