'Found him hiding'

McCabe is exactly the type of FBI official who Patel will root out.

'I’m disappointed'

In a new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the nature of the Sombrero galaxy seems completely different. When seen in visible light, the galactic core whites out the inner disk, while the outer disk roils with dust and gas. But when seen under Webb’s mid-infrared view, the Sombrero galaxy, also known as Messier […] The post Once Bright and Lively the Sombrero Galaxy Mellows Out Under James Webb Telescope’s Infrared Light appeared first on Good News Network.

Books Harlan Ellison Looking Back at Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions Trilogy Considering the groundbreaking anthology series, long delayed and finally completed. By Anthony Aycock | Published on December 4, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Everyone, it seems, has a Harlan Ellison anecdote.  Words that have been used to describe Ellison include angry. Genius. Jerk. Legend. “Sci-fi’s most controversial figure” (Wired). “A giant squeezed into a 5’5” frame” (Steven Barnes). “A parasite who can kiss my ass” (James Cameron). Ellison called himself “troublemaker, malcontent, desperado . . . a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket.” The advice “never meet your heroes” feels tailor-made for Ellison.  Yet he also had his good points. Ellison marched in Selma, Alabama with Martin Luther King, Jr. He let friends live in his house rent-free. He was fearless and passionate, a friend and mentor, a thorn in the side of censorship. George R.R. Martin remembered that he “fought for women’s rights and the ERA. He fought publishers, defending the rights of writers to control their own material and be fairly compensated for it. He served on the Board of Directors of the WGA. He gave of himself to Clarion [writers’ workshop], year after year.” Writers he championed—Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, J.G. Ballard, Octavia Butler—became major literary players, making Ellison a sort of sci-fi Ezra Pound (without Pound’s troubling politics). Like most human beings, he was a mixed bag—yes, he was fractious and sometimes behaved very badly; at other times, he fervently advocated for and supported others (exception: that Fantagraphics defamation suit).  Harlan Ellison will be remembered for all these actions, righteous and reprobate, and for his work, which was voluminous: novels, short stories, essays, screenplays, comic books. The man even voice-acted. And it wasn’t simply voluminous; it was pioneering. His 1967 story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” described an AI supervillain seventeen years before Skynet (and 55 years before ChatGPT). “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” won the 1965 Nebula Award and the 1966 Hugo Award, one of only twelve stories to win both since 1953, the first year of the Nebula. (Ellison did it again in 1977/1978 with “Jeffty Is Five.”) The Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which he wrote, is widely considered the pinnacle of the original series. His collection of TV criticism, The Glass Teat, still holds up despite its 1970 release date. “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” was included in The Best American Short Stories 1993. Most of all, he will be remembered for editing two anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), which together heralded the so-called New Wave of science fiction. And he will be remembered for The Last Dangerous Visions, a collection he said would be published “approximately six months” after the second one. It actually appeared on October 1, 2024, fifty-two years after promised and six years after Ellison’s death, edited by his longtime friend, writer and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski.  We’ll come back to that.  Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, American literature changed quite a lot. The “genteel” realism and naturalism of the nineteenth century gave way to modernism, which “sought to break away from ordinary social values.” World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, Freudian psychology, the rise of fascism—these were destabilizing events, and they forever changed authorial voices. America had never before seen writers such as Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Richard Wright gave us Native Son and Black Boy, both of which depicted racism in ways the white reading public had never witnessed. The Beat Generation—Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs—represented another avant-garde flowering, as did Southern Gothic writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers.  Science fiction, however, had remained largely static, sticking to the pure entertainment of the genre’s Golden Age: plot-heavy narratives, clear heroes and villains, cursory characterization, space opera, high technology. Writing in the Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, Darren Harris-Fain observed that “American SF remained rather conservative from the late 1920s through the 1950s, seemingly unaffected by the formal experimentation associated with literary and artistic modernism.” This all changed in the 1960s with the so-called New Wave. There were still astronauts and aliens, but, as literary fiction had done half a century earlier, the focus of many stories had turned inward. Writers felt freer to integrate more earthbound horrors like depression, violence, drug abuse, prejudice, and dystopian governments. They also began experimenting stylistically through wordplay, mixed-up chronologies, and unreliable narrators.  It was into this milieu that the first Dangerous Visions appeared.  Consisting of thirty-three never-before-published stories, DV, as fans call it, had a singular ethos, described by Ellison in the oft-quoted opening of his introduction: “What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we are lucky, it is a revolution.” Ellison had been writing speculative fiction, as he preferred to call science fiction, for about a decade, so he knew what editors were looking for. He wanted a collection of stories that were genre-popping, boundary-pushing, taboo-incinerating—in short, and to use his word, “unpublishable.” To that end, he courted writers who were both new voices (Carol Emshwiller, John Sladek, Sonya Dorman) and established craftsmen at the top of their game (Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Lester del Rey).  Reviews, as you can imagine, were mixed. Critics tended to think the revolutionary aspect of the book was overblown. Algis Budrys called it “hoohah.” For P. Schuyler Miller, the book “doesn’t live up to its billing.” Judith Merril wrote that “Ellison’s New Thing resembles to a great degree the same New Thing Anthony Boucher and J.F. McComas brought into s-f in 1949.” (She also wrote “I wish this book had had an editor for the editor,” a one-liner worthy of Dorothy Parker.) Yet all conceded that many stories were well done, and that a few were outstanding.  Awards committees agreed. Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” won a Hugo, while Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah . . .” won a Nebula. “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber won both, for Best Novelette. It’s one of my favorites, a cheeky take on the trope of gambling against Death, in a world that resembles ours, but only kinda. In addition to the general introduction, Ellison wrote a gossipy preface for every story. He also cajoled each author into writing an afterword, which was overkill. (Fiction doesn’t benefit from the same framework as a graduation speech: tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, then tell ’em, then tell ’em what you’ve told ’em.)  Five years later, in 1972, Again, Dangerous Visions was released. This time, there were forty-six writers, none of whom had appeared in the first book. The second volume was longer than DV, exceeding the former’s 520 pages by over 50 percent. (Incredibly, you can find the whole thing online, free of charge.) There was the same mix of obscure and prominent authors, though the Big Names this time around seemed bigger: Ray Bradbury, James Sallis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.  Moreover, the tone is different. Ellison’s introduction to DV, though written in his trademark gamboling style, had been a manifesto. By contrast, his Again, Dangerous Visions introduction reads like a bad movie sequel: bloated, self-parodic, and headache-inducing. Here, for instance, is how he describes his agent, Larry Ashmead: “I am too much the gentleman to comment on the history of congenital insanity in the Ashmead ancestry, save to report Larry is inordinately proud of a spinster Ashmead aunt who was said to have had repeated carnal knowledge of a catamaran, and a paternal great-grandfather who introduced the peanut-butter-and-tuna-fish ice cream sundae in the Hebrides.”  Weird.  The focus, of course, must be on the stories, and as with DV, there are some stellar ones. Vonnegut’s “The Big Space Fuck” is both knife-like political satire (“In 1977 it became possible in the United States of America for a young person to sue his parents for the way he had been raised”) and Douglas Adams-esque comic sci-fi. “With a Finger in My I” by Star Trek veteran David Gerrold is the best description of a mental breakdown I’ve ever read. And  Gahan Wilson’s story, whose title is a literal black blob (check it out, page 427), is the world’s first amalgam of H.P. Lovecraft and P.G. Wodehouse.    (An aside: it amazes me that Stephen King doesn’t appear in Again, Dangerous Visions. In 1967, he had published a single story, “The Glass Floor,” so it’s unsurprising he didn’t make the first book. By 1972, however, there was “Graveyard Shift,” one of his most famous stories; “I Am the Doorway,” “Night Surf,” “The Mangler,” “Battleground,” and “Suffer the Little Children,” all of which would appear in his later anthologies; and “The Dark Man,” whose titular character would morph into Randall Flagg, the big bad of The Stand. King revolutionized horror fiction. Hell, he revolutionized publishing. His absence? Embarrassing.)  Death does not respect ambition. This is as true of writers as of anyone else. When a writer turns that last page, it falls to those who stay behind to sort out the literary legacy. In some cases, this includes unfinished series. Thus, Jody Lynn Nye collaborated on, and then continued, Robert Asprin’s Myth Adventures series. Frank Herbert’s series of Dune books was concluded by his son Brian along with Kevin J. Anderson (though fans have mixed opinions on the later books). Brandon Sanderson finished Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (three books, 2,500 pages). Harlan Ellison’s ambition had been two-thirds realized by Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. His introduction to the latter made clear that he was already working on a third and final volume, The Last Dangerous Visions, which would include stories—and full-length novels!—by Clifford Simak, Fred Saberhagen, Anne McCaffrey, Frank Herbert, Michael Moorcock, and many other luminaries. Over the next few years, Ellison made public proclamations about the size and scope of TLDV. In February 1974, for example, according to Christopher Priest’s tell-all “The Last Deadloss Visions” (later published in paperback as The Book on the Edge of Forever), Ellison told the fanzine The Alien Critic that there would be 78 stories totalling 491,375 words, “with Preface, Forewords, Afterwords, Introduction, etc., yet to be added.” Priest comments, “Assuming that the non-fiction matter still amounted to 110,000 words, the book has now reached over 600,000 words in prospect: equivalent to seven and a half normal-length novels.” By the late 1970s, the book was several years late, but it looked like it would still happen. Eventually, however, most people gave up. Some treated TLDV as a running joke. For others, like Priest, its absence stung.  Enter J. Michael Straczynski.  In February 2011, Ellison, age 76, asked Straczynski to be his literary executor. He had been unwell for a couple of years, writing little, spending days in bed, binge-watching TV (an irony, considering how he savaged the medium in The Glass Teat and its sequel, The Other Glass Teat), and evincing little of his legendary fire. Antidepressants helped for a while, but then he suffered a series of strokes. He died in his sleep on June 28, 2018 from pulmonary arrest. Once Straczynski assumed control of Ellison’s estate, TLDV became his priority. He worked on the book for years, neglecting his own writing to do so. Why had Ellison never completed it? The answer is complicated. Straczynski addresses it in a 56-page “Ellison Exegesis,” in which he reflects on the man and his legacy. Now that the book is finally here, what’s it like? Well, it’s not like it would have been in 1973, obviously. Some of the authors whose stories he bought have passed away. Others got tired of waiting and asked for their stories back, a request Ellison usually honored. Straczynski worked with what was left, eliminating outdated stories and adding a few contemporary ones. He wrote introductions to each story, as is the DV way, and he also wrote the afterwords, each in the present tense, even for stories that were part of the original TLDV. Thus: “Edward Winslow Bryant, thirty, lives in Denver, Colorado.” In fact, Bryant died in 2017. He was 71.  Reviews of the book, of which there aren’t many, have been, of course, mixed. (“Mixed” is inevitable with Harlan Ellison.) Fantasy Literature calls it “meh” and “predictable.” Review site Looking for a Good Book, declared that it is “of high caliber and great reading.” Publishers Weekly thinks that TLDV “fulfills the series’ mandate to present ‘cutting-edge stories that spoke to our humanity in all its flaws, faults, and glories.’” My view is that, in 2024, not much feels “dangerous,” fiction-wise. Some of these stories, however, certainly grabbed (and held) my attention.  I was fully into Richard Peck’s “None So Deaf,” a contribution to the original TLDV, after two sentences: “Warren Patterson could hear. He could hear because he was deaf.” If you know Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series, you know that Harry has Wizard’s Sight, the ability to see a person’s essence behind their facade. Patterson is like that, but with sound. Steve Herbst’s “Leveled Best,” another original selection, follows the travails of a person jailed for possessing contraband books. It isn’t preachy or heavy-handed, and it’s a story that seems more urgent now than in 1973. “After Taste” by Cecil Castellucci is a new story, and its premise—a galactic food critic sampling alien cuisine—made me ask, “How has nobody thought of this in a hundred years of science fiction?” I said these words aloud. In fact, I shouted them.  Finally, a word about Kayo Hartenbaum’s “Binary System.” In honor of Ellison’s habit of paying literary success forward, Straczynski held a contest for a single story slot. Hartenbaum had the winning entry, an account of a lightship keeper, which is basically a lighthouse keeper in space. Not much happens in the story, though it’s well done, the language crisp, the narrator likable. The premise of being stranded, isolated and alone, has been used many times—see Cast Away, The Martian, the Black Mirror episode “Beyond the Sea,” and so on. The difference is that, in these instances, the outcast is trying to get home. Hartenbaum’s narrator volunteered to be cut off from humanity, removed from society, left entirely to their own devices… If that isn’t a dangerous vision, I don’t know what is.  In addition to a Harlan Ellison anecdote, everyone has a favorite story from the original Dangerous Visions or Again, Dangerous Visions. Which ones do you like? If you have read The Last Dangerous Visions, what are that collection’s best entries?[end-mark] The post Looking Back at Harlan Ellison’s <i>Dangerous Visions</i> Trilogy appeared first on Reactor.

Pro-life laws in some states are saving lives, according to the annual “Abortion Surveillance” report released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s report covers 2022. Roughly half of it accounts for abortion under the Roe v. Wade regime, before the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 ruling that allowed abortion on demand. The other half of the report accounts for abortion under the post-Dobbs v. Jackson landscape, after the high court sent the issue back to Americans and their elected representatives. Again, the data is clear: Pro-life laws that went into effect in the immediate aftermath of the court’s Dobbs ruling saved lives. But there’s cause for concern, too. Pro-abortion states are undermining progress in pro-life states. Here are key takeaways from the CDC report that you need to know. Every year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases a report compiling information about abortion in the United States. The report answers important questions. Among them: How many abortions happened in a given state during a one-year period? What were the ages and races of women getting abortions? How many previous abortions did these women have? Were they married or unmarried? How many weeks pregnant were the women when the abortions took place? Was the abortion done using pills or a surgical procedure?   The CDC’s data is valuable—to an extent. Reporting to the government agency is voluntary, and not all states submit the same information. Four states submit no information at all. And the states that don’t participate (California, New York, New Hampshire, and New Jersey) all have weak abortion restrictions, if any. We know that the CDC data undoubtedly is missing thousands of abortions in these jurisdictions. Some organizations have released more recent data that includes 2023, among them the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute and individual state health departments. But for this discussion, we’re looking specifically at data available to the CDC for its yearly surveillance report. With the caveat that the data is limited, we can learn from overall trends. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 613,383 abortions took place in 2022. This is down from 625,978 abortions in 2021 and 620,327 in 2020. Pro-life laws in a dozen states sprang to life after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022, and the results are undeniable: These laws save lives, and fewer women and girls were harmed by abortion. The continued rise in the percentage of abortions that are chemical, rather than surgical, is concerning. For years, activists have sounded the alarm that abortion pills pose the single biggest threat to the progress of the pro-life movement. The CDC report again proves just how well-founded those warnings are. In 2022, 57.6% of abortions were done by pills rather than surgical procedures. This is up from 56% in 2021 and 22% a decade earlier, in 2012. Looking back all the way to 2001 (when abortion pills first became an option and were accounted for in the CDC data), such pills were used in less than 3% of all abortions. When we zoom in on state-specific data, we see that some states with lax abortion laws—including states that border pro-life states—actually saw an increase in the overall number of abortions. Take New Mexico, for example. Abortions more than doubled from 2021 to 2022. For neighboring Texas in 2022, abortions were a third of what they were the year before. Unfortunately, it appears that many women traveled to New Mexico to obtain an abortion that they otherwise wouldn’t have had back in Texas. How can we tell? New Mexico reported that 40% of abortions were done on out-of-state residents in 2021. The next year, more than 62% of abortions were performed on out-of-state residents. This is a dynamic we see in other states as well. Abortions increased in Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, and North Carolina. At the same time, the number of abortions performed on out-of-state residents also saw a big bump in these states. Another troubling dynamic is the shift in when abortions occurred, particularly abortions prior to six weeks gestation (the point at which ultrasound typically can detect an unborn child’s beating heart). In recent years, the percentage of abortions at or before six weeks was rising higher and higher, meaning women were obtaining abortions earlier and earlier in pregnancy. As the chart below shows, the percentage climbed steadily following Food and Drug Administration approval of the abortion drug mifepristone in 2000. The percentage jumped significantly after 2016, when the Obama administration significantly weakened safety protections for this dangerous drug. In 2022, the percentage of abortions performed at of before six weeks dropped from 45% to 40%. Looking at the raw numbers, we see that even though fewer abortions occurred in 2022 compared to 2021, thousands more abortions occurred later in pregnancy. Why does this matter? We see that when more states protect unborn children early in pregnancy, it corresponds with fewer abortions overall. That said, it’s likely that some women in pro-life states would have gotten an abortion earlier if they could get one in their home states. Instead, they got one later after traveling to a pro-abortion state. More abortions occurring later in pregnancy should concern everyone who cares about women’s health and safety. After all, the further along a woman is in pregnancy, the more likely she is to experience complications from an abortion. Will this trend continue to show up in the CDC’s 2023 data? Time will tell. Besides these takeaways from the agency’s abortion report this year, there’s plenty more number-crunching and analysis to do in the months and weeks to come. It’s clear that pro-life laws in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision saved lives. The total number of abortions declined, and hearts are beating today that otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance at life. That’s cause for celebration. But it’s also clear that pro-life laws in some states are up against radically pro-abortion laws in other states. Women continue to travel to pro-abortion states and dangerous abortion pills continue to be shipped into pro-life states. The Dobbs ruling was a victory half a century in the making. But the status quo isn’t the end goal. The pro-life movement’s mission never was to protect women, girls, and babies in Texas, Idaho, and Tennessee while abandoning them to abortion on demand in New Mexico, California, and Illinois. The fight to build a culture of life continues at the local, state, and federal levels. Convincing our fellow citizens of the value and dignity of each and every life is more important than ever. The post CDC Abortion Report Shows Progress, Challenges in Post-Roe America appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Biden's Excellent African Adventure

"It's so that right-handed defenders could swing a swor--" NOPE.

If we were living in a simulation, what is in it for the simulators?

The International Space Station (ISS) is currently a problematic object in orbit. It suffers from cracks, coolant and air leaks, and just age, since it is already 25 years old. This makes the ISS a dangerous place for astronauts to stay. NASA has decided to “safely and under control” lower the ISS into the Earth’s atmosphere in 2031, where part of it will burn up, with the aim of sinking its debris into the Pacific Ocean. Some experts are beginning to question how safe this deadly plunge will be, since it could end up polluting the Earth’s air and water. The ISS’s controlled dive zone is located within the South Pacific Ocean, where there are no human settlements. This area is farther from land than any other point on Earth and is often referred to as the world’s largest spacecraft graveyard. However, the planned end of the ISS’s life is causing concern among scientists. Some researchers believe that debris from the station could heavily pollute the water and air as it descends through the atmosphere and falls into the ocean. NASA announced that it has selected SpaceX to develop a spacecraft that will help deorbit the International Space Station. The contract is worth nearly $850 million. NASA believes this is the best option for a controlled and safe disposal of the orbital station. Leonard Schulz of the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany says that given the ISS’s mass (450 tonnes), the Earth’s atmosphere could be contaminated with huge amounts of harmful substances when the station burns up due to intense heat from friction with the air. The ISS is the largest space station ever built. Its primary purpose is to perform microgravity and space environment experiments. Luciano Anselmo of the Institute of Information Sciences and Technology in Pisa, Italy, believes that there is also some risk to ocean water, as it could be contaminated by debris from the ISS. But he says that even if the entire mass of the ISS were to fall into the ocean, it would be nothing compared to the mass of all the ships and cargo sunk over the decades, not to mention other waste polluting the aquatic environment. Anselmo believes that the greater threat from the ISS’s descent is to the Earth’s upper atmosphere, but it is difficult to assess the negative impacts at this point. But representatives of organizations that protect the aquatic environment believe that space debris from the ISS crash could pose a major threat to the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Many experts point out that there is still no international legal framework that would control the descent of inoperative spacecraft to Earth. Darren McKnight of LeoLabs, which monitors space activity to identify threats to spacecraft safety, says many experts are more concerned about the water environment than the space environment. But if spacecraft are not re-entered under control, it could be a major disaster. If no one pays to keep the ISS in orbit, it won’t be able to maneuver and will be easily hit by space debris. Then the station could just fall anywhere, McKnight says. According to McKnight, it would be possible to dismantle the ISS in orbit and float it down into the ocean in pieces. Or it could be sent to a higher orbit. But both options are very expensive. The post NASA Is Going To Destroy The ISS By Crashing The Station To Earth appeared first on Anomalien.com.