Losers...

Just Jemele Hill out here being ignorant

'It's all talk, and no action!'

'You're wrong'

The sky has long been a source of inspiration for artists, dreamers, and musicians alike. It represents freedom, possibility, and boundless creativity—all qualities that resonate deeply with the spirit of rock and roll. In the world of music, many bands have taken their names from things that fly, whether literal or symbolic, connecting their identity to the majesty of flight. From majestic birds to powerful aircraft, these names carry an air of mystery, power, and grace, perfectly complementing their sound and legacy. The Flying Burrito Brothers infused country rock with a cosmic twist, capturing the freewheeling essence of the late The post 20 Great Bands With Names Inspired by All Things That Fly appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

News The Great When The Great When Is Getting Adapted and Alan Moore Is Excited(!) About It The author is confident that his adaptation disappointment is coming to an end By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on December 3, 2024 Credit: Alan Moore photo from Fimb, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Alan Moore photo from Fimb, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Alan Moore, the creative mind behind Watchmen, is notorious for hating adaptations of his work. His tune, however, is markedly different for the announced series adaptation of his recently published fantasy novel, The Great When. “For the first time in my career, I’m genuinely excited and enthusiastic about a work of mine… one that I own, and believe could work marvelously in a different medium… being adapted for the screen,” Moore told Deadline, who broke the news that the studio Playground had secured the rights to the novel, the first in a five-book Long London series the author has already mapped out. “In Playground, I feel that I’ve connected with people who respect both me and the narrative and are receptive to such input as I can offer,” Moore added. “And, given Playground’s track record, I have little doubt that this will be anything short of spectacular. It’s taken me some time, but I think at last I’m ready for my closeup.” Playground is the production house behind the Wolf Hall adaptation and other British period series, including the popular All Creatures Great and Small. The Great When also falls in the British period piece bucket. Here’s the official synopsis: Amidst the smog of post-WWII London emerges Dennis Knuckleyard, a young clerk employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis comes into the possession of a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book from the Great When, a nightmarish, imaginary realm that is the supernatural counterpart to the city Dennis calls home. Dennis has to return the book or get killed. Soon he finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events, navigating a new realm of criminals, artists and occult figures that puts his life at risk and may alter and endanger both Londons forever… The deal is a new one, so the project is still in its early days, though Playground has said they see this as a multi-season series.[end-mark] The post <i>The Great When</i> Is Getting Adapted and Alan Moore Is Excited(!) About It appeared first on Reactor.

News Deeper Deeper: Tom Cruise to Team Up with Director Doug Liman Once Again in Supernatural Thriller After several attempts to get this project off the ground, could this be the winning combo? By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on December 3, 2024 Screenshot: Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Warner Bros. Tom Cruise is suiting up to star in the movie Deeper, which has Doug Liman in the director’s chair. The film is still in the early development stages, and Liman shared the news (via Deadline) at a New York City screening of the documentary, Gaucho Gaucho. Deeper, which has been in development limbo for almost a decade, centers on “an astronaut who encounters a terrifying force while on a deep dive into a never-before-explored trench.” Why that person, presumably Cruise, is described as an astronaut when he’s diving in the sea isn’t clear. Maybe this is an ocean on another planet? Or maybe the space folks had to be called in to explore the trench for movie reasons? Perhaps that’s the real mystery of Deeper, with the Cthulhu-esque force presumably dwelling in that trench being something more knowable. The movie was originally in development in 2016 with Bradley Cooper attached, and another iteration was in the works after that with Idris Elba in the starring role. This grouping of Liman and Cruise is reportedly the third attempt, and the two have worked together previously on films like Edge of Tomorrow (where you can see Cruise pictured above) and American Made.   The film is still very much in its early days—Deadline couldn’t even confirm if Deeper is Liman’s next project—so no news yet on if/when the movie will go into production.[end-mark] The post <i>Deeper</i>: Tom Cruise to Team Up with Director Doug Liman Once Again in Supernatural Thriller appeared first on Reactor.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Biden-Harris administration opened the door for a massive increase of taxpayer-funded transgender interventions, including child sex-change surgeries, and the Daily Caller News Foundation has obtained enough data to give a partial estimate of the cost. From January 2018 to September 2023, 16 states spent more than $165 million funding “gender transition services”—including puberty blockers, hormones, and sex-change surgeries—with more than $45 million spent on interventions for children 17 and younger, according to data obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation through a series of public record requests. The DCNF asked states to provide reimbursement data for gender transition services covered through state insurance and medical assistance programs, such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which is funded through Medicaid. The states were able to identify gender transition services through medical billing codes such as the International Classification of Diseases codes. Published by the World Health Organization, ICD codes provide comprehensive diagnostic information for diseases and injuries and create a valuable dataset used in medical research. The DCNF requested the total amount of reimbursements paid for all gender transition services—which could include speech therapy and mental health services as well as life-altering surgeries—that were covered through state insurance and medical assistance programs. The states that provided data to the DCNF include: Michigan, Idaho, Illinois, Virginia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Kentucky, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. The three states with the highest amount of reimbursements for gender transition services for adults and kids were Illinois, Oregon, and Washington state. Illinois spent $40,843,721, which included $14,296,558 in services for children 17 and under. Oregon spent $30,045,262 and Washington state spent $27,145,383. Other statewide totals for gender transition services include Maryland, which spent $11,849,062; Nevada, which spent $10,096,655; Michigan, which spent $6,821,169; and New Hampshire, which spent $2,360,534, according to data sent to the DCNF. Virginia provided the DCNF with data from 2020 to 2022, spending a total of $13,933,635 on gender transition services in three years, with $3,480,492 spent on sex-change interventions for children 17 and under. The state of Oregon specified that its data included reimbursement costs for a range of sex-change procedures, including surgeries, anesthesia costs, hair removal, speech therapy, hormone therapy, and puberty suppression. The data showed a 60% increase in sex-change interventions for adults and kids under the Biden-Harris administration across the 15 states that provided yearly data totals for 2020 to 2022, jumping from $27,753,478 spent on gender transition services in 2020 to $44,553,052 in 2022. Utah did not break down its data into yearly totals and was excluded from this calculation. While data for 2023 was incomplete, 12 states provided some totals showing $22,017,362 had been spent on sex-change interventions over the first nine months of last year. The DCNF attempted to obtain similar data from 48 states. However, many states outright denied the requests or sought exorbitant fees to obtain public data. For example, Rhode Island wanted a prepayment of more than $3,000 to fulfill the request that other states considered exempt from public information processing fees. Explosion in Sex Changes for Minors  Democrat-led policies that required insurers to pay for sex changes for minors led to an increase in the procedures nationwide, according to a leading transgender activist and physician. Every person in our nation must have the freedom to be their true self and to live free from hate.On Transgender Day of Visibility, I say to all trans and non-binary people: We see you. We love you. We will never stop fighting for you.— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) March 31, 2024 In a June 2022 email exclusively obtained by the DCNF, Jason Rafferty, the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ sex-change policy, attributed the growth of pediatric sex-change surgery to services being more “accessible” due to increased Medicaid funding. “I would say that there has likely been an increase in ‘top surgery’ among 16 and 17 year olds simply due to the fact that this surgery has become more accessible. 10 years ago when I started in this field, if a patient wanted surgery there was really only 1 surgeon in the region doing it for patients under 18 and aside from that they would need to travel across the country and pay out of pocket,” wrote Rafferty. “Clearly if you were on Medicaid or did not have the resources, it was off the table. Today, we have 3 surgeons in [Rhode Island] doing these surgeries and probably half a dozen in [Massachusetts] plus a pediatric plastic surgeon at Boston Childrens specializing in gender surgeries. Most if not all now take Medicaid – very few patients are paying the fully cost of surgery out of pocket. So, the point is that my experience is not that surgery is ‘more popular’ but just more (or simply just) accessible,” he wrote. Rafferty did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the DCNF. The rapid growth of tax dollars funding the sex-change industry can be attributed to policies from Democrat presidential administrations. In 2014, the Obama-Biden administration overturned a rule preventing Medicare from funding sex-change surgeries, opening the doors for taxpayers to pay for sex-change operations. It further expanded coverage for sex-change interventions in 2016 through its interpretation of Section 1557, a nondiscrimination provision of the Affordable Care Act. In May 2016, the Obama-Biden administration issued a rule that quietly redefined the discrimination policy to include sexual orientation and “gender identity,” a move that strong-armed the entire medical community into embracing gender ideology and sex-change interventions, especially for children. “Gender identity” is a term used by transgender activists to describe how a person feels about or perceives their sex. Activists believe these feelings override a person’s biology and should have equal weight in law and society. The Obama-Biden administration’s regulatory change prevented insurance companies from categorically denying coverage for sex-change interventions, considering such bans a form of discrimination, which forced insurance plans to offer coverage for sex-change services. “What the rule was about under Obama, and now under Biden-Harris, was to force medical providers to do the surgeries, even against their medical judgments, and for insurance companies to pay for it, which means we all pay for it,” Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation and former director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, told the DCNF. “That includes the whole gamut from hysterectomies to breast augmentations to tracheal shapes, voice training—just an extraordinary number of very expensive procedures to treat a psychological condition using physical interventions, surgeries, etc. and no real religious exemption,” Severino said. A 2023 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed the impact of President Barack Obama’s 2016 Rule, finding the number of sex-change surgical procedures performed in the U.S. nearly tripled between 2016 to 2019. Roughly 8% of patients were between the ages of 12 to 18, the study found, and showed a sharp rise in breast and chest surgery from 2016 to 2019 within the pediatric population. Biden-Harris Restores Gender Surgery Funding After Trump Admin In June 2020, the Trump administration overturned Obama’s rule on Section 1557, reinstating the government’s previous interpretation of discrimination must be based on biological sex rather than “gender identity.” At that time, Severino was the director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS. On May 10, 2021, however, the Biden-Harris administration reversed the Trump rule and redefined discrimination under Section 1557 to include “gender identity,” again forcing the medical community, including insurance companies, to provide sex-change services to children or face accusations of discrimination. “I issued the Trump regulations, undoing the Obama Section 1557 changes that added gender identity as a protected class and requiring cross sex, surgeries, hormones, puberty blockers, included on children in federally funded programs and in insurance,” Severino said. “They were as comprehensive as they could to try to push unscientific gender ideology into the medical system, and they succeeded, over the last three plus years, in trying to coerce hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies to push experimental treatments and surgeries, including and especially on children,” Severino added. Look at those #s ??https://t.co/oCBZV2meeX pic.twitter.com/PdylS72l6U— Do No Harm (@donoharm) October 13, 2024 Do No Harm, a medical watchdog group, recently published a database that found from 2019 to 2023, 13,994 children in the United States have received sex change-related treatments and 5,747 sex-change surgeries had been performed on children. “Medical professionals must provide evidence-based care, not pursue a political agenda,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm, told the DCNF. “We are committed to ending this predatory practice, which is harmful to the thousands of minors whose lives and bodies will never be the same.” Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Biden-Harris Admin Opened Floodgates for Taxpayer-Funded Sex Changes on Kids appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—China announced Tuesday that it is banning exports to the U.S. of some metals and rare minerals that can be used in the production of semiconductors and ammunition, according to The Financial Times. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced that it is banning exports of “dual-use” items related to germanium, gallium, antimony, and superhard materials to the U.S. in retaliation against the U.S. government’s latest trade restrictions, according to The Financial Times. The ministry also announced that it is placing more rigid controls on exports of graphite-related items, it reported. The key minerals and metals are used in the production of a variety of items, including batteries, military hardware, and semiconductors, according to the Financial Times. Beijing has largely dominated the global supply of various crucial resources, it reported. Researchers estimated there could be a $3.4 billion decrease in U.S. gross domestic product if China implements a total ban on exports of germanium and gallium, minerals used in some semiconductors and other high-tech manufacturing, according to a November report from the U.S. Geological Survey. China’s decision comes after the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security announced on Monday new restrictions designed to curb the People’s Republic of China’s capacity to produce advanced semiconductors that can be used in weapon systems, artificial intelligence, and computing. “The U.S. has broadened the concept of national security, politicizing and weaponizing trade and technology issues, and abused export-control measures,” China’s Commerce Ministry said in a statement, adding, according to The Financial Times, “To safeguard national security … China has decided to strengthen export controls on dual-use items to the U.S.” President-elect Donald Trump has proposed implementing massive tariffs on imported goods when he returns to the Oval Office, including on goods imported from China. Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with the president-elect at his residence in Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Friday after Trump threatened in November to impose a 25% tariff on all products from Canada and Mexico. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum signaled that she would retaliate if Trump imposes sweeping tariffs on Mexico. The president-elect said Monday he would impose a 10% tariff on Chinese goods so that Beijing does more to stop the trafficking of Chinese-made chemicals used in fentanyl, according to Reuters. China criticized Trump’s tariff threats, saying U.S. tariffs will not solve America’s problems, Reuters reported. The U.S. has been engaged in an ongoing tech war with China in an effort to gain the upper hand in the production of advanced technology. China in August announced plans to enact export restrictions on antimony, a mineral that is critical for producing certain weapons. Originally published by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The post China Escalates Trade War With US, Banning Exports of Minerals Used in Weaponry, Semiconductors  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

AOC Wants Oversight Committee Spot