There’s something timeless about the word “story.” It holds a certain magic, a promise of connection, and an exploration of the human experience. In the world of rock and roll, stories have been told through pounding rhythms, gentle melodies, and everything in between, capturing tales of love, loss, rebellion, and redemption. These songs remind us that music doesn’t just entertain—it tells the tales of who we are, where we’ve been, and where we hope to go. From heartfelt ballads to roaring anthems, this list dives into the power of the word “story” and how it has inspired some of the The post 10 Best Songs With The Word ‘Story’ In The Title appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Ongoing excavations at a sprawling temple 125 miles north of Luxor have unearthed a towering discovery: a temple pylon measuring 150 feet wide made of sandstone blocks. It was found at the Athribis site dating to the Ptolemy dynasty when Egypt was ruled by the descendants of one of Alexander of Macedon’s generals, where excavations […] The post Archaeologists Uncover Gateway to Ancient Greek Temple Alongside the Nile in Egypt appeared first on Good News Network.

The post How to Keep Your Cat’s Nails Healthy in 5 Vet-Approved Steps 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 Right Tools Keeping Your Cat’s Nails Healthy Steps to Take Should Indoor Cats’ Nails be Trimmed? As a responsible cat owner, you’re well aware of the importance of caring for your kitty’s sharp little claws—not only for their health but also to spare your furniture! While our feline companions know how to keep their fur in tip-top condition, sometimes they need help maintaining their nails. With the right approach, patience, and plenty of pets, keeping your feline’s claws healthy can be a pleasant experience for both of you. Here are the steps to follow to take care of your cat’s claws while sparing yourself a few scratches! Getting the Right Tools Keeping your cat’s paws healthy starts with nail maintenance. This is why investing in a good pair of cat nail clippers is essential to make the task of trimming your cat’s nails as smooth as possible. Consider a comfortable grip and a safety guard to prevent cutting too deep. Hepper Cat Nail Clipper Kit - Small and Large... Complete Set - These cat nail clippers include both a large and small pair, meaning it works well as...Razor Sharp Stainless Steel - The most comfortable cat nail clippers for indoor cats provide a fast...Safety First - With a safety nail guard and locking spring, you can make sure every grooming cut is... Check Price on Amazon Trimming your cat's nails at home can be hard, but having a professional do it can be expensive. With the help of great tools like Hepper's Cat Nail Clipper Set, you can easily and quickly trim your cat's nails at home. This set includes two pairs of stainless steel clippers with safety guards and locking mechanisms, plus a built-in nail file and a convenient pouch. At Catster, we’ve admired Hepper for many years and decided to take a controlling ownership interest so that we could benefit from the outstanding designs of this cool cat company! What Does It Mean to Keep Your Cat’s Nails Healthy? Cats’ nails are like ours in that they will continually grow if they aren’t trimmed. That said, cats can scratch with their claws—sometimes in inappropriate places, like your favorite couch—to keep them at an appropriate size. However, checking your cat’s nails regularly is essential to ensure that they don’t get too long. Nails that aren’t trimmed often enough can curl on themselves and become ingrown, which is painful for the cat and can lead to infections. Moreover, their claws can get stuck in carpets, blankets, or other places, which can lead to injury when they try to free themselves. In short, keeping your cat’s nails healthy means making sure they aren’t too long, injured, deformed, infected, or dirty. The 5 Steps to Keep Your Cat’s Nails Healthy 1. Trim Their Nails Once or Twice a Month The health of your cat’s nails requires regular trimming. The idea is to familiarize your kitty with this process from a very young age, but getting an older cat to be fine with having their paws and claws handled is possible. However, it may take more time and patience! 2. Handle Each Paw With Care You are free to use this image but we do require you to link back to Catster.com for credit It’s essential to cut your cat’s nails in a position that suits them best, whether they’re sitting, standing, or lying down. Pick a quiet place in your house where your cat feels most comfortable, get cozy, close the door, and above all, make sure your kids or dogs don’t come in! To help your cat get used to having their paws touched, try this exercise. When your cat is relaxed, gently touch the top of one of their paws, and then give them a treat. Repeat this several times, touching each paw separately and giving them a treat each time. With practice, your cat should become more comfortable with having their paws touched. If your cat seems stressed or tries to bite you, stop immediately and let your cat leave. You can try again when they are calmer. If your cat seems relaxed and peaceful, it’s time to get a pair of quality cat nail clippers and get to work: Place your cat comfortably in the crook of your arm so you are looking in the same direction. Take one paw in your hand and hold it gently but firmly. Gently squeeze the tops of their toes to expose the claws. Place one exposed nail tip into the clipper ring, perpendicular to the nail. Squeeze the clipper to cut. Stop about 2 mm from the “quick,” as this sensitive part contains nerves and blood vessels. Cut the tip of each nail. Repeat with each paw. 3. Provide Multiple Scratching Posts You can safely encourage your cat’s natural instinct to scratch by providing appropriate outlets. Invest in scratching posts and other cat trees, which are available in different shapes, sizes, and textures at pet stores or online. You can also give free rein to your creativity and DIY an original scratching area for a low price! For example, you can cover a post or large cardboard box with carpet or opt for sisal or rope-like materials for cats that tend to destroy sofas. Place the posts strategically near your cat’s favorite scratching spots, such as near their resting areas. Some cat parents build custom scratching posts using wood, carpet, fabric, or sisal and make cat trees with many climbing perches and hanging toys. Whether purchased or built, scratching posts should be sturdy, unlikely to tip over, and at least as tall as your cat when they’re standing on their hind legs with their front paws extended. The Hepper Hi-Lo is the perfect alternative to a regular scratching post or cat tower and doubles as a fun and exciting way for them to keep their nail length at bay. Cardboard is the main attraction, because we all know how much cats can't resist it, and the scratcher itself was created to encourage play with its multi-position design. Hepper Hi-Lo Cardboard Cat Scratcher with Real... Premium Materials - Hepper's cardboard scratcher is made with dense, B-flute cardboard, and a metal...High, Low and Lower - A single cat scratch pad won't keep your cat engaged. 3 unique positions keeps...Activates Muscles - The Hi Lo isn't just a cat nail file to stop the chief cat couch scratcher. The... Check Price on Amazon If you are looking to keep nail trims to a minimum and your cat entertained for hours, the Hepper Hi-Lo Cat Scratcher is a must-have.  At Catster, we’ve admired Hepper for many years, and decided to take a controlling ownership interest, so that we could benefit from the outstanding designs of this cool cat company! 4. Check Their Paws Regularly Take the time to inspect your cat’s paws regularly. Look for any signs of redness, swelling, or abnormalities in the nails or paw pads. Detecting problems early will help prevent potential complications and unnecessary pain for your cat. Furthermore, the more often you check your cat’s paws and claws, the better you will become at identifying potential health problems, such as infections, trauma on the nail bed, or ingrown nails. If in doubt, ask your veterinarian for advice. Speak To a Vet Online From the Comfort of Your Couch! If you need to speak with a vet but can’t get to one, head over to PangoVet. It’s an online service where you can talk to a vet online and get the personalized advice you need for your pet — all at an affordable price! Click to Speak With a Vet 5. When in Doubt, Ask for Help Despite your best efforts, trimming your cat’s nails on your own can be tricky. So, if you are unsure how to keep your cat’s claws healthy or if your cat has specific nail-related problems, don’t hesitate to seek professional advice. A pet groomer can show you proper nail trimming techniques, while your vet can ensure that there are no underlying health issues that could affect your beloved beast’s nails. Image Credit: 135pixels, Shutterstock Should You Trim Your Indoor Cat’s Nails? It depends on your cat’s personality and how much they move around inside the home, but usually, yes, indoor cats need their nails trimmed. In fact, indoor cats typically don’t wear down their nails as much as outdoor cats do. The frequency of trimming depends on your cat’s activity level, how fast their nails grow, and how much they wear down their nails on scratching posts. As a rule of thumb, trimming your indoor cat’s nails every 2 to 4 weeks is advised by most vets. However, if possible, avoid cutting your feline companion’s claws if they go outside, as they need their claws sharp enough to climb trees and escape potential threats. Final Thoughts Keeping your kitty’s nails healthy isn’t rocket science, but it does take a bit of skill, practice, and patience. Some cat parents are lucky enough to have docile fur babies that let their paws be handled without issues, while others may witness their beloved cat turn into a ferocious beast at the slightest touch. In such cases, seeking advice from your vet may be your best bet to prevent any potential injuries. See also: Cat Pedicures: What’s Involved? Vet-Approved Facts & Explanation Featured Image Credit: Nailia Schwarz, Shutterstock The post How to Keep Your Cat’s Nails Healthy in 5 Vet-Approved Steps 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 Arcane Arcane’s Second Season Is as Beautiful as it Is Imperfect While it doesn’t reach the height of its explosive first season, Arcane’s final set of episodes have much to offer By Kathryn Porter | Published on December 3, 2024 Credit: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Netflix Arcane’s second season was never going to completely satisfy its audience. Most television is not guaranteed to make the people who watch it feel fulfilled season after season, but Arcane was destined to fall short of expectations the moment it was announced that its second season would be its last. Season one’s complex characters and themes were woven together in an incredibly balanced three act story that concluded with one of the best cliff-hangers of all time, and when all was said and done, there was no sense that the series would end with just two 9-episode seasons to show for it. This is not to say that all of Arcane season two was wholly disappointing or poorly done. With Fortiche at the helm of the animation, Arcane will always look incredible no matter how good or bad the writing is. As beautiful as the show continues to be, there are conclusions to character arcs that, had the series gone on for another season or two, would have likely stayed the same. Almost everyone lands where they are supposed to by the time the series concludes, but it is how they reach those conclusions that feels a little hollow in the wake of a far superior first season. Keeping track of large ensemble casts as a screenwriter is difficult. The lack of ability to do so is the bane of anyone who has been in a committed relationship with a long-running network TV show, but Arcane managed to give all 13 of its main characters proper allotments of its limited screen time in season one. It is an impressive feat that not many writing teams can pull off, so it is not completely surprising that things started to fall apart a bit in the second season. Storytelling cannot be perfectly even all the time, but in its quest to make sure that Arcane concluded in a true ending, many of the characters we loved fell to the wayside, and the thematic importance they carried fell with them. Most egregiously left behind by Arcane’s end are Sevika and the Zaunites. We see how Piltover has taken advantage of the undercity time and time again in the present day, we know how they have taken advantage of the undercity in the decades past, and yet there is no true resolution to the inhumanity that the Zaunites have faced at the hands of their oppressors. The undercity faces even worse under Caitlyn and Ambessa’s regime this season, subject to Enforcer checkpoints if they want to move between certain parts of the city. Anyone accused of dissent is imprisoned without a trial so that Piltover’s hold on Zaun is left unchallenged. Caitlyn, despite knowing what Vi has faced at the hands of Piltover and the Enforcers—the death of her parents, imprisonment as a teenager, abuse at the hands of her jailers—willingly puts every Zaunite under the same subjugation just to get her hands on Jinx for personal revenge. Credit: Netflix Jinx, now a symbol of Zaunite revolution and Piltover’s insecurity against her will, is encouraged by Sevika and Isha to take her place as the face of Zaun’s growing but fractured revolution. Sevika spends all of her time before the second act of season two jumping from leader to leader. She stood behind Vander until she realized he was no longer the radical he once was, she took up with Silvio until he died, and she sticks herself in the middle of the warring chem-barrons in order to keep some semblance of peace between the people filling the power vacuum Silco’s death blew wide open. It takes Jinx refusing to step up for Sevika to attempt to come into a leadership position in her own right, and even though she is only successful in rallying the people because Isha appears to impersonate Jinx, she implicitly becomes the leader she had always been looking for while Jinx goes off with Vi in search of Warwick. She ends the series with a seat on Piltover’s council, and though that is a solid conclusion for the Zaun narrative, it is hardly satisfying when we didn’t get to see Sevika fight for it. Aside from freeing the imprisoned Zaunites with Jinx—who only comes along because Isha is in danger—Sevika’s time at the forefront of Zaun’s revolution is completely forgotten until her final, dialogue-less scene where she takes her seat on the council. Her place is earned, but unlike many of the other characters Arcane features, we do not get to see her earn it, nor do we get to see Zaun carve out its autonomy as its own city and community in the face of Piltover’s increasing fascist behavior, and the show is worse off for that. Though she does get significantly more focus than Sevika and the plight of Zaun, Mel is also unfairly sidelined this season. After making it out of Jinx’s attack on the council unscathed with Jayce, she turns her focus to her mother. Ambessa did arrive in Piltover unannounced after all, and Mel is pulled into her mess as she tries to get to the root of Ambessa’s behavior. As fearless as she seems, Ambessa is embroiled in a conflict with the Black Rose that has caused her to run right towards the one thing they want out of her–her daughter. Credit: Netflix Mel is taken by the Black Rose in the third episode of season two, we don’t see her again until the episode five (where she is decidedly not the main focus), and even though this is the first time she has had a storyline to herself in the entirety of Arcane’s run, it is cut off at the knees by a cliffhanger that is not resolved until episode eight. Mel has come into her powers as a mage by then, having made her way out of the Black Rose’s prison, but has she? She is certainly aware of her power, but she has never consciously used it before. Later, Mel tells Jayce that she had begun to suspect that something was going on after they survived Jinx’s attack, but we have no sense of that until she flat out tells us that.  Were there another season of Arcane around the corner, or at least three more episodes waiting in the wings, there may have been space for Mel’s storyline to stretch across the narrative more organically instead of it coming up like an afterthought every other episode until the series finale. Mel could still pursue the mystery behind her mother’s appearance while trying to figure out how exactly she made it out of the explosion okay. There are plenty of other characters—Vi, Jinx, Caitlyn, Jayce, and Viktor, to name a few—who deal with multiple story threads at once, so why not Mel? She, like Sevika, ends the series exactly as she should. She is a powerful mage, she has overcome Ambessa’s doubts, claimed her family’s power, and defeated the Black Rose after being pulled into their web. It is unsatisfying, though, that we do not get to see her learn about this new version of herself before we see her in action. She openly admits to Jayce that she is still confused about her powers, but is somehow in tune with them enough to be god-like on the battlefield. It is hard to accept that she has progressed so far without seeing her journey.  It is clear that the bones of her story were there, but the finished product has none of the meat that we are used to sinking our teeth into in Arcane. There is a chance that Mel could be a significant part of one of Arcane’s future spinoffs, and if that means her story will finally be explored the way that it should have been here, that would be a dream come true. However, no potential spinoff should have to make up for the work that Arcane failed to do with Mel. She should have gotten her due this time around, and so should a lot of other characters. Instead of continuing down the meter-long list of things that were not properly addressed by Arcane’s final season (What happened to the Firelights’ tree? Do Jayce and Viktor know that Heimerdinger died?), let’s focus on some of the positives. Despite Viktor’s enmeshment with the arcane dominating the season—and choking out other storylines—it is one of the only storylines that gets the proper amount of room to breathe.  Viktor takes his desire to fix everything he believes to be wrong with the world so far that he uses the power of the Hexcore—the thing that “fixed” him by saving his life and healing his leg and disease—to strip away the free will of other people seeking solutions to their physical ailments. Ultimately, he decides that every person in Piltover and Zaun does not deserve to suffer the simple condition of existing as a person and attempts to suspend everyone’s souls in eternal nothingness with the idea that if there is nothing at all, there will be peace. He projects his own self-hatred onto the rest of society and takes their fate into his own hands without their consent. Credit: Netflix It is fitting that Jayce, the one person who never looked down at Viktor for the things he disliked about himself, is the one to pull him off the path of magical authoritarianism and remind him of who he is. Jayce tells Viktor that he was never the broken person he saw himself as, he was merely as imperfect as the next person, and that Viktor’s imperfections were a part of “everything [Jayce] admired about [him].” Whether it is platonic, romantic, or an unquantifiable third thing, Jayce always loved Viktor unconditionally. He never saw him as a thing to be fixed, only ever taking extreme measures with the arcane when it came to saving Viktor from the grip of death, something he would likely do for anyone else he cared about. Of course, it takes Viktor seeing that another version of himself realized this and orchestrated Jayce’s entire life to lead to the moment he and Viktor would eventually implode into each other to truly understand that Jayce means what he said, but hey, we got a great montage out of it, so who can complain? Even with Arcane’s conclusion being so crunched for time that significant elements are suffocated or flattened, the aspects that get the same attention they got in season one are as well executed as anyone who loves Arcane could expect. That does not excuse the shortcomings that plague the rest of the season, but they are proof that there was a stronger ending for the series that was lost in the decision to keep the series confined to the 18 episodes we are now left with. An Arcane that was allowed to complete its story in three larger acts would have had its own imperfections, but it may have allowed the series to remain the dense, detailed show we call came to love in its first season. At the very least, we will be getting more from the team behind Arcane, and that grants them the rare opportunity to learn from their mistakes, adapt to whatever limitations they may be restrained by, and improve upon the magic that they created with this show.[end-mark] The post <i>Arcane’</i>s Second Season Is as Beautiful as it Is Imperfect appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays historical fiction When History Podcasts Get Speculative: Mike Duncan Explores the Martian Revolution If you love well-researched history and speculative fiction, welcome to your new favorite podcast. By Ben Coleman | Published on December 3, 2024 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech There’s an invisible community living among you. Writers, journalists, professional academics and amateur students of history and political science, and many others, all united by a single overlapping point of interest. Mention one of several now-obscure historical figures in casual conversation—Talleyrand, for example, or Admiral Kolchak—and they’ll nod knowingly. To confirm your suspicions, simply play a few key bars from Haydn’s “Oxford Symphony” and all will be revealed. They are fans of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, and that sting of pensive violins precedes each episode, now numbering more than 300. The historical portion of the podcast ran for 11 seasons, each chronicling a different revolution in chronological order and increasingly granular detail, ranging from the origins of the English Civil War to the Battle of Lexington, from the rise of the Paris Commune to the fall of Pancho Villa, finally concluding in 2022 in the twilight of the Russian Civil War. Folks who unsubscribed in the interim may be surprised to find this deeply nonfictional, deeply wonky and scholarly podcast profiled on a speculative fiction blog. The series was conversational and at times a bit wry in tone, but it was entirely a synthesis of existing historical records and Duncan’s commentary on his research, putting everything in context without straying from the available sources. Season 12, however, which launched this October, is quite speculative indeed. “The Martian Revolution” is Duncan’s pivot from real-world history to future history, complete with holographic pop stars, corporate space battles, and of course, a healthy supply of unobtanium buried under the imperious peaks of Olympus Mons. The world of Duncan’s Martian Revolution will be familiar to anyone who’s read a bit of intra-solar space opera like The Expanse series or enjoyed Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. Five corporations dominate near future Earth after a deeply unsurprising ecological collapse. The largest, Omnicorp, operates an exclusive mining franchise extracting a shiny new energy source from underneath the mountains of Mars. This would probably be all well and good for everyone involved, were it not for an increasingly detached leadership class (kept alive by a slightly defective longevity serum) and an increasingly unequal distribution of haves and have not, which is generally how the ball gets rolling on these sorts of things. Push people around enough, even on Mars, and eventually they’re gonna start sewing flags and putting on red berets.  I discovered Revolutions at the height of the pandemic, and immediately devoured every available episode as fast as I could download them. It was an unexpected comfort during those tumultuous, dare I say unprecedented times, though not for the reasons the subject matter might suggest. Indeed, if there’s a common thread running through the series it’s that the middle of a political revolution is a bad place to be for pretty much everyone involved. The events detailed by Revolutions are generally violent, dirty, and precarious even in hindsight—focusing on the facts of the historical record tends to strip away any romantic notions listeners might have about the past. And even successful revolutions tend to be preceded by disastrous failed attempts and succeeded by schismatic infighting, neither of which seem like a great hang.  What Revolutions offers is an infinitely nested puzzle box of human motivations. Even the smallest historical moment represents a dozen different Rashomon-style stories competing to be considered “the truth.” Eyewitness testimony is notoriously imprecise, and it’s rarely presented by disinterested parties, especially during events that sweep nations into oblivion. History is often written by the victors—which presents its own set of problems and biases—but there’s plenty written by sore losers, as well as unreliable blowhards and the congenitally oblivious on both sides. Even the best textbooks and biographies must rely to some extent on less-than-the-best sources, and trying to make sense of those differing, subjective accounts, from source to source and book to book, makes for a compelling mystery in the right hands (see Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, for example, where the mystery author assigned the alleged crimes of King Richard III to one of her contemporary detectives). Duncan highlights the satisfying chains of cause and effect where possible, but he’s honest about what we don’t or can’t know about the past, and why that is.  It’s that last and unquestionably nerdiest component of The Martian Revolution, the patina of speculative historiography spread thick over everything, that’s truly exquisite. The podcast is presented from a perspective several hundred years after the events described, and is therefore dependent on the tenuous threads of information that link the present to the past, or in this case the far future to the slightly less far future. Wiped servers, hagiographic biographies, unreliable diarists, and a dozen other flavors of information decay feel authentically arranged over the central narrative of winners and losers. It’s a bit like an expert art forger artificially aging a pristine canvas until it’s indistinguishable from the work of a long dead master. After more than a decade producing the real thing on a weekly basis, Duncan’s is an expert forgery indeed. In marrying the authority of fact to the possibilities of fantasy Duncan joins an eclectic group of nonfiction practitioners who’ve used the weight of their expertise to inform some delightfully crunchy and structurally unpredictable fiction. There are strong parallels to Last Letters to Hav, in which Jan Morris, the storied journalist and travel writer, created the quixotic polyglot city of Hav somewhere or other in the contemporary Mediterranean and set about writing a travel guide as though it were Venice or Hong Kong. Applying the rigorous techniques of nonfiction to a constructed environment allows a writer to use all the tools in their toolbox at once, to pit their creative abilities against their evaluative methods. The results, in both works, are stories that are both deeply familiar and evocative of a place that never was. There’s a German word (fernweh) that describes the feeling of being homesick for somewhere you haven’t been, and that’s an exceedingly rare quality that both of these stories share. Duncan’s deft approach to nonfiction narrative is almost unchanged in this fictional iteration, right down to the Haydn music. This is a podcast that carefully guides the listener through to complex topics, exploring wherever possible the human motivations behind now-arcane rivalries like the Bolshevik/Menshevik split and the details of whatever it was the Continental Congress got up to. The big, iconic players of history become flawed, familiar characters in Revolutions, at least to the extent that the historical record supports it. Duncan has a gift for distilling distinct personalities out of amorphous and often contradictory historical profiles, and that skill is well deployed here. Just as the previous season featured wanton gadabouts, tortured heroes, and the “Great Idiots of History,” the Martian iteration already has a cast of colorful rabble-rousers and iconoclastic plutocrats to bounce off each other.  But there’s plenty of new territory to chart. Revolutions are often defined by the technological advances that preceded them, from the printing press to the machine gun, and the interplanetary logistics of the Martian Revolution lend some unique wrinkles to the narrative. Corporate statehood, privatized space exploration, and serum-addled gerontocracies mirror the excesses of the past in some ways, but they also provide new opportunities to speak to and consider our present era. What’s ultimately so compelling about the Revolutions podcast, beyond the innate drama of political intrigue and palace coups, is the evidence that human beings much like us have weathered the great storms of history and come out on the other side. Maybe not all the human beings involved, and maybe not in the way they’d dreamed or planned, but enough to pass something of what they were fighting on to future generations to consider, and be inspired—even if it’s while we’re in the middle of folding laundry or doing dishes (or whenever you listen to your podcasts). It’s said that history is what was carried out of a burning building, and when the fires of revolution burn hot, what survives is all the more precious. It’s also a reminder that while the systems that surround us seem unchangeable and inescapable here and now, as Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out, so did the divine right of kings, once upon a time… Do you have a favorite fiction/nonfiction hybrid? List them in the comments and let’s see how many of us are out there (bonus points for any that include Motel of Mysteries). And if you were already a fan of Revolutions—or any of Duncan’s previous podcasts—how do you feel about this pivot to speculative fiction?[end-mark] The post When History Podcasts Get Speculative: Mike Duncan Explores the Martian Revolution appeared first on Reactor.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—A group of 24 veterans organizations signed a letter slamming the Department of Veteran Affairs under Secretary Denis McDonough’s leadership for allegedly stonewalling veterans’ access to timely medical care when the VA bureaucracy fails to meet their needs. The letter, which was sent Monday and obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation, accused the Biden-Harris VA of undertaking a “concerted and strategic effort” to hinder veterans from accessing community care options when direct VA care is not immediately available. VSO-Letter-to-SecVA-on-Community-Care-Access-2-Dec-24Download Community Cares, a Trump-era program greenlit in 2018 as part of the VA MISSION Act, allows veterans to get specific care from non-VA providers if the department approves the request. Specifically, the letter calls on McDonough to approve community care referrals made by VA physicians and to remove “Referral Coordination Teams” that judge if any given referral by a physician is “clinically appropriate.” “Mr. Secretary, while these last approximately 50 days of the Biden-Harris Administration may seem like a minute for government agencies, for the sick veterans waiting for health care and getting the bureaucratic runaround from [Veterans Health Administration] almost two months can be a lifetime, both figuratively and literally,” the letter reads. “The Trump-Pence administration was clear as to what their regulatory intent was with regard to community care access in their original June 2019 community care access standard regulation.” The VA also blamed budgetary constraints within the department on the existence of community care options, despite the fact that a patient only becomes eligible if direct VA care is not available, according to the letter. The VA allegedly abuses inaccurate wait-time numbers, which allows the VA to skimp on providing community care options to patients by inputting their date of inquiry in the VA system 20 to 28 days later, according to the letter. The practice gives the VA more time to allow the direct VA care system to take the request when community care could have provided it earlier, according to the letter. The organizations’ advocated for an external scheduling system that the letter claims would speed up care considerably. “The budgetary facts do not support the argument that community care is somehow robbing Direct VA Care,” the letter reads. “Instead, it’s clear VHA can’t provide adequate and timely Direct VA Care, but apparently it is trying to protect those Direct VA care dollars for veteran patients that cannot be seen.” The signatories include the National Defense Committee, U.S. Navy Association, Military Order of the Purple Heart, and Mission: POW/MIA, along with 20 other organizations. VA press secretary Terrence Hayes told the DCNF in a statement that the direct VA care system is seeing record-high usage and trust from its patients, saying the VA care system is “proven to be the best care in America for Veterans.” “Whenever it takes too long to get a veteran access to needed care at a VA facility (or if they would have to drive too far), we ensure that they get care from a community provider,” Hayes said. “Veterans eligible for community care can always choose to receive care from a provider in VA’s community care network.” Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Veterans Groups Accuse Biden-Harris VA of Stonewalling Access to Medical Care appeared first on The Daily Signal.

ActBlue In Trouble?

No, it won’t be called Moony McMoonFace!

If correct, signs of primordial black holes could be easily detected on Earth.

The new WWF report represents a decade of describing new-to-science species from across six countries.