TRUMP RETURNS TO MADISON SQUARE GARDEN AS VICTOR... Trump Gets Hero’s Welcome At NYC UFC Event (VIDEO) President-elect Donald Trump returned to Madison Square Garden on Saturday evening for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 309 fight, receiving roaring applause from the crowd. Just over a week after Trump won both the Electoral College and popular vote against Vice President Kamala Harris, the former president made a grand entrance at the New York City event.

A post going viral on X claims that controversial socialite Ghislaine Maxwell has died while in prison. Looks like Ghislaine Maxwell may be dead. Remember 4chan reported Jeffrey Epstein’s death in advance. pic.twitter.com/dKxu2d7xWs — RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) November 14, 2024 Verdict: False She is still alive at time of publication. The original poster of […]

It looks like the Daniel Jones era in NYC is over

'Largest deportation program'

In the Polish forests north of Warsaw, a father and son were out with a local historical society when they found 17 pre-modern coins which may be worth around $120,000. They were supposed to be looking for the remains of a Roman road, but the metal detectors found the coins instead. The treasure was discovered […] The post Father-Son Were Trying to Find Roman Road but Found a Shovelful of 16th C. Silver Coins Instead appeared first on Good News Network.

Books SFF Bestiary She’s All That and Then Some: Steve Alten’s The Loch A book with plenty of silliness, along with a solid ration of blood, gore, and generational trauma… By Judith Tarr | Published on November 18, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Thanks to TheKingofKnots for suggesting I add Steve Alten’s The Loch to the annals of Nessie lore. I won’t say it’s quite Monty Python, but there’s plenty of silliness, along with a solid ration of blood, gore, and generational trauma. Alten’s book was published in 2005, after the Surgeon’s Photo was proved to be a hoax. It mentions the Ted Danson film Loch Ness, and takes a fair bit of inspiration from it, too. Protagonist Zach Wallace is a severely down-on-his-luck academic, a marine biologist who loses his job and just about everything else after a research expedition goes drastically wrong. He set out to find the biggest of all the giant squid, and succeeded, but his department head grabbed all the credit and left Zach with the blame for destroying expensive equipment and nearly dying in the process. Zach has an interesting history. He was born in Scotland and his estranged father still lives there. At age nine he nearly died in Loch Ness, and he still has the scars from the ordeal, both physical and mental. His search for the squid adds another layer of both, and leaves him with a water phobia. He comes to believe that the two events are related; that the monster that attacked him in the Sargasso Sea is connected with the one that he can’t quite remember in Loch Ness. Weirder yet, he believes he’s found the source of the Bloop, a loud and eerie noise first detected in the ocean in 1997. It’s an animal. A monster. He thinks he knows what it is. (Actually, years after the novel was published, the Bloop was identified as the sound of glaciers calving or ice scraping the sea floor.) Just as he hits bottom, he’s summoned back to Scotland by the father he hasn’t seen in seventeen years. Angus Wallace is being tried for murder, and he wants to see his son again. The last thing Zach wants to be associated with is either his father or the Loch Ness Monster. He ends up deep in it on both counts. Angus claims that the man he’s accused of murdering was killed by Nessie. This causes a furor, and sets Zach off on a wild ride around, over, and through the loch. Alten is not a minimalist writer. He Does His Research, and he makes sure you know it. It’s all there. He’s diligent, too. In an Author’s Note he reveals that just as he was getting ready to hand in the ms. of the novel, he found out about a new theory as to the species of the monster, and rewrote that part of the book to accommodate it. He does not name the cryptozoologist to whom he’s indebted, which is odd considering how many other sources he takes care to include, but he’s suitably and profusely grateful. The theory he settles on is the eel theory. He ties in the life cycle of the creature, which spawns, he says, in the Sargasso Sea. Once the eggs hatch, the larval form of the eel migrates to Europe and North America. There it undergoes metamorphosis and settles in fresh water, either rivers or lakes. After some years, it reaches sexual maturity, metamorphoses again, and returns to the Sargasso Sea to mate and die. Female eels are considerably larger than males. Alten, and presumably his source, speculates that a female who for some reason is prevented from mating and therefore dying will keep growing indefinitely—to fifty feet or more. And there’s your enormous brownish greyish slithery humpy thing that’s been seen so often in and around Loch Ness. This theory has been debunked since The Loch was published, but it makes good fiction. Alten piles even more on top of it, turning the normally harmless Nessie into a vicious predator. Tourists, mostly Americans, are being literally shredded while camping beside the loch, and Zach himself is attacked by killer eels. That’s not normal eel behavior. Zach discovers that the eels are being poisoned by pollution that’s leaked into the loch from oil drilling nearby. Lesions in their brains have turned them from peaceable pescatarians into savage maneaters. It doesn’t help that salmon, their normal prey, haven’t shown up in the loch this year, also thanks to pollution; the eels are starving, and they’re going after anything that moves. So we have the weird and complex life cycle of the eel, man-made destruction of food sources, a murder mystery, and a historical mystery on top of it all. Zach and his father Angus are descendants of William Wallace, as in Braveheart. The brave heart itself is the heart of Robert the Bruce, which is supposed to have been preserved and hidden against the time when Scotland will once more be independent of England. Also, Templars. Because why not. Back in the fourteenth century, the warrior knights built a shrine under Loch Ness for the heart of the Bruce, and trapped eels in the loch to guard it. Zach runs afoul of the blood oath of the Black Templars, a secret order within the order, who know all about the killer eels but can’t and won’t tell him what’s really going on. It’s a mismash, but it’s entertaining. It reads as if it’s meant to be a film. The rights were sold and were in the works according to the Author’s Note, but the film never seems to have been made. I imagine it would have looked a bit like The Loch Ness Horror, with added family drama and bonus flashbacks to nine-year-old Zach and fourteenth-century Templar knights. I kind of like that the eels have a reason for being bloodthirsty monsters; they’re not ripping people apart Just Because. There’s a bit of environmental activism there, which is fitting for a protagonist who’s a marine biologist. In addition to proving the existence of Nessie and solving the murder mystery and the mystery of the Templars, Zach uncovers political corruption and helps save the ecosystem of the loch. And, of course, salvages his career and gets the girl. It’s a pretty good ending, and a beginning. Zach will go on to star in further adventures, which from what I can gather are just as far over the top as this one.[end-mark] The post She’s All That and Then Some: Steve Alten’s <i>The Loch</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Hilarious! Mourning Joe and Mika Kissed Trump's Ring at Mar-a-Lago on Friday

One of the most challenging aspects of astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is anticipating what life and extraterrestrial civilizations will look like, reports www.universetoday.com. Invariably, we have only one example of a planet that supports life (Earth) and one example of a technologically advanced civilization (humanity) upon which to base our theories. As for more advanced civilizations, which statistically seems more likely, scientists are limited to projections of our own development. However, these same projections offer constraints on what SETI researchers should search for and provide hints about our future development. In a series of papers led by the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS), a team of researchers examines what Earth’s level of technological development (aka. “technosphere”) will look like in the future. In the most recent installment, they offer a reinterpretation of the Kardashev Scale, which suggests that civilizations expand to harness greater levels of energy (planet, host star, and galaxy). Instead, they suggest that the Kardashev Scale establishes upper limits on the amount of stellar energy a civilization can harness (a “luminosity limit”) and that civilizations might circumvent this by harnessing stellar mass directly. As with the previous study in this series, the research was led by Jacob Haqq-Misra, the Senior Research Investigator at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. The paper “Projections of Earth’s Technosphere: Luminosity and Mass as Limits to Growth” is being reviewed for publication in Acta Astronautica. The Kardashev Scale, named after Soviet-Russian astrophysicist and radio astronomer Nikolai Kardashev (1932 – 2019), was first proposed in his seminal paper, “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations,” released in 1964. In it, Kardashev suggested what types of radio frequencies (and at what energies) scientists should search for to discern possible transmissions of an extraterrestrial civilization (ETC). In keeping with the idea that there may be civilizations billions of years older than humanity, he reasoned that these civilizations could harness levels of energy beyond human capabilities. To characterize the level of an ETC’s development, Kardashev proposed a three-level scale based on the amount of energy they could harness. Energy consumption estimated in three types of civilizations defined by the Kardashev Scale. However, this scale reflected the assumption that civilizations and their energy needs will grow exponentially. This is in keeping with observations of humanity’s own “technosphere,” which refers to the human-made infrastructure, machinery, communications, and other indications of technological activity (aka “technosignatures”). Basically, it reflects our limited perspective when it comes to the kinds of behaviors advanced ETCs would exhibit. As Haqq-Misra told Universe Today via email: “Earth is our only known example of a planet with technology, so the search for extraterrestrial civilizations must begin by thinking about how to search for analogs to Earth’s technosignatures today and possible technosignatures that could arise in Earth’s future. We should also try to stretch our minds to consider other, non-terrestrial, and more exotic possibilities, but even such imaginative possibilities will always either begin with (or contrast with) what we know is possible based on existing or known physics on Earth.” Traditional applications of the Kardashev Scale predict that growth will be exponential and have even considered how this could give rise to a civilization capable of utilizing the energy output of all stars in the Universe – a Type IV Cosmic Civilization! This application has motivated many searches for civilizations that have reached these scales of vast energy utilization, as indicated by megastructures (e.g., Dyson Spheres, Clarke Bands, etc.) and other advanced technospheres. For their study, Haqq-Misra and his colleagues took a different approach: “Our study re-examines these assumptions by noting that civilizations can follow different trajectories for their expansion in space and their energy consumption. This involves tradeoffs between ‘exploration’ and ‘exploitation,’ and there are many possibilities for how a civilization might develop along these two dimensions. “Some civilizations may prioritize exploration in physical distance without ever needing to expand their energy consumption to Kardashev Type I or Type II scales. Other civilizations may focus on exploitation and increase their energy use more locally. Some civilizations may attempt to find an optimal balance between exploration and exploitation. “We also point out that the Kardashev scale is better considered as a theoretical limit to a civilization that utilizes stellar energy (luminosity). Rather than describing a trajectory that advanced civilizations will follow, the Kardashev scale is the uppermost limit for a civilization’s energy use, as it relates to expansion in physical distance, but a limit that may never actually be achieved due to thermodynamic efficiency limits. “In other words, the Kardashev scale describes an upper-limit to the tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation, and a civilization that is dependent on stellar luminosity for its energy needs will always fall below the energetic and spatial limits described by the Kardashev scale.” Artist’s impression of a Dyson Sphere, a proposed alien megastructure that is the target of SETI surveys. Finding one of these qualifies in a “first contact” scenario. The scenario Haqq-Misra and his colleagues proposed presents some new and interesting possibilities for advanced civilizations. For example, suppose humanity ever reaches the limit of how much energy it can harness from our Sun. In that case, it may not choose to explore and settle other star systems (with the intent of harnessing the energy of more planets and more stars). Instead, they may turn to harvesting stellar mass itself. “Civilizations like this that consume stars, which we call ‘stellivores,’ would be able to expand in energy use beyond the luminosity limits of the Kardashev scale,” said Haqq-Misra. “We are not at this level as a civilization on Earth yet, but we can at least think about the possibility that harvesting mass and converting it into energy (as Einstein’s famous equation describes) provides a way for a civilization to reach energy use scales beyond those envisioned by the Kardashev scale.” Like all projections on humanity’s future development, this study also has implications for future SETI surveys. This is in keeping with the assumption that ETCs in our galaxy would be older and more advanced than humanity at this point. It’s also consistent with the principle that “if we can conceive of it, someone else has probably done it already.” As Haqq-Misra explained, future SETI surveys should examine “accreting binaries,” closely orbiting binary stars with mass flowing from one star to another. Maqq-Misra and his colleagues recommend that scientists observe accreting binaries to search for abnormal behavior, which could indicate technological activity: “If some civilizations actually do evolve into stellivores, then some of these may look like such accreting binary star systems. We cannot claim that all, or even most, accreting binaries are actually technological civilizations, but we also cannot rule out the possibility that some of them could in fact be technological. It is worth keeping our minds open and actually searching for such evidence of advanced and exotic civilizations rather than ruling them out before we look.” The post New Study Explores How Alien Civilizations Could Harvest Energy from Stars appeared first on Anomalien.com.

It’s been many years since the MRC began calling out CBS’s “King of Comedy,” producer Chuck Lorre for his political rants via his sitcoms, as well as his vanity cards that display at the end of his shows. And for a while, we’ve enjoyed a nice reprieve after Lorre waved a white flag and began leaving politics out of his attempts to entertain us. (Minus one blip in 2022.) But when Trump won the 2024 presidential election, it was just too much for Chuck. The TDS took hold again, (albeit in a much milder form than what we’ve witnessed from most on the left) and led him to write Vanity Card #749 which aired in the credits after Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage and Ghosts: The card reads as follows: I’ve been playing around with writing a sitcom based on the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus. In my rendition Sisyphus is not unhappy about his soul-crushing, assembly-line gig building children’s swing sets in the underworld. He’s actually pleased to have job security in a down economy. And he’s fine with living in the underworld because it has a terrific transit system. His real torment comes when he learns the truth about his name. Before he was born, Zeus told his mother that her son would struggle with a speech impediment. In an ill-fated attempt to mock the prophecy, she named the baby Sisyphus. My working title for the show is, “Swing and a Myth.” I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore. I’m not really writing a Sisyphus sitcom. “Swing and a Myth?” Please. Give me some credit. This is just what came out while I was trying to avoid writing about the election. I do find it amusing that the subtext of Sisyphus is the futility of existence. Read into that what you will.                                                          The futility of existence? Correct us if we’re wrong, Chuck, but the way it reads to us is you believe existence is futile now that Trump was elected again by an unequivocal mandate from a majority of Americans. In which case, we highly suggest seeking treatment for your TDS so you can learn how to still live in the world when things don’t go your way, and to un-brainwash yourself from all the fearmongering the left has been pushing for years now. No, democracy won’t crumble. No, Trump won’t be a dictator. And no, existence won’t be futile. We can’t wait to see what your vanity cards say in 2028 when you realize you had nothing to fear all along. Then again, you are part of the propaganda machine that is Hollywood, so you probably won’t ever admit you were wrong. You know, kind of like how you never admitted to being wrong about the Russian collusion hoax, and instead tried to double down on it long after it was disproved. Please just go back to doing what you do best- comedy- and leave the politics out of entertainment for good this time.