A hydrogen-powered car fueled by sewage and manufactured with various recycled materials may soon attempt to break several land speed records. The car was built by students at Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) at the University of Warwick and will run off a byproduct of wastewater from the utilities company Severn Trent Water. The Waste2Race Le […] The post Hydrogen-Powered Car Fueled by Sewage Attempting to Break Land Speed Records appeared first on Good News Network.

Movies & TV Agatha All Along Agatha All Along Breaks the Westview Bubble (Again) in “Familiar by Thy Side” The familiar finally gets a backstory… By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on October 17, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Billy Kaplan? Maximoff? The answer is a little more complicated that you might have expected. Recap The Teen is William Kaplan, and three years ago, it was the day of his bar mitzvah. During the celebration that follows, William goes into the tent of a fortune teller who is part of the entertainment: It’s Lilia. She notes that he has a broken lifeline, not an uncommon occurrence, but one that she feels is relevant—something frightening is in this young man’s future. She tells him to live in the moment, but once he’s left, she creates the sigil and slips it into his jacket pocket. She promptly forgets that she’s done this. Suddenly, the bar mitzvah party has to end: The bubble encasing the neighboring town of Westview is beginning to collapse, and everyone needs to return home for safety reasons. William’s family is distracted by the changes to the bubble as they’re driving home and wind up in a car wreck. William appears to be dead, but once the Westview bubble is gone, he wakes, calling for Tommy. Alice, currently a police officer, arrives on the scene and tells William’s parents (Maria Dizzia and Paul Adelstein) to keep him still until the ambulance arrives. William has developed amnesia and doesn’t remember his life before the crash, but the doctors insist that he’ll be okay. He notices that he can hear people thinking when their emotions are heightened. He’s eventually released home and heads up to his old room, trying to recall something of his life and who he is. Three years later, William is making out with his boyfriend Eddie (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), and admits that he never recalled his past from before the accident—he just pretends he has to make his parents more comfortable. William wants to tell Eddie the truth, so he shows him everything he’s pieced together about the Westview bubble, which most of the public believes was just an “Avengers training incident.” William has figured out that there were runes on the bubble and magic at play. He’s been talking to a former Westview resident online about this and is supposed to go meet the man. He asks Eddie to go with him as backup, and Eddie agrees. They meet with Ralph Bohner (Evan Peters), who is extremely erratic, but tells them about his time being mind-controlled by Agatha and watching what Wanda did to the town. He tells them about Wanda’s family, and how both Billy and Tommy Maximoff disappeared following the events. He also tells them that Agatha is still in Westview. William—now certain that he is Billy Maximoff—goes home and starts searching for information on Agatha Harkness. He finds out that she’s reportedly the only witch to have ever survived the Witches’ Road, the place referred to in the song he has on record by Lorna Wu. Thinking that this might be the key to finding his brother, Billy heads into Westview to find Agatha, stealing her locket in order to break Wanda’s spell. We see the “cop show” premise from outside Agatha’s mind, and how Billy keeps trying to break through to her, finally managing it with the spellwork. In the present, Agatha emerges from the mud to talk to Billy. Jen and Lilia are gone, and he asks her how long she’s known who he was. Agatha admits she suspected from the beginning. They learn that the sigil has finally been destroyed and Agatha teases Billy about what he truly wants on the Road, figuring out that he’s looking for his brother. She tells him that she’s still needed for this quest since Billy is not fully in control on his abilities and she already has experience with this. The two continue toward the final test on the Road. Commentary Image: Marvel Television/Chuck Zlotnick There are a lot of great choices made by this episode, so let’s get into them. First, the choice to make William Kaplan Jewish is important on several fronts: Billy Kaplan is Jewish according to comics text because, according to the most common backstory, Magneto is the father of Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. So while we have no indication that the Maximoffs of the MCU have this lineage, the choice to make the life that Billy overtakes one of Jewish descent effectively keeps that background for the character. It’s also excellent because it allows them to use William’s bar mitzvah as the springboard for all these massive changes, which is both textually accurate—according to Jewish law, William has become a man and is now responsible for his actions—and a great way of having all these bits and pieces coalesce at once. The presence of Lilia makes perfect sense; it indicates that William is into witchy/magic things well before Billy drops into his body, and it’s common for parents to engage entertainers for bar or bat mitzvahs that play into their children’s interests. Fortune tellers aren’t uncommon in this at all. There’s also receiving the aliyah at the bar mitzvah, where the young man/woman/person in question reads a portion from the Torah before their community and sometimes discusses their reason for choosing the passage, and what lessons they believe are present in the text. William appears to be reading a passage pertaining to Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, who were struck down for bringing “alien” fire into the community’s offering to God. I’m guessing not too much thought was put into this choice at the scripting level aside from “two brothers who get in trouble with the Almighty for going off-book,” but it makes me wish we’d heard William’s reasoning behind choosing this passage. It’s one that tends to divide scholars and students in terms of the reasoning behind their deaths, and I’m curious as to what William made of the story. The idea that William and Billy are in some ways aligned brings up a lot of questions for me, including how much of Billy’s person is suffused with William’s in some way. In this version of events, Billy hasn’t actually been “alive” for that long—when he enters William’s body, he was essentially “born” in Westview a few weeks ago? Days? Which makes me assume that there are plenty of parts to William’s person that Billy accidentally absorbed just by virtue of occupying his body. For instance, I get the impression that William probably already knew he was gay, which then makes it possible that Billy’s queerness doesn’t entirely originate with him. And I love that, in concept? This idea that we don’t really know which parts are which, and how that must feel to Billy, who still can’t remember William’s life before he arrived. I also love the juxtaposition of Billy and Eddie’s relationship to Agatha and Rio’s because it’s great to find multiple queer relationships in a story, but moreso when those relationships show a range of possibilities for queer romance. Billy and Eddie are so very young and sweet and figuring things out, next to Agatha and Rio’s ancient and forever toxic, fighty antagonism. I know which one I prefer, but queers deserve multiple options at once, and we don’t often get it. We have the return of Ralph Bohner, whose identity was disappointing to me in how WandaVision played it out, but damn if it isn’t great to watch Evan Peters mess around in the part. There’s also Agatha’s “Bohner Family Reunion” shirt later in the episode, so there are endless gifts on this one. And the jokes about his online handles. If he’s going to be a punchline in this iteration, that’s pretty much the only way to deal with it. But the best part is that we finally get to see exactly how Wanda’s spell had Agatha interacting with Westview, and the answer is so much better than I’d hoped. She’s just out there fully hallucinating her surroundings with every scene, and roping her neighbors into it despite the fact that they have no idea what she’s dreamt up. From the outside, it looks like the worst overacting possible, and Hahn doesn’t back down for a second. They seemingly let Joe Locke break on camera during the phony interrogation and why not? It’s easy to believe that Billy wouldn’t be able to hold it together either. So that’s the backstory of Billy Maximoff. I’m admittedly not very interested in finding Tommy—he’s the least interesting of Wanda’s kids by far—but it makes sense that that Billy would want back the only member of his family that might be out there somewhere at the moment. Hopefully they won’t have to overtake another body to get him there. Tarot Readings and Witchy Thoughts I know they didn’t want to recast William for the bar mitzvah scenes, but it’s very silly to have a twenty-year-old playing thirteen—which was true for all the other kids at the party, for that matter. Thirteen-year-olds are tiny! They do not seem like young adults at all! There are posters for things that Disney either has rights to or require no rights for on William’s wall, with a couple exceptions. The most noticeable one is a poster with a pirate ship for a movie called The Goofballs—clearly meant to be an alt-universe version of The Goonies. The bits of Agatha’s history that Billy finds online are very 2005-Doctor-Who in their photoshop silliness and joining Agatha up with amusing historical events. Really do love that Agatha attempts to wipe some of the mud/pitch coating off of herself once she’s emerged because that’s the thing that folks don’t usually do in movies or TV and it drives me nuts? Who is cool just wandering around coated head to toe in slime, it’s too distracting. We’ve only got two more weeks. The end of the Road is near.[end-mark] The post <i>Agatha All Along</i> Breaks the Westview Bubble (Again) in “Familiar by Thy Side” appeared first on Reactor.

As if Nevada parents didn’t already have their hands full, including helping their children navigate the waters of adolescent sexuality. Now gender activists increasingly are using the public schools to lead students down a path their parents may know nothing about. And the Biden-Harris administration is making it worse. Nevada is hardly alone. Nearly 20,000 public schools across the country, attended by 11.5 million students, now have policies that cater to kids’ current sense of “gender identity” but that deliberately keep parents in the dark about that same thing. The Elko County School District’s gender policy, like many others, defines “gender identity” as “a student’s inner sense of being male or female.” That sense might be nothing more than a fleeting feeling, prompted by a suggestion on social media, or a clinically significant diagnosis of gender dysphoria requiring medical intervention. These policies not only don’t distinguish between these radically different situations, they actually prohibit anything beyond taking a student’s self-perception at face value. And by shutting out parents, the schools exclude the very people who are the best source of information about that student’s health and well-being. There’s little dispute that, in general, schools should take the lead on matters such as curriculum or school administration. Sex and gender identity, however, fall in a different category. A federal judge in Pennsylvania put it this way: “[T]eaching a child how to determine one’s gender identity” strikes “at the heart of parental decision making in a matter of greatest importance in their relationship with their children.” But Nevada public schools don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Instead, they are imposing their own opinions, theories, and ideology about this volatile and controversial subject and establishing a significant range of policies based on nothing more than a youngster’s current feelings. The Washoe County School District policy, for example, defines gender identity as “an individual’s understanding, outlook, feelings, and sense of being masculine, feminine, both or neither.” While such things can change at any time, for any reason, school policies dictate that a child’s latest “outlook” will dictate how a school responds. That school’s policy also states that students “have the right to be addressed by the names and pronouns that correspond to their gender identity.” They may use any restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities, as well as participate in physical education classes and intramural sports for the same reason.   Needless to say, implementing school policies that cater to a student’s current “sense” of his or her sexuality tells the student to expect that others will conform to his or her feelings. Parents may have a very different idea about how to develop their child’s character, but these policies deliberately shut parents out. The Washoe County policy, for example, prohibits school personnel from disclosing any information related to a student’s gender identity “to others, including parents/guardians … [unless] the student has authorized such disclosure.” These same schools, however, handle far less significant matters very differently. Washoe County School District has a 51-page manual dictating procedures for field and activity trips, requiring both parental permission and a liability waiver. The district requires both parental consent and health-care provider authorization for any medication, including over-the-counter medication such as Tylenol. The upshot is that Johnny needs his parents’ permission to go to the zoo, but his parents need his permission to know that he’s undressing in the girls’ locker room. The Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Education just issued a sweeping rule that will push more public school districts in this direction. It reworks Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funds. The administration’s rule redefines “sex” to include “gender identity”—something Congress certainly didn’t intend when it passed the law in 1972—and redefines “harassment” so that staff and teachers could face disciplinary action if they “misgender” a student. This massive federal mandate carries the implied threat that billions of dollars in federal funds could be revoked if schools don’t knuckle under and enforce it. Parents might not agree that their child’s latest feelings always deserve indulgence. They might have a well-considered idea of how to guide their children through the challenges of adolescence and establish their own identity. The bottom line is that this is the parents’ decision to make. But by pushing parents aside and imposing the government’s preferred gender ideology, these policies violate the parents’ constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children. The Supreme Court has called this “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests” it has ever recognized. It’s time for parents to fight back against policies in local schools, state laws that allow those policies, and federal rules that promote this agenda at their expense. The post Pay No Attention to the Gender Activist Behind the Public School Curtain appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Racism and sexism endure. Think of the “Unite the Right” white supremacist, neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. But sometimes unexpected voices fan the flames. As the civil rights movement gathered steam, colorblindness was the endgame. Ballots could not identify candidates by race. Employers could not ask for the racial identities of applicants. As success approached, the Democratic Party was terrified of losing a wedge issue. (A greater percentage of Republicans in Congress voted for the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act than did Democrats.) Democrats thus changed the game from colorblindness to racial or gender preferences for nonvictims of discrimination. Even as the U.S. Supreme Court embraced colorblindness as a constitutional imperative, the Democratic Party continued marching in an opposite direction. Former President Barack Obama, at a campaign rally endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, amplified: “My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running.” He added that it “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.” Obama continued: And you are thinking about sitting out? Part of it makes me think—and I’m speaking to men directly—part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that. Echoes of the past? President-to-be Woodrow Wilson in 1902 wrote, referring to blacks, that “the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded.” Sen. Theodore Bilbo, D-Miss., in 1938 chorused, “It is essential to the perpetuation of our Anglo-Saxon civilization that white supremacy be maintained, and to maintain our civilization, there is only one solution, and that is either by segregation within the United States, or by deportation of the entire Negro race.” Obama flirted with racism and sexism for political gain. I was floored. I thought he had higher principles. He urged people to vote for Harris on account of her race and sex, an act of desperation. Former President Donald Trump is making headway with black voters, jumping to 15%, a 6-point climb since 2020. Blacks and other minorities are to the Democratic base what the MAGA crowd is to Trump. Lose that base and Democrats become permanent losers. The Democratic Party has emptied the word “racist” of meaning. It now applies to anyone who subscribes to merit and character over skin color. According to Democrats, everyone is protected against discrimination or bigotry, but some are more protected than others. Whites, Asians, men and heterosexuals need not apply. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan magnificently explained in his legendary dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): “In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.” But when Obama takes the stage to chastise his “brothers” for their inadequate enthusiasm for Harris, it’s acceptable. When Trump tells Jews they would be crazy to vote for Biden or Harris, in contrast, protests erupt like Mount Vesuvius. American leadership is plunging because Democrats have abandoned meritocracy for tribalism. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved a proposal that requires all publicly traded companies listed on Nasdaq to include at least one female, one minority, and one LGBTQ individual on their board, or provide justification for noncompliance. The SEC, however, would never think for requiring diversity of all-black, all-female or all-LGBTQ boards. Isn’t racism or sexism by any other name as reprehensible? We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Memo to Obama: Race Remains Last Refuge of Scoundrels appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Now Saying Migrants Should 'Love Our Country' is Racist?

The next day, all authorities could find was the man's wallet and a pair of flip-flops.

If life exists in Martian ice deposits its survival would be tenuous, but there’s a case for sending future rovers there to look.

They might not poop often, but when they do, you’ll know about it.

And it's all thanks to a 110-year-old head.

There are more than 300 different sign languages in the world.