'I think it would scare the living fucking piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that'

From Washington state comes the story of a senior citizen being saved by his senior canine, who risked her life obstructing traffic in order to find help. On September 25th, the unnamed, 84-year-old owner of this beautiful pooch named Gita, fell, hurt his leg, and couldn’t move. Gita then ran down to the main road […] The post Dog Sits Down in Middle of Road Unmoving–Until Officer Follows to Save Her Owner appeared first on Good News Network.

News Kaos The Gods Must Be Disappointed: Netflix Cancels Kaos However will Zeus’s ego handle such a defeat By Molly Templeton | Published on October 8, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Jeff Goldblum’s shiny-sweatpants-wearing-era is over after just one season. Netflix has already called it quits on Kaos, creator Charlie Covell’s modern-day take on the Greek gods and their whims, desires, and petulant nonsense. Variety notes that the series “did spend four weeks in the Netflix top 10 charts upon its release, but failed to garner a significant audience in that time.” Kaos starred quite a list of folks as mythological figures: Goldblum as Zeus, Janet McTeer as Hera, Billie Piper as Cassandra, Debi Mazar as Medusa, Suzy Eddie Izzard as Lachy, David Thewlis as Hades, Cliff Curtis as Poseidon, and Stephen Dillane as Prometheus. The show also worked in an Orpheus and Eurydice take; Killian Scott played another rock star Orpheus, with Aurora Perrineau as “Riddy,” who was one of three humans (along with Leila Farzad and Misia Butler) with “cosmic significance” in the godly strife. The series was generally well-received; Time called it one of the best new TV shows of the month, with Judy Berman writing, “It’s a clever, if not wholly original, premise, elevated by smart casting, sharp dialogue, and world-building that makes inspired use of some of Western culture’s most enduring lore.” But not everyone was fully on board. The Hollywood Reporter said, “With an impressive cast, a cheeky tone and little investment in substantive follow-through, the show goes from promising to frustrating to disappointing—albeit with tantalizing hints throughout of what could have been.” You can watch the single existing season of Kaos on Netflix.[end-mark] The post The Gods Must Be Disappointed: Netflix Cancels <i>Kaos</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays John Carpenter Absurdist Humor and Truck Drivers in Space: The Legacy of John Carpenter’s Dark Star Carpenter’s irreverent first film impacted the sci-fi genre in some surprising ways… By Tim Ford | Published on October 8, 2024 Credit: Bryanston Pictures/New Line Cinema Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Bryanston Pictures/New Line Cinema In 1970, a group of long-haired, anti-establishment student filmmakers came together at the University of Southern California to work on the degree project of an aspiring director. The director was John Carpenter. The film was Dark Star, and it served not only as the launching point for Carpenter’s career, but it would go on to have a startling effect on science fiction film as a genre, with its impacts felt even now, 50 years later. Over the course of 1970 to 1974, Dark Star was shot and cut together first as a student film running just 45 minutes, then re-cut with an additional 50 minutes of new footage, and, finally, theatrically released, making it Carpenter’s feature directorial debut, before he went on to become a legend of sci-fi and horror cinema with titles like Halloween, The Thing, and Escape from New York. It was also the feature debut for Dan O’Bannon, who served as the film’s co-writer, editor, and main supporting actor. O’Bannon is revered today among dedicated sci-fi aficionados, serving as the screenwriter for Alien, co-screenwriter for Total Recall, and working on visual effects for films like Star Wars. But those impressive careers started humbly, with a cramped, cobbled-together set, a budget of just $60,000, and the very simplest of premises. “At some point, [Carpenter] told me about what his degree project was going to be, which was a science fiction story about…his phrase was ‘truck drivers in space,’” said Dark Star’s optical effects consultant Bill Taylor, in an interview for the documentary Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star. Indeed, the film was deliberately positioned as the “anti-2001: A Space Odyssey”—a movie which O’Bannon and Carpenter both respected, but which O’Bannon in particular thought represented a romanticized, glamorous version of space. Instead, Dark Star set out to focus on the people working boring, unglamorous jobs, living a life of tedium. The crew of the titular spaceship, the Dark Star—Doolittle, Talby, Boiler, and Pinback (played by O’Bannon)—are tasked with deploying huge bombs, each of which is equipped with its own artificial intelligence system, to destroy “unstable planets” that could threaten human civilization as it expands out into the cosmos. Due to the effects of time dilation from jumping through hyperspace, the crew has been on their mission for 20 years, but has aged only three years, and their boredom has made them all a bit loopy. Talby spends almost all of his time sequestered in a tiny observation dome, obsessed with a cluster of asteroids called the Phoenix Asteroids. Boiler performs dangerous knife tricks and recklessly shoots a laser gun for target practice. Pinback plays practical jokes, keeps a video diary, and has also adopted an alien lifeform shaped like a beachball as the ship’s mascot. And Doolittle, left in command after their commander, Powell, suffered an accident which has left him essentially dead (but kept in cryogenic suspension), finds solace while playing a crude musical instrument made from glass bottles while he fantasizes about surfing. The movie spends most of its 90-minute run time simply spending time with the crew as they go about their weird routines, occasionally lapsing into an almost episodic sequence, like when Pinback pursues the beachball alien into a comically harrowing situation that leaves him dangling from an elevator. Rather than having a core “plot” per se, Dark Star invites the audience to experience space with a bunch of schlubby, scruffy dudes. This was, in Carpenter’s own words, intentional. “I was always a big fan of absurdist humour. I was a big fan of…not the intellectual content of, say, Waiting for Godot and some of those things, but they were extremely humorous to me. I think O’Bannon influenced me a great deal, because he enjoyed that. He really enjoyed the craziness of the pointlessness of their mission.” In its initial release, critics were not kind to Dark Star. Variety called it a “dim comedy” that “consists of sophomoric notations and mistimed one-liners.” Carpenter himself has said the film isn’t his favourite, and O’Bannon was so wounded by the experience of seeing audience members not laughing that he pivoted to horror with Alien. That particular turn in O’Bannon’s writing and career is often cited as the biggest upshot of Dark Star, given the subsequent impact that Alien had on horror and science fiction. The beachball alien sequence in Dark Star is credited by O’Bannon himself as the inspiration for the duct-crawling Giger creature in Ridley Scott’s 1979 flick. Other filmmakers were also affected and influenced as well, particularly by the film’s creative use of early computer graphics and low-budget set and costumes. “[George Lucas] did such things in his student version of THX [1138]… he used actual video monitors and put stuff on them,” O’Bannon says in Let There Be Light. “We did them in a different manner, using traditional animation table. Then Lucas sees that; hires me to do the computer screens on Star Wars. That was that little two-step.” “I would guarantee that George Lucas saw Dark Star well before he wrote Star Wars. I think that’s inescapable, because of him being a USC alum, etc. etc. I think he would have seen it.” Carpenter, meanwhile, would make it a career trademark that he would also compose music for his films, starting with Dark Star. His iconic music (often featuring synthesizers) is heard in the opening notes to Halloween, Escape from New York, and in most of his movies. But on top of the filmmaking expertise the two lead creators of Dark Star would go on to establish in their professional careers, the film would have a major impact on the future science fiction comedy as a whole genre. Prior to Dark Star, sci-fi comedy, where it existed, often fell into a handful of sub-categories. There were the films with established characters or groups, like Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, or The Three Stooges in Orbit. Then there were the raunchier comedies of the ’60s, like the iconic Barbarella or Invasion of the Star Creatures, where the invaders are (what else) buxom women with skimpy outfits. And then there were the goofy “mad scientist”-style comedies, like Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor, or the parodies of ‘50s pulp heroes, like Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century. What these films have in common, despite their apparent stylistic differences, is that even as they parody the golden age of science fiction, with its aspirations of moon colonies and extrapolation from the Soviet-US space race, they celebrate it as well. There’s still a belief in the core idea that space, and science, are cool, and fun, and filled with strong men with jawlines and beautiful women who swoon. Dark Star rejected that notion. “I could hear Dan’s voice saying: ‘space is not fun. Space is boring. Space is shitty. It’s a horrible job out here, doing this crap. It’s awful.’” said Tommy Lee Wallace, Dark Star’s associate art director, in Let There Be Light. While this is a seemingly cynical outlook, there’s tremendous pathos and empathy at the heart of Dark Star as well. Each of the four crewmembers is fully realized and distinct. Doolittle’s surfing obsession, while initially treated as a joke, leads to a final, climactic fate that mirrors the tragic ending of Ray Bradbury’s short story “Kaleidoscope.” Pinback confesses in one of his video diaries that he is actually a stowaway named Bill Froug, and only on board by accident, an admission which gives the character a curious amount of depth. Rooted firmly in O’Bannon and Carpenter’s anti-establishment tendencies, fueled in part by the Vietnam War-era counterculture movement, Dark Star celebrated the average joe in the future. And this filtered down into its various successors. Rob Grant, one of the co-creators of Red Dwarf, the iconic British sci-fi comedy series about a crew of dysfunctional failures, credits Dark Star as a key inspiration. Red vs. Blue, one of the earliest examples of machinima filmmaking, is said to have been inspired in part by Dark Star by co-creator Burnie Burns. That shift in comedic sensibilities has trickled out, and we can trace back more recent shows like Avenue 5 or The Orville to Dark Star’s celebration of ordinary goofballs’ struggles in space. If 2001 was a revolutionary film for “serious” science fiction filmmakers, Dark Star was the absurd beachball alien chasing after it, altering the trajectory of science fiction comedy with a bomb blast that was felt, if not seen, by millions of fans to come. Let there be light.[end-mark] The post Absurdist Humor and Truck Drivers in Space: The Legacy of John Carpenter’s <i>Dark Star</i> appeared first on Reactor.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court declined to take a case over mail-in ballot lawsuit from the Republican National Committee, asserting it would be too close to the November election. As previously reported in The Daily Signal, the RNC sued the office of Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt for what they say are inconsistent standards for allowing voters to correct—or “cure”—ballots. Curing is a term used to describe a voter making a mistake on a mail-ballot, and making a correction. Pennsylvania, with 19 electoral votes, is one of the seven hotly-contested battleground states. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows the state is a tie between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden beat Republican Trump in the state by just 1%. In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by less than 1%. The state’s high court also declined to hear a case brought by left-leaning organizations against the state requirement that mail ballots have the correct postmark date in order to be counted. This was on the same grounds, that it was too close to the election. Neither case was rejected on the merits, Reuters reported. Both decisions occurred Saturday..  As described in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” the controversy in 2020 in Pennsylvania dealt largely with postmarks and the deadline for absentee ballots.  Earlier this year, Schmidt announced that voters who don’t follow instructions for completing and returning mail-in ballots may cast provisional ballots. The plaintiffs–the RNC and the Pennsylvania Republican Party–argued that voters who choose to vote by mail don’t have the legal right to cure defects in those ballots. Under Schmidt’s directive, county election officials may adopt what the RNC calls “a patchwork of unlawful curing policies.”  In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs note that the Pennsylvania Constitution says: “All laws regulating the holding of elections by the citizens, or for the registration of electors, shall be uniform throughout the state.” The post Pennsylvania High Court Blocks RNC Challenge on Mail Ballots appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A case that the Supreme Court will hear this year raises a fundamental question about why we outlaw some types of discrimination. It’s worth thinking through that question, given that discrimination is, unfortunately, an ever-present human phenomenon, and because America, unique among other nations, is so deeply committed to stopping it. The case is Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, and the facts appear to be a pretty run-of-the-mill employment discrimination case. Marlean Ames, a heterosexual woman, worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services for many years and had good performance reviews. In the past two years of her employment, she was assigned a homosexual supervisor, who also gave her good reviews. Then, in the final year of her employment, Ames applied for a promotion. What happened next was a whirlwind. She was denied the promotion, her supervisor told her that she should retire, she was fired from her current job, and then given the option of staying on if she accepted a demotion and a 40% pay cut. Ames took the demotion, and the department gave her previous job to a homosexual man and the promotion she wanted to a homosexual woman. Both were “arguably less qualified” than she was, and one “lacked the minimum qualifications for the job.” Ames filed a sexual-orientation discrimination lawsuit. (Sexual orientation discrimination is considered sex discrimination under the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock. v. Clayton County.) She lost in the lower courts, but not because the courts found that there was no discrimination. The case never got that far. Ames lost because she’s part of a “majority” group (heterosexuals), and as such, she must provide more preliminary evidence of discrimination than someone in a “minority” group before she can get a trial. If Ames had been in a minority group, all she would have to show to get a trial is that someone with a different sexuality was treated better. But because she is in a majority group, she must show “background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.” The evidence that she presented didn’t rise to that high threshold. Why the unequal standards? That question turns on another one: What’s the point of antidiscrimination law? That is, what are we trying to prevent? The judges who long ago created the unequal standard that Ames now faces would argue that the point of antidiscrimination law is to prevent the use of political and private power against groups of people who cannot easily wield political power in their defense.   There’s something to this argument, but it’s incomplete. What the argument gets right is that minority groups often cannot wield power to defend themselves against what the Founding Fathers called the “tyranny of the majority.” But what it gets wrong is its assumption that power dynamics among groups is all that matters. That argument misses the fact that there’s a higher morality at issue, and that the law is concerned with this morality. It’s wrong to treat any person—no matter what groups they belong to—with hate or arbitrariness. To fire someone simply because of his or her sex (and for no other reason) is either hateful or arbitrary, and in either case, immoral. To hate what is not evil is immoral, and to refuse to use the gift of reason is immoral, especially when those choices hurt others. Choice is the key here. The choice to discriminate is immoral, and its immorality doesn’t depend on the group that any person belongs to. It depends on whether you’re acting toward another person out of hatred or arbitrariness, or whether you’re acting reasonably. What is reasonable will, to some extent, depend on the circumstances. It’s reasonable to discriminate against atheists when hiring Christian ministers, which is why the Civil Rights Act expressly permits that sort of discrimination. But it is unreasonable to fire someone from the Ohio Department of Youth Services simply because they’re straight, black, or Hindu. In all three cases, the choice would be equally immoral. It doesn’t matter what group your victim belongs to; what matters is your choice. Antidiscrimination law doesn’t police all discriminatory choices, only certain ones that implicate the sorts of animus—racial, religious, sexual—that tend to tear apart the national fabric. There are always trade-offs in choosing which categories should be subject to such laws. But with respect to those that we choose, the law should focus on figuring out whether a particular discriminatory choice is reasonable or not, and it should not treat people better or worse depending on what group they’re part of. A group-focused approach misses the higher morality that the law is trying to serve, and it reduces valuable individuals into mere parts of abstract groups. When the Supreme Court decides Ames’ case, it should endorse the correct understanding of antidiscrimination law by eliminating the unequal standard that Ames faced in the lower courts.   The post New Supreme Court Case Poses Question: ‘What’s Point of Antidiscrimination Law?’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Harris Bizzarely Attacking DeSantis During Hurricane Prep

Small-brained Australopithecines already had human-like hands.

This could answer a lot of questions about the after-effects of severe COVID infections.

Former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown accused NBC of purposely not mentioning Elon Musk during its broadcast while he was attending a game.Musk was in a luxury box at Acrisure Stadium as the Pittsburgh Steelers hosted the Dallas Cowboys Sunday night, in a game that took until nearly 1 a.m. to complete due to weather delays.The Tesla CEO stuck around in Pennsylvania after speaking at a Donald Trump rally in Butler, the same location the former president was shot.'Taylor Swift gets shown every game she's at and not even a mention he's at the game.'Musk was widely seen in social media clips hyping up the Pittsburgh crowd and even waving the Steelers' signature Terrible Towel.However, the Super Bowl champion alleged that NBC purposely kept Musk off the airwaves during their "Sunday Night Football" presentation."NBC choose not to show Elon Musk at the Cowboys vs Steelers game," Brown wrote on X. "Another reason to get out [and] Vote [.] Media censoring is real and will only get worse unless change." — (@) Brown responded to media coverage about the issue and stated he believed "it's not an accusation it's the truth."He added that Taylor Swift, who is said to be dating Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce, is consistently shown on-screen during NFL broadcasts."Taylor Swift gets shown every game she's at and not even a mention he's at the game."He added, "Did you see [NBC] say anything about being at the game? Does not fit their agenda."Musk then replied to the same post and said, "That was weird."Unfortunately for NBC and "Sunday Night Football," this wasn't the first time this year they were accused of foul play. The network was criticized earlier in 2024 for editing out portions of an interview with Houston Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud."First and foremost, I just want to give all glory and praise to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ," then-rookie Stroud said to start the interview. "Thank you, God bless," he said at the end. Both mentions of God were removed for social media posts, with the first edit being far more egregious and obvious.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!