Self righteous christians

Never let it be said that Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck lacks a flamboyant streak. Although his Electron launch vehicle is one of the smallest orbital rockets in the world, Beck gleans every bit of performance from the booster he can. On just the rocket's second launch, in January 2018, he added a disco-ball like geodesic sphere called "Humanity Star" to give humans a small and bright shining object to, however briefly, gaze upon in the night sky. "The whole point of the program is to get everybody looking up at the star, but also past the star into the Universe, and reflect about the fact that we’re one species, on one planet," he said at the time. In interviews since then Beck has made no secret of his love for humanity's next-closest world, Venus. The surface of that hell-planet is a miasma of carbon dioxide, crushing pressures, and fiery temperatures. But scientists believe that high above that terrible surface, in the clouds of Venus, there are air pressures not dissimilar … [Read more...] about Rocket Lab will self-fund a mission to search for life in the clouds of Venus

When a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a libel suit brought against Techdirt's Mike Masnick, the decision was a victory of sorts for the First Amendment. And it may be short-lived. Even so, the ruling , which followed two-plus decades of legal precedent, brings to mind how lawsuits like this can be used as a weapon to stifle the First Amendment and extract huge settlements to make the issue disappear. Masnick fought the allegations that he defamed Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who claims to have invented e-mail. Ayyadurai sought $15 million in a lawsuit against Masnick and Techdirt parent company Floor64 over blog posts that labeled Ayyadurai a "fraud" and a "liar" surrounding Ayyadurai's "fake" claims to have invented e-mail in 1978 as a teenager in New Jersey. As strange as it may sound, however, Gawker paid out $750,000 to settle a similar lawsuit from Ayyadurai. He sued Gawker for ridiculing him with headlines that said Ayyadurai has "pretended to invent Email" and "The … [Read more...] about 1st Amendment wins in self-proclaimed e-mail inventor’s Techdirt libel suit

She-Hulk herself isn’t a telepath, but Disney Plus’ She-Hulk: Attorney at Law knows exactly what you were thinking when you first saw its statuesque heroine in all her uncanny VFX glory , and it appreciates all the feedback . While She-Hulk ’s frequent forays into the uncanny valley feel like an undeniable sign of the less than ideal conditions its visual effects were produced under, the show as a whole is a surprisingly refreshing spin on Marvel’s small screen character studies — one that feels like the precursor to something new yet very familiar. After multiple Phases full of hero origin series like Daredevil and Moon Knight that gradually teased out how their titular vigilantes became super, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law switches things up by immediately dropping you into the deep end of Jennifer Walters’ (Tatiana Maslany) life with little warning. Much like her counterpart in the comics, She-Hulk ’s Jen is an exceedingly talented but pathologically sheepish … [Read more...] about She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is peak uncanny valley, but it works

More than 500 pastors and faith leaders quietly gathered in San Diego, California, last weekend at the first annual Pastors Summit, hosted by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA Faith. “Only the pulpits have the power to change America,” one pastor said after attending the event. The summit was held from August 10 to 12, and featured pastors Rob McCoy, John Amanchukwu, Rick Brown, and John Randall, national pro-life leader Lila Rose, academic and leading critic of wokeness James Lindsay, and Charlie Kirk, among may others. “There remains one institution in America that the radical left doesn’t control, and that is the American Church,” Kirk told Breitbart News. “The Church is the last firewall to freedom.” “But there are three types of churches in America today: the courageous, the cowardly, and the complicit, and this final category is growing fast,” Kirk added. “TPUSA Faith wants to raise up a whole new generation of trained, equipped, and action-oriented pastors and church … [Read more...] about Over 500 Pastors, Faith Leaders Gather in CA at TPUSA Faith Summit