Lie Hard
One year after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, when mobs stormed in trying to stop Congress from certifying the election of President Biden, a new NPR/Ipsos poll shows that belief in the, quote, "big lie" that voter fraud helped Biden win is as widespread as it's ever been - and that despite mounds of evidence refuting that lie. NPR's Tovia Smith has this report on why the big lie is proving so hard to dispel.
Lie Hard
Lie Hard is directed by Ian Niles, who also stars in the lead role. Niles co-wrote the script with Harrison Feuer. Niles and Feuer also produced with the film executive produced by Andy Cohen, Melanie Chandra, Adam Lindo, and Richard Switzer.
Moreover, it is not the case that inmates are doing lots of hard time under horrible conditions. Despite the enactment of mandatory minimum laws, between 1985 and 1992 the average maximum sentences of prisoners declined about 15 percent from 78 months to 67 months. In 1992 the actual time served by felons whose latest conviction was for a violent crime was only 43 months counting both prison time and credit for time spent in jail before sentencing! Among other things, this helps to explain why fully a third of all violent crimes committed in this country are committed by known criminals whom the system has repeatedly had in hand but repeatedly let go.
Yet Hard Candy is a truly great rape-revenge movie, and Elliot Page has always been trans. In fact, I would argue that Hard Candy features his best performance precisely because it leans hard into masculinity and gender fluidity, in ways later fame made him unable to do. Contemporary audiences will see Page clearly, in a way viewers in 2005 were unable to, and aside from a few awkward word choices and lines of dialogue, it changes hardly anything to view this as a story about a teenage boy.
It's hard to reconcile the sworn testimony offered by former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien before the House Jan. 6 select committee with what I heard from him as the headliner on a hastily convened fundraising teleconference about a week after the 2020 election.
"Please join us for an IMPORTANT New Jersey Trump Campaign Update with NJGOP Chairman Doug Steinhardt, Campaign Manager Bill Stepien, Deputy Campaign Manager Justin Clark, and Director of Battleground Strategy Nick Trainer," wrote Paul Valenziano on the broadcast email sent out around 1 p.m. on Nov. 10. There were links to donate to the New Jersey Republican State Committee.
Steinhardt defiantly declared it wasn't up to the news media to determine who won the election. My InsiderNJ colleague Fred Snowflack was monitoring the call and reported how those who dialed in were told there was a Trump campaign war room with 50 staffers following up on alleged voting irregularities.
Another segment of hard-core supporters feel strongly that America is under attack by foreigners, including Central Americans crossing the southern border. They also falsely believe the Chinese sent COVID-19 to kill Americans.
Families can talk about The Good Lie's messages. Is it hard to watch dramas with violent/upsetting scenes even if you know the take away will be positive/uplifting? What audience do you think the movie is intended for?
Dorsoinferior (back down) transverse lie is more difficult to deliver since the fetal feet are hard to grasp. An attempt at intraabdominal version to cephalic or breech presentation can be done if membranes are intact before the uterine incision is made. Another option is to make a vertical uterine incision; however, the disadvantage of this is the risk of uterine rupture in subsequent pregnancies.
Live-Action TV Doctor Who: While Who taken as a whole is Science in Genre Only, the "pure historical" stories (and one pseudohistorical, "The Time Meddler") of William Hartnell's tenure belong here. Everything in them is scientifically plausible (if not necessarily historically accurate), except for the existence of the alien time traveller that bought them there in his Magic from Technology time machine (and, in "The Time Meddler", the existence of a second alien time traveller with his own time machine). The focus remains on the historical setting and how the characters interact with the time travellers, with the direct implications of time travel technology itself - altering history - being present as a background theme and the primary theme of several ("The Aztecs", "The Massacre", "The Time Meddler").
"The Robots of Death" is based mostly on plausible technology and science bar the Doctor's existence and presence, and possibly whatever travel mechanism bought humans to the Kaldor City planet in the first place. In particular, even the psychology of the most highly advanced and intelligent robot in the story is markedly different to that of humans and they struggle to recognise certain objects and commands. Various laws of physics are encountered in the story and dealt with realistically, like the inability to stop the sandminer while in motion for fear of it sinking, and then-cutting edge robotics research is incorporated into the story (specifically, the Uncanny Valley Effect). There is even a stage play adaptation that removes the Doctor and Leela due to rights issues, making the scifi even harder.
The Expanse has no significant deviations from scientific reality except for the existence of "constant thrust" technology allowing for Casual Interplanetary Travel, and even then, it's downplayed because it merely reduces the traveling speed from planet to planet from months to weeks, as opposed to the mere hours common in many Space Opera settings. There is no Inertial Dampening or Faster-Than-Light Travel and spaceship battles avert Old-School Dogfighting. The only particularly wacky piece of science fiction is the protomolecule and all of its resulting effects. We do hear sound effects in the space battles, but the sounds are muffled and that has more to do with what the audience is expecting than mistakes of the research.
Firefly: The Big Lies are gravity/inertia control, faster than light radio communications* and possibly travel, albeit of the "several days to go between stars" variety - precise distances and travel times are rarely stated, and Psychic Powers.
Revolution: This U.S. TV series seems to fit here: the impetus for the series is some strange effect which disabled all electronic devices on Earth, and the efforts of the protagonists to reverse it. In "The Dark Tower", the protagonists do reverse it by using the Tower to shut down the nanites. Unfortunately, Randall Flynn then uses the opportunity to launch Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles at Philadelphia and Atlanta.
While the first season of The 100 was Speculative Science, Season 2 moved into One Big Lie territory, with the way radiation poisoning works changed to serve the plot and/or make for a more dramatic visual. Subsequent seasons introduced more scientifically-questionable Phlebotinum, till by the end of Season 4 we were definitely in Physics Plus territory.
In The Leftovers, the departure of 2% of the population is the one and only confirmed supernatural event, although many people are convinced others have or will happen as a result of the anxiety, superstition and paranoia following it, and many fantastical coincidences and phenomena happen in the series which would be extremely unlikely but could be explained rationally.
Tabletop Games Eclipse Phase is, in the main, Speculative Science based on forecast trends of technological development. However, post-singularity beings and aliens are capable of doing stuff that runs straight into Clarke's Third Law, most notably the Pandora Gates. The use of quantum entanglement for FTL communications is a bit iffy too, though at least they acknowledged that attempting to communicate using an entangled particle would collapse the two.
Luke Campbell's Vergeworlds has manufactured traversable wormholes, which are arguably physically possible, and the entire fictional but consistent physical principles behind Affector technology, but is otherwise quite grounded in real physics. The game was written by a professional laser physicist, and it shows - the laser guns common in game have enormous focusing lenses and fire millisecond length pulses to explosively bore through targets, using superconducting solenoids to gain the extreme levels of energy storage and power output required.
Infinite Worlds: The core worlds of Homeline and Centrum have physical laws largely identical to ours, with the exception of Parachronic Conveyor technology enabling access to various other nearby alternate realities. These accessible universes can range from other "like our own but Conveyors are possible" worlds to outright fantastical worlds where conventional physics holds little sway, however.
Ogre is premised around the existence of Biphase Carbide armor, a super-strong composite that can survive direct tactical nuclear strikes, leading to a battlefield dominated by robotic supertanks in which nuclear weapons are standard issue. The science is otherwise mostly pretty hard.
Western Animation StarCom: The US Space Force, developed with the cooperation of NASA, had the hardest science fiction ever seen in a Merchandise-Driven cartoon. FTL travel exists, but it can only be used between the planets of the solar system, and one episode has an alien city discovered on Mars with technology still active.
Stephanie Cawthon investigates issues of equity and access in education from multiple vantage points. Cawthon is a national expert on issues related to standardized assessment and students who are deaf or hard of hearing, particularly in the context of accountability reforms such as No Child Left Behind. She is the Associate Director for Research and Evidence Synthesis at pepnet2, a Technical Assistance and Dissemination project that serves individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. Cawthon explores assessment issues such as the effects of accommodations or item modifications on test scores for students with disabilities and English Language Learners. 041b061a72