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Benjamin Netanyahu has recently come under fire for his comments comparing Jesus Christ to Genghis Khan at a recent press conference — but like most clips that go viral, it doesn’t tell the full story.

“Unfortunately and unhappily, Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good, aggression will overcome moderation,” Netanyahu said.

“So you have no choice. If you look at the world as it is today, you have to be blind not to see that the democracies led by the United States have to reassert their will to defend themselves,” he added.

While many conservatives were in an uproar after hearing Netanyahu’s comments, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey believes that some nuance and context are required in order to understand what he meant.

“He’s quoting an American historian, Will Durant, he was a Catholic. He turned into an agnostic as an adult. And his 1968 book, you see that actually at the beginning of the full clip, that he is quoting this book called ‘The Lessons of History,’” Stuckey says, before reading the full clip.

“Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan,” Durant wrote.

Netanyahu later clarified on X that the outrage was “fake news” regarding his “attitude toward Christians” and that he “did not denigrate Jesus Christ.”

“A morally superior civilization may still fall to a ruthless enemy if it does not have the power to defend itself. No offense was meant,” the prime minister added in another post.

“Now I disagree that he is insulting Jesus Christ here. He actually seems to me to be making an effort to caveat what he’s saying, that unfortunately he says, unhappily, it’s not the way of Jesus that wins wars,” Stuckey says.

“However, it was also an unfortunate way to make his point because the quote, I think, is a misunderstanding of the Christian worldview. We do serve a Jesus who tells us, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit,’” she continues.

“The characteristics of the Christian life are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. But there is also the just war theory that Christian thinkers over time have taught that asserts that there are good reasons to wield violence in defense of the innocent against the wicked,” she adds.

Stuckey points out that in the Old Testament, there was a demand for war and violence by God.

“I’m not saying that the Old Testament is a justification for America’s wars,” Stuckey says, adding, “It is to say and to point out that one cannot state that in principle God is always against war and violence.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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Contemporary software has to contend with the distributed system, the concurrent program, and the stateful service: domains in which unlucky timing and subtle concurrency produce rare, timing-sensitive failures that are difficult to reproduce. We are living in a software crisis that Edsger W. Dijkstra identified decades ago: the realization that testing can demonstrate the presence of bugs but never their absence. In this environment, a bug can be a ghost, a “Heisenbug” that vanishes the moment you attempt to observe it.

One response to this difficulty is a paradigm known as deterministic simulation testing, which attempts to impose a repeatable order upon a medium that is naturally entropic. In DST, the system under test is moved inside a simulated environment in which every major source of nondeterminism (the clocks, the thread scheduling, the randomness, the faults) is brought under control. The goal is to treat reproducibility as a first-class product requirement. In the same way that a scientific laboratory makes repeatability a condition for knowledge, DST makes repeatability part of the description of software failure. A bug is not only found but can be reliably replayed and interrogated.

The experimental world is made harsh so that the real world becomes easier.

A deterministic simulator is an epistemic instrument. The real world of computing is not deterministic, but one can create a deterministic micro-world in which events are rendered legible. The power of this practice comes from building a tool in which time, I/O, and failure are modeled.

FoundationDB was an early example of this approach. Its engineers designed a simulator capable of running an entire cluster in a single-threaded process. They replaced physical interfaces with shims and replaced a production run loop with a time-based simulation. They fed the system enough randomness to explore diverse behaviors but kept that randomness replayable by making the pseudo-random seed part of the control.

The practical implication is a form of information compression: the cause of a complex failure, which might otherwise require a sprawling and unwieldy production history to understand, is instead encoded in a small artifact: a seed, a schedule trace, a fault plan. The actual execution path can then be systematically varied into nearby possible paths through different seeds or fault injections. It is a machine for disciplined counterfactual reasoning.

We have moved away from the era of hand-designed illustrative cases toward a systematic exploration of execution space. This shift began with property-based testing, in which one states general properties and lets the machine search for counterexamples. The QuickCheck library pioneered this approach, focusing on “shrinking” or finding small counterexamples to make failures tractable, seeking to show not just that a property fails, but why it fails in a simple, telling case.

RELATED: Yes, there’s an AI hive mind, and it’s making us dumber

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In the 2020s, this lineage has converged with the practice of virtualization. Antithesis frames the process as “multiverse debugging.” The company offers an interactive replay environment in which engineers can “time-travel,” inspecting past and future points of a run, or engage in counterfactual analysis, experimenting freely within a deterministic universe without losing the reproduction.

This differs from record-and-replay debugging, which captures a single observed history. Modern DST aims to generate many plausible histories and then provide the tools to branch and replay within them.

DST reframes the ethos of chaos engineering. While the Chaos Monkey tool injects failures into a production system to increase resilience, DST relocates that experimentation under turbulence into a controlled simulation. The failures are amplified, but the risk to a production service is zero, and every discovery is perfectly reproducible.

The design of these systems also acknowledges the human element — what we might call attention design. In a world where triage is hard and problems are multiple, Antithesis aims to help teams fix the new things first, using novelty as a salient guide. The company uses statistical narratives, such as survival-style plots, to estimate how much more testing is needed to be confident that a bug is truly gone. This is testing as workflow governance.

Ultimately, the promise of DST is an intensified form of accountability. If failures are perfectly reproducible, causes are no longer lost in the fog of a one-time occurrence. It changes organizational expectations about how quickly trust can be earned. We see this in high-stakes fields such as blockchains, in which the Cardano Foundation uses DST to test its node software. DST is a disciplinary technology that reshapes what counts as responsible work and what kind of evidence is demanded from an engineer, constructing a world in which time, faults, and concurrency are ordered into inspectable objects.

DST allows the developer to produce stable, revisitable histories. In this simulation-first regime, the experimental world is made harsh so that the real world becomes easier. It is a way of reclaiming some measure of trust from a digital world that is increasingly unreliable.

Disclosure: Stephen is an investor in Antithesis. He otherwise receives no compensation from the company.

​Tech 

Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma has been confirmed by the Senate to head the Department of Homeland Security just weeks after President Donald Trump tapped him for the role.

Trump recruited Mullin to replace current DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in early March after a string of personal and political controversies. Noem will continue to serve in the role until March 31.

Despite Paul’s defection, Mullin secured support from some Democrats.

Mullin’s nomination sailed through the Senate in a 54-45 vote Monday night with Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky being the lone GOP “no” vote after the two shared a heated exchange during a confirmation hearing.

Paul called out Mullin for allegedly calling a vicious assault against Paul that left him with broken ribs “completely understandable.” Mullin in turn said if he had something to say he would just “say it directly to [his] face,” arguing that Paul likes to “fight Republicans more than you work with us.”

RELATED: Trump adds new condition to ICE airport plan in DHS shutdown fight

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Despite Paul’s defection, Mullin secured support from some Democrats. Sens. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico voted with Republicans to confirm Trump’s nominee.

It’s typical for senators to overwhelmingly confirm a Senate colleague to a Cabinet position despite their political affiliation, so the limited Democrat support potentially indicates how divisive DHS has become. While Mullin was confirmed on a near party-line vote, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former senator from Florida, was unanimously confirmed by his colleagues back in January 2025 to serve in the Trump administration.

Mullin is now set to take on the task of resolving the partial DHS shutdown that has withheld funding from key agencies like TSA and FEMA since February 14. As a result of the Democrats’ partial shutdown, airports across the country are seeing massive security lines and constant flight delays.

RELATED: ‘Freaking snake’: Trump’s new DHS pick faces major roadblock from lone Republican

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Senate Democrats allowed DHS funding to lapse after the shootings of anti-ICE agitators Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Notably, the partial shutdown does not affect the immigration agencies Democrats seek to dismantle. Mullin’s Democrat colleagues are also demanding changes to immigration enforcement like deploying body cams and removing face coverings, all of which he will have to negotiate in his new role.

Mullin is now expected to be sworn in at the White House Tuesday afternoon.

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​Donald trump, Dhs, Markwayne mullin, Kristi noem, Alex pretti, Renee good, Dhs shutdown, Democrat shutdown, Senate democrats, Senate republicans, Ice, Tsa, Fema, Rand paul, Martin heinrich, John fetterman, Marco rubio, Politics 

An Ohio Republican Supreme Court candidate is facing scrutiny after claiming on the campaign trail that she was never nominated by a Democrat, despite evidence to the contrary.

Former Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Colleen O’Donnell’s comments have raised questions about her transparency and credibility in a crowded May primary. The upcoming race offers Republicans the chance to unseat the state’s last Democratic justice, Jennifer Brunner, and secure a 7-0 conservative majority on the court.

‘Ohio voters deserve clear, factual information about the record of anyone seeking a seat on the Supreme Court of Ohio.’

Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who refused to vote for either presidential candidate in the 2016 election and announced his endorsement of Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election, appointed O’Donnell in May 2013 to fill a vacancy on the Franklin County Common Pleas Court. She lost her re-election bid to a Democrat in 2022. In August 2023, the Biden administration appointed O’Donnell as a U.S. immigration judge in Laredo, Texas.

“In Laredo, I faced the worst of the worst — drug traffickers, human smugglers, and violent gang members,” O’Donnell stated when announcing her Ohio Supreme Court run in October. “I was proud to protect our communities from dangerous individuals, but I was also frustrated by how broken the system was. Too often, laws weren’t enforced. That lawlessness still echoes across our courts today.”

During a January interview, O’Donnell stated that she was “assigned to serve” in Laredo, which she noted was “about 1,500 miles from my home and my family here in Columbus.”

“I was presiding over asylum cases day after day after day. And I honored my oath and obligation to interpret the immigration law with impartiality and with integrity and resolve those asylum cases as efficiently as I could,” she said.

O’Donnell explained that she left the Laredo position “after six or eight months,” adding that the travel and time away from family were “pretty difficult.”

Her campaign website describes her as “a constitutional conservative with extensive judicial experience at every level of government.” It notes that as a U.S. immigration judge, she “handled illegal entry and asylum cases during the height of the border crisis.”

O’Donnell’s website claims that she “enforced the law as written,” “never once granted asylum,” and “consistently ordered the removal of illegal aliens from our country.”

RELATED: Chris Christie absolutely trashes John Kasich after former Ohio GOP governor speaks at DNC

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In early March, the Ohio Conservatives PAC accused O’Donnell of lying to voters about her immigration judge appointment.

The PAC shared an audio clip of O’Donnell’s speech from a March 2 lunch with legislators event for the Greene County Republican Party, during which she accused her opponents of “mischaracterizing” her background and qualifications.

“Because I value transparency and the truth, I want to be crystal clear: I was never appointed by Joe Biden, or any other Democrat, to serve as an immigration judge, or in any other role I’ve ever had in my career,” O’Donnell stated in the clip.

Two event attendees confirmed the authenticity of the audio to Blaze News.

One of those individuals, Setys Kelly, who is running for State Central Committee, told Blaze News, “I’m thankful that the Republican Club of Greene County has these meetings that give you a chance to ask these questions of the candidates. And more people should take advantage of that because that’s how you find out the things that you want to know, instead of somebody repeating it on Facebook or social media — you never really know if it’s true. But you can ask the question here and hope to get a final answer.”

A Department of Justice notice from August 2023 confirmed that the Democratic administration of then-President Joe Biden appointed O’Donnell.

“Today, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland officially appointed the following individuals as immigration judges,” the DOJ notice reads, listing 38 names, including “Colleen O’Donnell.”

The PAC further highlighted O’Donnell’s claim that she never granted asylum.

“O’Donnell claims she never granted asylum one time. Well, that could be because she only served for a handful of months and quit before she completed her entire training program and probationary period,” the PAC stated, contending that it was unlikely she oversaw any case from start to finish.

“For the last eight months Colleen O’Donnell has lied to Republicans about her appointment to the Biden Department of Justice,” Cameron Brady, a spokesman for Ohio Conservatives PAC, told Blaze News. “The record shows that during her very brief stint for the Biden administration, she wasn’t a tough on the border judge, but rather just another Biden flunky taking marching orders to catch and release dozens of illegal immigrants into the interior of our country. O’Donnell’s forced to lean on her four-month stint as an immigration judge because unlike her three opponents who are actually judges, O’Donnell has been unemployed for going on three years.”

Immigration judge record

A Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review dataset of O’Donnell’s decisions as an immigration judge shows that in roughly 25% of the hearings in which the person appeared, O’Donnell ruled in their favor, allowing them to remain in the country rather than be deported.

In two of the 14 credible fear review cases she ruled on, O’Donnell overturned immigration officers’ decisions that the individuals lacked credible fear. Doing so allows individuals to pursue asylum or other forms of deportation protections.

In nine cases, she granted relief from removal, enabling those individuals to remain in the U.S. through some form of approved protection or status change. The available judicial datasets do not specify the exact type of relief granted; however, they may include options such as asylum, cancellation of removal, adjustment of status, or other forms of relief.

In one case, where the individual may not have been eligible for full asylum, O’Donnell ruled that deportation to his or her home country would pose a danger, thereby permitting the individual to stay in the U.S.

Two other cases were terminated without a deportation order, which can occur when the government withdraws charges, the charges are defective, or the individual qualifies for legal status through an alternative pathway.

O’Donnell’s campaign declined requests to clarify these rulings, only insisting that she never granted asylum.

“Colleen O’Donnell had a distinguished career as a Common Pleas Court judge and federal immigration judge, where she never once granted asylum. Our campaign team will not dignify these kinds of allegations. We have no further comment on this matter,” Amy Natoce, O’Donnell’s campaign adviser, told Blaze News.

RELATED: JD Vance’s half-brother becomes another casualty of Tuesday’s electoral bloodbath, losing Ohio race in a landslide

Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images

Ohio Republicans react

In the Republican primary for Ohio Supreme Court, O’Donnell is running against three other candidates: Andrew King, Jill Flagg Lanzinger, and Ronald Lewis. The election is scheduled for May 5. The winner will face off on November 3 against Brunner, who currently holds the seat.

Lewis, a judge on Ohio’s Second District Court of Appeals, told Blaze News, “Although I am not in a position to make a judgment on the truthfulness of this particular statement from Ms. O’Donnell, I do believe it would be valuable for Republican primary voters to receive a thorough explanation from O’Donnell on how she was appointed to the position, how her tenure as an immigration judge went, and how she arrived at the decisions she made while serving in that role.”

“The enforcement and application of immigration law was certainly different in 2023 than it has been since the inauguration of President Trump, and voters deserve to know O’Donnell’s role in immigration enforcement during her time as an appointee in the Department of Justice during Merrick Garland’s tenure as director,” Lewis added.

King, a judge for the Ohio Fifth District Court of Appeals, said in a statement to Blaze News, “The next justice needs to be rock solid in their judicial background and philosophy. I am the type of constitutional conservative judge Trump would appoint. We need a judge who the Trump administration would appoint, not a judge that the Biden administration did appoint.”

State Rep. Meredith Craig (R), who has endorsed King, told Blaze News, “Ohio voters deserve clear, factual information about the record of anyone seeking a seat on the Supreme Court of Ohio. It’s a matter of public record that Merrick Garland, serving as Attorney General under Joe Biden, appointed Colleen O’Donnell.”

“And the facts don’t stop there. According to available case data, Colleen O’Donnell presided over 110 immigration cases, transferring 35 into the interior of the United States. Of those, 28 involved individuals who were never detained or were released. This aligns with what has commonly been described as ‘catch-and-release’ policies during the Biden administration,” Craig continued. “These are facts voters can and should consider as they evaluate candidates for one of the highest courts in our state.”

Flagg Lanzinger and the Ohio Republican Party did not respond to a request for comment.

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​Colleen o’donnell, Ohio, Ohio supreme court, Republican party, Gop, Franklin county common pleas, Franklin county ohio, Jennifer brunner, Immigration judge, Ohio conservatives pac, Merrick garland, Joe biden, Biden, Biden administration, Biden admin, Cameron brady, Amy natoce, Ron lewis, Ronald lewis, Andrew king, Jill flagg lanzinger, Meredith craig, Politics 

Are you guilty? That depends. Are you white? Then yes, you are guilty. But whiteness is no longer the only offense. Believe in God? Believe Christ saves sinners? Believe in objective morality, the rule of law, or marriage between one man and one woman? Then skin color hardly matters. You are guilty anyway.

Guilty of what? Guilty of the sins of history, the inequities of the present, and whatever new offense the racial racketeers invent tomorrow. At least that is what grifters like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have spent years selling to America, often for staggering sums underwritten by universities eager to flatter the ideology. Arizona State University, where I teach, has offered classes on the problem of whiteness. ASU’s Barrett Honors College teaches the evils of settler colonialism.

You, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, are footing the bill for Struggle Session 101.

That is the backdrop for “White Guilt,” the new documentary from Shelby Steele and his son, Eli Steele, which premieres this week at ASU. Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and recipient of the National Medal of the Humanities, has spent decades writing about race, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. In his 2006 book “White Guilt,” he argued that racial moralism had become a tool for gaining power over others rather than a path toward justice.

The film appears at a moment when Americans have begun to see more clearly how much of the modern racial industry depends on intimidation, guilt, and fraud.

Steele understands the temptation from the inside. As a young man, he felt drawn to the black power movement. His parents had been active in the civil rights movement, and he wanted to help his community. But he came to see that race blame solves nothing. It degrades everyone it touches. Blame wielded by race remains racism, no matter who aims it or who absorbs it.

The better question, Steele argues, asks what it means to live as a free and responsible person. What happens when an individual takes responsibility for his own choices? What kind of life becomes possible when dignity comes from agency rather than grievance? That moral vision sits much closer to the American ideal than the racial spoils system now preached across much of higher education.

Steele rejects the fashionable claim that slavery was America’s original sin. The deeper sin, he argues, is the use of race to gain power over others. That temptation did not die with Jim Crow. It adapted. It migrated into institutions, party politics, nonprofits, and university bureaucracies. Today it thrives in classrooms where professors insist they do not teach racism while teaching students to judge one another by skin color, ancestry, and inherited guilt.

That fraud has paid well.

Black Lives Matter offered perhaps the clearest recent example. In the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, BLM became a moral brand for affluent liberals, activist professionals, and corporate America. Shelby and Eli Steele explored the lie at the movement’s foundation in their earlier film, “What Killed Michael Brown?” Their new film picks up a related question: How did the language of anti-racism become such a lucrative racket?

The answer is not hard to find. Much of the left’s social justice industry runs on a simple formula: Manufacture guilt, divide people by race, promise absolution, then collect money, influence, and institutional power. Sell moral panic to well-intentioned Americans, then invoice them for redemption.

RELATED: The campus isn’t ‘misunderstood.’ It’s mismanaged — on purpose.

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Want to end racism? Write a check. Sign the DEI pledge. Sit through the seminar. Keep your head down while the consultants explain that your skin makes you complicit and your silence proves your guilt.

The strategy stays simple. Divide humanity into categories. Teach each group to resent the others. Tell people that the brokenness of the world is not a permanent feature of fallen life but the fault of their neighbors. Then arrive as the enlightened manager who can fix it all, for a fee. That formula has wrecked poorer countries for generations. Now left-wing elites have imported it into American life, dressed it up in therapeutic language, and sold it as virtue.

Anyone who has spent time around a university classroom knows the script. A professor begins with a banal truth: The world is filled with injustice. The class nods. Then comes the poisonous turn: Would you like to know who is to blame? Look around the room. Identify the oppressor. Assign the guilt. Require ritual silence from some students and ritual confession from others. Repackage humiliation as education.

And you, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, are footing the bill for Struggle Session 101.

Instead of surrendering to this politics of racial hatred, envy, and managed guilt, Americans should recover a better ideal. Freedom means more than license. It means responsibility. It means building a life through choice, discipline, and moral agency rather than through grievance and tribal score-settling. Whether the world crowns that life a success or a failure, it still belongs to you. No race hustler can take that from you.

“White Guilt” premieres March 25 at 6 p.m. at ASU Tempe in Bateman Physical Sciences F Wing, Room 166.

​Opinion & analysis, Black lives matter, White guilt, Shelby steele, Eli steele, Documentary, Antiracism, Grift, Ibram x. kendi, Whiteness, Struggle session, Michael brown, Ferguson, The left, Black power, Dei pledge, Diversity equity inclusion, Freedom, Jim crow, Arizona state university, Racism, Robin diangelo 

Food delivery app company DoorDash has revealed a new way for couriers to make money.

In a blog post on Thursday, the company introduced DoorDash Tasks, a method for users to earn cash by feeding its artificial intelligence systems.

‘These are the kinds of real-world problems we’ve been solving for over a decade.’

The tasks range from innocuous to voluntarily intrusive. DoorDash listed example tasks like taking photos of a restaurant’s food to help showcase the menu to customers, photographing a hotel entrance so future couriers know the drop-off location, or even helping a delivery bot that may have tipped over or otherwise lost its way.

At the same time, DoorDash said it was piloting a new stand-alone app for users to “complete activities like filming everyday tasks or recording themselves speaking in another language.”

According to a report by Bloomberg, this more specifically refers to users filming themselves doing household chores like washing dishes, loading a dishwasher, or folding laundry.

The audio and video thus captured will reportedly be used to train DoorDash’s AI models as well as the company’s partners’. This likely means that data will be sold or shared to partners in the reported sectors: retail, insurance, hospitality, and technology.

RELATED: Former NFL player melts down after old ‘Caucasian’ mistakes him for an Uber Eats driver

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An example of a paid video submission’s instructions, cited by Bloomberg, included a dishwashing task that asked the worker to use a body camera pointed down toward the hands as the worker scrubbed and rinsed at least five dishes. The user was asked to hold each clean dish steady in the frame for at least a few seconds.

This could be used to train a robotics firm’s robot slave army to recognize certain objects from a specific point of view.

DoorDash showcased an image of a sample task, which included going to a local grocery store to take pictures of the current stock on the shelves.

“It’s simple: you can’t deliver to a door you can’t find or get someone milk if you don’t know what’s on the shelf,” said Ethan Beatty, DoorDash’s GM of tasks.

“These are the kinds of real-world problems we’ve been solving for over a decade, and we realized the same capabilities that helped us could help other businesses too. The goal of Tasks is to help more businesses understand what’s happening on the ground and gather new insights, all while giving Dashers a new way to earn on their own terms,” Beatty added.

RELATED: How to be bored — and 4 more real-world skills you can give your kids

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Pay is shown up front for the tasks and is determined based on the required effort and complexity of the job.

The tasks, and their accompanying app, are currently available only in some areas in the United States. California, New York City, Seattle, and Colorado are excluded.

DoorDash said that since 2024, more than 2 million tasks have already been completed.

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People don’t wear nice clothes to funerals anymore. Some still do, I’m sure, but many don’t. I haven’t been to a funeral in quite some time — thank God — but I’ve heard enough, and seen enough driving past graveyards, to know something is off in 2026.

You see it outside funeral homes and churches, near the hearse, gathered around an open grave: untucked shirts, jeans, sweatshirts, tennis shoes. People dressed for a quiet night on Netflix, not a solemn goodbye.

Can we really take death seriously if we won’t even take the clothing for a funeral seriously?

Dying custom

Why is it important to wear something nice to a funeral?

At first, the question feels almost offensive — or at least it does to me. My instinct is to snap, “Because it is.” You’re probably the same. Most of us never thought about it. The most obvious social norms rarely come with explanations. They’re absorbed, not argued for — like gravity or the sunrise.

Of course you dress up for a funeral.

But somewhere along the way, that assumption slipped. Now it has to be explained why a tie and leather shoes matter when you go to bury the dead.

When you attend a funeral, you are “paying your respects.” But is there much respect in showing up in jeans and sneakers? No. Some clothes are more formal than others, and some signal more respect than others. Not all clothes are equal. That’s simply how it is. Showing up to a funeral in a hoodie isn’t neutral — it’s a failure to honor the moment.

More than that, it’s a kind of disrespect. It doesn’t take much to put together a decent outfit. It isn’t unreasonable to ask someone to put their best foot forward for a single day. It doesn’t even have to be expensive. If you’re broke — and I’ve been — there’s always Goodwill. Twenty bucks gets you a shirt, pants, even shoes.

Last holdout

Dressing poorly for a funeral is a choice. It used to be a rare one. Now it’s common.

And it isn’t happening in isolation. It’s the endpoint of a broader culture that prizes informality and unconcern.

That culture starts small: not doing more than you have to, not dressing properly unless required, valuing comfort above all else. Casual Friday becomes casual every day. Soon enough, no one dresses up anywhere. And eventually, even the last holdouts — weddings and funerals — give way. For funerals, that day may already be here.

I don’t mean to sound overly gloomy, but there is something especially sad about this particular form of decline. Dressing down means one thing at the grocery store or the DMV. It means something else entirely when we are burying the dead.

It’s connected, I think, to the fact that we still bother with funerals at all — that religious traditions have long-prescribed rituals for burial and mourning. Those rituals reflect a belief that death matters, that it should be marked with care and seriousness.

Can we really take death seriously if we won’t even take the clothing for a funeral seriously?

Maybe not.

RELATED: Back to Black: We need a return to mourning etiquette

Wisconsin Historical Society/Getty Images

Dust to denial

There’s a more sobering truth beneath all this: Funerals themselves are becoming less common. More people are skipping them entirely — opting for cremation, informal memorials, or nothing at all. Sometimes it’s just an obituary. Sometimes not even that. I’ve seen it.

Some say it’s about cost — that funerals are too expensive. I’m not convinced. When people care about something, they find a way. If they cared about funerals, they would have them. If they cared about dressing properly, they would do that too.

The harder truth is that many simply don’t care.

The culture of informality and unconcern seems harmless at first — just more casual manners and a little less effort before leaving the house. But it doesn’t stay contained.

It spreads. It draws more of our lives into its orbit, and eventually there are no suits at the funerals, and then finally, no funerals at all.

​Men’s style, Lifestyle, Usefulness, Funerals, Mourning, Funeral etiquette, Manners, Death, Grieving, The root of the matter 

A Florida man was arrested for allegedly meeting with a minor to have sex, and law enforcement officials believe there may be dozens of other victims.

Aaron Starbird, 42, was arrested in a police sting from Sept. 2025, where an undercover officer was posing as an underage boy on dating apps.

The victim was able to point out Starbird and said how they communicated through an app.

Starbird sent explicit files to the officer he believed to be a boy. Investigators gathered information from communications spanning several weeks and obtained numerous search warrants.

Police performed a traffic stop on Starbird’s vehicle on Nov. 2025 and confiscated his cell phone. He claimed in police interviews that he tried to stop communicating with online juveniles after finding out their ages.

In December, Starbird was arrested by the Orange County Sheriff’s Office for the following slew of charges:

Ten counts of unlawful possession of materials depicting sexual performance by a child;One count of solicitation of a minor via a computer; andOne count of obscene material transmitting information harmful to minors.

In February, the state charged Starbird with one count of solicitation of a minor via a computer and 12 others related to child sex abuse material.

Investigators were able to tag about 77 videos that were indicative of child pornography and were able to identify one of the victims. When that victim was questioned, the victim was able to point out Starbird and said how they communicated through an app.

That victim was 14 years old when he was allegedly molested by Starbird.

RELATED: Elementary school teacher allegedly possessed thousands of files of child sex abuse material

Police are working to identify what they believe could be as many as 30 other victims.

Starbird was a former employee of Orlando Health.

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​Florida man online predator, Creep meets kids for sex, Aaron starbird, Florida crime, Crime 

“Moshitora,” Japanese shorthand for “what if Trump?,” first emerged in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election, as policymakers and business leaders in Tokyo tried to make sense of an unpredictable candidate.

The phrase resurfaced in early 2024 as Donald Trump’s campaign regained momentum. This time, it carried more than curiosity. It reflected strategic caution and genuine unease. What would a second Trump presidency mean for Japan’s security, its economic ties, and its role in the Indo-Pacific?

The US-Japan alliance has entered a new phase that looks beyond defense alone.

The question mattered bigly. Since former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s assassination in 2022, Japan has had to manage its alliance with Washington without the personal rapport Abe cultivated over decades. Trump’s first term had already shown how quickly supply chains could become instruments of strategic power and how fast economic policy could merge with national security.

For decades after the Cold War, Western policymakers assumed deep trade ties would soften geopolitical tensions. If nations became economically intertwined, conflict would grow too costly to sustain. That assumption collapsed. Supply chains did not reduce rivalry. They became tools of leverage instead.

Technology, once treated mainly as an engine of economic growth, became a strategic asset. Materials long confined to commodity markets — lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths — moved to the center of national security planning.

The consequences reached far beyond trade policy. Industries once taken for granted became strategic pressure points. Governments began to see commercial flows not as neutral exchanges, but as levers of power. Control over production, processing, and access could shape the balance of global influence.

Trump’s first administration accelerated that reckoning. Washington had to confront dependencies it had ignored for too long. Over the next several years, policymakers turned instinct into structure. Alliances no longer looked like military arrangements alone. They began to function as economic security networks built around trusted supply chains, resilient manufacturing, and reliable access to critical materials.

The results are now visible. In October 2025, the U.S. and Japan signed a framework to secure supply chains for rare earths and critical minerals, with the stated goal of reducing dependence on China’s dominant processing capacity.

Africa shows the stakes even more clearly. In early 2026, Glencore entered a nonbinding agreement with the U.S.-backed Orion Critical Mineral Consortium to sell 40% of its Mutanda and Kamoto copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

RELATED: China is arming itself with minerals America refuses to mine

Bert van Dijk / Getty Images

These mines rank among the world’s largest producers of metals essential to next-generation technologies. The deal aims to diversify supply beyond China’s orbit.

Across Africa, Washington has deepened partnerships to strengthen supply chains for essential commodities, while Japan has pursued its own ties with resource-rich nations.

These efforts go beyond securing raw materials. They concern industrial resilience, strategic autonomy, and influence over the technologies that will define the next era of power. Countries now face a hard question: Who offers long-term commitment, and who merely shows up to extract what it needs?

Japan’s approach reflects foresight. Its economic security policies — diversifying supply chains, investing in semiconductors, and deepening ties with African and Southeast Asian resource producers — show a clear understanding that industrial capacity underwrites national power. In some respects, Tokyo saw this shift coming before Washington did.

The U.S.-Japan alliance has entered a new phase that looks beyond defense alone. Who will build together, mine together, and secure the industrial base behind technological competition? The choices nations make now will help determine which economies and militaries remain resilient enough to compete in the years ahead.

“Moshitora” began as a phrase about a single American election. Its return in 2024 looks, in hindsight, like a warning Japan had already begun to heed. The question now is whether Washington will answer with the same clarity, persistence, and long-term vision.

​Japan, Foreign policy, Moshi tora, Trump, Shinzo abe, Trump administration, Supply chains, Rare earth minerals, China, Opinion & analysis, Rare earths, America first, Diplomacy 

When I find myself agreeing with Democrats more than Republicans on a core liberty issue, I know something has gone badly wrong on the right.

That is where we are.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has shown more urgency about protecting privacy from Big Tech than most Republicans. Republicans, meanwhile, keep covering for companies like Meta in the name of innovation or “anti-regulation.”

Privacy is not a boutique concern for cranks. It protects freedom of movement, assembly, association, and speech. A country that abandons privacy invites tyranny.

If the biomedical security state pushed during COVID looked sinister, wait until Big Tech deploys smart glasses with AI facial recognition.

In February, the New York Times reported, based on internal Meta documents, that the company had revived a 2021 plan to add facial recognition to its Ray-Ban smart glasses. The feature, internally code-named “Name Tag,” would let wearers identify people in real time without their knowledge and pull up information through Meta’s built-in AI assistant. “Dystopian” hardly covers it.

The privacy threat gets worse. According to the Times, an internal Reality Labs memo from May 2025 discussed launching the feature during a “dynamic political environment” to reduce scrutiny from privacy groups. In other words, Meta appears to know exactly how toxic this is and hopes to slip it into public life while the country is distracted by a war.

A new boundary breached

Meta already has access to billions of personal profiles and a long record of treating privacy as a nuisance. Facial recognition in covert wearable cameras would not be a harmless upgrade. It would breach a boundary that should never be breached.

For most of modern life, stepping into public did not mean surrendering your identity to every stranger around you. A person outside his home still retained some anonymity. He could walk, speak, assemble, worship, or attend an event without assuming that every passerby could identify him and connect him to a digital dossier.

Meta’s glasses would end that.

This is how the surveillance state grows: one device, one platform, one “convenience” at a time. The goal is obvious enough — surveil Americans continuously, gather every available scrap of data, and make it available for private exploitation or government abuse.

Republicans should lead the fight against that future. Instead, Democrats have taken the lead. Markey, joined by Oregon Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter laying out the civil-liberties threat.

“Embedding facial recognition into consumer wearables would vastly expand this surveillance infrastructure, enabling continuous, decentralized identification of members of the public without their knowledge or consent,” the senators wrote. “The deployment of facial recognition technology in smart glasses risks entrenching a system in which Americans are routinely scanned, catalogued, and analyzed as they move through daily life — an outcome fundamentally incompatible with a democracy.”

For once, the Democrats are right.

A doxxing machine

A wearer could blend into a crowd and scan thousands of faces in a single afternoon. The people being scanned would never know. No practical mechanism for consent exists. No opt-out exists. Your privacy would depend on strangers’ self-restraint and Meta’s internal rules.

That is no protection at all.

Now add politics. America is already divided along political, social, cultural, and religious lines. These glasses would function as a doxxing machine — a gift to activists, harassers, and anyone who wants to expose, blacklist, or intimidate another person.

Imagine someone wearing them at a protest, church, synagogue, school-board meeting, rally, or conference. A passing glance could tie a face to a name, employer, relationship status, online history, and web of personal associations. The line between public presence and forced disclosure would disappear.

Markey asked whether Meta had evaluated “the potential for stalking, harassment, doxxing, or government misuse.”

That question answers itself. Those are not side effects. They are among the most obvious uses.

‘We see everything’

The data pipeline should alarm people just as much. Anyone who wants to use the AI functions on these glasses will likely have to run them through Meta’s app. That means Meta and its contractors will receive the footage and other user data and can use the data to train models and refine the system.

A Swedish newspaper already found that workers for Meta contractors had access to shockingly intimate moments from users’ lives. One Kenyan subcontractor put it this way: “We see everything — from living rooms to naked bodies. Meta has that type of content in its databases. People can record themselves in the wrong way and not even know what they are recording. They are real people like you and me.”

Defenders will say smartphones already allow people to spy on one another. That misses the point. Phones are conspicuous. They require effort. Smart glasses make surveillance ambient, easy, and nearly invisible.

RELATED: Your smart thermostat is watching you — it knows your routine and when your house is empty

Photo by Gado/Getty Images

Political malpractice

Republicans should grasp the politics as well as the principle. Getting outflanked by Democrats on privacy, Big Tech, and the surveillance state is malpractice. Young voters already distrust AI. Fighting biometric surveillance and warrantless data abuse should be easy territory for a party that claims to care about liberty.

Instead, Trump has called on House Republicans to pass a clean reauthorization of FISA Section 702 without requiring warrants when federal agencies query Americans’ communications swept up in foreign surveillance. He has also pushed legislation to preempt many state regulations on data centers and AI deployment.

That is the wrong instinct at the wrong moment.

Privacy is not a boutique concern for cranks. It protects freedom of movement, assembly, association, and speech. A country that abandons privacy invites tyranny.

Americans do not want data centers imposed on their communities, fentanyl zombies defecating in the street, chemicals in their food, and camera networks tracking their movements. They certainly do not want strangers stripping away their anonymity with a glance through AI-powered glasses.

If Republicans cannot draw the line here, on a bedrock question of liberty and human dignity, they deserve to lose.

​Ai, Data, Democrats, Doxxing, Ed markey, Mark zuckerberg, Meta, Meta glasses, Opinion & analysis, Privacy, Reality labs, Republicans, Surveillance 

Seattle is already struggling with empty office towers, fleeing businesses, and rising urban decay — but Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck warns that the city’s latest proposal could make things worse than they already are.

“In Seattle, nearly one-third of the office space is empty — 35% at the core. More than a quarter of all of the office space all across the city is vacant. Entire buildings are dark at noon. Elevators that carried thousands of engineers and lawyers and designers now move janitors and security guards through hollow floors where the lights never come on,” Glenn explains on “The Glenn Beck Program.”

“This is New Orleans without the hurricane. It’s not war damage. This is policy that is doing this. And the response from the city leadership shows something that is far more than incompetence. It is intentional destruction,” he adds.

This “intentional destruction” has come in the form of a new tax being imposed in Seattle.

“You make over a million dollars, … 9.9% extra tax,” Glenn says.

“They don’t have any understanding of how an economy works. Seattle’s incoming mayor, Katie Wilson, proposed what she calls a solution now to just the hollowing out of Seattle,” he says, before explaining what he would do instead.

“Here’s what I would do. Fix the problems. Get the poop off the streets. Get the people pooping off the streets. Get the drugs off the streets. Clean the city up, and you won’t have this problem,” he explains. “But that’s not the solution.”

“Seattle is not known for technology. It’s known now for open-air drug markets, sidewalk encampments, retail theft treated as a nuisance instead of a crime. A regulatory climate where starting, running, or expanding a business requires navigating a maze of taxes and mandates,” he says.

“You feel like a criminal if you’re going to run a business. You feel, you know the city is against you, and the state is against you. Even now, Seattle businesses face one of the country’s most aggressive business and occupation taxes,” he continues, pointing out that the regulations caused businesses to leave, and in turn the city decided to start taxing owners of vacant buildings on top of their already steep taxes.

When companies noticed these insane regulations, they understandably chose to take their business elsewhere.

“The employees all followed; the buildings emptied out,” Glenn says.

Now, residents are trying to sell their homes — and they’re getting taxed for it.

“Instead of asking why companies are leaving,” Glenn continues, “city leaders ask a different question entirely. How do we punish the people creating jobs? How can we make their life even harder?”

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​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Seattle, Seattle taxes, Seattle mayor, The glenn beck podcast, Blue state, Blue city, Blue city crime, Katie wilson 

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, blamed evangelical Christians and other conservatives for not allowing progressives to redefine what pro-life means.

The resurfaced video gathered attention as Gavin Newsom’s suspected run for a presidential campaign continued.

‘They’re living in this silo, this evangelical, conservative silo that, ultimately, is just pulling us back as a country to a time and a place where we don’t deserve to be.’

Jennifer Newsom made the comments in an interview with Elex Michaelson from 2022.

“I appreciate that so many people, so many progressives, are leaning into redefining what pro-life is really about, and that’s what we’re doing in California,” she said. “You know, pro-life is about prenatal care and universal preschool and universal after-school and universal health care and taking care of foster kids and feeding, you know, universal meals and child care. Like, that’s pro-life. It’s not conception.”

She went on to accuse evangelicals and conservatives of holding back the pro-abortion effort.

“They’re living in this silo, this evangelical, conservative silo that, ultimately, is just pulling us back as a country to a time and a place where we don’t deserve to be, and we’re not going to be,” she continued. “Because honestly, young women and fathers of daughters are awake now, and they’re woke, and they’re not going to let us go back.”

She added that she has “so much hope because of that, and obviously California has a huge responsibility to lead.”

The video was posted to social media, where it garnered more than 1.5 million views.

RELATED: Rose McGowan claims Gavin Newsom’s wife tried to get her to bury Harvey Weinstein allegations

Jennifer Newsom also made headlines when she recently scolded reporters for ignoring her pro-abortion event and asking unrelated questions.

“We just find it incredulous [sic] that we have Planned Parenthood here, and women are 51% of the population,” she said.

“And the majority of the questions — all of these questions — have really been about other issues. … You wonder why we have such a horrific war on women in this country and that these guys are getting away with it. Because you don’t seem to care,” she added.

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​Jennifer siebel newsom, Jenn newsom woke abortion, Woke abortion, Gavin newsom’s wife, Politics 

Officials in Boston are celebrating the highest graduation rates in their history after significantly lowering standards for students and hiring “equitable grading policy” consultants, according to a bombshell analysis.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu (D) announced earlier in March that the graduation rate at Boston Public Schools had reached a new record high of 81.3%. The previous high had been 81%.

‘The increase in graduation rates is more the result of policy changes than of students’ rising academic achievement. And it comes at the expense of students’ readiness for the real world.’

“I say every day around the city that our top priority is making Boston a home for everyone, and that has everything to do with our young people, our schools, school communities, and opportunities for families in Boston,” Wu said at a press conference. “That is the story behind these numbers.”

But another story behind these numbers says that the figure just represents grade inflation and that actual student achievement results have not improved at all.

An analysis from City Journal of the Manhattan Institute found that other metrics showed no improvement despite the allegedly inflated graduation rates.

BPS students did not score any better on the math and reading portions of the SAT, according to the analysis. Math scores for lower income students declined by 5%, even as their graduation rates improved.

Reading and math scores for English language learners fell by 9% and 13%, respectively, as their graduation rates improved by an astounding 21%, the analysis claimed.

And only about 40% of BPS 10th-graders meet expectations for reading and math in the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System testing, both of which are lower than those from 2019, it said.

While Wu claimed they had not lowered student expectations or moved goalposts to artificially jack up graduation rates, the City Journal report claimed they had done just that.

One policy had teachers assign “incomplete marks” rather than give students failing grades, and the district spent $120,000 on education consultants who advocated for “equitable grading policies.”

RELATED: School credit ‘recovery’ plans are apparently being misused for racial equity — and disadvantaging students even more

Critics are noting that many schools are offering “credit recovery” programs where students are able to make up failing grades with minimal effort, allowing them to move on to the next grade will remaining woefully uneducated.

“The increase in graduation rates is more the result of policy changes than of students’ rising academic achievement. And it comes at the expense of students’ readiness for the real world — a cost that the students themselves will ultimately pay,” the report concluded.

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​Grade inflation, Boston public schools failures, Mayor wu is horrible, Fake graduation rates, Politics 

President Donald Trump is throwing his full support behind the proposed SAVE America Act, framing it as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overhaul U.S. elections and restore public confidence in their right to vote.

And he’s not going to let those who oppose it off so easily.

“The Save America Act is one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress, and America itself. NO MORE RIGGED ELECTIONS! Voter I.D., Proof of Citizenship, No Rigged Mail-In Voting (We are the only Country in the World that allows this!), No Men in Women’s Sports, No Transgender MUTILIZATION of our Children,” President Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“Only sick, demened, or deranged people in the House or Senate could vote against THE SAVE AMERICA ACT. If they do, each one of these points, separately, will be used against the user in his/her political campaign for office — A guaranteed loss!” he added.

“We have one chance to secure elections,” BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler says on “The Liz Wheeler Show.” “Do you remember what it felt like sitting in front of your television, watching on X as election results in 2020 rolled in? Do you remember the outrage that you felt as we saw anomalies, what appeared to be lawbreaking activity, happen before our very eyes?”

“So I challenge you today. This is what we should challenge our senators today. How many of those anomalies on that ill-fated evening in November of 2020 could have been prevented by the provisions that now exist in the SAVE America Act?” she continues.

“And for those on both sides of the aisle, on the left and on the right, who contend that anomalies are not proof, are not evidence, of fraud, OK. If no fraud existed whatsoever in any way, shape, or form, then why oppose the SAVE Act?” she asks.

“If it won’t change the outcome because no fraud existed — fraud played no part in those elections — then the SAVE Act couldn’t change the outcome,” she says, adding, “so you couldn’t possibly oppose it on any reasonable grounds, could you?”

Want more from Liz Wheeler?

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​The liz wheeler show, Liz wheeler, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, President trump, Donald trump, Republicans, Save america act, Save act, Save act debate, President donald trump, President donald trump election 

A video has been circulating widely on social media showing what appears to be a couple of Michigan school employees on a school bus engaged in what the district called alleged “professional misconduct,” WJBK-TV reported.

The station went a bit further, deeming what went on inside the yellow and black vehicle apparent “X-rated activities.”

‘My God, such total disrespect to both themselves and others.’

WJBK spoke to a mother who called herself Katie — and who was a reluctant cinematographer.

The station said Katie was at the Chesterfield Township Walmart last week when she caught two individuals who turned out to be school employees on the bus. Chesterfield Township is about 45 minutes northeast of Detroit.

She told WJBK the first thing she noticed was intense motion, initially believing they were simply cleaning the seats — but the movement kept up.

“I’m an adult, so I kind of put two and two together,” Katie noted to the station.

With that, she captured the incident on video, noting to WJBK, “I grabbed that just to have proof that what I’m seeing is what I’m seeing.” Katie then reported it to the Macomb Intermediate School District, the station said.

Blaze News is not linking to the unedited clip because of its inappropriate content. WJBK’s news video below, however, included a heavily blurred clip of the incident:

RELATED: School district speaks out after now-former employee, 22, accused of sending nude photos of herself to 14-year-old boy

No children were aboard the school bus during the incident, WJBK said, and the school district is investigating the employees in question and has placed them on leave.

“What if my kids rode that bus?” Katie asked the station. “I wouldn’t be aware of what’s going on, on that bus.”

Commenters under WJBK’s video report shot back reactions that ranged in tone from humorous to disgusted.

“That’s gross [for real] tho,” one user wrote. “Kids sit there.””Nasty,” another commenter said. “Where [children] sit. You can’t wait or find somewhere else. That’s gross.””Engaging in sexual activity … on a school bus … in the broad open day … in a parking lot?” another user observed. “My God, such total disrespect to both themselves and others. This type of behavior is unacceptable, and neither one of them should ever drive a school bus again. No buses for that matter. Damn shame. But none in their game.”

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​Education, Michigan, School district employees, Investigation, Macomb county, School bus, Employees on leave, Politics 

The Texas family of a 9-year-old girl is grieving her loss after she died from attempting a social media challenge.

Curtis and Wendi Blackwell told CBS News that their daughter JackLynn loved karaoke and wanted to become a singing star.

‘You could check on your kid, it could be kid-friendly videos, and then three minutes later it could be totally something dark because of the algorithms they start creating.’

“It was just the three of us, three amigos. We did everything together,” Curtis Blackwell said.

They recalled the horror of the last day they saw their daughter alive in the back yard of their home in Stephenville.

“Normal morning, tickle her to wake her up to get ready for school,” the mother said.

“She goes out to play like she always does, out in the yard. I noticed it’s kind of quiet — quieter than it should’ve been,” Curtis Blackwell said. “Then I saw her kind of around the corner that goes to the carport, saw her hair. I said, ‘JackLynn!’ I thought she was bending over playing because she was always in that area playing, but she wasn’t playing.”

His daughter had a cord around her neck when he found her.

“I found her unconscious. She was leaned into the cord,” he added. “I tried to do everything I could to save her. I got her off the cord. I tried to give her CPR until the first responders got there. It was the most terrifying, shocking thing I’ve ever seen. It was horrible to see my daughter in such a vulnerable state because of something so senseless.”

They believe that she was trying the dangerous “blackout” challenge that has caused other deaths and grievous injuries to others. It involves choking oneself in order to obtain a euphoric high.

“My mom told me that JackLynn had shown her a video before of a guy doing that with the cord. My mom told her, ‘Don’t you ever do that,'” Curtis Blackwell added.

About 80 people have died from the challenge.

“She’s our beautiful angel now,” Wendi Blackwell added.

RELATED: Family says their 10-year-old boy died from attempting a dangerous TikTok challenge

The Blackwells said they want more accountability for social media companies over the dangerous trends.

“You could check on your kid, it could be kid-friendly videos, and then three minutes later it could be totally something dark because of the algorithms they start creating,” Curtis Blackwell said. “There’s too many of these kids lost for these companies not to be held accountable in my eyes.”

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​Curtis and wendi blackwell, Death of jacklynn blackwell, Social media challenge death, Online challenge death, Politics 

Are demons more likely to attack Christians when they’re vulnerable? According to BlazeTV host Rick Burgess, the answer is yes.

On a recent episode of “Strange Encounters,” Rick shared a deeply unsettling encounter he had with what he believes were demons while preaching to thousands of men at a convention in 2021.

Rick admits that at the time of his speaking engagement, he was overworking himself, neglecting his home life, and was physically and spiritually worn out.

“I think I opened myself up for this battle … because I was wore down,” he confesses.

When he took the stage to speak, he immediately sensed that something wasn’t right.

“I just could sense pretty quick that there was just kind a darkness. There was an oppressive spirit that was there,” he recounts.

Rick opened his speech by sharing the story of his son’s tragic death. As he “got to the part about [his] wife holding the lifeless body of [their] son,” he saw something strange among the grim audience members: a group of men with “wicked” and “distorted” faces laughing at him at the back of the convention center.

“I’m literally talking about the death of my son and this gruesome scene, and they’re laughing at me,” he says.

Shocked, Rick stopped his speech and asked, “Do you think this is funny?” but the men “just kept laughing.”

He moved on with his speech but later circled back to look for the men who had laughed at his son’s death, but he could never locate them again in the crowd.

“I keep looking to find them, and they’re not there. So then I realize … there’s a spiritual war going on in here,” he says.

After his speech concluded, Rick inquired about the mysterious group and even physically sought them out, but he never could find them. Even stranger, no one he spoke to had any recollection of seeing or hearing laughing men.

“I couldn’t find any evidence of them at all,” he says.

In the end, Rick came to this sinister conclusion: “I was being mocked by demons about the death of my son.”

To hear more details from his harrowing story, watch the full episode above.

Want more from Rick Burgess?

To enjoy more bold talk and big laughs, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Strange encounters, Strange encounters with rick burgess, Rick burgess, Spiritual warfare, Demonic oppression, Blazetv, Blaze media, Blaze podcasts 

It took less than a minute. Not for the show to find its rhythm — that never arrived — but for viewers to reach for the remote.

A more generous critic would say “Saturday Night Live: UK” stumbled out of the gate. Someone actually grounded in reality would say it arrived DOA, was resuscitated by optimism, flatlined again during the opening credits, and spent the rest of its run time as evidence that nobody in the commissioning process had ever actually watched British television.

The live format, in particular, punishes British reserve. The Brits, much like the Irish, don’t do collective euphoria on command.

The opening sketch — a Downing Street caricature so limp that it needed medical attention — felt like it was written by people who had heard of the place the way most people have heard of Uzbekistan: aware that it exists, entirely unclear on the details. Keir Starmer reduced to a bed-wetting schoolboy: accurate enough, but executed with all the surgical precision of a drunk toddler.

Satire requires stones. This was neutered at conception

Fey’s lemon

The host was former “SNL” head writer Tina Fey — parachuted in to anchor the spin-off in the history of television’s most durable comedy franchise.

Rather than evoking “Saturday Night Live,” however, her appearance called to mind “30 Rock” — Fey’s own sitcom about a sketch comedy show flailing within an absurdly corporatized NBC.

She stood there less like a master of ceremonies than like a faintly embarrassed consultant, as if tasked with explaining why this seemingly gratuitous product was actually a masterstroke of synergy and brand extension. You could almost hear the Jack Donaghy pitch behind it: familiar logo, international rollout, scalable format. Somewhere between the greenlighting and the greenroom, the only premise that mattered — making people laugh — had been quietly lost.

The audience noticed immediately. They always do. Forty seconds. One minute. Five, if you were feeling charitable. The reactions weren’t angry. They were worse. They were bored. There is no harsher verdict for comedy than indifference.

Stupid and sublime

It wasn’t always this way, of course. “Saturday Night Live” was once genuinely great. Not good. Not fine. Great. Belushi, Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy — dangerous, deranged, alive. Bill Murray doing a sort of dollar-store Sinatra. Chris Farley destroying every piece of furniture within reach. Phil Hartman doing impressions so precise that the subjects should have taken it personally. They probably did.

These were performers who understood that live television was a dare, not a format, and they took it every single week. Comedy that felt like it could go wrong at any moment, and sometimes did, and was better for it. Sharp, stupid, sublime in equal measure.

Those days are long gone — the show swallowed by Trump derangement syndrome and the passive-aggressive ritual of swiping at conservatives until the writers’ room mistook a political position for a punch line.

In its prime, it was still political, but at least it was anchored in something real — American culture, fast, furious, and occasionally brilliant. If today’s “SNL” is but a degraded facsimile of the show in its prime, this transatlantic fiasco is a facsimile of that facsimile: edges blurred, ink fading, soul entirely absent.

RELATED: 9 must-have devices for detecting leftist threats in your area

CBS Photo Archive/Monika Graff/Getty Images

Fawlty hour

The failure here is structural, not superficial. British comedy is built on irony, understatement, and a very specific species of darkness. “Fawlty Towers.” “Brass Eye.” “The Office.” “I’m Alan Partridge.” Comedy that watches you squirm and enjoys it. Comedy that finds the precise point of maximum discomfort and builds a home there. Comedy forged in restraint and bad weather, in class anxiety and institutional distrust, in the particularly British conviction that authority is always, at some level, ridiculous. You cannot import that.

If British comedy runs on slow-burning cringe and the precise calibration of discomfort, the “SNL” format runs on volume — loud, broad, relentlessly American, built around celebrity cameos and political impressions that reset with each news cycle and evaporate by Sunday morning.

Hiring Lorne Michaels doesn’t transplant the institution any more than putting a McDonald’s in a country farmhouse makes it rural. The live format, in particular, punishes British reserve. The Brits, much like the Irish, don’t do collective euphoria on command. They do collective embarrassment, the kind that makes you leave the room on someone else’s behalf, change your name, and book a one-way ticket to the aforementioned Uzbekistan.

Nothing much

Crucially, nobody asked for this. Nobody petitioned. Nobody wrote in. Sky’s decision to commission eight episodes before a single one had even aired suggests the company was already nervous — hedging against failure by pretending it was a plan.

The deeper problem is one of fundamental incompatibility — a cultural mismatch so obvious that it’s almost impressive that no one in the commissioning process named it aloud. Or perhaps they did and were overruled by someone with a spreadsheet. Comedy, at its best, feels dangerous. This felt focus-grouped. Safe. Sanitized. A show that promised the sun, moon, and stars but instead delivered, with full confidence and considerable expense, a urine-scented underpass.

Of course, the next episode could be great. Revelatory. The best television in years. But judging by the first, almost anything else would have been better. Including nothing. Nothing would have been better. Nothing, at least, doesn’t waste your Saturday night.

​Saturday night live uk, Television, Culture, Lorne michaels, Tina fey, Sky news, Kier starmer, Review 

The Department of Homeland Security is calling on Chicago officials to enforce an immigration detainer on a man accused of shooting and killing a freshman college student.

Eighteen-year-old Loyola University Chicago student Sheridan Gorman went out with friends to the Tobey Prinz Beach early in the morning on Thursday to see the northern lights.

‘We are gravely disappointed by the policies and failures that allowed this individual to remain in a position to commit this crime.’

A 25-year-old man named Jose Medina-Medina approached Gorman while wearing a mask, and when she tried to flee, he allegedly shot and killed her, according to a DHS statement.

DHS said Medina-Medina is a criminal illegal alien from Venezuela and blamed the former Biden administration for his presence in the U.S.

“Medina-Medina should have never been in our country, but was RELEASED into our communities by the Biden administration,” the agency said on social media. “He was then released AGAIN following an arrest for shoplifting in Chicago, Illinois.”

The family of the victim also blamed government failures for Gorman’s death.

“We are gravely disappointed by the policies and failures that allowed this individual to remain in a position to commit this crime,” a family statement reads. “When systems fail — whether through release decisions, lack of coordination, or unwillingness to act — the consequences are not abstract. They are real. And in our case, they are permanent.”

Medina-Medina was charged with first-degree murder and gun charges but did not appear in court because of his continuing hospitalization. Prosecutors indicated to Judge Luciano Panici that the suspect is being treated for tuberculosis.

RELATED: ‘Cold-blooded’ illegal alien murdered 15-year-old who was trying to stop him from raping his mother, ICE says

Acting Assistant DHS Secretary Lauren Bis excoriated the former administration in statement about the incident.

“Sheridan Gorman had her whole life ahead of her before this cold-blooded killer decided to end her life. She was failed by open border policies and sanctuary politicians who RELEASED this illegal alien TWICE before he went on to commit this heinous murder,” Bis said.

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A left-wing member of the Los Angeles City Council is getting hammered for her hypocrisy in hiring police officers for her event while pushing to deny similar protection for her residents.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez has campaigned against the police, but the California Post discovered that she hired a large police presence when it came to her event celebrating Mexican Independence Day.

‘Apparently, she has no problem spending taxpayer dollars for her safety but opposes doing the same for the residents she represents. It is time for change in Council District.’

Hernandez pushed to “abolish” police and to divert police funding toward investing “in housing, economic mobility, education, child care, and public health infrastructures.”

But surprisingly, when she needed security for a celebration of Mexican Independence Day at City Hall in September, Hernandez hired 13 armed LAPD officers for the event at a cost to the taxpayer of $135,000 in overtime pay.

The event, titled “El Grito 2025,” was expected to include about 500 attendees, which means Hernandez paid about $270 for police protection for each person for just that one day. The per capita spending on police for the entire year is about $420, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

She also advocated that police be unarmed when providing security for the City Council and advocated for a “mediation-based model” for cops.

The Post found that Hernandez voted in 2025 against the City Council contract that authorized using the LAPD for special events like the Mexican Independence Day event she publicized.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League condemned Hernandez for her hypocrisy.

“It should come as no surprise that some politicians act like hypocrites, but Eunisses Hernandez takes the cake,” reads a statement from the union’s board of directors to the Post.

“Hernandez has repeatedly voted to defund and disband the police, yet she saw nothing wrong with requesting police security at a community event to keep herself and others safe,” the union added.

RELATED: Police release body-cam video after lawsuit over 9-year-old who was handcuffed at school

Photo by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

“Apparently, she has no problem spending taxpayer dollars for her safety but opposes doing the same for the residents she represents. It is time for change in Council District,” the union concluded.

Hernandez says in her biography that she’s the daughter of Mexican immigrants and a community organizer.

Hernandez did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

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