Transcendental. The post The song Yusuf/Cat Stevens called 50 years ahead of its time: “The problem has not gone away” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Those of us who are familiar with mason jars know that they come with a two-piece lid, but what is the reason? The design actually serves an important purpose.

from Alex Christoforou: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

Mexican cartels amassed fortunes on par with major corporations, but that has all changed since President Donald Trump closed the border. Under the Biden administration, the Mexican cartels’ profits jumped from $500 million in 2018 to an estimated $13 billion in 2022, according to The New York Times. The massive flow of cash was largely due to their migrant smuggling enterprise, which grew even more profitable than their vast drug empire. Border Patrol agents were instructed to release illegal crossers into the United States as swiftly as possible under then-President Joe Biden, and many likened what the job had become to aiding in the smugglers’ enterprise. But now that’s all changed since Trump’s return to office. For the last six months, the Trump administration hasn’t released a single illegal border crosser into the country, putting an end to the major catch and release pipeline and driving migrant encounters to record lows. Smugglers, however, have grown desperate to maintain their profits, shifting operations to the high seas to move people illegally into the U.S. Along the California coast, the pace of interdictions of boats packed with illegal immigrants has remained constant. Last fiscal year, the Coast Guard encountered “well over” 2,000 illegal immigrants. And traffic has remained “fairly steady” with the Coast Guard seeing an increase in interdictions, Coast Guard Capt. Jason Hagen, who is the southwest district chief of enforcement, told The Daily Wire in a recent interview. “As you lock down the land border, the cartels will need to make their money, so they push to the maritime, to the water side. And, unfortunately, there is no border wall in the ocean; we’re challenged with the tyranny of distance,” Hagen said. Earlier this month, Coast Guardsmen in San Diego’s Mission Bay were forced to fire several rounds to disable the engine of a 20-foot smuggling boat carrying 12 illegal immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador as they tried to escape. Credit: Customs and Border Protection Days later, Navy sailors came across a small boat packed with 17 illegal migrants traversing the sea near San Clemente Island. Border Patrol took them into custody, as is standard procedure. Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are fifty percent off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday. At least four illegal migrants died after their boat recently capsized off Imperial Beach in a separate incident. The Justice Department has since hit a Mexican man believed to be the captain with charges of “Bringing in Aliens Resulting in Death and Bringing in Aliens for Financial Gain” that could result in life in prison, according to the Justice Department. “It’s a dangerous game, and I can tell you the cartels are not in the business of safety, they’re in the business of money,” Hagen said. The cartels have also increased their maritime smuggling fees. Under the Biden administration, they were charging illegal immigrants between $10,000 – $15,000 in smuggling fees to take to the seas. Now, they’re forcing migrants to pay between $20,000 – $40,000, Manny Bayon, the President of the Border Patrol union’s San Diego chapter, told The Daily Wire. Bayon echoed that maritime smuggling in the Pacific Ocean has picked up “due to the increased enforcement on the southern border.” In response, federal authorities are now preparing to bolster security along the coastal border by installing new thermal imaging cameras to spot smuggling activity before it reaches America’s shores, according to the Los Angeles Times.

For all the hysterical claims that President Donald Trump is some sort of First Amendment supervillain, the reality is precisely the opposite. Trump has done more to defend constitutionally protected speech and to dismantle the most coordinated censorship regime in modern American history than any president in living memory. But don’t tell that to the New York Times, NPR, or the ladies at The View. According to them, Trump is basically moments away from burning the Bill of Rights on live TV. Why the disconnect? The modern Left has confused breaking norms with breaking laws, and those are two very different things. Norms are unwritten rules, handshake agreements shaped by cultural institutions. Over decades, those institutions shifted left and rewrote the norms to ensure that public policy always bends in their direction. One glaring example is the “norm” that government spending must increase every year at rates higher than inflation, substantially higher. Laws, by contrast, are enforceable with financial penalties or jail time. Trump breaks norms. The Left breaks laws and then screams “authoritarian!” when someone tries to enforce those laws. That, in a nutshell, is the dynamic between Trump and the Democrat Party today. To understand the elitist media’s role in all this, start with the epic collapse of journalism. The press still loves calling itself the “Fourth Estate,” bravely speaking truth to power. That may have been true once, back when reporters described reality instead of trying to socially engineer it. But over time, journalism mutated, first through ideologically uniform J-schools, then through newsroom monocultures, into something far more partisan. Post-Watergate hero fantasies turned reporters into crusaders. Conservative viewpoints disappeared. Elitists replaced objectivity with “moral clarity” — their euphemism for political activism. This has led to the death of journalism. The vapors emanating from its stinking corpse have made it nearly impossible for so-called “reporters” to understand basic constitutional law. So let’s clarify. The First Amendment protects a broad range of speech, but not all speech. Speech in service of a crime? Not protected. Offer a bribe and try claiming “free speech.” See how that goes. Defamation? Also not protected. And when you take a government handout, whether as a defense contractor or a publicly funded media broadcaster, you accept the regulatory conditions that come with it. NPR and PBS assumed otherwise. They took billions from taxpayers while repeatedly violating the law that required them to “ensure strict adherence to objectivity and balance.” They assumed the norm, that they’d always get our money through Congressional earmarks, even while breaking the law. Trump did what no other president has ever done: he broke that norm and enforced the law. His Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Brendan Carr, has done something similar with broadcasters. That’s not censorship. That’s accountability. The same principle applies to universities. For years, the norm was that campuses would tolerate and even encourage criminal behavior under the guise of “social activism.” Blocking highways, occupying buildings, vandalizing property, and assaulting students was perfectly fine, as long as the rioters chanted the right slogans. But the First Amendment doesn’t magically convert crime into protected speech. Trump ended that law-breaking norm, too. None of this alone makes Trump the “greatest defender of free speech.” His words and his deeds earn him that gold model. Just before taking the oath of office for the second time, Trump laid down the truth long forgotten by the left: “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. … If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple, just like dominoes.”  Trump’s actions followed suit. He and his administration have eviscerated the sprawling censorship apparatus built by President Joe Biden. MRC Free Speech America has shown how the Biden administration operated the most expansive government-driven censorship system in U.S. history. Not metaphorically. Literally. A few “lowlights” from the Biden censorship regime include: federal agencies pressuring social media platforms to suppress lawful political speech; agencies partnering with private entities to provide “plausible deniability” while carrying out government censorship goals, and government “switchboards” funneling thousands of takedown demands, creating lists of posts to hide, throttle, or erase. Biden’s objective wasn’t about fighting “misinformation,” as he has claimed. It was about controlling and shaping narratives before an election. This was speech policing. This was government censorship. This was illegal. Trump tore it apart. Through executive orders, personnel changes, and directives barring government censorship, Trump dismantled Biden’s censorship machine. Platforms can no longer hide behind federal pressure, and bureaucrats can no longer run secret speech-surveillance pipelines. That is what defending the First Amendment looks like. Not symbolic gestures. Not pretty rhetoric. Real action. Real results. Restoring the foundational principle that in America, the government does not decide which opinions are allowed. No other president has done more to defend the First Amendment. Trump truly has made free speech great again. * * * Dan Schneider is Vice President for Free Speech at the Media Research Center. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. * * * Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are fifty percent off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday.

Controversy erupted in Arlington, Texas, after American competitor Jammie Booker took home the title of the World’s Strongest Woman. There was one big problem. Booker is not a woman, and organizers said he failed to disclose that he is a man. Sanity won this time, and Booker was disqualified. “It appears that an athlete who is biologically male and who now identifies as female competed in the Women’s Open category,” organizers explained. “Strongman officials were unaware of this fact ahead of the competition and we have been urgently investigating since being informed.” “Had we been aware, or had this been declared at any point before or during the competition, this athlete would not have been permitted to compete in the Women’s Open category.” Booker claimed gold while British powerhouse Andrea Thompson, a former champion and one of the most respected figures in the sport, stepped off the podium muttering “this is bullsh*t,” according to multiple witnesses. Within hours, her coach, former strongman Laurence Shahlaei, declared Thompson the real 2025 champion, praising her dominance in the deadlift, log press, and circus dumbbell. “Sport is sport,” he wrote. “Women’s classes exist for a reason.” Even Booker’s own sponsor, Iron Ape, cut ties before he was disqualified, saying it had “reason to believe” Booker misrepresented critical information to the Official Strongman Games, stressing the decision was about integrity, not identity. So, what do we learn from this circus? That when truth punches through the charade, the house of cards collapses. But here’s the kicker: this isn’t just about sports. It’s about every industry being hijacked by feelings over facts, ideology over integrity. Whether it’s on the field or in the aisle of your local drugstore, you’re constantly being sold lies wrapped in pastel packaging and virtue signals. You deserve better. You deserve products that don’t pander. At Jeremy’s Razors, we don’t bend the knee to delusion. We build razors that slice through stubble and spinelessness with equal precision. Barber-grade stainless steel blades. Argan oil and aloe lubrication. A trimmer so sharp it could cut through progressive bull$#!& — and it does. Whether you’re grabbing the Legendary Bundle or just need a Starter Set that doesn’t lecture you mid-shave, you’re not just buying a better product — you’re making a statement. Because reality still matters, and so should your razor. For a limited time, get up to 50% off gifts for men (and women) who don’t back down. Shop the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale today. Jeremy’s Razors shares common ownership with The Daily Wire. 

Since its earliest days, the church has been known for bringing good news to the poor—not only through the gospel message but also by caring for people’s physical needs. In the first centuries, the church was so zealous in caring for those who were weak, poor, or abandoned that they earned a public reputation for it. While many Christians continue to answer that call, from a broader perspective, the church now seems relegated to a supporting role. In dollar terms, the current federal spending of $31,000 per American in poverty far surpasses anything our benevolence committees could ever hope to muster. Perhaps that’s why only 14 percent of evangelicals see poverty alleviation as primarily the church’s responsibility, while 55 percent view it as mostly the government’s job. But appearances can be deceiving. As books like When Helping Hurts have compellingly argued, poverty stems more from broken relationships than from a mere lack of capital. If relationships are the key, then the tables are turned. The tens of thousands of taxpayer-funded caseworkers are vastly outnumbered by the tens of millions of Christians who fill our assemblies. Despite initial impressions, the church is best equipped to implement real solutions. Allow me to offer a few practical strategies that can help your church do the most good with the resources you steward. 1. Deputize Church Members as Kingdom Workers Every church is on the hook for more ministry than the paid staff can possibly carry out—to many demographics, including the poor, who are a significant portion. So what if you treated church members less like additional “customers” to be served and more like kingdom employees with a duty to serve the poor and lost? The church is best equipped to implement real solutions. The gathered church could deliberately train and plan for the activities of the church members throughout the week. That might mean practical training and serving opportunities during what would typically a gathering time before or after the service. Or that might mean assigning tasks for volunteers to complete during the week. Certainly, some members would object to being transformed from the served into the servants, but many others are crying out for a sense of purpose that transcends the pursuit of happiness. In the end, an engaged body of believers can disciple far more people than the most exemplary staff team. Even if some of your flock hopped off to another church in the process, being the best church for the community is also a biblical long-run growth strategy. 2. Celebrate Individual Initiative Engaging your community doesn’t necessarily mean starting more ministries in-house. If your members are the church, then their service with local nonprofit ministries or redemptive businesses is just as valid as ministries listed in the church bulletin. One benefit of highlighting what individuals in your church are doing is that you can connect other members to those initiatives. Your church leaders can use the church’s communications to let the congregation know about ministries they could join: church calendars can contain aligned community events, church websites can link to ministry partners, and announcement channels can broadcast external volunteer activities. You could run an internal ministry fair where churchgoers share about their passion projects. Some churches make an effort to track their congregants’ external ministry and regularly report on involvement and fruit. You could consider a survey to help gauge the ministry assets already in your congregation. 3. Shift Existing Ministries to a Long-Term Focus If your church already has programs to minister to the poor, consider how oriented they are toward long-term, holistic discipleship. According to one survey, 62 percent of churches have food ministries, but only 2 percent have workforce development ministries. Simple provision of material goods isn’t the pressing need for people in poverty in America; relationships, connections, and skills development are far more useful. Numerous programs you can run or partner with provide mentorship, life skills classes, job fairs, and personal goal-setting and follow-up. These high-touch approaches create more space for meaningful gospel conversations as well. Even a micro version of a developmental program has greater effects than a substantial canned-goods drive. 4. Call the Poor into Reciprocity As you shift or initiate ministries to serve the poor, remember that God has equipped the poor with assets as well. Since development cannot be done “to” someone, effective approaches should borrow from God’s innovation of the gleaning system in the Old Testament (Lev. 19:9–10). We should offer the poor a subsidized exchange—such as asking them to mow the lawn in exchange for the payment of an electric bill, or stock a food pantry in exchange for some of the groceries—that rewards their effort and expands their capabilities. Simple provision of material goods isn’t the pressing need for people in poverty in America. Food pantries can become food co-ops in which “clients” become members of a club and make a financial and labor contribution. Christmas giveaways become Christmas markets, where parents in need buy deeply discounted items for their own children. Earn-it models replace handouts as the default way to meet a need. Some of our benevolence may even shift to an interest-free loan. All these approaches naturally reduce the quantity of applicants to people serious about improving their situation and allow for a deeper relational connection with those people. It also tends to lower cost and volunteer commitment, as it amplifies people’s ability to contribute to their own solutions. These strategies leverage the relational power unique to Christ-followers, and they can’t be replaced by any centralized solution, regardless of the budget. The church will always be the main character in any successful efforts to increase human flourishing. God has given us more than enough to make a difference.