A year ago, MAGA champion and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) fired a shot across the bow, calling on all major league sports commissioners to be honest about how the changing sports-viewing landscape affects fans. He made clear that Congress was watching as America’s sports leagues quietly moved more games behind expensive streaming paywalls, pricing out the working fans who fill the stands, pack the bars, and enthusiastically tune in to support their teams. It was a warning. The leagues mostly shrugged. They should have listened. On Tuesday, June 9, the Committee’s GOP majority released a new report debunking the leagues’ talking points defending the move to streaming. According to the hard-hitting review, “the NFL’s claim of a fan-friendly distribution model defies the reality experienced by millions of NFL fans.” The report continues, “the NFL’s current model of placing games behind a paywall, especially through its Sunday Ticket offering, is harming consumers. . .” The concerns of consumers will be front and center on Wednesday when the antitrust subcommittee hears testimony on whether the Sports Broadcasting Act’s antitrust exemption is being twisted to harm consumers and benefit leagues’ bottom lines. This is a smart and timely move by Chairman Jordan and subcommittee chairman Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI). Since his letter last year, other Republican leaders have followed, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has opened a review, and the Department of Justice has launched an investigation into potential anticompetitive practices by the NFL. Most importantly, President Donald Trump himself said in a recent interview: “You have people that live for Sunday. They can’t think about anything else, and then all of a sudden they’re gonna have to pay $1,000 a game. It’s crazy, so I’m not happy about it.” Where the administration and allies in Congress stand is clear: Putting fans first is America first. “$4,785. That’s How Much It Costs to Be a Sports Fan Now,” according to sports journalist Joon Lee. To watch every NFL game last season, die-hard fans needed subscriptions to nine different channels and streaming platforms, totaling more than $750. A recent Fox News national survey confirmed that nearly 6 in 10 sports fans say they’ve skipped watching a game because it was too expensive, with one-third saying this has happened “many times.” And it’s not just happening in living rooms. Restaurants and bars, where watching the game is a community ritual, are equally frustrated—in fact, a restaurant owner will be one of the witnesses at Wednesday’s hearing. The leagues and Silicon Valley streamers are driving a wedge between fans and the teams they love. And as always, it hits hardest on families who can’t afford a different subscription for every sport, every platform, every week. The leagues’ antitrust exemption was a product of its time, and even then, it wasn’t supposed to be a blank check. Courts have been explicit: that exemption covers free, sponsored telecasting, not pay TV, not satellite, not streaming. The leagues have been exploiting a regulatory no-man’s-land, benefiting from an antitrust shield while shifting games to platforms that sit outside it. Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner who presides over the most lucrative sports league in the world, was invited to testify but decided to skip the hearing. The image of an empty chair with a nameplate reading “Roger Goodell” may not materialize on C-Span, but his decision to decline the Chairman’s request speaks volumes. That’s been the NFL’s playbook. When the FCC opened its review, the NFL didn’t engage until the last minute, while the other major leagues didn’t participate at all. The strategy is transparent: run out the clock, hope the political heat fades, and keep the money flowing. But fan frustration isn’t dissipating. Every Sunday when a family can’t find the game, every bar owner who loses customers because the right subscription costs too much, every working-class fan priced out of a sport their family has followed for generations, that frustration will land somewhere. It will manifest in town halls, polling data, and ultimately in hearings like this one. The leagues’ bet is that Washington’s attention span is shorter than their lawyers’ patience. That’s a bad bet, especially as the NFL makes things worse by moving next season’s holiday games online. Sports is a national love affair, not merely another consumer product. The leagues thrive because of their social contract with the American people. Fans give them their loyalty, their money, and their Sundays. The leagues return that love with exciting action available to everybody. That’s the premise behind the telecast exemption. Now the leagues are abandoning that deal in slow motion, and Congress is right to throw the flag. And fans, who have been patient long enough, are right to demand that policymakers protect their interests. *** Daniel Suhr is the president of the Center for American Rights, a nonprofit, public interest law firm dedicated to protecting Americans’ most fundamental, constitutional rights.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** YouTuber Jesse Ridgeway, who goes by McJuggerNuggets to his over 4 million subscribers, has sparked heated debates over the last week after announcing that he and his wife had chosen to get an abortion. They couple recorded themselves explaining that decision after discovering the unborn child had a high likelihood of being born with Down syndrome. The pro-life crowd rightfully called out this evil for what it is: eugenics. Even some leftists seemed to grapple with the larger ramifications, with several X commenters expressing their cognitive dissonance that abortion on demand for any reason is good, but also people with disabilities should be protected. Ridgeway said when he first found out the baby may have Down syndrome, he was “optimistic” and would try to “make it work” if the child was just “a little slow intellectually.” But he decided against it. “I just didn’t fully understand what Down syndrome entailed,” he explained. “I didn’t realize just how rough it is for the child, let alone the family … more often than not, they would be fully dependent on others for the rest of their life.” The one thing no one seems to be talking about is how Ridgeway opened up a conversation that should be seen as a gift to the pro-life argument. That is, he exposed the reality of why abortions are happening, and it’s not the extreme situations that so often dominate headlines. Pro-abortion advocates would love for the general public to picture abortions happening only when the baby was going to die anyway, or when the woman was raped, or very, very early in a pregnancy when the fetus was supposedly nothing more than a meaningless clump of cells. For years, pro-lifers have pushed back on that narrative with facts and reason. But it took a random YouTuber to show the reality of who is getting abortions and why. Per the National Library of Medicine, the most common reasons women seek abortion include “financial reasons (40%), timing (36%), partner related reasons (31%), and the need to focus on other children (29%). Most women reported multiple reasons for seeking an abortion crossing over several themes (64%).” Studies show that at least 67% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome in the United States are aborted. In Iceland, there are almost no cases of Down syndrome because those who have it are killed before they have the chance to be born. Between 350,000 and 400,000 Americans have Down syndrome, meaning they were born with an extra chromosome. When polled, these individuals consistently say they are satisfied with their life and were happy they were born, as The Daily Wire previously reported.  The Ridgeways going viral for the killing of their unborn child has prompted parents, siblings, and friends of people living with Down syndrome to post stories of why their lives are amazing. They speak of challenges, yes, but also of a surprising joy that can only come from accepting reality. People of faith would call this following God’s plan. However, even non-religious people can understand the futility in trying to control the world and the peace that comes from embracing life as it comes.  It also points to a larger question: Who is qualified to determine what makes a life worth living?  Stories such as the Ridgeways’ are gleefully held up by the pro-abortion crowd as proof of why abortion should exist. But this viral Down syndrome story is a bridge too far for many people who recognize that Trisomy 21 isn’t life-limiting enough to warrant a death sentence. They are pointing out how people with Down syndrome are often the happiest individuals they know. Why do they deserve to die for being “differently abled,” as progressives would say? I used to have a distant acquaintance who was an ob-gyn who performed abortions. We would get into surface-level debates all the time about abortion. I will never forget the one time she conceded to me on one point: sex-selective abortions. She recalled a time her patient, who only wanted two children, came into her office to schedule a second-term abortion after finding out she was pregnant with a second girl. “All I could think about was this woman’s adorable toddler, with blonde curls and big eyes, and think she was making a huge mistake terminating a healthy pregnancy,” she told me. Even someone participating in such an evil act had a moral standard. Most Americans who believe abortion should be legal also have lines they won’t cross, which are commonly determined by gestational age. But the thing about lines is that they are incredibly arbitrary. If we tell mothers only to abort for life-limiting medical reasons, then who gets to decide what counts as life-limiting?  Ridgeway has made it clear that the real justifications people give for abortion — Down syndrome, my boyfriend broke up with me, I wanted a boy instead, I’m just really tired — are flimsy excuses when it comes down to it. Abortion is never the right choice. Now that the reasons it keeps happening are out in the open, we can start having honest conversations about it.

The guilty verdict seemed obvious.

"We were quite shocked to discover this shrimp in the heart of the forest."

The divers were removing so-called "ghost nets" from a shipwreck in the Strait of Sicily when the enigmatic creature paid them a rare visit.

Love alcohol? Your fingers may hold a clue.

A California homeowner was visiting with his neighbors when he heard gunshots and screaming coming from his house and rushed back to find a shocking threat.Riverside County Sheriff's deputies were called to the residence on Heron Way in San Jacinto on Friday just before 10:30 p.m. on reports of gunshots being fired.'His goal was to get his daughter out safely, regardless of what happened to him.' They found a man with gunshot injuries and declared him dead at the scene, according to the Los Angeles Times. They identified the deceased male as 45-year-old Ismael Martinez.The father of the home told them that he had rushed to the house after his wife said a home intruder was firing a gun. The homeowner armed himself with a gun from his garage and exchanged gunfire with Martinez.Martinez was struck, but no other injuries were reported.A police investigation found that Martinez assaulted his 52-year-old girlfriend with a knife before running off to attack the family at the Heron Way home. The woman was found inside a vehicle and transported to a hospital for treatment. She was reported to be in stable condition.Police said there was no evidence that Martinez or his girlfriend had any connection with the residents of the home he allegedly invaded.A neighbor named Frankie Aguilar said the husband and wife of the family had been at his home when the incident unfolded. He said the wife had gone back to her house to charge up her phone when she found the armed intruder."When she was screaming, he was shooting at her with a shotgun," Aguilar said.Aguilar added that his neighbor's teenage daughter was also in the home during the shooting and home invasion."His goal was to get his daughter out safely, regardless of what happened to him," another neighbor named Robert Dorame said to KTLA-TV. RELATED: Intruder violently breaks down door of home with family inside — and gets justice from the end of a gun "I'm shattered for them because they're good people," he added. Police said the shooting would be referred to the Riverside County District Attorney's Office for review. Neighbors said they believed the homeowner had acted in self-defense. A friend of the family has opened a GoFundMe donation account to help them deal with the costs associated with the incident. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Steven Spielberg this week will drop “Disclosure Day,” his long-awaited engagement-bait alien movie. On cue, the internet is abuzz — with soyfacing and fangirling, dunking and slop farming, chin-stroking and opining, opining, opining. Somehow, therefore, more, but also dramatically less, needs to be said.I was early to the disclosure discourse. Five years ago, as the topic began to heat up in earnest, I tried to get ahead of the conversation by focusing on the religious dimension. Back then, that wasn’t center stage. The alien thing was still mostly Joe Rogan- and "X-Files"-coded, disclosure a cause célèbre for freedom-minded individualists sure that the evil secret government was hiding the TRUTH that only heroically skeptical intellectual rebels could force to come to light.In the coming age, many — even believers — will be deceived.To me, that felt incomplete. At best. The American experience with “alien encounters,” I underscored, had always been depicted and acculturated religiously — not just as a matter of “having a religious experience,” good or bad, but of actual theology.Its manifestation as popular culture belied not secular origins but spiritual ones: When your religious belief is that “organized religion” is bad and the only authority you can really trust is your own, you’ll see what’s at stake in the alien debate as the ultimate nature of the universe, one where perhaps everything we thought we ever knew about God and our relation to Him could be completely debunked. The desire to overthrow the authority or even the existence of the unbroken Christian church, that is, doesn’t stem fundamentally from secular principles. It actually stems from a desire to actualize a much different, ostensibly higher or ultimate, spiritual order. Among usThat is why in 2021 I emphasized that aliens are so often interpreted as proof that Christianity is not the truth that will save us — that the Christian era is over, Christianity is defunct, a new religion is not only “needed now” but has arrived, whether we like it or not. “The invaders are here,” I summed up the claim, “and they impose on us the responsibility of accepting a new age from which there is no turning back. Humans are but one organism, a weak and inferior one, whose only hope of salvation is in satisfying whatever it is the aliens herald and demand.”I went on to push back on this master narrative by way of Father (perhaps soon to be Saint) Seraphim Rose. He got ahead of the disclosure discourse decades ago, citing key scholars who showed the overwhelming pattern among “alien encounters” is of experiences impossible to distinguish from encounters over the millennia with spiritual entities — specifically fallen angels. Demons, in other words.“Aliens,” Rose explained, do not behave like angels, who appear as holy messengers cautioning people at once to not be afraid. Instead, like demons, they zoom around at will, produce terrifying illusions, and violate and persecute victims in their bodies and minds. Nevertheless, as anyone knows who grew up in the spiritual anarchy of the 1980s — where the lines blurred dangerously between “progressive” Christianity, New Age cults, and straight-up demonic occultism — there was already back then a huge and growing swath of alien believers who nursed a kind of syncretism with Christianity or some kind of “biblical” religion. That was what troubled Rose the most. Today, many people speak of the Antichrist and the apocalypse, topics very close to Christ’s warning that in the coming age, many — even believers — will be deceived that He has returned or the end is nigh. RELATED: It’s not easy being pope — Leo's big new tech encyclical proves it ANDREAS SOLARO/Getty Images Yes, millions of people may now be catching up to what counted as the frontier of the disclosure debate in 2021. X is full of eager, Spielberg-fueled arguments over whether aliens are compatible with Christianity, with both sides producing scripture, doctrine, lore, and receipts in the now-familiar style of the “global public square,” where every question is debated until it has been pulverized.Even alien-skeptical Christians, or those aligned with Michael S. Heiser-style caution, can find serious authorities noting that the cosmos exceeds human comprehension. The existence of other rational created beings somewhere in that vastness cannot simply be ruled out.But that is precisely the point. Some matters are best left to God. The human mind can crack them open with curiosity, only to find itself wandering a vast mental labyrinth — and once there, easy prey for delusion, pride, and disbelief.Take, for one example making the rounds today, the question of whether He has perfect knowledge of all possible counterfactuals — a question that first made the rounds centuries ago thanks to Luis de Molina, a Jesuit theologian who touched off a furious and protracted round of discourse and debate, an effusion of energy that might well have been better spent in other ways. What other ways? Well, here is where the new frontier of the disclosure debate appears. Haunted hallsIn theaters right now is a film called “Backrooms.” It’s close to being the opposite of “Disclosure Day,” at least in the sense that “Backrooms” is about the danger, and ultimately the tragic horror, of today’s deepening temptation to understand on our own terms the things that confuse and weaken us the most — things of our own flawed and falsely independent mental constructs. Today the foremost of these false realities — what the ancient monks called logismoi — is the creepy combination of depression and pride that makes people curious to know “for themselves” what is really good and what is really evil. Rather than trusting God on this matter or trusting God to sort it out and seeking refuge in humble self-denial of what even secular medicine calls the call of the void, we are all being carried along on a massive wave of belief that we somehow must subject all things to intellectual processing in order for us to function. Increasingly, we treat human beings as if our only real function is intellectual processing. Everything becomes reducible to intelligence, or optimized as an operation of intelligence. Intelligence becomes the only thing that matters because it is treated as the only thing that truly exists. Everything else — the body, the soul, love, worship, suffering, memory, family, place — becomes merely an expression or construct of intelligence.Under this view, nothing remains for us to do except intellectualize everything. We keep refining thought, language, and computation until we produce an intelligence so pure and complete that it no longer needs the rest of the human person at all, except perhaps for a time as fuel.RELATED: ‘Backrooms’ is horror for a self-justifying age A24This insane belief has become compelling because it fits the modern mind. It is becoming a new “organized religion,” even among people who most loudly hate organized religion. We entered the current stage of technological development already convinced that spiritual truth could be uncovered, created, or replaced through endless discourse: talking, writing, printing, disseminating, propagandizing, discussing, debating, and filling the world with more and more words.Eventually, we looked around and saw only language. Not merely spoken language, but language as thought itself. Reality had been swallowed by interpretation. And once everything became words, it was only a matter of time before we mistook the processing of words for the fullness of being human.In 1962, Beat Generation drug hellion William S. Burroughs, author of “Junkie” and “Queer,” wrote that language is a virus from outer space — in other words, an alien. Any Christian must know that, in reality, the Word, the Logos, is the opposite of a deadly xenomorph. But severed from the divine Word, the merely human word swiftly becomes something alien, monstrous, devouring. (“Time to leave the Word-God behind,” Burroughs wrote in his final doped-up years.)That is why the frontier of the disclosure debate now expands from the recognition that being sucked into the disclosure debate, by the “Disclosure Day” debate and all the alien debates, is a labyrinth with a minotaur inside our own delusional creation. This is the not-too-cryptic message of “Backrooms,” a message most strongly conveyed in the film by what’s also the cure for our servile and self-destructive yapocracy: silence. Holy silence.

Supernumerary, or extra, penises are very uncommon. Medical students uncovered a particularly rare case while dissecting a cadaver.

Winter Storm Uri ripped through Texas in January 2021. The frigid temperatures froze pipes, which then burst and caused flooding in aging barracks at Fort Hood, many of which were overdue for renovations…