'We can't just keep waiting'

'Call out actions that we ourselves are doing'

From Australia’s Gold Coast comes the story of an honest young man who handed over $3,500 he found at a gas station and was repaid manifold. 17-year-old Josh Pache was the first to notice a wad of Australian dollars sitting on the cement outside Fox’s Pantry. The dough had fallen out of the pocket of […] The post Teen Rewarded with Cash, Job, and GoFundMe After Turning in Wad of $3,500 ‘Without Hesitation’ appeared first on Good News Network.

Books cannibalism Tender Is the Flesh-Eating: The Literary Cannibal as Exploitation and Desire Wen-yi Lee examines the teeth of fictional cannibalism By Wen-yi Lee | Published on November 11, 2025 “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Francisco de Goya Comment 0 Share New Share “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Francisco de Goya What’s up with all the cannibals right now? Yellowjackets just saw its third season. Timothee Chalamet (Bones and All) and Sebastian Stan (Fresh) both recently played cannibals. Monika Kim’s Asian girl serial killer horror The Eyes Are The Best Part just got picked up for adaptation by Greta Lee and there’s been a whole slew of other books about people-eaters, including Olivie Blake getting literal with Girl Dinner and Caitlin Starling serving up a particular feast to The Starving Saints.  Eating other humans is an intrinsic taboo. Think of the classic trope of serving your unwitting enemy their partner/children/family members, or in the Greek case of Tantalus, serving your enemy your own son. Cannibalism, as in Silence of the Lambs, was once used to display extremities of evil or primitive barbarism. But consider the contemporary cannibal as metaphor. My fascination with the literary cannibal and their storytelling potential is one of those topics that I pull out only with the right audience—some friends that I told about this essay merely nodded politely. But there’s a long artistic tradition of using physical appetite to symbolise emotional appetite, and this is merely the next step along. As a literary device, I think cannibalism is the perfect mechanism to explore different wants to possess a body: be it wanting to exploit, wanting to enact revenge, or wanting as loving desire.  Bleeding me dry: Eating as exploitation Before the cannibals, though, we have to talk about vampires, which have absolutely been so back. (See: Sinners, Interview with the Vampire, Nosferatu, Dracula and Carmilla retellings, recent New York Times bestsellers Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, Immortal Dark, This Ravenous Fate,  Blood Moon, or Bride, just as a sampling…) Vampires are cannibals’ precursors, in a way. They draw on a lot of the same imagery–a puncturing of flesh with teeth, the drawing out of the vital insides, the simultaneous viscera and intimacy. They’ve also long been used in media as symbols of leeching from another. Historically, they might represent fears of the Other (see: the Eastern European vampire lurking amongst the civilities of Victorian England). As a class, they could represent the gluttonous and immortal wealthy. They’re also often stand-ins or literalizations for destructive relationships (see: P.H. Lee’s Locus-nominated short story “The V*mpire”, or the titular song by Olivia Rodrigo).  Cannibalism just takes it a step further. Instead of merely draining their lover, the cannibal—as in Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter album—kills and eats her, his freezer bride. Cain’s cannibalism is almost folkloric, a Southern gothic matched in tone if not location by the dark fairytale of Lucy Rose’s The Lamb, in which a little girl in the isolated English mountains helps her mother lure “strays” into their cabin and eat them. It’s an abusive story: about a mother who consumes because she feels entitled to possess, a narcissism that includes the daughter she sees as an extension of herself, upon whom she’s imposed her own appetite—and upon whom she will inflict violence when the girl starts rejecting her. For the love of her mother, this Gretel has been taught to return to the oven again and again.  On the flipside there’s Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater, where daughter witches consume their dead mothers in order to inherit their power. Possession, codependency, and what one gives the other are common conflicts in toxic maternal stories; to grow in a womb is to literally be made within and from pieces of the mother. It’s only a step further to reunite the two via the digestive track. To replace the umbilical cord with intestine. But in both these coming-of-ages, the protagonists must grapple with the forming of their own desires, and the social consequences when these desires aren’t the same as the ones they were raised with.  On a broader scale, human consumption is a great vehicle to explore exploitation, consumerism, and the real systems of inequality that feed off some in service of others. Hozier’s “Eat Your Young”, which implores “Puttin’ food on the table, sellin’ bombs and guns/It’s quicker and easier to eat your young”, is allegedly a reference to Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satirical essay A Modest Proposal, suggesting that the Irish poor could ease their burdens by selling their children as food to the wealthy, particularly colonial Britain. Meanwhile, Agustina Bazterrica’s terribly unflinching Tender is the Flesh depicts a dystopia where plague has killed off animals and turned society towards alternative forms of meat, starting, unsurprisingly, with the most vulnerable. “In some countries,” the narrator notes, “immigrants began to disappear en masse. Immigrants, the marginalized, the poor”. Even after human meat becomes a regulated industry, with people bred specifically for consumption, gradients of violence remain: White skins are prized more than darker ones. Women’s bodies exist not just as flesh, but as vessels to produce more flesh. Limbs are optional. But at the same time, there are different classes of women, too; see the head of the experimentation lab nicknamed Doctor Mengele, or the heiress turned female butcher entrepreneur. The fact that a woman ran the shop put everyone at ease, the narrator says. She also has the money to ensure she’s not eaten in turn when she dies. In Star Eater it’s men who’ve been infected by plague, and reproduction occurs via coercive conception with magically enslaved male convicts. Just as the bodily desires for food and sex are considered base and intertwined (Freudian theory calls this collective life drive Eros, as in, the root of erotic—more on that later), so are these commentaries about how a society that controls one controls the other.  A lot of violence stems from objectification: reducing the other to something separate from and lower than yourself. A biological food chain in which consumption is not only justified but natural. In The Lamb there is mother and daughter, and there are strays. In Tender is the Flesh, there are humans and there are products, heads, merchandise. (“Another word that obscures the world”, admits the narrator, who is troubled but complicit in the slaughterhouse all the same, for the sake of earning a living.) These stories use cannibalism as an exaggerated mirror of society’s existing inequality and selfish violence: how easily people can justify destroying others for the quest of their own survival, and how much these fragile systems can be disrupted simply by someone challenging the division between diner and meal. “Since the world began,” Tender posits, “we’ve been eating each other.” As readers we have to ask: whose ugly appetites should we actually be worried about? And perhaps, is there a point where they should be worried in return?  Eat the rich: Devouring as revenge Said Rousseau for the French Revolution: “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich”. One of the most classic cannibal stories, in fact, is ultimately about class revenge: Sweeney Todd, despite his rather problematic sins of murdering his barber clients and turning them into meat pies, turns out to be the story’s tragic antihero in the slums of Victorian England, victim of a wealthy judge who abused the law in order to exile Sweeney, rape his wife, and then claim his daughter. No one quips like Sondheim: “How gratifying for once to know/that those above will serve those down below!”  Or take, perhaps, august clarke’s upcoming The Felicity Complex, in which six women lab-grown to serve billionaires in a luxury fallout shelter rebel against their programming and eat their one-percenter guests instead. There’s a whole separate essay on the trope of the attendant female cyborg, an entanglement of femininity, disembodiment, and subservience that extends to why all your helpful robot assistants are coded female. (Hey, Siri. Hey, Alexa.) For now, we can focus on the fact that whittled down to its bones, eating is about survival, and those who glut while others starve deserve, perhaps, to be in for a shock when they realize the concierge has teeth, too.  Cannibalism media has even managed to lure Tony Leung: he’s in the 2004 Hong Kong horror film Dumplings, in which an aging female starlet begins consuming dumplings containing fetuses in order to retain her beauty—and thus the love of her cheating and abusive husband (Leung), who has his own appetite for younger women. Exploring the objectification of women, sexual violence, and possibly even wider cultural anxieties surrounding pregnancy (the film highlights abortion being illegal in Hong Kong at the time), it similarly uses the grotesqueness of cannibalism as a reflection for other marginalized, often gendered, bodies. And cannibalism, ultimately, is so much about the body. Girl dinner: On the female cannibal and repressed desire On the topic of dehumanization, controlling bodies, and flipping the script, there’s a ten-dollar word I love pulling out: carnophallagocentrism. Carno as in carnivory; phalla as in phallic; centrism as in something that orders everything around it. It’s a theory developed by Jacques Derrida linking human eating of animals to patriarchal ordering of people, specifically the way both bodies are objectified and thus more easily consumed. (For the more contemporary manifesto, see Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory.) I was introduced to the concept while studying Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, in which a Korean woman starts refusing to eat meat, to the increasing abuse of her husband and his family.  The Vegetarian isn’t a cannibal book (it just sounds like it should be) but it illustrates a particular relationship to meat and gender. The problem wasn’t that she wasn’t eating; it was that she wasn’t eating the way they wanted her to. Ultimately it’s about the behaviour society expects, and abuse as the expected consequence for straying from it. The personal desires of wives and mothers are so often suppressed in favour of those they’re expected to serve. Hunger, literal and metaphorical, is demonized. Our bodies are often sites of violence inflicted upon ourselves—all my teen girl friends and I flirted with eating disorders. I have a friend who, years later, can still ballpark the calories of a dish just by looking at it. You never think about something as much as when you hate it. There’s something about becoming obsessed with the thing you’re holding yourself back from.  Enter the female cannibal. Indulger of all forbidden desires, sometimes the female cannibal skips the tortured moral grappling. She is a satirical wish fulfilment taken to an extreme, reversing the experience of who typically gets consumed, and who’s allowed to consume with abandon (i.e. not women). The literal man eater trope can just be fun: see Chelsea G Summers’ A Certain Hunger, where an acclaimed and unabashedly sexual female food critic starts indulging more of her fleshy appetites, or Olivie Blake’s aforementioned Girl Dinner, which grapples with the performance of womanhood through an exclusive sorority that has a secret to its sisters’ gleaming perfection.  You’re killing people? Amanda Seyfried’s Needy asks in Jennifer’s Body.  No, Jennifer replies, I’m killing boys. But other times, the female cannibal is grappling with this increasingly undeniable desire the same way she is with all her other suppressed urges, and all her other obligations to be a nice girl for society; this cannibal story is about anger, suffocated feelings, and cathartic outburst. Monika Kim’s The Eyes are the Best Part, in which a Korean American girl entering college develops a taste for blue eyes—specifically, those of her mother’s creepy white boyfriend—simmers with rage about misogyny and the fetishization of Asian women. Catherine Dang’s What Hunger, about a Vietnamese American girl who begins craving human meat after being assaulted at a party, gives body to the abstract monster that is haunting trauma, both from the assault and from her parents’ history with the Vietnam War.   For obvious reasons, I’m personally invested in Asian daughter cannibal stories. But it’s interesting in general to think about intersectional cannibal stories and the different ways the trope can be used to dissect cultures around propriety, desire, consumption, and repression. The monstrous feminine, ultimately is about the vicious freedom in being unshackled from prettiness and propriety.  Admittedly, I tend to find male cannibals less subversive, and less interesting. But admittedly, issues of restrictive eating and body dysmorphia under the male gaze don’t only affect women. Luke Dumas’ upcoming novel Nothing Tastes As Good follows an obese gay man who starts a trial drug for drastic weight loss and finally turns his life around, gaining the approval of his family and getting a boyfriend, even as he starts to have cannibalistic cravings. A theme here, I suppose, is grappling with your body in relation to others’ harmful desire, and what it feels like to seemingly only have worth as good meat.      Eating is ultimately about power: who gets to take and who is being taken from, and sometimes the dehumanisation of certain bodies and certain hungers. But sometimes, that ultimate giving is consensual… I just want to taste you: Eating as eroticism and connection Back to Eros: the language of cannibalism overlaps heavily with the language of eroticism. Savoring the body. Merging two into one. Taking the best parts of someone else into yourself. Love being all-consuming. Want being all-consuming. If consumption is about power, the surrendering of one’s self for the primal need of another is a jackpot for sensuality. The Catholics kind of had it right with transubstantiation—it’s quite the religious act, making someone’s flesh symbolic of their essence and craving it so much that you want it, well, inside of you.  (Double entendres abound. “I dipped these fingers inside her skull, and for the first time something filled the emptiness inside me,” says The Lamb’s Mama to her female lover, about the first woman she ate; her lover whispers back about the thigh she’ll have for dinner.) (Or, as Preacher Boy says in Sinners: I just want to taste you.) When has forbidden fruit not been alluring? This is a metaphor intrinsically drawing on taboo and secrecy, so it packs an extra punch when entwined with a queer story. (As in The Lamb, Yellowjackets, or Monstrilio, mentioned below.) At the core of both cannibalism and homoeroticism is also the base desire to partake in those just like you. It’s the overlapping thematic playground of literary fiction-writing dreams.  The yearning doesn’t always have to be horny. A metaphor for eating allows a metaphor for starvation. So many of these cannibals are lonely, terrible creatures—Tender’s Marcos roams an abandoned zoo after the death of his son, The Lamb’s women are alone in the woods and can never satiate their hunger–and perhaps sublimated flesh is the closest approximation they can get to the connections they desperately yearn for, deep down. You are, after all, what you eat. Hannibal (2013) blends the grotesque and the ecstatic from the onset: Hannibal Lecter’s serial-killer crime scenes are intricate tableaus of body parts entwined with nature, and as a chef, he prepares his human meat with artisanal delicacy. It’s an easy tonal step from there into his charged relationship with FBI profiler Will Graham, who must grapple with realizing that he’s more like Hannibal than he thinks. The sense of taboo is triplefold: Will might be drawn to a man, Will might be drawn to a cannibal, Will might be drawn to a serial killer. Yet they’re each other’s only equals, and cannot exist without the other. In Jennifer’s Body, meanwhile, the high school boys getting eaten are merely tangential to Jennifer’s actual emotional core: her intense friendship with Needy (at some point they kiss, and then Jennifer tells Needy she goes both ways before attempting to eat her, too).  And then there’s the actually religious, but significantly unorthodox, minor cult that is Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, in which a key part of the magical bond between necromancer and their sworn-sword involves consuming a part of the cavalier (and in which, at some point, there is a feeding of soup containing unethically sourced bone marrow). It’s a series where grief, love, and power all are deeply embedded in exchanges and vesselages of the physical body. Insert joke about lesbian entanglement and codependency here. My favourite line to pull out in the spiritual coding of cannibalism is, in fact, biblical: This is my body, broken for you, said Jesus at the First Communion shortly before crucifixion, eat this in remembrance of me.  In that way, cannibalism also functions as a demonstration of memory: honoring and taking a piece of someone so you can always carry them with you. In Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio, this fixation comes from overwhelming grief. Here, a mother carves a piece of lung from her deceased eleven-year-old son, and nurtures it until it becomes a new creature. In Choi Jin-young’s Hunger, meanwhile, a woman consumes her lover’s corpse after finding him murdered, unravelling a story that’s also about the deadliness of capitalism and class inequality–and in which retaining your lover by any means necessary feels like an act of subversive agency.  This version of the metaphor desires intimacy so pervasive and devotion so desperate that no external closeness is enough. It resonates, perhaps, with anyone who’s ever mused about how far they might go for connection–and who wants someone to go that far to keep them. On cannibals for the modern age The world has felt increasingly disembodied in recent years. So much of our relationships with other people—and our sense of self—are mediated online; via the internet, we are exposed to a brain-breaking surplus of human beings that we simultaneously cannot touch or interact with in a real way. Our ideas of sexuality and intimacy have been slowly reconfigured.  Cannibalism forces story to grapple with humanity in its rawest, most vulnerable form, and so I find its metaphor almost relieving—a return to fundamentals, primal and physical. Amidst overconsumption of increasingly flimsy and unsatisfying objects, maybe we crave to sink our teeth into something dense and real. Governed by fleeting, often unkind, and often lonely digital worlds, maybe we crave visceral intimacy.  And overwhelmed by the world without being able to pinpoint exactly why, maybe we’re relieved by picturing the invisible monster finally taking clear form: we feel consumed just trying to stay alive, we feel like we have become the product to be exploited; here, you’re not crazy—here is the thing eating you.[end-mark] Buy the Book When They Burned the Butterfly Wen-yi-Lee Buy Book When They Burned the Butterfly Wen-yi-Lee Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post Tender Is the Flesh-Eating: The Literary Cannibal as Exploitation and Desire appeared first on Reactor.

Every soldier in Ukraine has already made a priceless sacrifice for the fight. Many have spent endless months in the trenches, holding just a few square meters of ground, some have lost their limbs, others their lives.  President Donald Trump repeatedly underscores the staggering death toll. And yes, the losses are immense—the direct result of Russia’s aggression.  Trump has cited figures of seven to seven and a half thousand deaths each week on both sides. Recently, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that the ratio of Ukrainian to Russian losses is one to three. Those who fought—and died—for Ukraine are not only Ukrainians themselves, but also international military volunteers.   Many have been Americans, usually veterans, who understood the difference between right and wrong, and recognized where today’s battle for freedom is being waged. By the end of 2024, at least 50 American families had lost their loved ones in this war. The Harris family of McLean, Virginia is one of them.  “I feel like part of this family that’s going through a lot of tragedy, but at the same time, the tragedy is worth it, because fighting there is something you’re doing with your heart,” says retired U.S. Marine Col. Rick Harris, whose son Thomas died while serving in the War in Ukraine.  On the 24th of November 2023 Rick got the call notifying him of his son’s death. We met with him on the seven-month anniversary of his loss.   During the interview, Rick shared stories about his son, how Thomas was adopted by the Harris family at the age of two, about the destiny to happen. “Of course, we immediately fell in love with him and he was it.” When Rick retired from the Marine Corps, his family moved to McLean, Virginia, right outside of Washington, D.C., where Thomas finished up at McLean High School. He had an early passion for golf and was on McLean’s golf.   After graduation, Thomas was recruited to the Marine Corps, deploying to Afghanistan at Helmand Province in Marjah for six months, “He really liked the Marine Corps and especially the camaraderie, the military, the disciple, and the excitement,” his father says. U.S. Marine Thomas Harris with his parents. (Harris Family) Thomas got out of the military and then started college for a nursing degree at the University of Alabama first two years and Columbia University in NYC then, where lived until he went to Ukraine. “He still missed this military, this camaraderie, this kind of working on a mission, doing something bigger than himself. So, when he got [to Ukraine], he was immediately introduced to a really competent team, a really highly thought of team,” says Rick Harris.  Saving Gino  On the way to Ukraine, Tommy met “Gino,” another American military volunteer. Recalls Gino, “I thought “Man, I’m gonna save this guy, I’m gonna help this guy out. He’s gonna need me.” And then we went into the position, and I got hit by the grenade. Guess who saved who?”   Gino recalled the incident with Tommy during the “For Freedom” exhibition in Kyiv, organized by the RT Weatherman Foundation which highlights the stories of foreign volunteers who have joined Ukraine’s fight for freedom.  It was a massive 12-hour Russian attack around Kupyansk, Thomas and Gino were wounded by a grenade, Gino’s leg was a broken mess. Thomas put the tourniquet on it and maintained it during the fight. At the aid station after the attack, the doctor said that Thomas saved the leg from amputation. “It was he who was there for me,” says Gino.   Rick recalls, “And so Gino said to me that meeting Tommy was God’s hand working to save him.”  A Machine Gunner With Medical Training  Thomas Harris had studied neuroscience in Columbia, and so he understood the basics of biology. A Ukrainian brother in arms remembers him a person, an experienced machine-gunner, and medical combat at the same time.   “Tommy was a machine-gunner in his team with past experience doing this in the United States Marine Corps. Tommy had also attended medical school in the United States, and though not assigned as a medic he was often filling the role as medic and both his machine-gunner and medical experience were crucial during a fight in Kupyansk to repel multiple enemy attacks” said “Vlad,” a representative of DIU Legion of Ukraine.  Thomas had also been involved in scouting, where he learned lording over other people and forcing them to do things that they don’t want to do is not right. “He was stubborn, he didn’t like bullies. He liked being something, participating in something that’s bigger than you,” his father Rick says. “Being there for the service as well as meeting people that Thomas knew and grew to love was worth the trip in and of itself.”  Still recovering from his wounds from the attack, Thomas was doing logistics support for an intelligence legion when he was killed in a car accident while driving to a DIU Legion forward operations center.  Honored at Arlington  Around 150 people attended the service of Thomas’ life at Arlington National Cemetery June 9, 2025. Rick remembered Thomas as a person getting along with everybody, adapting to different situations, being very empathetic and curious. “He went into Ukraine and integrated into a unit, just pretty much instantaneously.”  Thomas died doing what he loved, his best friend told me. He was so happy when he got there being part of the military with a team that he likes. “He was the kind of friend that if you needed someone to be there for you. The most important thing for him was that he had gotten a chance to help save somebody else.”  Memorial service for Thomas Harris at Arlington National Cemetery (Uliana Boichuk) Before Thomas left for Ukraine, he asked his father and mom not to worry about him. “He was there by his own choice,” Rick said. “He was happy with the team, happy with his job, happy supporting Ukraine. And that gives us some comfort that he was doing what he wanted to do.” Harris’ family understood the danger and accepted it, though they remain heartbroken. “I thought, not just my son, but all the other sons, brothers, fathers, who are making sacrifices, sometimes dying to protect Ukraine,“ says Rick, adding that he feels like part of a big family of those who have lost their loved ones because of this brutal war.   “This family that’s going through a lot of tragedy, but at the same time, the tragedy is worth it. Because the people that are fighting, the people that are supporting Ukraine are doing it, not just from the head, from the heart We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post VETERANS DAY: Remembering Thomas Harris, a US Marine Vet Who Gave His All in Ukraine appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A watchdog group alleges that Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, filed inconsistent financial disclosure statements regarding investments, which potentially violated House rules and federal law if the unreported assets exceed $1,000 in value. The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Conduct seeking an investigation into Crockett for failing to fully disclose financial investments in two dozen companies. “Generally, a lot of members of Congress are trading and holding assets that could be considered a conflict of interest,” Kendra Arnold, executive director of FACT, told The Daily Signal. “When we see members of Congress not taking financial disclosure seriously, we do see other ethics problems.” Crockett is a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, where she also filed financial statements. When candidates run for federal office, they disclose financial information for the current and past year.  The ethics complaint contends that the state disclosure for 2021 was very different from federal disclosures covering the same period.  The complaint notes that as a member of the Texas Legislature, Crockett reported owning stock in at least 25 companies, including Amazon, AstraZeneca, Exxon Mobil, Moderna, and Uber. However, her federal filings as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives covering the same period listed investments in just three companies. Crockett’s office did not respond to email and phone inquiries for this story last week and this week. The foundation’s complaint says that publicly available stock valuations and records indicate that at least some of these undisclosed assets exceeded the $1,000 reporting limit. That means her failure to report them might violate federal disclosure requirements. FACT regularly investigates potential violations of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, better known as the STOCK Act of 2012, which aims to prevent potential conflicts of interest among members of Congress with shares in publicly traded companies.  Members of Congress must file annual financial disclosure reports accounting for assets, debts, and income, as well report transactions exceeding $1,000. Arnold said there is no automatic policing system in Congress, leaving it to watchdogs to discover problems to report to the Office of Congressional Conduct.  “There is no checking or auditing process,” Arnold said. “The financial disclosures are key to our democracy to one, ensure transparency; and two, ensure that members of Congress are not involved in conflicts of interest or perceived conflicts of interest.” The complaint details the alleged inconsistencies between Crockett’s Texas Legislature disclosure and congressional disclosure.  FACT-CrockettDownload “In her Texas filing covering the year 2021, Crockett states she owned stock in at least 25 companies, including: Amazon, American Airlines, AstraZeneca PLC, Aurora Cannabis, AT&T, Brinker International, Bristol-Myers Squib, Carnival, Corporate Cannabis, DuPont, Devon, Energy Corp, Exxon Mobil, GM, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, MGM Resorts, Moderna Inc, Match the Market, Newell Brands Inc, Occidental Petroleum, RedHill Biopharma (RDHL), Uber, Sabra Health Care REIT, Stocks Worldwide, T2 Biosystems (TTOO), ALNA, SNUS, and VBIV. She also reported owing debts of $110,000,” the complaint says. The complaint later states: “Three of her federal filings [covering] 2021, were, however, inconsistent with her earlier Texas filing covering the same year. In her federal disclosures, Crockett only reported owning shares of Devon Energy Corporation, MGM Resorts International, and Moderna, Inc. and did not include the 25 other stocks.” The complaint says it’s possible—yet unlikely—Crockett would not be required to disclose her shares in the unreported companies.  “While it is conceivable that Rep. Crockett’s stock shares in these 25 corporations could fall under a value of $1,000 each, the publicly known facts suggest otherwise,” the complaint says. “For instance, at least two of the stocks that Crockett did not disclose, T2 Biosystems and Red Hill Biopharama, were valued at more than $1,000 per share for the entirety of 2021.” “This means that so long as Crockett owned a single share of these stocks, regardless of whether she sold them or continued to own them at the end of 2021, she was required to disclose her ownership during the year,” the complaint adds. The post In Hot Water: Jasmine Crockett Faces Probe Over Conflicting Financial Disclosures appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Rumble has announced an expansion of its “Freedom-First” technology strategy, unveiling a binding business combination agreement to acquire Northern Data AG, a German company known for full-stack artificial intelligence and high-performance computing solutions. Alongside the planned acquisition, Rumble has also secured major advertising and GPU service commitments from Tether, worth up to $250 million, in what both companies describe as a long-term push for technological independence and free expression online. Under the agreement, Rumble will move forward with a voluntary exchange offer to Northern Data shareholders. The acquisition will give Rumble control over roughly 22,000 Nvidia GPUs and access to a global network of energy-backed data centers, strengthening its cloud operations and giving it a strong presence in both the US and Europe. The announcement follows Rumble’s earlier statement in October about its intent to acquire Northern Data. By joining forces, the two companies aim to scale Rumble’s cloud infrastructure and accelerate the development of its AI, creator, video, and advertising roadmaps. Rumble said the deal will help it build “scaled infrastructure rooted in freedom, privacy, independence and resilience,” while enabling Tether to “train AI models and co-create tools that empower content creators worldwide.” The company also emphasized that “Tether’s AI products are aimed at being insulated from censorship or access restrictions.” As part of the broader arrangement, Tether will become a cornerstone client and partner through a pair of major financial commitments. The first is a $100 million advertising deal, involving Tether’s pledge to spend $50 million per year over two years, beginning in the first quarter of 2026. This advertising commitment will integrate with Rumble’s upcoming cryptocurrency wallet, Rumble Wallet. Rumble said the initiative will expand creator monetization opportunities, accelerate development of new ad products, and strengthen its community while promoting what it called a “freer and more open digital ecosystem.” Chris Pavlovski, Rumble’s Chairman and CEO, described the integration of advertising into Rumble Wallet as a key part of this evolution. “A transparent, privacy-focused, and independent future of monetization and engagement for creators and users,” he said, is what the company seeks to build. The second commitment from Tether involves purchasing up to $150 million worth of GPU services from Rumble over two years, a move designed to further boost Rumble’s AI and cloud operations. Together, these commitments will not only enhance Rumble’s technical capabilities but also give Tether the infrastructure to develop AI tools free from traditional gatekeeping or political interference. Rumble, best known as the video platform powering Truth Social, has now firmly transitioned into a diversified technology company with ambitions across AI, digital finance, and data infrastructure. As Pavlovski explained, “Freedom-First is the new way forward for tech. Unlike Big Tech, it represents a future where technology empowers rather than controls.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Rumble Takes Aim at Silicon Valley’s Throne with Northern Data Acquisition appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Jeep 4xe Hybrids Turning Out to Be a Hot Number...Literally

Elephants and hippos and giraffes, oh my!

Raising the question: How does one milk a spider?