It’s been nearly ten years since Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck announced they were separating after a decade of marriage. They ultimately divorced in 2017 but have remained amicable for the sake of their children Violet, 18, Seraphina, 15, and Samuel, 12. The pair reunited in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving for a good cause. Ben and Jen served meals to the homeless for The Midnight Mission, which has served LA’s homeless community for more than 100 years. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Midnight Mission (@themidnightmission) Ben Affleck And Jennifer Garner Appeared Happy Together The Midnight Mission shared photos of the pair along with a grateful caption on Instagram. “Today, we were honored to have Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner join us at The Midnight Mission for Thanksgiving! Their kindness, warmth, and dedication brought so much joy to our Skid Row community.” The Midnight Mission added, “Thank you, Ben and Jennifer, for serving meals and sharing smiles on this special day. Your compassion reminds us all of the true meaning of Thanksgiving—coming together to support one another.” A fan commented, “Jennifer Garner making this world a better place. She is an inspiration. Proof you can be a beautiful and successful movie star and have time for meaningful contributions to communities.” Sadly, Jennifer Garner shared a sad update on Instagram hours after she and Ben Affleck helped serve meals. Her dog, Birdie, passed away unexpectedly, leaving the family heartbroken. Jen noticed Birdie wasn’t feeling well, but she had no idea how sick the poor dog was. She wrote, in part, “We were surprised to learn that, not only was she very ill, she was at the end of her life. The vet told us that dogs often hang on until their person comes home from college, and we believe Birdie did just that so that we could pet her soft ears together and thank her for being the world’s best dog.” This story’s featured image is by Featureflash Photo Agency via Shutterstock. The post Ben Affleck & Jennifer Garner Spend A Wholesome Thanksgiving Together appeared first on InspireMore.

‘Threats of violence against elected officials are unacceptable, unconscionable and have no place,’ Jeffries said

Universities have suffered a cataclysmic decline in public approval and support. A Gallup poll taken this year found that only 36% of Americans polled either expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education—once the agreed-on touchstone to upward mobility. Gifting to most universities has been down for two consecutive years. There is zero intellectual diversity on most university campuses.Speakers with conservative viewpoints are often either disinvited or shouted down—and worse.The federally guaranteed student loan program is in shambles. Some $1.7 trillion in outstanding loans were taken out by half of all college students.Nearly one-fifth are now not being paid back.Marriage, child-rearing, and home ownership are all delayed by some 40 million indebted graduates, who can take decades to pay loans back.The Biden administration demagogued the issue by illegally granting rolling student loan amnesties—to win votes just before both the midterm and general elections. That proposed debt relief would be covered by taxpayers, over half of whom never went to college.The expansion of student loan debt roughly correlates with universities raising their annual costs higher than the rate of inflation—largely due to administrative bloat.Although the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down the practice of using race and gender to adjudicate applications and hiring, universities are already seeking ways to circumvent the ruling.Asian and white Americans for decades have been systematically, overtly, and supposedly with justification, discriminated against by ignoring or not requiring test scores and downplaying grade point averages. Stanford University may be representative of these crises.In the 2020 election, 94% of Stanford faculty voted for the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket. Four years later, some 96% of all Stanford-affiliated donations went to Democrats during the 2024 election season.Former Stanford law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried—parents of mega-Democratic donor and now imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried, and recipients of millions in gifts from their felonious son—were reportedly heavily involved in either bundling large left-wing campaign donations or offering legal advice to their son’s bankrupt and Ponzi-like business.In 2023, a federal judge was shouted down at Stanford Law School, his lecture aborted and then hijacked—by a Stanford diversity, equity, and inclusion administrator!Former Donald Trump health advisor and Hoover Institution scholar Scott Atlas in 2020 was censured by the Stanford faculty.Yet subsequent events supported Atlas’s prescient warning that a complete lockdown of the country and the shutdown of K-12 schools would not only not retard the COVID-19 epidemic, but would cause far greater economic, social, cultural, and health damage than the virus itself.Two recent attempts to lift that censure failed—in part because some faculty claimed—that to do so would empower the Trump reelection bid!In contrast, Stanford professor Jeff Hancock, who founded the “Stanford Social Media Lab,” boasts he researches ‘how people use deception with technology.” Yet when liberal Minnesota officials wanted such “experts” to support their new law banning “deep fake” technology at election time, they called in the expert deception-detector Hancock.However, the references Hancock provided to prove his support for the law allegedly never existed.In fact, the lawyers who challenged his online expertise argued his sources apparently were invented by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT.Who will police the deception police?Last academic year, anti-Israel Stanford students with impunity violated university rules and camped out for months in the free speech area, shouting and disrupting passersby.A small group of students occupied and trashed the president’s office, and another vandalized historic campus architecture.After Oct. 7, a Stanford lecturer was suspended for singling out and targeting Jewish students in his classroom.A Stanford faculty committee on antisemitism recently concluded, “The most existential problem at Stanford is the emergence of a general atmosphere in which Jewish and Israeli members of the Stanford community are denied dignity and respect based on their Jewish identities, denied treatment and protection afforded to other minority groups, and afforded equal respect and inclusion only if they denounce Israel in various ways and forms.”Can out-of-control universities reform?The incoming Trump administration has floated a variety of tough-love remedies.They include predicating hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants on campuses’ adherence to the Bill of Rights, taxing the income on universities multibillion-dollar endowments, and removing the federal government from the student loan business.Recently, there have been a few hopeful signs that campuses are aware of the need to change.At Stanford, a new president was hired, widely respected for his singular commitment to disinterested education and freedom of expression.The SAT entrance exam is returning to many campuses and is still appreciated as crucial to most universities’ applications.A number of partisan elite college presidents have resigned in disgrace.So, hope springs eternal, even if it may be too little, too late.(C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Universities Have a 2025 Rendezvous With Reality appeared first on The Daily Signal.

NYT: The House Dems Are Revolting!

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Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest was one of the most talked-about political moments in sports history. For many, it became a symbol of standing against bigotry and racism, and eight years later, the protest is surprisingly still in effect in English soccer leagues. To others, it represents an unwanted interruption in a medium that should be void of activism, serving as an escape from reality. With the sports world now using the election of Donald Trump as an inspiration for dances and celebrations, the simple acts signal that politics in sports isn’t going away any time soon. ‘On the war in Vietnam, I sing this song.’ Muhammad Ali’s fight against the Vietnam War Iconic boxer Muhammad Ali is often portrayed as not only one of the greatest ever in his sport but also one of the greatest activists of all time. However, many of his polarizing remarks don’t often make it into recollections of some of his most famous protests. In 1967-1968, Ali was seeking an exemption from the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector on the basis of being an Islamic leader, USA Today reported. Ali was sentenced to five years in prison for draft-dodging, but he was freed on bail and never served any time. Your browser does not support the video tag. Footage by Getty Images Ali’s boxing title was revoked by the New York State Athletic Commission, and he was banned from the sport. At the same time, his opinions and even his poetry about his views on the war were widely publicized.Keep asking me, no matter how long, On the war in Vietnam, I sing this song, I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. However, other remarks, specifically about white people, are not often recited. "You’re talking to me about some drafts, and all of you white boys are breaking your necks to get to Switzerland and Canada and London. I'm not going to help nobody get something my negroes don't have. If I'm gonna die, I'll die right here fighting you." "You my enemy,” Ali continued. “My enemy is a white people. Not Vietnam, Chinese, or Japanese. [You’re] my opposer when I want freedom." In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Ali’s favor, saying his beliefs in his faith were sincere. Before Kaepernick, there was Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf Image via Brian Bahr/Getty Images Much like Cassius Clay changing his name to Muhammad Ali, Chris Wayne Jackson changed his name to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf upon converting to Islam and following black identitarianism. In 1996, Abdul-Rauf sat during "The Star-Spangled Banner" more than 60 times. When questioned on his decision, he reportedly said Islamism and American nationalism don’t mix. “Islam is the only way,” he said, according to ESPN. "It's also a symbol of oppression," Abdul-Rauf said of the American flag. "Of tyranny; it depends on how you look at it. I think that this country has a long history of that." The player garnered mixed reviews from other NBA players, including Dennis Rodman, who said for the amount of money Abdul-Rauf was being paid, he should be happy to stand for two minutes. "If you want to do that, why don't you bring your own flag and sing your own national anthem?" Rodman said. Fellow Muslim player Hakeem Olajuwon said that the flag should be respected, while Magic Johnson simply stated that people shouldn't be mad at others for expressing their beliefs. Abdul-Rauf eventually agreed to stand, but not until he was suspended two games and started losing money. The trade-off was that the player could stand and say his own private prayer during the anthem. He was booed during his first appearance after his suspension. Cold War buzzer-beater During the 1972 Munich Olympics, with the Cold War in full swing, the Soviet Union and the United States played a heated men’s basketball final in front of a tense audience. The Americans were poised to win — or face shame upon their return home for losing in the sport they had long dominated. With just three seconds left in the final, American Doug Collins sank two clutch free throws despite taking a nasty fall just seconds earlier. This gave the American team a 50-49 lead with three seconds remaining. What followed was a calamity of scoring table errors that transformed the game’s ending from iconic to controversial. Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images First, Russian coaches took a time-out, but their team inbounded the ball anyway, and referees blew the whistle with the clock stopped at just one second remaining. Before the clock could be correctly reset to three seconds, the referee handed the ball to the Russians, who then inbounded and threw up a desperate last-second shot that missed. The elated American squad celebrated for minutes on the court, ecstatic about their victory and relieved of the immense pressure on their shoulders. However, officials stopped the celebration, reset the clock to three seconds, and gave the USSR yet another chance. A full-court pass to Alelxander Belov resulted in an easy bucket, giving the Soviets a 51-50 gold medal win. Due to the apparent controversy, the American team refused their silver medals and did not show up for the medal ceremony. Team captain Kenny Davis said the Americans felt the Soviets “did something” that was illegal, and they didn’t know any other way to protest. “You're not about to get us to show up to take that silver medal,” he said. The team appealed, but Olympic judges voted 3:2 in favor of the official result. "Everything progressed according to strictly Cold War politics," Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith remarked. "There were three Communist Bloc judges. It's a three-to-two vote. America loses. The Soviet Union wins the gold medal, and at that point the American players are facing a stark reality. Do they accept the silver medal?" Those silver medals are now kept in a vault. Some of the American team members allegedly wrote into their wills that their beneficiaries cannot claim the medals, either. World Cup struggle session In 2010, the North Korean soccer team qualified for its first FIFA World Cup since 1966. Expectations were appropriately low, until the North Korean squad looked impressive in a 2-1 loss to Brazil, which was a juggernaut in the tournament. Despite the loss, the close score was so unexpected that North Korea decided to run its next game against Portugal live on state-run television, the first time a sporting event had been broadcast live in the country. This would turn out to be a horrible mistake. Photo by Alex Livesey - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images Unfortunately for the North Korean players, they lost 7-0 to Portugal in that live broadcast and then 3-0 to Ivory Coast in their final game. The Portugal game had long-lasting consequences on the players, as when they returned home they were reportedly subjected to a six-hour struggle session. According to the Telegraph, the entire squad was placed on a stage and subjected to criticism from the sport minister as 400 government officials, students, and journalists looked on. The event was called a “grand debate” because the team had failed their “ideological struggle.” The team’s manager was allegedly forced to become a builder while being expelled from the ruling political party. Only two players avoided the communist display, Jong Tae-se and An Yong-hak, who were both born in Japan and returned there immediately following the World Cup. Even stranger, North Korea allegedly pumped out videos to the masses in an attempt to change history. In one video allegedly broadcasted, a state television news host not only claimed North Korea had beaten Brazil but was “denied a rightful victory” against Portugal and that the game ended in draw. The broadcast also dubbed over star Portuguese player Cristiano Ronaldo and pretended that he said he would be willing to play in Pyongyang because of the wonderful fan base. For the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, North Korean television stated that the North Korea team beat Japan 7-0, the United States 4-0, and China 2-0. The broadcast said North Korea would go on to play Portugal in the semifinal. North Korea was never actually in the 2014 World Cup. Neither was China. Helmet Pride humiliation 2023 was a year of reckoning in the NHL when it came to gay pride, Pride Nights, and the ever-present specter of woke ideology. Teams were seemingly falling over themselves to outdo one another’s Pride Night festivities and pregame gay-pride jerseys. At least seven players eventually took a stand against the practice during the 2022-2023 season, one of whom was Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender Ilya Samsonov. Photo by Kevin Sousa/NHLI via Getty Images Did Samsonov make a public statement? Carry a crucifix across the ice? No, the goalie’s crime was simply not wearing a rainbow decal on the back of his helmet during warm-ups. Samsonov did not even play in goal that night, and the Leafs organization went above and beyond in its tribute to non-heterosexual lifestyles. Nonetheless, Samsonov was subjected to a humiliation ritual by the Toronto sports media. Canada’s TSN specifically singled out Samsonov for not wearing the decal in the few minutes he was on the ice, meaning there was likely someone assigned to check for such ethical violations. Another since-removed report from MSN claimed the Leafs "hid Samsonov away from the media" and called the Russian's actions a "disappointment," along with "foolish and unnecessary." Eventually, at least seven NHL players refused to participate in Pride activities, leading the league to announce that teams would no longer wear “Pride”-themed jerseys during warm-ups, which bothered some of the league’s most woke players. Not to worry, though. It took just a week for the league to announce a new Player Inclusion Coalition to help create a "safe space" and educate about the importance of diversity and inclusion.

A Florida mom allegedly stole several items from Target by using a barcode trick — but police said she posted incriminating evidence on her popular TikTok account that alerted authorities to her purported crimes. Marlena Velez, 22, hosts a TikTok page that boasts more than 356,000 followers and receives millions of views. Her "marlenavelezz" account features mom content with her two small children and also highlights products. 'She essentially incriminated herself.'But the Cape Coral Police Department accused her of stealing hundreds of dollars in merchandise from a Target store. The alleged caper commenced Oct. 30 when the loss prevention team at a Target in Cape Coral caught a woman using the self-checkout register without scanning the products' actual barcodes. Instead, the woman allegedly scanned a fake barcode with cheaper prices.Police in a press release: "Sixteen items of miscellaneous household goods and clothing were stolen. The total loss of the stolen items was valued at $500.32. Officers verified this with Target’s security cameras."Police shared a video screenshot of the suspect on its social media pages and asked the public to help identify the unknown woman. An anonymous tipster saw the social media post and identified the suspect as Velez. The tipster also provided police with her social media accounts. "Officers then found Marlena’s TikTok account, which documents her getting ready on October 30, 2024, in the same outfit and glasses and going to Target," the police said in a statement. "Marlena documents herself picking out items inside the store and placing them in her car after exiting the store."The Oct. 30 TikTok post appears to have been deleted from her social media account, but police downloaded the incriminating video before it was scrubbed from her page. Police on Nov. 21 arrested Velez, and she was booked into the Lee County Jail.She was charged with one count of petit theft of more than $100, less than $750.“She essentially incriminated herself,” Officer Riley Carter, the police department's spokesperson, told the Express Tribune. “Social media gave us an unexpected lead, which expedited her identification and subsequent arrest.”Velez reportedly has a history of theft. WBBH-TV reported that she was arrested in 2019 for allegedly stealing her friend's car and crashing it. Amanda Santana — Velez's former high school friend — told the news outlet, “I went to the parking lot, and I’m looking around for my car, and I can’t find it, so I actually, like double-checked, looked on every side, and I was like, 'Where is my car?'” Santana continued, "We figured out that she went and crashed my car and totaled it into a ditch at a Dunkin' on Cape Coral Parkway."Police confirmed that the then-17-year-old Velez was arrested in October 2019 and charged with grand theft of a motor vehicle.Santana claimed, “There's a restitution that she has not paid for. And actually, not even a dime that she has paid for."In July 2023, police records show Velez was arrested for shoplifting kitchen items worth $63 from a Walmart in Cape Coral.The police report noted that security camera footage captured "a female, later identified as Marlena Velez, in the self-checkout under ringing items by scanning one item, then placing another item underneath the scanned item ..."Velez pleaded no contest to the charges and completed an anti-theft course. She was on probation for six months until last month.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

If you're quick, you can upgrade to a speedy 4TB SSD for just $199.99 thanks to this excellent Black Friday weekend deal. That's one of the lowest prices we've seen for a 4TB drive, and especially one that can hit PCIe 4 speeds, making this a great gaming SSD deal. While HP might not be the first name that springs to mind for SSDs, this model has the specs to make for a solid gaming PC upgrade. Other drives might top our best gaming SSD guide for raw performance but when it comes to PC boot times and game loading times, the likes of this HP model are plenty fast enough. Continue reading Grab a 4TB SSD for under $200 in this incredible Black Friday deal MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best graphics card, Best gaming PC, Best SSD for gaming

Following in the footsteps of Starship Troopers and its 2015 prequel, Helldivers 2 puts you in control of the titular, freedom-loving Helldivers as they wage war against their insectoid foes across the galaxy. Since its release in February, it’s quickly established itself as one of the most popular games of 2024. If you’ve yet to pick it up, your patience has finally paid off, because the game is now available at a 30% discount for Black Friday, bringing it down to its lowest price yet. Continue reading Helldivers 2 is at a record low price for Black Friday MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Helldivers 2 weapons, Helldivers 2 stratagems, Helldivers 2 system requirements