Being used is one of the worst feelings in the world—a deep emotional wound that lingers and often leaves scars. For many rock stars and musical artists, channeling that pain into music becomes a form of catharsis, a way to reclaim power and look back at the people who wronged them with a sense of triumph. In some cases, these songs come from a place of revenge, where the artist—now a successful rock star—has risen above the betrayal and uses their platform to call out those who mistreated them. Other times, these songs are written in the moment, raw and The post 10 Best Rock Songs About Being Used appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

More dog owners had an “instant connection” with their pet than with their own partners, according to a new poll. The survey of 2,000 dog owners who are in serious relationships revealed that 87% were more likely to believe in “love at first sight” with their animals, compared to people. 80% of respondents said they […] The post Nearly 9 in 10 Adults Believe in ‘Love at First Sight’ With Their Dogs appeared first on Good News Network.

Frontier Airlines Flight 'Bursts Into Flames' Upon Landing in Vegas

One year ago (October 7, 2023), Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israeli communities and murdered nearly 1,200 individuals, the vast majority of whom were civilians, including babies. According to Human Rights Watch, Hamas and its partners committed “numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity,” including the “willful killing of people in custody; cruel and other inhumane treatment; crimes involving sexual and gender-based violence; hostage-taking; mutilation and despoiling bodies; use of human shields; and pillage and looting.” Despite the savagery of the attack, some in the American media found ways to defend the indefensible. “Hamas is saying, well, if nobody is able to defend, what is happening for Palestinians in the West Bank or East Jerusalem — with the home demolitions, the arrests, the children being killed, the desecration of holy sites — if they’re unable to do that, then we only have the ability to do it with military might and crude weapons and military,” MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin rationalized on his network’s Velshi that morning. “American politicians and other politicians think they can just ignore the context in which all of this is happening: the fact that Israel is an occupying power, the fact that Israel has violated international law as well as Palestinian rights,” a Palestinian political analyst, Nour Odeh, charged on the same program. “I really want to caution your viewers not to be dragged into the good guy vs. bad guy equation. We have to look at the bigger picture.” CNN viewers heard pretty much the same thing: “While this attack was deplorable, and deeply unprecedented, it did not happen in a vacuum,” CNN International reporter Nada Bashir insisted on CNN Tonight October 9. “This has come after decades of what Hamas and other Palestinians view to be occupation of Palestinian territory. It comes after decades of violation of Palestinian rights and decades of which is where the rights groups and U.N. Human rights experts have characterized as policies and practices which amount to apartheid.” Never mind that Gaza, where Hamas ruled, hadn’t been “occupied” by Israel since 2005. And Hamas wasn’t particularly respectful of “Palestinian rights,” either — a 2015 report from Amnesty International found the group guilty of “a brutal campaign of abductions, torture and unlawful killings against Palestinians accused of ‘collaborating’ with Israel and others” after the 2014 Israel-Hamas war. It was breathtaking how quickly some in the American media pivoted to making Israel the villain of the story, recasting Hamas as plucky underdogs. “I’ve made frequent trips to Gaza and have spoken with several Hamas leaders,” CBS’s Imtiaz Tyab recounted on CBS Mornings October 10. “What they lack in fire power, they make up for in ideology and sheer determination.” Journalists warned each other not to accept Israeli-supplied information. “The only source for ‘Hamas beheaded babies’ appears to be the Israeli military, which is widely known to spread lies and disinformation,” Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Adam Elmahrek tweeted on October 10. “Don’t amplify unverified, sensational info.” “Last night, I asserted that this report indicated that babies were beheaded. This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them,” tweeted New York magazine Intelligencer feature writer Eric Levitz on October 22. While refusing to accept Israeli claims, journalists showed themselves to be more gullible when it came to Hamas. On October 17, a Palestinian rocket pointed toward Israel malfunctioned, landing in the parking lot near the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. Hamas falsely claimed Israel had bombed the hospital, and inflated the death toll to “hundreds.” In spite of the fact that the hospital building was quite intact, journalists quickly repeated the anti-Israeli propaganda. “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say,” screamed the New York Times. That night’s CBS Evening News pushed the same falsehood with the huge headline: “Hundreds Dead at Gaza Hospital.” “Hundreds Killed in Hospital Strike,” ABC’s World News Tonight echoed. Dozens of other news organizations followed suit, as NewsBusters’ Curtis Houck painstakingly documented the next day — all wrong. During the 30 days following the October 7 massacre, NewsBusters’ Bill D’Agostino found fully two-thirds of ABC, CBS and NBC evening news broadcasts cited Hamas as a source for their Gaza reporting. D’Agostino compiled a video showing several instances of the inflammatory and wrong anti-Israeli charges that resulted:     The terror organization promoted an always-rising, impossible-to-confirm death toll that refused to acknowledge casualties among Hamas’s fighters. The networks ate it up. “In Gaza, it’s the youngest who are paying the ultimate price — tiny bodies covered in blood as exhausted doctors try to save their lives,” CBS’s Imtiaz Tyab recounted October 12. “The death toll in the besieged Palestinian territory has surged past 1,000 in just five days, and on nearly every street, scenes of anguish as rescue workers gathered the remains of the dead.” “Night after night, the bombs rain down with the Israel defense forces saying they have now surrounded Gaza City,” CBS’s Debora Patta mourned on November 6. “But around the world, people are recoiling in horror at the staggering civilian death toll, with calls for a ceasefire growing louder.” NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham noted how the Associated Press instructed their correspondents not to call Hamas “terrorists.” In an October 2023 explainer, the AP offered this guidance: “The terms terrorism and terrorist have become politicized, and often are applied inconsistently. Because they can be used to label such a wide range of actions and events, and because the debate around them is so intense, detailing what happened is more precise and better serves audiences.” Yet as journalists pushed to soften their description of Hamas, hundreds of journalists advanced a petition insisting upon harsher language for Israel: “To use precise terms that are well-defined by international human rights organizations, including ‘apartheid,’ ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide.’ To recognize that contorting our words to hide evidence of war crimes or Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is journalistic malpractice and an abdication of moral clarity.” As if on cue, PBS host Christiane Amanpour trotted out the “G-word” on her November 16 show, asking one guest: “What do you make of the killings in Gaza, which so many people are now beginning to talk about it as a genocide against Palestinians.” “Would you describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza as a genocide?” CNN’s Abby Phillip queried left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore on her February 23 program. Three days later, she pounded the same drum with another left-wing figure, California’s Democratic Representative Barbara Lee: “Do you consider what Israel is doing in Gaza to be genocide, and do you consider the President, as a result of that, to be complicit in a genocide?” Less than six months after the October 7 attacks, the transformation of an unconscionable war crime against the Jewish people into a viciously anti-Israeli media narrative was complete. Hosts now compared Israel’s Prime Minister with some of the worst butchers in history. “It is increasingly looking like Benjamin Netanyahu had a plan to force famine on the Palestinian people, on the Gazan people,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough seethed on April 5. He claimed: “You’re starving women and children in Gaza....They’re now having to grind up dog food and cat food and....drink salt water....It’s savage conditions, and it’s calculated....It’s calculated just like Stalin’s starvation of Ukrainians was calculated.” The war in Gaza continues only because Hamas, beaten by all conventional measures, refuses to surrender and end the suffering of civilians caught in the crossfire. And Israel, having seen the moral depravity of their enemy on October 7, understands that it is impossible to live side-by-side with a merciless terror group bent on their destruction. Worst of all, the media probably know that their one-sided hammering of Israel only rewards the cynical strategy Hamas set in motion with their bloody attack one year ago. For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.                          

As the Western world catches collective amnesia around the profile of the historic father, we’ve begun to move past portrayals of fathers as the bumbling idiot of shows in the 1980s and 1990s to a new kind of engaged, empathetic, and present father. There’s only one problem with this new ideal father: He embodies almost all of the elements of the traditional mother, purged of the essence of elements from the historic father. The poster child for this new depiction can be found in the mega-popular kids program "Bluey." The dad, Bandit, is seen as a constantly nurturing, always-present playmate to his two daughters, Bluey and Bingo. He’s so present, in fact, that fans of the show often joke about when Bandit finds time to work, and in the show, it’s clear that the mother has less time to play than the dad. Our culture LOVES this depiction of fatherhood. It empties the father character of all the elements of the traditionally masculine father we’ve grown uncomfortable with, and at the same time, it provides freedom for the mother to get out in the world and explore her individual passions. Everyone wins, right? Well, it depends. God created the concept of male and female to create the kind of family that would maximize fruitfulness and multiplication and that over generations of collective effort would subdue and rule the created order. It depends on whether there’s an objective ideal of fatherhood and motherhood, and if there is, then symbolic depictions seeking to reverse these objective profiles are problematic. Embracing these kinds of portrayals, especially in a highly symbolic medium like in a cartoon, will go a long way in shaping our intuition around the essence of these roles. Now today, almost no one thinks there are objective ideals to these archetypes, and if they are right — and they personally resonate with the father, mother, and daughter depictions in "Bluey" — then everything I’m about to say will be dissonant and probably offensive. So let me say from the outset that, even in the conservative Christian world, my position is a tiny minority, maybe less than 1%. So feel free to stop reading if you’re getting triggered. Let me lay out three premises I believe about this topic, and if you disagree with any of these, you’ll likely disagree with my conclusion. Masculinity and femininity are not social constructs or primarily biological concepts but are family concepts designed to create a certain dynamic and to construct a highly functional multigenerational family team. The Bible presents meta descriptions of masculinity/fatherhood and femininity/motherhood through symbolic characters primarily rooted in the story of Genesis. Meta depictions of these roles are good and necessary to give culture at large something concrete to aim at even, though all of us as individuals will find some elements of these roles dissonant with our desires or even our innate wiring. I derive my first premise from the theological principle of first mention. When God created male and female, he actually revealed the purpose for gender, and that was to create a certain kind of family team. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth" (Genesis 1:27-28 ESV). God created the concept of male and female to create the kind of family that would maximize fruitfulness and multiplication and that over generations of collective effort would subdue and rule the created order. Genesis 1 does not yet give us content around the different male and female roles, only that male and female combine to achieve the purposes of the family. The second premise is that Genesis gives meta descriptions of the various parts of the family, and these meta roles can be seen in the Hebrew names given to the people. "Adam" = Man or Humanity "Eve" = Giver of Life But since we’re focusing here on fatherhood, the most important person comes when we meet a man named Abram. "Abram" = Exalted Father Abram is literally described in our language as a meta father. As he progresses in this role, his name is elevated again to Abraham, or father of many nations. One struggle that Greek-minded people often have is to think "meta" means ideal or model. Abram is not the perfect father. He’s the meta father. We understand the elements of how God interacts with both the specific father Abram and the concept of fatherhood through the Genesis narrative. I’ve learned that this idea is highly intuitive to people native to the Middle East but endlessly confusing to Western thinkers. That’s why of the three “Abrahamic religions,” Christianity is the one least influenced by Abraham’s depiction of fatherhood — and this is the West’s primary source of fatherhood confusion. Jesus, in one of his parables, referred to Abraham as “Father Abraham,” but — besides a particularly annoying youth group song — Christians do not think of Abraham through the lens of fatherhood. We see him more as an individual historic man of faith. This lack of a symbolic depiction of fatherhood has untethered the concept of fatherhood and masculinity from anything objective and leaves us vulnerable to following the ever-changing depictions of fatherhood and masculinity invented by modern cultural sensibilities. This brings me to my third premise and back to "Bluey." I first heard of red flags in "Bluey" from my two teenage daughters, who watched an episode after hearing from so many Christian families who loved the show — and they immediately saw what was happening. You might think that 'Bluey' is a wonderful depiction of fatherhood, but please don’t be naive about the power of symbolic depictions, especially ones aimed at children. Their first statement was something like, “They treat their dad like a plaything.” I then watched one three-minute clip on YouTube from a different episode and saw what they were so alarmed by. There are hundreds of interesting elements of fatherhood that one can glean from studying how God interacts with the meta father (Abram), but I’m pretty sure Bandit is in no way tethered to this understanding of fatherhood. And this tethering is not hard to do. When I’m in the Middle East, I see it everywhere. All the good and toxic depictions of fatherhood I see from those native to this region I recognize as coming from these Abrahamic stories. It’s increasingly hard to see in the Christian West. We need to get into the details of the beautiful biblical balancing of the life-giving presence of motherhood and the training, territory expanding, and leadership of fatherhood. But let me say one more thing that concerns me. One reaction I’ve received is from people who think it’s absurd to criticize a cartoon. You might think that "Bluey" is a wonderful depiction of fatherhood, but please don’t be naive about the power of symbolic depictions, especially ones aimed at children. We spend almost one-third of our lives experiencing symbolic depictions in our dreams, and most of our entertainment is created by watching stories filled with meta characters and what they symbolize. Symbols tend to bypass our conscious awareness and form our intuitions about the nature of truth and reality. These symbols include things like numbers, colors, animals, objects, shapes, and storylines. The Bible is full of these kinds of symbols, and most Western Christians are totally unaware of their power. When Jesus says things like “how many baskets did we pick up” after the feeding of the 5,000 and 4,000 and the disciples reply, "12" and "seven," he expected his disciples — and us — to immediately get the symbolic significance of what he did. But we don’t. And in the same way, creating a daughter named Bluey using the color blue is totally lost on us. It goes right past our conscious awareness. If we do think about it, we think it’s cool that they’re reversing the gender stereotype of colors. We’re playing checkers with those who are playing chess, and we’ve been checkmated over and over again. Editor's note: This essay was originally published by Jeremy Pyror on his Substack and was republished with permission.

Every generation gets to choose whether or not to abandon Christianity. In 2,000 years, no generation has fully walked away. The irony is hard to miss: The very tool we feared might render faith obsolete has given us the most human image of Jesus yet. Science, thought to replace God, is now part of the process that brings us back to Him. Christianity isn’t merely a story that’s been retold for millennia; it is the story. It’s the one that never grows old, never fades with the times. Sometimes, the new chapters of this story come in the most unexpected ways. A recent example is how the Shroud of Turin — a centuries-old relic long thought to be a medieval hoax — found its way back into the public conversation. Best of all, it wasn’t a miracle that rekindled interest in the cloth. It was science. From skepticism to wonder For decades, modern skepticism relegated the Shroud of Turin to the realm of medieval forgery, debunked by carbon-dating tests in the 1980s. Science was supposed to bring clarity, to expose the myths that faith had built. But here we are again. The Shroud has returned, and this time, it is technology itself that has reignited the mystery. Former "Saturday Night Live" star and recent Catholic convert Rob Schneider was so inspired by his encounter with the relic that's he's making a movie about it. "It breathed life into me," he explains. It’s not just Schneider. The Shroud’s reappearance on the world stage reveals something far bigger. Science, which was once so sure it could unmask religion’s mysteries, is now revealing new layers. Tiny particles of pollen, identified through advanced equipment, suggest that the cloth’s origins trace back to the Middle East — specifically Israel. New scientific methods like wide-angle X-ray scattering dated the Shroud far earlier than previously thought — around A.D. 55. The lines between myth and reality are blurring. Science, once believed to be Christianity’s greatest adversary, is suddenly taking a seat at the table of faith. AI gave us the face of the Lord But it’s not just relics like the Shroud that are undergoing a digital transformation. Technology is now playing a central role in how we encounter faith. The face of Jesus — something people have dreamed of, imagined, and painted for millennia — has been recreated by artificial intelligence. Using data from the Shroud and other sources, AI systems have attempted to render what may be the most accurate depiction of Christ’s face. It’s a face that’s both familiar and new. The long hair, the beard, the haunting eyes — eyes that seem to look into not just the world but each of us, individually, deeply. The irony is hard to miss: The very tool we feared might render faith obsolete has given us the most human image of Jesus yet. Science, thought to replace God, is now part of the process that brings us back to Him. As we hurtle deeper into the digital age, we’ve been conditioned to seek meaning in data, in pixels and screens, in algorithms that shape our reality. And yet these same tools are leading us back to questions that are profoundly ancient. The face of Christ, now digitized and rendered in high definition, serves as a reminder: The divine is not so easily replaced. Back to the heart of belief For centuries, the Christian faith has thrived on a core paradox: to believe without seeing. When the apostle Thomas doubted the resurrection, Jesus appeared and offered his wounds as proof. "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed," He added (John 20:29). He was talking about us. You and me. Now, in the 21st century, science is offering glimpses of what once seemed impossible to prove. While we may never confirm the Shroud’s authenticity beyond a shadow of a doubt, the mere possibility forces us to grapple with something bigger. Faith isn’t about what’s seen — it’s about what transcends sight. And sometimes, when technology allows us to glimpse the mysteries of old, it invites us to marvel rather than dismiss. The resurrection has always tested human comprehension. It’s a story of victory over death, a promise at the heart of the Christian faith. As AI constructs the face of Christ and science re-examines ancient relics, the digital world and the divine collide in unexpected ways. We aren’t abandoning faith; we’re rediscovering it through the very tools meant to replace it, tools that allow us to stare deeply into that unmistakable face, those never-ending eyes.