Good job. Hopefully, they'll get the one in Florida, too.

It being leaned up against a tree instead of planted in the soil like most are, is an indication it was done by a lone person.

Glory to God in all things!

Michie said:

Allie Beth Stuckey Tells Sen. Mike Lee: ‘Mormonism Rejects the Triune God’​

When Sen. Mike Lee asked why his church was initially left off the list of Christian faiths, numerous people responded with theological explanations. “That’s because Mormons aren’t Christian,” someone replied, adding:

You believe god was once a man who became god, and that you can become a god if you do good enough. You believe you are saved by grace after all the works you do. The Bible teaches the exact opposite. God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) have ALWAYS been and ALWAYS will be.

That person also shared a video about Mormonism from Jeremiah Films, creator of the 1982 documentary “The God Maker.”

Conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey also engaged in back-and-forth debate on X with Lee. To his request for an explanation of the slight, she posted, “Because, unlike every Christian denomination, Mormonism rejects the triune God.”

Continued below.

Why Latter-day Saints Aren’t Christians: Allie Beth Stuckey Responds to Sen. Mike Lee

Allie Beth Stuckey addressed Sen. Mike Lee’s question on the Pentagon’s exclusion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a recent list of Christian denominations.

churchleaders.com

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The same can be said about Jehovah witnesses since they also reject the Holy Trinity.

rebornfree said:

No, I'm not saying that you can prove God's existence mathematically. My point is that someone, like John Lennox, who has a personal relationship with Jesus yet who is an eminent mathematician, is likely to carry more weight with atheists, especially those who look to science for their answers, than a theologian would. Their response to the latter is usually "I trust science", but when someone with John Lennox's credentials, in a scientific subject, says that he believes in God they are more likely to listen.

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That hasn't been my experience. IME, that's the sort of thing that sounds good to Christians, but doesn't really pan out in real life.

From what I've seen, the "I trust science" crowd is more likely to listen to you if you acknowledge that it's all based on faith and focus your attention on the metaphysical aspects of life that science can't answer.

johnnypapa said:

Funny to see the different liberal headlines...PBS - lol

Pope's historic speech to Spain's parliament demands respect for migrants, gets 7-minute ovation​

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Thank you for sharing. May God have mercy on the Spanish people.

Please pray that God keeps us safe from the storms and allows us to keep power because of the heat.Please pray that He will allow us to stay cool. Thank you and God bless you. Carmen. I ask in the name of Jesus.

bèlla said:

Costco is selling water storage units. I saw it on a facebook reel yesterday. They wouldn't carry it in the store if there wasn't demand and we've seen deals on freeze dried food as well.

~bella

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Good to know! Thanks
What is more important than water in your preps?

How much more are ~220,000 MARYLAND ACA enrollees *really* paying this year due to Trump/GOP policies? (with important additional data points)


As I've repeatedly warned, however, the increases in premium costs (whether gross or net) are only half the story. The other big shoe which is dropping this year is increased out of pocket costs as millions of the ~19.2 million or so remaining enrollees as of April have been forced to downgrade their coverage to avoid (or at least minimize) those massive premium spikes.

In most cases this means moving to plans with higher deductibles, higher co-pays & higher coinsurance costs. In many cases this has also included moving to plasn with worse networks, referral requirements to see specialists and so on.

With that in mind, that's exactly what I've decided to set out to do: Calculate the average year over year increase not just in net premiums (that is, how much more ACA enrollees are having to pay each month) but also the year over year change in average out of pocket costs.

Rest@link

d taylor said:

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She served for 35 years

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I thought you were in favor of serving a country. You didn't mention a cutoff point at 35 years.

1 Corinthians 2:6-14 NKJV


The Natural Man

Now the Lord put in my mind a secular song called, “On My Own,” which is taken from the movie/musical “Les Misérables,” yet I do not recommend the movie/musical due to certain content. The song is about someone being “in love” with someone else who does not return the same affection. So this person lives in a fantasy world, having a love affair with this person in their own mind. And as I thought about that in relation to this Scripture passage, I thought about the “natural man” and how that might relate to him or her.

For the “natural man” is our flesh nature that we are born with. And those who live according to the flesh, and not according to the Spirit of God, will naturally think on and act on what is of the flesh, and not on what is of God. Even if they know about God, and even if they have studied the Scriptures, and even if they have made a profession of faith in Jesus, and maybe even have taught the Scriptures, they may still be those who are still living by the flesh, living in a fantasy world, not receiving the things of the Spirit of God.

So, who they are “in love” with may or may not be a person, but it could be an idea or a concept or a certain belief or a particular subject. Or it could just be the world – the lusts of the flesh and of the eyes, and the pride of life. And when I think of “fantasy” that can include movies, stories, and imaginary tales, which includes all kinds of sources of entertainment. But it could also include porn addiction, and/or romanticizing a relationship with whoever is in the video, which Jesus Christ calls adultery and also idolatry.

Of the Spirit of God

In contrast to the natural man who lives by the flesh, and not by the Spirit, we who are of the Spirit of God, via God-persuaded and God-gifted faith in Jesus Christ, by which we deny self, die to sin, and follow our Lord in obedience, we should be among the spiritually mature. We should not be those who are living in a fantasy world, living according to our flesh, getting our “high” from what is clearly against God. We should not be following the “wisdom of this age,” but rather the wisdom which comes from God.

For, if we have believed in Jesus Christ, in truth and in righteousness, and we have received his gift of salvation from sin, then we have not received the spirit of the world which tells us we can keep living however we want. But we have received the Spirit who is from God that we might know the things which come from God, that we might do all that God has planned for us to do and to be as his followers. And as his followers we must follow him in obedience to his commands and no longer live as slaves to sin.

For Jesus Christ taught that to come to him we must deny self, take up our cross daily (die daily to sin), and follow (obey) him. For if we hold on to living in sin and for self, we will lose our lives for eternity. But if we deny self, die daily to sin, by the Spirit, and we walk in obedience to our Lord and to his commands, in his power, then we have eternal life with God. For not everyone who calls him “Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one DOING (obeying) the will of God (see Luke 9:23-26; Matthew 7:21-23).

For Those Who Love God

To love God – Father, Son Jesus Christ, and Holy Spirit – is to obey him according to his New Covenant commandments written down for us in the New Testament books of the Bible. It is to deny self, die to sin daily, and to follow our Lord wherever he leads us in doing, and in being, and in speaking all that he has for us to do and to be and to say. It does not mean that we will never sin again (1 John 2:1-2), but that sin must no longer be our habit, what we practice. Now living the life God has for us is how we want to live.

[Matthew 7:13-14,21-23; Luke 9:23-26; John 10:27-30; Acts 26:18; Romans 1:18-32; Romans 2:5-10; Romans 3:23; Romans 6:1-23; Romans 8:1-14; Romans 12:1-2; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10,19-20; 1 Corinthians 10:1-22; 2 Corinthians 5:10,15,21; Galatians 5:16-24; Ephesians 2:8-10; Ephesians 4:17-32; Ephesians 5:3-6; Titus 2:11-14; Hebrews 3:1-19; Hebrews 4:1-13; Hebrews 10:19-39; Hebrews 12:1-2; 1 Peter 2:24; 1 John 1:1-10; 1 John 2:1-6; 1 John 3:4-10; Revelation 2:1-29; Revelation 3:1-22]

The Spirit Calling

An Original Work / November 12, 2019
Christ’s Free Servant, Sue J Love

Hear the Spirit calling. He’ll keep you from falling.
Tenderly He’s calling, “Come and follow Him.”
Walk with Jesus daily. Don’t give in to lazy.
Folks may call you crazy. Fellowship with Him.

Follow where He leads you. Eat what Jesus feeds you.
His love will renew you, if you follow Him.
Do what Jesus tells you. Don’t let your faith fail you.
His love will avail you, if you walk with Him.

Jesus, Lord and Savior, reigneth now forever.
He gave us His favor, so we’d live with Him.
Turning now from our sin, Holy Spirit live-in.
Holiness we walk in, purified by Him.

Login to view embedded media
We Speak the Wisdom of God
An Original Work / June 10, 2026
Christ’s Free Servant, Sue J Love

""An enormous whale graveyard around 1,200km (745 miles) long has been discovered in the south-eastern Indian Ocean"

"Jellyfish, worms and crustaceans are among the community of creatures living off the huge spread of carcasses"


and (but paywalled) in Nature Magazine
A vast whale necropolis has been found

This seems like one distinctly impressive find.

essentialsaltes said:

DOW broke 51,000

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And now under 50,000. Epstein Files are again important.

Welcome. Greetings from Scotland

The iPhone may have played a role in the falling birth rates in the United States by changing how young people socialize, form relationships and spend their time, new research suggests.

Researchers Caitlin Myers and Ezekiel Hooper of Middlebury College in Vermont analyzed the connection between the smartphone’s 2007 release and the overall decrease in fertility since then in a paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The research has not yet been independently reviewed.

“The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors,” Myers and Hooper wrote. “We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone.”

The first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and the researchers noted that their study uses that timeframe as “a natural experiment,” drawing on data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were sold only on AT&T.

Continued below.

The percentage of Americans who believe that sex outside of marriage and birth control are morally acceptable has declined, as a new survey shows the public embracing more conservative attitudes on hot-button social issues.

Gallup released the most recent installment of its annual Values and Beliefs Poll Tuesday, finding that attitudes on a range of moral issues have shifted in a more conservative direction compared with the previous year.

The survey, which is based on responses collected from 1,001 United States adults from May 1-17, found declines in the share of Americans who view many behaviors as morally acceptable, including sex between unmarried adults, gambling, pornography, euthanasia and gender transition. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.

Among the most notable changes was a sharp drop in support for having children outside of marriage.

While 67% of Americans said having children outside of wedlock was morally acceptable in the previous survey, that figure fell to 58% this year — one of the largest year-over-year shifts recorded in the poll.

Support for birth control also declined. Although a large majority of Americans continue to view contraception as morally acceptable, the percentage dropped from 90% to 83%, marking the lowest level recorded since Gallup began asking the question.

Continued below.

Trump says ‘I love the inflation’ after consumer price index hits 3-year high​

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said, “I love the inflation” after being asked if he was concerned about new consumer price index data that showed the annual inflation rate at 4.2%, a three-year high.

Trump, speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, also predicted that inflation is “going to come down like a rock” after the United States’ war against Iran is over.

The Word does many things, conviction is one of them, which can often feel like a nail. But what is the purpose of a nail? To be hammered or to join & secure? It’s important to remember that the Word can do many things. It is used to heal, encourage, support, provide wisdom, guide, sanctify, strengthen, & even rebuke just to name a few. Not every message needs to feel like a spike through the heart. Also, fools despise wisdom & instruction, it would be unwise to believe that every word will provide conviction. Simply proclaiming the truth with the authority that God has given you is enough.

essentialsaltes said:

On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by 31-year-old lawyer Seth Cohen. Just five years out of law school, Cohen brought no significant experience in nuclear law or policy; he had just entered government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.

As Cohen led the group through a technical conversation about licensing nuclear reactor designs, he repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns. When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.

“They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said.

“But … there’s lots of babies,” one staffer pushed back. Babies, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups are thought to be potentially more susceptible to cancers brought on by low-level radiation exposure, and they are usually afforded greater protections.

“They’ve been downwind before,” another staffer joked.

“This is why we don’t use AI transcription in meetings,” another added.

ProPublica reviewed records of that meeting, providing a rare look at a dramatic shift underway in one of the most sensitive domains of public policy. The Trump administration is upending the way nuclear energy is regulated, driven by a desire to dramatically increase the amount of energy available to power artificial intelligence.

Career experts have been forced out and thousands of pages of regulations are being rewritten at a sprint. A new generation of nuclear energy companies — flush with Silicon Valley cash and boasting strong political connections — wield increasing influence over policy. Figures like Cohen are forcing a “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley ethos on one of the country’s most important regulators.

During that Idaho meeting, Cohen shot down any notion of NRC independence in the new era.

“Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do,” he said, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In November, Cohen was made chief counsel for nuclear policy at the Department of Energy, where he oversees a broad nuclear portfolio.

The administration is routing the new rules through an office overseen by Trump’s cost-cutting guru Russell Vought, a move that was previously unheard of for an independent regulator like the NRC. The White House spokesperson noted that, under a recent executive order, this process is now required for all agencies.

Political operatives have been “inserted into the senior leadership team to the point where they could significantly influence decision-making,” said Scott Morris, who worked at the NRC for more than 32 years, most recently as the No. 2 career operations official. “I just think that would be a dangerous proposition.”

Morris voted for Trump twice and broadly supports the goals of deregulating and expanding nuclear energy, but he has begun speaking out against the administration’s interference at the NRC. He retired in May 2025 as part of a wave of retirements and firings.

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lol, this whole administration is people fixing to be those garbage VP's who steamroll into a new company, break a bunch of things, and then leave with a golden parachute.

Just looking at the El Niño regions...

Valletta said:

We don't want to overlook the fact that it was the United States fought a war to end slavery, where roughly 700,000 people died. But we have much more to stop, over a million die by abortion each year in the United States.

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Yes, fought a war with itself with a lot of sore losers.

I see the analogy with abortion. There also some refuse to see the humanity and want to treat life in the womb as property rather than person.

In a recent New York Times guest essay, Catholic writer David Gibson praised Pope Leo for moving his church away from “pelvic theology.” For those unfamiliar with the term, it is a way of dismissing those concerned with all matters related to sex—from abortion to LGBTQ rights to traditional notions of chastity—as morbidly obsessed and (presumably) laboring under some psychological disorder. Given the attractiveness in our lazy soundbite world of any term that delegitimizes critics and thereby makes serious engagement with ideas unnecessary, the phrase will no doubt migrate into Protestant quarters too, if it has not done so already.

Despite Gibson’s assumptions and assertions to the contrary, there are obvious, perennial reasons why Christianity should focus on these “pelvic” issues. The Old Testament surrounds sexual activity both with taboos and with rituals of purification even for acts deemed legitimate. This carries into the New Testament. St. Paul argues that the man who sleeps with a prostitute has committed a particularly heinous sin—not only because he has sexually exploited a woman, but because he has sinned against his own body. The point is that the sexed nature of the human body is central to who we are as human beings. As for the post-apostolic world, the Didache, one of the earliest extant post-canonical writings, makes the rejection of abortion a central identity marker for the Christian community. This was key to the early church’s growth, as sociologist and historian Rodney Stark argued.

This all makes theological sense: The sexual act is biblically (and historically) both a key social bond (Gen. 2:24) and part of the mandate given to human beings (Gen. 1:28). Indeed, sexual intercourse, with its creative potential, is the human act that makes us most godlike. In short, attitudes to sex lie at the heart of what it means to be human. Of course, secular thinkers are free to reject this. A professing Catholic such as Gibson should pay more attention both to the teaching of his church and to the book his church considers to be divine revelation.
And, of course, underlying the notion of “pelvic theology” is the assumption that this sexual obsession is the fault of certain elements within the Church. Strange to tell, when I was a pastor, I had to spend a lot of time talking to young men about their internet pornography habits—but not because I was myself obsessed with such. It was because the culture was saturated with it. Some of them had become addicted to porn before the age of ten, long before I had even met them. I suspect the same applies to those now dealing with congregants wrestling with matters such as abortion, homosexuality, and the like. These are not the creations of the Church but rather the emphases of our age. I write this at the start of a month devoted to those who not only wish to indulge privately in the sexual deviations of their choice but who also demand that everybody else acknowledge the legitimacy of their acts through commercials, marches, and flags more ubiquitous in town centers than the Stars and Stripes. The Church hasn’t caused that; celebrating queerness is part of the liturgical calendar of this present age, not of the Church. The Church does have a God-given calling to respond to moral chaos, but the specific details of the moral chaos are determined by the evils of the age, not by pastors and presbyters.

Continued below.