In 2023, an app called Text With Jesus attracted attention for allowing users to exchange messages with AI-generated representations of biblical figures. The service used conversational artificial intelligence to generate responses attributed to figures including Jesus and other people named in the Bible. Some characters were available through a paid subscription. The app prompted discussion about the accuracy and appropriateness of using AI to simulate religious personalities and provide spiritual advice.

Read more at www.businessinsider.com

In 2023, Ohio-based LifeWise Academy reported that its Bible education program had expanded to more than 300 public schools across 11 states. The program uses released-time religious instruction: participating students leave campus during the school day with parental permission for classes held separately from public-school instruction. Its expansion drew attention to longstanding legal provisions permitting voluntary off-campus religious education. Supporters described the program as a way to increase biblical literacy, while participation and implementation remained matters for families and local school communities.

Read more at washingtonstand.com

More bad news for Darwinism arrived after my last article about Cambrian Explosion. I showed there that taphonomic conditions should have produced Precambrian animal fossils had they existed. Now, some of the other props for Darwin’s House of Cards have been removed. Tom Bethell had said in that book, “The near-instant explosion of body plans is the opposite of what Darwin’s theory predicts” (p 134).

Oxygen Theory Deflated

“No, oxygen didn’t catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth’s first multicellular organisms,” begins some news from the University of Copenhagen. “Life on Earth didn’t arise as described in textbooks.” What? Textbooks wrong? Shocking!

“The fact that we now know, with a high degree of certainty, that oxygen didn’t control the development of life on Earth provides us with an entirely new story about how life arose and what factors controlled this success,” says the researcher, adding:

“Specifically, it means that we need to rethink a lot of the things that we believed to be true from our childhood learning. And textbooks need to be revised and rewritten.” [Emphasis added.]

Textbooks had been saying, “increased oxygen levels triggered the evolutionary arrival of more advanced marine organisms.” Scientists at the university, with international peers, claim that the oxygen theory “is being disproved” by measurements of oxygen levels in rocks dating from “the Avalon explosion, a forerunner era of the more famed Cambrian explosion.” The Avalon Explosion they date at “between 685 and 800 million years ago.”

Defying expectations, the result shows that Earth’s oxygen concentrations had not increased. Indeed, levels remained 5-10 times lower than today, which is roughly how much oxygen there is at twice the height of Mount Everest.

Evolutionists have a strained relationship with oxygen. They don’t want it at the origin of life, but they were relying on it to power the Avalon and Cambrian Explosions. And in modern times, they struggle with the complexity of molecular machines that protect life from Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS). Current atmospheric oxygen levels appear finely tuned for complex life, as biologist Michael Denton argues in Fire-Maker. We have a Goldilocks value that balances the advantages of oxygen for metabolism against the disadvantages of too much or too little.

Read more at: evolutionnews.org

In a commentary published in 2023, Sarah Westall argued against proposals to implant tracking microchips in children as a response to fears about child trafficking. She questioned whether such technology would actually protect children and warned that normalizing implanted identification could create privacy and civil-liberties risks. The article also discussed public attention to trafficking following the release of the film Sound of Freedom. These are the author’s arguments, not findings that microchipping programs were being implemented. The original commentary provides her full reasoning.

Read more at sarahwestall.com

City of Myrtle Beach staff are continuing efforts to make Myrtle Beach a ‘smart city’.

A Smart Cities Council has been created. It’s an internal working group made up of 13 staff members from nine different departments. They officially started meeting toward the end of April. During the meetings they talk about economic development strategy, what are some kind of technology or research they want to bring to Myrtle Beach.

Myrtle Beach staff has also recommended the development of a 311 Office, at the beginning of 2024.

The 311 Office will be a place where people can call and get their government services answered and they don’t have to be bounced around from place to place to get an answer.

They also want to implement virtual management with the 311 Office so that chatbots can answer people’s questions if they don’t want to call

Myrtle Beach Chief Innovation Officer, Howard Waldie, is also hoping to develop a “Myrtle Beach 101″ app to not only help people answer questions but can be a place where residents and visitors can alert the city to issues.

“So, there’s obviously a public safety component, but I mean it could be endless. It could have augmented reality at some of our hot-spot visitor destinations or also hot-spot destinations for our residents,” Waldie said. “That tells you the story of a park or tells you the story of Myrtle Beach’s history during World War II.”

The goal of a smart city is to use advanced technology to help improve the quality of life and businesses. That could include smart trash cans.

Read more at: www.wmbfnews.com

The Pentagon and FBI have alerted several of the grieving families who lost relatives in the deadly 9/11 attack in which nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered that the suspected architect of the attacks and his fellow defendants may have their death sentences overturned through plea deals.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — who suggested the 9/11 attacks to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and then planned the attacks — and four other terrorists have been incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay detention center for years, while repeated delays and legal disputes have postponed the death penalty being applied. No trial date has been set.

“The Office of the Chief Prosecutor has been negotiating and is considering entering into pre-trial agreements,” the August 1 letter sent to the families stated. It stated that although no plea deal has “been finalized, and may never be finalized, it is possible that a PTA in this case would remove the possibility of the death penalty.”

The families were given until Monday, August 21, to respond to the FBI’s victim services division with any comments or questions about the matter.

Some relatives of the nearly 3,000 people killed outright in the terror attacks expressed outrage over the prospect of ending the case short of a verdict. The military prosecutors pledged to take their views into consideration and present them to the military authorities who would make the final decision on accepting any plea agreement.

Jim Riches, a retired deputy fire chief whose son Jimmy was a firefighter who died as a result of the 9/11 attacks, emitted a bitter laugh when he received the letter. “How can you have any faith in it?” he said, adding, “Those guys are still alive. Our children are dead.”

Former President George W. Bush established the prison and court system at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 following the 9/11/2001 attacks. Former President Barack Obama promised to close the center; during his administration, the number of prisoners was reduced from roughly 250 to 41. Republicans in Congress blocked Obama’s move to close the detention center.

In early 2021, President Biden declared he would close the facility.

Read more at: www.dailywire.com

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) has updated its handbook to ban trans-identifying males from competing in women’s competitions.

FIDE, the international governing body for the sport, provided new guidelines to address transgender chess players and how it would handle titles such as Woman Grandmaster, Woman International Master, Woman FIDE Master, and Woman Candidate Master amid transgender players, Mediaite reported.

“In the event that the gender was changed from a male to a female the player has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women until further FIDE’s decision is made,” the rule read. “Such decision should be based on further analysis and shall be taken by the FIDE Council at the earliest possible time, but not longer than within 2 (two) years period.”

“Titles. If a player holds any of the women titles, but the gender has been changed to a man, the women titles are to be abolished,” the guidelines added. “Those can be renewed if the person changes the gender back to a woman and can prove the ownership of the respective FIDE ID that holds the title.”

“The abolished women title may be transferred into a general title of the same or lower level (e.g., Women’s Grand Master may be transferred into FM, Women’s International Master into Candidate Master, etc.),” it continued, noting that there “are no restrictions to play in the open section for a person who has changed the gender.”

Read more at: www.dailywire.com

Five Medicaid healthcare insurers have violated Florida’s rule against using taxpayer funds to provide transgender treatments, and the state is now fining them for the action. It’s the first time any state has taken this step in regard to gender transition coverage.

Among the procedures one of the plans covered was a double mastectomy on a 16-year-old girl. The other plans paid for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors. Florida health officials sent out letters informing the providers they were being fined over the violation late Thursday.

“These plans recklessly continued to cover these services with permanent, harmful effects, after the rule was adopted,” Jason Weida, Secretary of the Agency for Healthcare Administration, told The Daily Wire news podcast Morning Wire. “[They] will not stand in the way of our fight to protect the innocence of Florida’s kids.”

Though a federal judge recently blocked a new law in Florida that banned transgender surgeries and medications for children, a rule from the Agency for Health Care Administration still required the state’s Medicaid plan providers to deny coverage for all such treatments.

The rule went into effect last August after the agency performed a systematic review of the medical literature on treatments for gender dysphoria in children, including surgeries, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones. It determined they are not medically necessary. But in December, well after the agency says Medicaid healthcare plan providers were notified of the rule, the five providers covered the trans treatments anyway. The violations were caught as part of a routine audit of the Medicaid system.

Typically, Medicaid rule violations occur when providers refuse to pay for treatment that should have been covered. Paying for procedures and medications that have been banned is extremely unusual, raising the question of whether the providers’ decisions to provide coverage were politically motivated. Weida told The Daily Wire he doesn’t want to speculate about their reasons but “they’re certainly going to be on notice now.” He added that his office would consider more drastic penalties for any further violations.

Simply Healthcare, the provider that covered the mastectomy, is facing a $30,000 penalty and will be sanctioned. The other providers face smaller, unspecified fines, but the non-willful sanction is the more serious penalty as it places a black mark on a provider’s record that must be disclosed when it competes for contracts. Providers who have been sanctioned are much less likely to be awarded other state contracts for 10 years until the sanction expires. According to the Agency for Health Care Administration, Simply Health has already replaced the team that approved the mastectomy coverage.

Weida told The Daily Wire that he’s grateful Governor Ron DeSantis empowered his office to issue the rule blocking public money from going to transgender surgeries, and he doesn’t see it as a question of politics but of ethics.

Read more at: www.dailywire.com

Many people are familiar with the account in the biblical Book of Genesis about the two sin-filled cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and their cataclysmic destruction.

Yet many in this modern, scientific age struggle — or outright refuse — to accept that the cities ever really existed, much less that God wiped them out with fire from heaven. …

But last week — and again this week — on THE ROSENBERG REPORT, I sat down for an exclusive interview with Dr. Steven Collins, the archaeologist who claims that he and his team have actually uncovered the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Kingdom of Jordan.

If he is right, Collins is responsible for the most dramatic — and controversial — archaeological find of the 21st century. …

As Collins explained in the interview, he first rejected the notion that Sodom and Gomorrah are fictional, mythical cities that were made up by ancient writers. …

Second, Collins said that the wealth and size of Sodom as described in the Bible meant that Sodom would have been one of the largest and most influential and powerful cities of its time. And thus hard to make up to ancient audiences who knew the history and the geography of the region well.

Third, Collins noted that the apocalyptic destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah ought to be verifiable, if the cities really existed.

So, Collins told me, he simply followed all the location clues laid out in Genesis and boom — he uncovered the biggest Bronze Age city in the entire Middle East, a city that comports with the Biblical account of Sodom in every respect, including its sudden and cataclysmic annihilation. …

Another clue the Bible gives regarding the location of Sodom, he told me, is the description of the meeting between Abraham and Lot before they parted ways.

“The proper question to ask in the location of Sodom is, ‘Where was Lot standing when he lifted up his eyes and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well-watered?’ It was Bethel and AI,” Collins explained. …

All this led Collins and his team to dig in a site called Tall el-Hammam, with the permission of — and under the supervision of — the Kingdom of Jordan.

And what did they find?

A massive series of cities, including the biggest and wealthiest city of the Bronze Age in the entire region.

What’s more, they found a massive metropolitan city that was completely wiped out in a sudden firestorm and then uninhabited for the next 700 years. …

Read more at: allisrael.com

When most people hear the words “Disney magic,” they think of the cruise ship or the decades of charming and delightful adventures that inspired generations of childhood wonder for millions of viewers, not cloaks, daggers, and dark rituals done in the dead of night. Recent promos for Haunted Mansion rely on precisely that.

Disney and horror rarely dwell in the same house, but the studio can have some truly unsettling and eerie creations when they do. As the studio prepares to welcome all foolish mortals to the Haunted Mansion with the upcoming film adaptation, they might be working some black magic in the process.

Occult Rituals of the Haunted Mansion

Fans of the prolific Disney Parks attraction know the sordid history of the Gracey Manor’s lore. From ghostly butlers to murderous pirates with a collection of dead brides, the original Disneyland attraction was one of the earliest examples of Disney’s darker side. The studio embraces that original flavor with some of Haunted Mansion’s latest marketing.

Hitting theaters July 28, 2023, the newest posters for Haunted Mansion depict its lead characters framed on the faces of tarot cards. Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, and all the rest are depicted as representing select cards in the deck, clearly a nod to the ones seen on Madam Leota’s table in the seance room. While this is creative marketing on Disney’s part, it might have a deeper meaning.

Read more at: insidethemagic.net