This is a sad story, but it is also full of warmth, joy, and everlasting familial love. Whether you have a Grandma, Nana, Memaw, Nona, or Grammy, now is the time to visit them. Rachel Brynn and her family took advantage of one “final sleepover with Nana.” There were five grandkids: Steven, Joe, Sam, Nicole, and Rachel. They traveled from three different states to surprise their Nana for an evening of memories, laughs, and lots of love. @thenourishedlady Grandparent Sleepover #family #love #familytime #memories #memoriesbringback #grief #grandma #grandparent #nana #cousins ♬ original sound – WBsongs The grandkids brought food and all the fixings to share a meal. As they filed into the house, Nana joked about not knowing them and asked if they were telemarketers. With a wit as quick as that, this would be a great evening. The table was set, and the food was passed. Conversation flowed as everyone got caught up on all the events in their lives. Nana had a blast. After everyone left, she told another relative, “I would say it was up there as one of the best nights of my life. I loved every minute.” The evening was a welcome adventure for the grandchildren and Nana. @thenourishedlady Grandparent Sleepover Pt. 2 #family #love #familytime #memories #memoriesbringback #grief #grandma #grandparents #nana #cousins #fyp ♬ original sound – The 143 Movement Rachel’s Nana passed 12 months after their final sleepover. Rachel made one more trip to visit about three weeks before her Nana passed away to join her husband in quiet slumber. While she was there, Nana gave Rachel her Tiffany’s heart necklace. Nana’s words, “my heart to your heart,” add to the sentimental value of the gift. @thenourishedlady Go hug your Nana. #family #nana #grief #love #loveyou #grandma #fyp #memories ♬ What Was I Made For? (Epilogue) [Instrumental Version] – Mark Ronson & Andrew Wyatt It is never easy to say goodbye to loved ones. When the grandchildren went to have their final sleepover with Nana, they savored the amazing evening. If you have elders in your circle, spend as much time with them as you can. Please share. You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post “We Each Traveled From Three Different States To Have One Final Sleepover With Our Nana” appeared first on InspireMore.

In the 1970s, Jeffrey L. Starr won our hearts as Mike Engelberg in the Bad News Bears franchise. He disappeared from Hollywood and went back to a simpler life raising a family in Illinois. His brother, Kevin Starr, posted a message about his brother’s death on Facebook. “The world got a little darker yesterday with the passing of my Best Friend and Brother. Jeff lived an amazing life and shared his light with countless people, Jeff never met a stranger and helped so many people throughout the years. Jeff has been sick for several years and depression is one of the biggest killers in the world. Our family has suffered so many losses in the past but we must push through,” he shared. “Please keep my mother Janet ‘Sue’ Starr as well as his oh so caring and loving wife Linda and his sons his Grandchildren nieces, nephews extended family in your Prayers please. I Love you so much little Brother and I’ll see you in the other side.” The News Of Jeffrey L. Starr’s Death Saddened Those Who Knew And Loved Him Many posted prayers and love following Jeffrey L. Starr’s death on Kevin’s Facebook post. “Sending prayers and my most sincere condolences out to you and your entire family and friends,” a friend shared. “Deepest condolences to you and your family,” another person wrote. So sorry.” Jeffrey L. Starr’s sister-in-law also posted a sweet Facebook message. “Today we lost another family member taken too soon. Jeffrey Louis Starr went home. He was surrounded by a room full of loved ones and went peacefully. He could make anyone smile or laugh, give great hugs when you needed one and ‘Papa kisses’ you had to wipe off. Everywhere you went you could guarantee that he would run into someone he knew. He had a big heart and loved his family. If you didn’t know him personally you may have seen him in The Bad News Bears Breaking Training and the Bad News Bears go to Japan. He also had Nick name for just about everyone,” she wrote. “You’ll truly be missed and we love you so much.” Jeffrey L. Starr was 61. This story’s featured image is by Paramount Pictures/Getty Images. The post Family Shares Loving Messages After “Bad News Bears” Star’s Sudden Death appeared first on InspireMore.

'THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER'

'Walk the streets'

'Her brutal murder'

[Trump] seemingly is within his constitutional authority'

Books reading recommendations Six Star-Gazing Books to Celebrate the Perseid Meteor Shower This Summer Six cosmic stories to read under the stars this summer By Samantha Edmonds | Published on August 12, 2025 Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls Comment 0 Share New Share Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls I almost failed the astronomy course I took in college. I thought it was going to be all about stars and planets and the vast unexplored expanses of the universe, but it was just math. Like, a lot of math. Numbers and physics and formulas. And no shade to those who love math, but numbers are not at all what intrigue me about the universe.  It turns out, my interest in outer space owes very little loyalty to reality. I’m more interested in the story, which is why I look forward to the Perseid meteor shower every summer. The Perseids are so named because they appear to radiate out from the constellation Perseus, although that’s not actually where they originate from. The meteors are actually debris in the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttle, becoming visible when the Earth, too, passes through the comet’s debris field each year, but that’s not quite as enchanting as imagining them as the children of Perseus, the slayer of Medusa.  The combination of the myth and the astronomical event inspired my story, “Mother, May I Go to the Shower Show,” in which a group of mistreated girls find themselves emboldened with the power to turn men to stone each year during the pinnacle of the Perseid meteor shower in August. The story is included in my debut book, A Preponderance of Starry Beings, a collection of short fiction about the cosmos, emphasizing the stories we tell ourselves about the universe and our place in it. In my book, “Starry Beings” might mean aliens, deities, personified planets, and even the ordinary people on this magnificent lonely rock hurtling through space with no idea what to do about it.    If that sounds like you—if you find yourself looking at the night sky with an interest that has more in common with fables than physics—then here are six cosmic titles to read under the stars this summer. (That’s right, six, not five; I’ve already told you how little I care for math, which includes counting.)  Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (1965) The oldest book on this list, Cosmicomics remains one of my favorite books of all time. It’s probably the most influential text for my own collection, especially Calvino’s first story, “The Distance to the Moon,” in which a group of people row a boat out to the middle of a lake, raise a ladder, and scramble up to the moon to collect its milk. These characters are composed from mathematical formulas and cellular structures and consistently make and remake themselves across galaxies, in the big bang with hydrogen atoms, in the solidification of planets. This kind of math feels more like magic (maybe because no one is testing me on it). These stories will not only make you feel closer to the stars but remind you that you are, in fact, made from them.  Star Stories by Anita Graneri (2019) If you, like me, enjoy the myths of the stars more than the math, then this collection of constellation legends from around the world is a great introduction to the night sky. Featuring stories from Ancient Greece, North and South America, China, India, and more, each chapter chooses a region and tells that culture’s origin story for a different constellation, including Ursa Major and Minor, The Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, and the Pleiades. And it’s beautifully illustrated to boot. This is perfect for star-gazers of all ages! Black Stars: A Galaxy of New Worlds, edited by Nisi Shawl and Latoya Peterson (2021) A digital anthology published by Amazon, this collection of short stories features science fiction by some of the most stellar (see what I did there?) Black writers in the contemporary literary landscape, including Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I love that they are all standalone short stories; it’s rare to read such richly imagined science fiction outside of multi-book series. My favorite story–and the one most directly related to the stars–is “These Alien Skies” by C.T. Rwizi, which features two characters using a stargate to explore new planets somewhere far away (or, as the narrator puts it, “maybe somewhere better”). They end up stranded on an alien planet with no way home–but what makes a single planet home when there are so many other options among the stars? The rest of this anthology features millennia-old supernatural entities, interstellar wormholes, characters receiving cosmic messages from soda cans, and even merfolk, meaning these stories are even better than “out of this world”: their world is ours, reflected, broken, and remade into a universe of possibilities.  The Unfinished World by Amber Sparks (2016) Though not every story in this gorgeous collection has to do with outer space, this book earns its place on this list largely due to its opening story, “The Janitor in Space,” which is a beautifully poetic depiction of a woman whose job it is to clean the International Space Station. She wondered if it might bring her closer to God and instead she finds space lonely. But is lonely the same as empty? While the rest of this collection is set closer to home—featuring stories with crumbling mansions, taxidermy, and time travel—rest assured they are all otherworldly and haunting. The Voyager Record: A Transmission by Anthony Michael Marena (2016) The subtitle for this book is “a transmission,” and that’s as good as any label I can produce to describe it: in parts lyric essay, flash fiction, and poetry, these are a series of vignettes about the Golden Record, the time capsule on board of Voyager 1 when it was launched into space in 1977. This book examines that collection of 27 songs, 118 images, and 55 languages by creating a collage of history, hope, and imagination. Why did Carl Sagan and his team assemble this record as a representation of the human race? How would any alien cultures who encounter it respond? What happens to such a record out there in the emptiness, and what comes next? There might never be an answer, but at least this book is daring to ask the question. Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel by Julian K. Jarboe (2020) Broadly interpreted, “star-gazing” fiction doesn’t always have to mean set in outer space. I’ve included this sixth title because Jarboe’s collection of not-so-satirical “mid-apocalyptic” short fiction would get along with the other books on this list based predominantly on the themes it shares with that of the star-gazer: looking at the world around you, staring at the sky, and thinking that surely there has to be more out there than this. In these stories, characters apply for jobs to work on the moon; they build new bodies and turn into bugs; they wrestle and embrace and celebrate their sexual and gender identities; they notice strange things fall out of them; they fight with their parents and they question God. This book is an excellent reminder that stories, and the people who tell them, are perhaps the brightest “starry beings” of all. [end-mark] Buy the Book A Preponderance of Starry Beings Samantha Edmonds Genre-bending stories of the cosmos and the worlds within our own skin Buy Book A Preponderance of Starry Beings Samantha Edmonds Genre-bending stories of the cosmos and the worlds within our own skin Genre-bending stories of the cosmos and the worlds within our own skin Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleIndieBoundTarget The post Six Star-Gazing Books to Celebrate the Perseid Meteor Shower This Summer appeared first on Reactor.

Although it’s still summer here where I live, I am now gathering my herbal medicines for the winter. I hang them up around my little cabin and set some on the metal drying rack I bought at a local thrift shop. When cold and flu season arrives, I will be ready. Yesterday, a friend of a friend came over to talk herbs with me. She is at the beginning of her journey, whereas I’ve been actively learning about herbal medicines for more than two decades. Our conversation got me thinking about some of the worst herbal mistakes I have made or know about. Naturally, I wanted to then share these with you so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes that I did! I should note that some of these below are my errors, and some of these are the errors I have seen and heard herbalism green horns make. Read on and learn.  Rely Solely on an App Now, this one is super trendy these days. Just stick that smartphone of yours in the direction of any plant and it will tell you what it is. Personally, I see no benefit in this whatsoever. To me, the absolute foundation of herbalism is plant identification.  Is learning plant identification fun? Well, yes and no. Like a lot of valuable skills on the homestead, it is actually a lot of work. It did not come naturally to me to learn the technical names for the shapes of leaves and how they attach to the stem. However, learning these has helped me understand how to look at plants and what distinguishes one plant (excellent medicine and good for you) from another plant (poison that could kill you). Apps can fail. There might not be cellular service during the Apocalypse. You will be in the forest and not actually know anything. If I am making a medicine for myself from plants I have gathered locally, I am willing to bet my life on my plant identification skills. Get your books on plant identification and learn the old-fashioned way. It’s good for your brain! If you want a recommendation on field guides, check out my article on weeds here.  Use Only One Reference Book Now, as much as I love my plant identification guide, I’m going to recommend that you also get books from herbalists who are actually practicing. I have found that the plant identification books have sometimes given advice that I have lived to regret. One example is regarding the plant mullein, which my identification book says makes a good tea when you use the leaves. However, my book on weeds, The Homegrown Herbalist Guide to Medicinal Weeds, by the wise and wonderful Dr. Patrick Jones, warns readers that some people are sensitive to the hairs on the mullein leaf, and filtering the tea is recommended.  I violently reacted twice to this tea before I figured out what was going on. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Jones, it would have been difficult to ever figure out. That is why I always recommend that you have more than one guidebook to consult about every plant that you want to use. You are more likely to get the whole picture this way. Dangerous Collection I have a local acquaintance who knows I practice some herbalism. She was excited to tell me how she had gathered a certain flower, the red clover, for a city friend of hers. I asked her where she was gathering it. She told me that the ditches just outside our village were full of the flower. I was shocked to hear this, but asked her as calmly as possible did she not know that those ditches were sprayed every year by the county? That is not to mention the road chemicals that make their way in there.  It is not likely that herbs can be healing when they are loaded with toxic chemicals! Most herbalism guides that I have read start out with severe warnings about the dangers of gathering herbs in areas that may be sprayed. My acquaintance may not have had an herbalism book….but she may have had a plant identification app on her phone. I guess the app forgot to mention the spraying in the ditches….Dangerous! Improper Harvesting This is my own mea culpa. I have always had a nice bounty of St. John’s Wort on my land here. I have been able to gather what I need to make tinctures and leave a great deal of it standing. A few years ago, I was chatting with some other herbalist friends and they were bemoaning that they were very short of St. John’s Wort and wanted to make a tincture for the winter.  Being a good friend, I mentioned that I still had quite a bit left. I gathered up a good amount for them. In the process, I also happened to gather most of the plants that I usually left that reseeded my land. Virtually NO St. John’s Wort came up the next year. I felt terrible. I hadn’t thought it through, and as a result, I had harmed the plants, almost completely destroying the population. Not harvesting thoughtfully in nature can do the same thing. One guidebook that I use, Christine Buckley’s Plant Magic, recommends harvesting no more than 10% of a visible population of a plant when in the wild. I consider that to be a good guideline. As I have a good friend who has a lot of St. John’s Wort on her land, I have been able to slowly remediate the plant population here by reseeding and letting it grow wild again. Lesson learned.  Thyme for Sage Advice Herbalism is a skill with its own learning curve, and mistakes can happen. For a great way to get started correctly, check out this course. Do you practice any herbalism yourself, whether in the city or the country? Do you have any personal herbalism mistakes or cautions you can share with us? Please tell us in the comments section. About Rowan Rowan O’Malley is a fourth-generation Irish American who loves all things green: plants (especially shamrocks), trees, herbs, and weeds! She challenges herself daily to live her best life and to be as fit, healthy, and prepared as possible. The post The Worst Herbal Mistakes I Know: Read and Learn appeared first on The Organic Prepper.

On July 28, an Obama-era judge blocked a key provision of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”: the one-year ban on taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. This latest ruling is just one of many setbacks the pro-life movement has faced since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. But that’s not surprising: For 50 years, Roe corrupted not just our laws and courts but our culture—landing us in a society where the defense of unborn human life struggles to resonate. Roe (1973) didn’t emerge in a vacuum; rather, it represented a pivotal moment in the sexual revolution that has reshaped our society for two generations. Despite a solid scientific case for the humanity of the unborn, legal abortion persists because of the staying power it provides for that revolution. To make meaningful progress, the pro-life movement must frame legal abortion as one battle within this broader cultural upheaval. That might seem like quixotic advice, but the recent battles over gender ideology and pediatric gender medicine have exposed the destructive logic of the sexual revolution to a large majority of Americans like never before. How? The sexual revolution’s core enticing idea is that sex, marriage, and childbirth need not—and even should not—be interconnected. Its success hinged on a technological catalyst: the birth control pill, introduced in 1960. The pill arrived as influential voices vilified motherhood, pressuring women to reject their unique callings to love and nurture in favor of a so-called “liberation” from marriage and domestic life. It normalized casual, uncommitted sex by severing its natural link to procreation. By detaching the conjugal act from its life-giving purpose, it undermined the cultural meaning of marriage. Then came no-fault divorce laws, which further weakened marriage’s foundational role in society. Legally, marriage became a weak contract reflecting adult preferences, not a sacred union tied to family and procreation. Revolutionaries marketed these changes as tools of freedom, selling the pill as a solution to “unplanned” pregnancies of unwed mothers. But that was never the case. In 1950, only 3.9% of U.S. births were to unwed mothers. By 1960, this rose to 5%. A decade after the pill’s introduction, the rate doubled to 11%. Today, about 40% of U.S. births occur outside marriage. Far from solving “unplanned” pregnancies, the pill exacerbated them. That meant a new “solution”: abortion on demand. In 1973, Roe v. Wade claimed a constitutional right to abortion, making it the fallback when contraception failed. This became a perverse answer to the moral chaos created by decoupling sex from marriage and childbirth. Since 1973, over 64 million abortions have occurred in the U.S. That’s equivalent to 19% of our current population. Nearly one in four American women has had an abortion. Now, in 2025, it’s become cultural. In 2022, the pro-life movement celebrated a legal victory when Dobbs v. Jackson overturned Roe. But Dobbs alone cannot reverse the cultural damage of a half-century of abortion on demand. Indeed, the sexual revolution’s logic extended far beyond Roe. In 2015, the Supreme Court fundamentally redefined marriage in the landmark case Obergefell v. Hodges, ruling that marriage had no inherent connection to mating or childbirth—merely to romantic preference. This decision rested on the revolutionary premise that sex, marriage, and procreation are not a package deal—a premise that, by 2015, might as well have been settled law. Obergefell paved the way for gender ideology, which seeks to erase the legal and cultural distinction between male and female. By 2015, states, medical groups, media, schools, and the federal government under President Biden began replacing “sex” with “gender identity” and “sex assigned at birth,” dismissing biological reality as a mere oppressive social construct. But around 2022, this battle of the sexual revolution stalled. Armed with scientific evidence, a diverse coalition of parents, academics, and activists launched a counteroffensive. Many states passed laws protecting women’s sports and bathrooms and restricting gender transition drugs and surgeries for minors. In 2024, Trump’s re-election campaign capitalized on this, making opposition to gender ideology a cornerstone of his second term. And in June 2025, the Supreme Court’s Skrmetti decision upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender “transition” quackery for minors. This rare cultural reversal offers a strategic opportunity for the pro-life movement. For the first time, the sexual revolution is losing ground. Americans are beginning to see its ghoulish consequences, recognizing that it’s not just an attack on the unborn, but on marriage, family, and the minds, hearts, bodies, and fertility of our children. The pro-life movement should seize this moment to persuade the public to join us in restoring the purpose of marriage and family in law and culture. To succeed, we must connect the dots between abortion on demand and the sexual revolution’s assault on the natural family. The lives of countless unborn children—and the future of the American Experiment—depend on it. The post Protecting the Unborn Means Restoring Marriage and Family appeared first on The Daily Signal.