1 Corinthians, 15:14

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.

Illustration from White Horse Inn Blog.

The income gap

On average, young married men, aged 28-30, make $15,900 more than their single peers, and married men aged 44-46 make $18,800 more than their single peers.

Marriage transforms boys into men.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/04/02/dont-be-a-bachelor-why-married-men-work-harder-and-smarter-and-make-more-money/

For all races and ethnic groups. Black men enjoy a marriage premium of at least $12,500 in their individual income compared to their single peers. The advantages also apply, for the most part, to  men and women who are less educated. For instance, men with a high-school degree or less enjoy a marriage premium of at least $17,000 compared to their single peers.

http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IFS-ForRicherForPoorer-Final_Web.pdf

A hedge of protection

Prayer Tip: Pray a “hedge of protection” around family, loved ones, and church leaders in order to keep them safe from the attacks of the Evil One (see Job 1:10, Psalm 80:12, Isaiah 5:5). In Bible times people would often build a hedge of thorns around their homes to keep out predators.

Learn more about the benefits of building a spiritual hedge around yourself and others at http://www.fairborndailyherald.com/news/lifestyle-religion/152407805/Devotional:-Gods-hedge.

Obama’s desired legacy

First destroy Israel, then the great Satan (U.S.)

http://www.economist.com/node/21647692

“Chants of “Death to America” remain a feature of Friday prayers at Tehran University, even though they seem more of a perfunctory ritual than a real display of rage.” NYT, Dec. 2014

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/30/us-iran-usa-ties-insight-idUSKBN0MQ1RE20150330

Good News about Onions from “World’s Healthiest Foods Newsletter”

• The flavonoids in onion tend to be more concentrated in the outer layers of the flesh. To maximize your health benefits, peel off as little of the fleshy, edible portion as possible when removing the onion's outermost paper layer. Even a small amount of "overpeeling" can result in unwanted loss of flavonoids. For example, a red onion can lose about 20% of its quercetin and almost 75% of its anthocyanins if it is "overpeeled." [I confess—I over peel]
• The total polyphenol content of onions is much higher than many people expect. (Polyphenols are one of the largest categories of phytonutrients in food. This category includes all flavonoids as well as tannins.) The total polyphenol content of onion is not only higher than its fellow allium vegetables, garlic and leeks, but also higher than tomatoes, carrots, and red bell pepper. In the French diet, only six vegetables (artichoke heart, parsley, Brussels sprouts, shallot, broccoli, and celery) have a higher polyphenol content than onion. Since the French diet has been of special interest to researchers in terms of disease prevention, onion's strong polyphenol contribution will very likely lead to follow-up studies that pay closer attention to this unique allium vegetable.
• Within the polyphenol category, onions are also surprisingly high in flavonoids. For example, on an ounce-for-ounce basis, onions rank in the top 10 of commonly eaten vegetables in their quercetin content. The flavonoid content of onions can vary widely, depending on the exact variety and growing conditions. Although the average onion is likely to contain less than 100 milligrams of quercetin per 3-1/2 ounces, some onions do provide this amount. And while 100 milligrams may not sound like a lot, in the United States, moderate vegetable eaters average only twice this amount for all flavonoids (not just quercetin) from all vegetables per day.
• When onions are simmered to make soup, their quercetin does not get degraded. It simply gets transferred into the water part of the soup. By using a low-heat method for preparing onion soup, you can preserve the health benefits of onion that are associated with this key flavonoid.
• When we get quercetin by eating an onion-rather than consuming the quercetin in purified, supplement form-we may end up getting better protection from oxidative stress. That's exactly what happened in an animal study where some animals had yellow onion added to their diet in a way that would provide the same amount of quercetin provided to other animals in the form of purified quercetin extracts. The best protection came from the onion version of this flavonoid, rather than the supplement form.
• Several servings of onion each week are sufficient to statistically lower your risk of some types of cancer. For colorectal, laryngeal, and ovarian cancer, between 1-7 servings of onion has been shown to provide risk reduction. But for decreased risk of oral and esophageal cancer, you'll need to consume one onion serving per day (approximately 1/2 cup).

Now, head for the kitchen and chop some onions!

http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v64/n3s/fig_tab/ejcn2010221t1.html

http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v64/n3s/fig_tab/ejcn2010221t2.html#figure-title

Monday Memories—Easter 2015

With stops in Indianapolis to see family and friends, a stay with my sister and brother-in-law in Mt. Morris, dinner out with my brother and cousin Dianne and their spouses, Good Friday and Easter services, a trip to Sterling to see my Aunt Lois, dad’s youngest sister, and her daughter Rhonda (my first cousin), lunch with “the girls” of the class of 1957, we had a lot of memories to share over the past week. Bob took his guitar with him and practiced faithfully.

Tim Cook, the face of gay corporate bigotry

It’s all about the money. Apple owns businesses in four Muslim countries where to be gay is a death penalty offense, but wants to attack and destroy the income of Christian bakers and photographers for their beliefs.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/416176/want-evidence-hysterical-anti-christian-bigotry-look-no-further-boycottindiana-david

And look how long he hid in the closet all for Apple.  Now that’s evidence of the strength of his convictions.  But everyone else has to change and accept his lifestyle, which he hid for years on behalf of his career.

http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-says-hes-gay-it-may-not-matter-chinas-conservative-market-1716365

Michael Hurd’s observation on hypocrisy of Apple and other businesses

“On Sunday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that his company would “never tolerate discrimination.” He then compared Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act to Jim Crow; he equated a law guaranteeing the rights of individuals to take part in only the transactions they want to a law forcing individuals to take part in only those transactions the government deems worthy. But Cook is happy to do business with and in Saudi Arabia, as Erick Erickson points out, as well as Uganda, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. All of those countries are quite unfriendly to homosexuals.

Other companies looking to boycott Indiana include Smallbox, Salesforce, and Angie’s List; particularly, they want to disassociate from businesses headquartered in Indiana. Yet all of these companies work with businesses with outlets in places like Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is punishable by death.”

Hypocrisy on the left should hardly be news; but it seems each new generation forgets the concentration camps, the reeducation ordeals, the starvation of kulaks, the show trials, the banishments to Siberia—all in the name of socialist/leftist ideologies.

http://www.redstate.com/2015/03/31/time-tim-cook-apple-stand-homosexual-rights-china/

http://www.examiner.com/article/apple-boycotts-indiana-opens-stores-saudi-arabia

http://www.religiousfreedomcoalition.org/2013/08/15/obamas-gay-muslim-hypocrisy/

http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/politics/indiana-religious-freedom-and-the-utter-hypocrisy-of-the-left

How the media see the parties’ candidates

Indiana isn’t targeting gays. Liberals are targeting religion.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-intolerance-1427760183

The Indiana law is a version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) that passed 97-3 in the Senate and that Bill Clinton signed in 1993. Both the federal and Indiana laws require courts to administer a balancing test when reviewing cases that implicate the free exercise of religion. . .

The federal RFRA followed the Supreme Court’s Employment Division v. Smith ruling in 1990 that abandoned its 30-year precedent of reviewing religious liberty cases under strict scrutiny. Congress responded with RFRA, which merely reasserted longstanding First Amendment protections.

In 1997 the Supreme Court limited RFRA’s scope to federal actions. So 19 states including such cultural backwaters as Connecticut, Rhode Island and Illinois followed with copy-cat legislation, and Indiana is the 20th. Courts in 11 states have extended equally vigorous protections.

As I noted earlier. . . this is political, it’s about the 2016 election and having a “gotcha” question for Republicans, because the Democrats have NOTHING except sex.

“This was not a deliberate attempt to breach the security of NSA.”

No, of course not.  It was just two drug dealing prostitute transgenders stealing a car from the man they were having sex with and then they drove the wrong way.  No problem.  Nothing to see.  Move on. Definitely not terrorism.

Washington Post story to beat all stories.

It does make one wonder how intruders can make it all the way into the White House after jumping a fence, when they get shot making a wrong turn into the NSA.  What is going on there that is more important than the security of the President?

Baltimore Sun

John Vogel

Kevin Corke on Fox

A really great addition to the Fox News line up is Kevin Corke. He does the morning correspondent news, usually on Washington. He keeps opinion to the minimum in his reporting, but occasionally slips it in. I think he used to be with an NBC affiliate. One of the best I’ve seen with a beautiful voice, and not tough to look at either. Love his ties and fashion sense. Fox has much better diversity, better looking women with great dresses and shoes, and more qualified news reporters and more political variety than the other cable and network news sources. The outnumbered show at noon is outstanding. 200% better than the View.

But make it dark chocolate

Dark chocolate helps with weight loss, and has also been shown to improve memory and cognition. Don’t waste the calories.  But buy the best and not white or milk chocolate.  There are some companies that produce a chocolate supplement, but I prefer to make my own.

http://samadimd.com/healthy-food/could-eating-cocoa-improve-brain-health-in-elderly

I think the secret to the positive attitude and energy is theobromine (food of the  gods). I no longer drink regular coffee, only decaf. Generally, caffeine and theobromine have very different effects on different people. Theobromine is relatively mild and helps elevate serotonin levels producing a really nice side effect of feeling good over a longer period of time. Caffeine is a stronger stimulant and acts relatively quickly as a wake-up drug. Compared to the caffeine, the theobromine has about one-quarter the stimulating power.

Other memory helps, including dark chocolate were listed in my Thursday Thirteen in January 2014.

Diabetes and high fiber breakfast cereal

I was watching a medical segment on Fox News this morning with Dr. David Samadi which was a display of breakfast cereals and which ones are high in fiber and therefore help fight diabetes.  So I looked it up, and found . . . an article published in 2004, 11 years ago.

http://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20040618/high-fiber-cereal-ward-off-diabetes

and from 2006

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16443861

and from 2008

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=183081

So maybe someone from the cereal companies was just doing some clever marketing.  Eating cereal at breakfast makes me hungry all day, so I don’t do it.

Governors who rule from Democrat glass houses

shouldn’t lob missiles at Indiana.

Connecticut has the same law as Indiana about religious freedom, as do almost 20 states.  Shame on you, Gov. Dan Malloy,  Democrat. There is also federal law—not only the Bill of Rights, but the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act signed by President Clinton. Barack Obama as a state senator in Illinois helped pass Illinois’. . . although perhaps that not a good example since he lied about his beliefs to get elected in 2008. He probably lied then too. The LBGT lobby is very hostile to Christianity. The real aim isn’t bakeries and florists, but churches.

“The first RFRA was a 1993 federal law that was signed into law by Democratic president Bill Clinton. It unanimously passed the House of Representatives, where it was sponsored by then-congressman Chuck Schumer, and sailed through the Senate on a 97-3 vote.

The law reestablished a balancing test for courts to apply in religious liberty cases (a standard had been used by the Supreme Court for decades). RFRA allows a person's free exercise of religion to be "substantially burdened" by a law only if the law furthers a "compelling governmental interest" in the "least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest." “ http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/indianas-religious-freedom-restoration-act-explained_900641.html#!

http://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/Malloy-to-Bar-State-Travel-to-Indiana-Amid-Religious-Freedom-Law-Backlash-298010911.html

http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/30/connecticuts-governor-doesnt-understand-his-own-states-rfra/

No gay person has ever been hurt or discriminated against by the RFRA, whereas many by choice kept their sexuality hidden for decades for fear of their careers and wealth or disappointing their own families.  Being “out” never hurt librarians, hair dressers, or musicians.  Perhaps there was a bigger story?

Shallow memes by Democrats

This is what happens when unbelievers try to be theological and tell Christians what to believe and do.

When did Jesus ever tell sinners to continue as usual whether the sin was greed, lying, sex or telling others how to live? What did he tell Zacchaeus the tax collector who was cheating his own people?  He was really hard on hypocrites and haters, which right now the winners in that class are representatives of the LBGT community who demand service and ruin people’s livelihood after living years in the closet hiding who and what they were, voting for a man who lied about his true beliefs.

 Zaccheus stopped and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, half of my possessions I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will give back four times as much.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”

Close to Hayers Gap, VA, but still in Virginia

I’ve now cycled 502 miles.

That means I’ve cycled the distance between Columbus and Mt. Morris, past Mt. Morris, which is only 455 miles.

There’s more to it than surgery and hormones

It would appear there’s much more going on in being male or female than surgically changing the genitals or adding hormones. I guess scientists are bigots.

“Differences in male and female rodent sexual behaviors are programmed during brain development, but how exactly this occurs is not clear. In the preoptic area (POA) of the brain—a region necessary for male sex behavior—the female phenotype results from repression of male-linked genes by DNA methylation, according to a study published today (March 30) in Nature Neuroscience.

There is very little known about how the brain is masculinized—and even less about how it is feminized—even though the question has been studied for more than 50 years, said Bridget Nugent, study author and now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

These sex differences in the brain are programmed toward the end of fetal development, through to one week after birth in rodents. In males, testicular hormones drive masculinization of the brain; this was thought to occur by direct induction of gene expression by hormone-associated transcription factors. Because a feminized brain occurred in the absence of ovarian hormone signals, most researchers assumed that the female brain and behavior was a sort of default state, programmed during development when no male hormones are present. But the downstream mechanisms of how hormones can modify gene expression were not previously known.”

http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/42555/title/Female-Brain-Maintained-by-Methylation/

http://waltheyer.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/data-shows-male-to-female-transgender-brains-are-not-feminized.html

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3988.html

Ferguson the play

LOS ANGELES (March 30, 2015) — Would you indict Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown? The controversial shooting will be reenacted on stage in FERGUSON, a new play based on actual grand jury witness testimony. Written by journalist and documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer and presented by Theatre Verité Collective, four performances of FERGUSON take place as a guest production at the Odyssey Theatre, April 26 through April 29. The audience is the jury. How will you vote?

Crowd funding. If you contribute, you get a copy of the script—which is the actual words of testimony.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ferguson-the-play

                    

The wedding cake order