When Full House went off the air in 1995 after eight seasons, many stars moved on to other projects. Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen went on to have extremely successful careers in both Hollywood and fashion. They have famously separated themselves from their Full House days and decided not to participate in the Fuller House reboot in 2016. Instagram John Stamos Was Upset Mary-Kate And Ashely Olsen Decided Not To Return For The Reboot Sadly for fans of the original series, Mary-Kate and Ashely, who played Michelle Tanner in 191 episodes, didn’t want to participate in Fuller House. John told the And That’s What You REALLY Missed podcast that their decision initially upset him. “When I did Fuller House, they didn’t want to come back and I was angry for a minute, and that got out,” John explained. “But they said, ‘We loved you guys, we loved our childhood. We loved being with you. We miss Bob.’ They came over to my house and they brought a pork chop and sage.” It appears the project wasn’t right for the women who, when the show wrapped, were 8 years old. Today, they are 38 and have moved on to other things besides acting. Mary-Kate and Ashley retired from acting as teenagers to focus on their fashion careers. They established their fashion brand, The Row, in 2004 and have solidified themselves as style mavens. John Stamos recently posted a picture of himself and the grown-up Olsen twins on Instagram and said that despite what anyone believes, Full House was a family, and they are still close. “That time the Olsen twins came to Studio 54 to see my performance as the M.C. in Cabaret,” John Stamos captioned. “It was pretty surreal having an all grown-up Michelle Tanner watching me exhibiting a complete metamorphosis from their TV uncle. But they got it, and we shared a mutual pride for how far we’ve all come.” This story’s featured image is by John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images. The post “Full House” Stars John Stamos & The Olsen Twins Are Still Family In Rare Pic’ appeared first on InspireMore.

Harris will avoid approximately 1,500 guests and lighthearted roasts in Midtown Manhattan

'That is a 33-point gender gap'

I received an email at work the other day. Supervisors are looking for a “team of volunteers” to decorate for Fall/Halloween. We all know what is meant when work says they’re looking for volunteers. But CONTINUE READING... The post The 10 Best Halloween Costumes on HalloweenCostumes.com appeared first on The Retro Network.

San Francisco Suddenly Wants to Clear Out the Homeless

Adding to the stakes of who wins in November, the big issue in 2025 will be the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, aka the Trump tax cuts. A look back at the media’s performance seven years ago, as the tax reform package moved through Congress, shows the liberal media’s raging hostility to lower tax rates — and the wrongheadedness of their predictions that lower rates wouldn’t boost economic prosperity. The Trump tax cuts lowered the effective tax rate for all income groups, and nearly doubled the standard deduction — simplifying the tax returns of most families and a big tax savings for those in the lowest brackets. Yet news watchers heard journalists regurgitate Democratic talking points about how the measure amounted to “stealing” from ordinary workers to benefit the wealthiest Americans. “Donald Trump ran for president promising to fight for the middle class against the elites...[but] President Trump just released a tax plan that benefits the elites,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews sneered on September 28, 2017. “He’s the opposite of Robin Hood. He’s the Sheriff of Nottingham!” “How are you going to make the case that this is not a tax cut for the wealthy?” co-host Charlie Rose grilled Speaker of the House Paul Ryan a few weeks later on CBS This Morning. On November 13, MSNBC’s Morning Joe brought on liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs to rail about how the tax bill was “theft” by America’s “richest gazillionaires” to “bankrupt” the country. “This is a complete giveaway to the richest people in this country at the expense of everybody else,” he complained. “It’s the biggest theft I’ve ever seen even proposed. It may be the biggest heist in history.” “Corporate taxes, along with those on wealthy Americans, would be slashed on the presumption that when people in penthouses get relief, the benefits flow down to basement tenements,” the New York Times scoffed in a November 30 front-page “news” story by Peter Goodman and Patricia Cohen. “I think it’s becoming clear that [the tax bill] is very much tilted toward corporations and the wealthiest Americans,” CBS’s Jill Schlesinger echoed on December 4. “It’s a terrible idea,” Philadelphia columnist Will Bunch wrote on December 17, “arguably, if approved, the worst law to be enacted on Capitol Hill since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed the return of captured slaves up North to their whip-cracking masters down South.” “This is a nightmare bill,” liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman growled on ABC’s This Week that same morning. “They are essentially stealing from the rest of us,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg charged on MSNBC’s All In. “The extent of actual kind of straight-up self-dealing in this bill...is really something new and astonishing and sort of more, I think, in common with a post-Soviet kleptocracy than what we’re used to seeing in American politics.” “It’s the largest transplant of money in the history of the Republic: Trillions of dollars being shoved up to the top to join where most of the money already sits,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews griped after Trump signed the bill into law on December 20. Referring to the large collection of GOP legislators at the White House for the bill signing, the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus mocked: “Nothing brings the Republican Party together like a nice, big irresponsible tax cut, I guess.” Liberal-minded journalists could not believe that businesses would apply their tax savings in ways that would benefit their employees, customers and shareholders across society. Before the bill passed, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on December 19 reprimanded at a pro-tax cut guest: “I would just argue with you, increase in economic activity because I think that is notional, but it has never proved to be the fact. I mean, this just does not happen.” “The Republicans are betting if you give corporations a break, they will then hire more people, give them higher wages, build factories. But that’s a big bet,” cautioned NBC’s business correspondent Stephanie Ruhle that morning on Today. The next day, Today’s Savannah Guthrie confronted Paul Ryan: “As I understand your argument, and that of your colleagues, you’re counting on corporations to take that money they now have and plow it right back into the economy, hire people, raise wages....Are you living in a fantasy world?” A front-page piece in the December 21 New York Times agreed: “If they [Republicans] are proved correct, they will be repudiating not only historical experience, but most experts. From Congress’s own prognosticators to Wall Street’s virtuosos, scarcely any independent analyses project anything like the rosy forecasts offered by the President’s top economic advisers.” But just hours after the legislation passed, businesses began announcing wage increases and fat bonuses for workers. NBC’s Ruhle refused to concede she had been wrong: “They’re literally doing the least they can do....This is a great gesture on the part of these companies, but thus far, it’s a gesture.” By January, the wave of companies boosting workers’ pay was too huge to ignore. “Today Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, announced plans to raise wages, hand out bonuses and increase benefits,” Nightly News anchor Lester Holt announced on January 11. At that early point (early January 2018), a list compiled by Americans for Tax Reform showed more than 100 companies had handed out either bonuses or raised worker pay, amounting to thousands of dollars in additional annual income for employees. By June 2024, ATR’s list had grown to “1,233 examples of pay raises, new job creation, facility and product line expansions, special bonuses, utility rate reductions, 401(k) match increases and employee benefit increases attributed to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.” Those are anecdotes, but you can also see the benefits in the government’s own data: In 2018, the post-tax cut economy added 2.7 million jobs; in 2019, another 2.1 million. Earnings were up, too: 3.4% in 2018 and 2.0% in 2019. In both years, the rise in take-home pay was significantly higher than the inflation rate, so these wage gains were real increases in workers’ standard of living. Thanks to the burst of new economic activity, government revenues didn’t suffer, as most in the liberal media had predicted. According to Congressional Budget Office data compiled by the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards, total federal tax revenues were $3.32 trillion in 2017 before the Trump tax cuts. Even with the new lower rates, revenue was just as high in 2018 ($3.33 trillion), and continued to rise in 2019 ($3.46 trillion) and 2020 ($3.42 trillion). By the time Joe Biden took office in 2021, tax revenues were over $4 trillion, “22 percent higher than prior to the tax cut in 2017.” The government also took in even more corporate tax revenue than it would have without the tax cuts. In June 2017, when the higher rates were in place, the CBO estimated the federal government would take in $389 billion in corporate taxes in 2022 and $395 billion in 2023 (scroll to page 17). In fact, the government reaped $425 billion in 2022 and $420 billion last year — billions more dollars flowing into the U.S. Treasury than was expected when the rate was far higher. In 2017, the media trashed the Trump tax cuts as a gift to the rich that would come at the expense of workers. The experience of the past seven years has shown those predictions to be false. Keep that in mind as you listen to journalists talk about the likely effects of Trump’s promise to cut taxes further if he’s elected next year, or Kamala Harris’s plan to raise them. For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.    

How should Christians engage in politics in a manner consistent with their Christian faith? How should a Christian's faith influence his political engagement? In our hyper-politicized culture, Christians disagree on the correct answer to these questions — and that's OK. Christians must remember: No matter where you live, your primary allegiance is to Jesus, his church, and what he called the 'kingdom of God.' Christians are not a monolith. Every Christian has personal experiences that impact how they view the world. Our background and life circumstances affect what issues we believe are important. Life experience, moreover, shapes how we understand what role our faith should have in influencing our political engagement. In 1984, the Assemblies of God offered Christian voters guidelines to help them wisely consider how to engage in politics. Dr. Daniel Isgrigg, a professor at Oral Roberts University, who reposted the principles this week, calls them "a breath of fresh air in this current political climate." The guidelines are as follows: Do not confuse patriotism, national pride, and Western culture with Christian faith and practice. Do not confuse secular political activity with the purpose of the church, nor campaigning with witnessing and preaching. Do not make slanderous or false accusations against your opponents, but maintain your integrity. Do not consider a brother or sister who is of like precious faith an adversary if he or she holds a different political view. At all times endeavor to verify information before accepting it as true or before repeating it to others. At all times endeavor to know and understand the candidate's positions and evaluate him or her on that basis, on the basis of his or her ability to perform the duties and functions of the office, and his or her integrity. At all times endeavor to know and understand the issues; do not excuse yourself from this duty by saying, "God will show me whom to vote for." At all times compare a candidate's position with Scripture but only where the Scripture addresses the issue; do not force Scripture to address issues that the Author did not intend to address. Neither vote nor work for a candidate merely because he or she professes to be of the Christian faith. Do not neglect your family, worship, prayer, or Bible study. At all times uphold your leaders in prayer. These guidelines are not rules. They are guidelines to help us wisely engage in politics. But there are a few timeless truths embedded in this list that we should remember when engaging in politics on social media, in relationships, and as citizens at the ballot box. 1. A Christian's allegiance belongs to Jesus Few people would argue that it is a sin to love your country or to be proud of the land in which you live. But Christians must remember: No matter where you live, your primary allegiance is to Jesus, his church, and what he called the "kingdom of God." Yes, we are citizens of earthly nations. But as the apostle Paul reminds us, "Our citizenship is in heaven." Christians should not be indifferent to their communities, and we should seek the common good. The prophet Jeremiah wrote to the exiles in Babylon on behalf of God: Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. Seeking the good of your community, state, and country is good for everyone. But Christians should not pursue certain political outcomes if they are incongruent with the Christian faith or their allegiance to Jesus. 2. Love your neighbor Most of the guidelines above reverberate around Jesus' teaching on loving your neighbor. Not to slander or lie about those who hold politically different views is loving your neighbor. To approach them with charity is loving them. Verifying the truth before sharing information is loving your neighbor. Understanding a candidate correctly is to love the candidate as your neighbor. Understanding the issues of an election — because it allows you to vote wisely — is loving your neighbor. The command to love your neighbor wasn't new when Jesus taught it. In fact, God gave the Israelites an imperative to radically love their neighbors, and Jesus drew on the ancient wisdom of his Jewish faith (in Leviticus 19) when he taught the greatest commandment. Many of the voting guidelines above are echoed in Leviticus 19: Verse 11: "You shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another." Verse 13: "You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him." Verse 15: "You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor." Verse 16: "You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor." Verse 17: "You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor." Verse 18: "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself." 3. Read the Bible, pray, and engage your Christian community Two of the primary modes of communication that God uses to speak to his people are through prayer and the scriptures. The guidelines above remind Christians that they must remain steadfast in the core Christian disciplines of prayer, Bible-reading, and worship to engage in politics wisely. Psalm 1 teaches Christians: Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither — whatever they do prospers. Biblical wisdom — that which comes from God — comes from communing with God through prayer, the scriptures, and the church. It is only when Christians remain in prayer, in the scriptures, and in community with other Christians that they grow in God's wisdom. As we head to the ballot box this November, thoughtfully consider how the guidelines above may help you vote in a wise and discerning manner. And most importantly, remember who you are in Christ.

In the beginning, there was ... a big explosion.Which came from ... nothing?Thinking man has introduced the most unpredictable force in the universe: free will. He can steer the destiny of all life in any direction he so chooses. In order for evolution to make sense, we must accept its explanation for the genesis of all life.Magical thinkingSo let's start there: Everything that has ever supposedly existed came from this gigantic explosion from a single subatomic point of origin. And over time, this entropic inertia of particles from the explosion eventually somehow created stars and planets. Now, most planets are barren wastelands of nothingness. But ours? Ours is different. We are teeming with life. But how did life come into existence here on this tiny, blue planet? Well, according to our brightest minds, we don’t exactly know. But from what we can gather, after hundreds of millions of years of particles sloshing around in this primordial soup of water, nitrogen, carbon, and some other random elements, the first protein was magically created! And from there, it was only a matter of time before a protein magically became a single-cell organism, which eventually magically turned into a more complex organism, and so on and so forth. Fast forward to now. Trees and animals everywhere. Then you have us. The most complex life forms in the known universe. We have bones, muscles, organs (each with its own specific function), eyes, ears, noses, and brains. It’s kind of funny how all of this life came to be so incredibly complex, multilayered, and perfectly symbiotic in its structure. But there’s obviously no way any of this could have been purposely designed by an intelligent designer, because we know that this all happened by a random and chaotic process of particles smashing into each other over millions of years until they eventually began building themselves into fully functioning organisms.OK, that’s the end of my sarcastic rant. Time to get serious. Theory or guesswork?My general thoughts on evolutionary theory? To put it simply, it’s too broad, general, and discombobulated of a theory for it to be considered a serious historical account of our universe. The process of simply recording human history is one that involves making sense of specific moments in time involving specific historical figures with the hope of compiling a coherent story of humanity. This consists of finding primary evidence, like documents and artifacts, of those moments in time. And then it takes teams of scholars to interpret what the evidence means; to connect the dots. And that process is never 100% accurate. It is, much of the time, guesswork. It is excruciatingly hard — in fact, damn near impossible — to know to a full extent the full scope of detail for a single moment in history. And that’s only for a single moment. Evolutionary theory asserts an assumption that is applied to the entirety of history. That life has uniformly and unquestionably progressed to this point in time according to its rules. The problem with that is that it attempts to cover way too many data points across time and space and yet has no real way of doing so. We’re not talking about a team of scholars debating the political motivations of Napoleon during one of his military campaigns; we’re talking about the development of all life everywhere throughout all time. It is the epitome of theory having no evidence to back it up.Seeds of doubtPersonally, I think our ideas on evolutionary theory need an update. We need to see it through a new lens. Evolution asserts that nature selects the set of genetic traits that are to be passed on to the next generation of organisms. But what we have to understand is the role the thinking man plays within the evolutionary model. As conscious beings, we humans have gotten to the point where we have direct influence on what and who gets chosen to live on. We have the power and the conscious will to change the genes of an unborn child or abort the baby before it ever gets to be born.On a simpler scale, we plant flowers and trees in a garden in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. We hold the power of life and death in our hands, and, therefore, we essentially construct and shape our world. A few questions arise from this. How does evolutionary theory account for this journey of “biological construction” man has been able to embark on for quite some time? How much weight can it really hold if it does not? My initial impulse is to be skeptical of the supposed immovable object that is evolutionary theory, only because it seemingly does not possess an historical account, and therefore predictive analysis, of the times when ecosystems have been and continue to be constructed by man. What I mean by this is simple. Take the invention of agriculture for example. Every time people fashion a wooded forest or an empty plot of land into a farm of crops, a new ecosystem is born. This would not have happened naturally. The forest cannot evolve into a garden. It can only happen through human intervention. It needed to be constructed. Keep in mind, I'm not saying the evolutionary traits that have been passed down to every species of plant and tree don't remain, which is why hedges need to be trimmed and branches need to be pruned or else it would grow wild. But that's also exactly my point. The farmer must intervene and choose how this ecosystem operates. He chooses what plants stay, what plants get uprooted, and what the arrangement of the crop looks like. He decides what things get to live on and what things must go. Similarly, on a larger scale, man has waged war with man and with nature. He has erased entire genetic pools from the face of the earth. Now, is that evolution? I thought “the survival of the fittest” was a random and automatic process, one that was out of our control? How is it possible then for man to logically and consciously choose to initiate a "random" process of genetic elimination? It would make sense if he were merely an animal, for animals aren’t conscious beings with agency. Animals are in bondage to their instincts. (If this were the case, if man were merely a cog in the evolutionary process, then genetic elimination via anthropogenic climate change should be considered one of the forces of natural selection, but that's a discussion for another time.)Obviously, man also can be a slave to animalistic instincts. But he has the ability to overcome them and be a freely thinking man. And this thinking man is what shatters the paradigm of the routine-like progression model of evolution. Thinking man has introduced the most unpredictable force in the universe: free will. He can steer the destiny of all life in any direction he so chooses. In this very manner and for this very reason, I am arguing that evolutionary theory is deficient.Show me the fossilsThe current model of evolution is a reductive approach that meagerly attempts to “predict the past” per se by observing biological subjects in an atomistic fashion. It doesn’t attempt to take into account an organism’s past and present relationships with its ecosystem. What’s meant by that is that the way an organism behaves in the present day (genetic traits and all) is obviously a product of a complex history of events through generations. And what evolutionary theory lacks is an exhaustive account of generational history relating to its subjects of study.What this means in simple terms is that there is not enough evidence to justify the acceptance of the evolution model. The biggest red flag in the evidence department is the absence of transitional fossils. You see, evolutionary theory traditionally holds that species undergo evolutionary change via a process called phyletic gradualism, wherein species branch off into different species gradually over time. And if this were to be the case, there should have been thousands, if not millions, of fossils showing this transition. The problem is just that. There’s a gaping hole in the transitional fossil record. Some of the most famous evolutionary theory proponents, like Darwin and Dawkins, even admit the glaring absence of this evidence. The evidence is so severely lacking that some scholars have had to come up with entirely new models of evolution to explain the phenomenon. Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould, contrasting phyletic gradualism, came up with the theory of punctuated equilibrium, wherein he asserts that speciation actually occurs in short bursts in between long periods of evolutionary stability.This new model should be able to help verify the validity of evolution, in theory. It should at least narrow the timeframes for genetic mutation down to specific time periods. Suddenly, data now theoretically does not have to be gathered from all time periods in all of history and all locations in all the world. Needle in the hayHowever, it also puts the pressure on evolution advocates precisely because it narrows down the field of view. In a weird paradoxical way, it has broadened and complicated the quest to validate evolution. Now, not only is there a search for evolutionary change in specific times and locations (a proverbial needle in the haystack), there must also be some account for and definition of what exactly “evolutionary stability” looks like to appropriately contrast the short bursts of change. By abandoning the search for transitional fossils, evolution advocates have doubled their work. They must be able to explain the properties of the long-term routine the biosphere experiences as well as the drastic short-term chaos that intervenes in order to produce such kinds of changes.There’s that word again: intervene. It seems as though genetic change can only occur when there are specific instances of intervention. And who is the only variable in the biosphere? Mankind. Random rules?Make no mistake, only mankind is capable of consciously exerting its authority over nature enough to change nature itself. Because as tempting as it is to gloss over generations of history with a single doctrine like “survival of the fittest,” we ultimately don’t have any transitional fossils of ancient plants, fish, or kangaroo, but we do know about the one conscious agent who had the ability to deliberately intervene in nature’s business. The point is that evolution implies this sort of random process whereby species unpredictably vie for survival, but what it misses is how conscious will intervenes in this process. And there’s no shortage of this human intervention. We construct our world today in too many ways to count. Look around you. Most things didn’t evolve to be there. They were fashioned. Crafted. Placed. The more interesting question to me is, what exactly emerges when we deliberately choose which genetic traits to proliferate and which traits to leave out? Make no mistake, issues like the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate serve as examples of our struggle with evolution and eugenics. We are currently shaping a new evolutionary pathway because of our tendency to intervene, whether we know it or not. Who's to say what the effects of these practices will be?

Skyrim mods come in all shapes and sizes: for every DLC-scale quest mod we also get tiny, mechanical shifts in how we play the RPG. Even unassuming mods can prove to be the most popular. A simple change to the UI has over 17 million downloads, for example. To me, this is the beauty of the still-thriving community as even after 11 years, we’re finding ways to rewrite our experience across Tamriel. Today, another small creation with huge ambition grabbed my attention, and if utilized properly it could change how we interact with Skyrim mods forever. Continue reading New Skyrim mod gives you a big reason to play more community creations MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best Skyrim mods, Elder Scrolls 6 release date, Games like Skyrim

We’ve been here before - for the last 17 years, ever since Half-Life: Episode Two concluded, rumors, speculation, and hope for Half-Life 3 have swirled like the dark energy vortex about the Citadel. Recently, we’ve seen a few teases, a few hints, that suggest something, maybe, might be on the way. Even if it doesn’t arrive imminently, I’m still confident Valve will make Half-Life 3, or at least another Half-Life game, eventually. With that in mind, it feels like time to replay and re-appreciate the original and the first sequel. We’ve looked at the data - a lot of people who have the Half-Life series in their Steam libraries haven’t ever actually booted the games up. But if you got Half-Life, HL2, the Episodes, or any of the expansions in a bundle and you’ve left them alone, now is the time to take them down from the shelf. There are still, all these years later, some of the most influential FPS games of all time. Continue reading If Half-Life 3 is coming, the original games need even more attention MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best old games, Best FPS games, Best VR games