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Poker isn’t just about luck. The song captures something true, players make constant choices based on incomplete information and reading their opponents. Continue reading…Country Music News – Taste of Country
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Both Jinger Duggar and Joy-Anna Duggar are struggling to find happiness in this dark time for their family.
Josh is in prison where he belongs after receiving and possessing child sex-abuse material (CSAM).
Joseph has been arrested and is awaiting trial for allegedly molesting a 9-year-old girl.
The sisters never expected to see these family scandals be so dark and twisted.
‘Just sickening, horrible things’
On the Wednesday, September 2 episode of The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast, Jinger and Joy-Anna Duggar spoke about dark times in their family.
“Family stuff has probably been the other thing,” Joy said of the hardest periods of her life.
The first thing, she said, was losing her pregnancy 20 weeks in back in 2019. Joy is currently pregnant with Baby #4.
“Like, we’ve had wave after wave of just sickening, horrible things happening,” Joy acknowledged.
In addition to family ties to their disgraced brothers, Joy was also particularly close with Kendra Caldwell, Joseph’s wife.
Despite everything that the entire world knows about Josh, it sounds like Joy felt surprised by the arrests of both brothers — but especially Joseph.
“And it really just sends me into a spiral,” she admitted.
“Those have been really hard seasons,” Joy expressed.
As we have previously explained, fringe evangelical and especially fundamentalist communities in America sometimes use “seasons” to refer to experiences or chapters of their lives. This is in-group language designed to set them apart from the rest of humanity.
“And I feel like I’m coming out of that finally with this last run we went through of family stuff,” Joy assessed.
Joy-Anna and Jinger Duggar never imagined this growing up
“It just feels like, you know, sin is so dark and so heavy,” Joy-Anna explained to her sister, Jinger Duggar.
Christianity holds a belief in sin, a concept of spiritual wrongdoing that distances adherents from their god.
Sin can cover a wide range of activities, including events with no victim — though not in the case of Josh’s crimes or the charges against Joseph.
“It’s hard to find true joy… it’s like, happiness is circumstantial,” Joy lamented.
She added: “It is really hard to find joy in those hard, hard moments.”
Something that we should all keep in mind as Joy and Jinger process this is that they were raised to believe that they were set apart and special.
Crimes — particularly depraved acts of sexual predation — were the result of spiritual corruption, and something that happened in the outside world and not within their cult.
That was obviously never true. In fact, the founder of IBLP resigned in disgrace for … exactly the reasons that you’d guess.
But when you grow up believing that your life of isolation in an abusive cult somehow protects you from wrongdoing only to find out that it often does the opposite, that can be hard to process.
And anyone would struggle if not one but two of their brothers were (alleged) monsters who prey upon little girls. That’s true no matter how many brothers one has.
Joy-Anna & Jinger Duggar Lament ‘Hard, Hard Moments’ Amidst Joseph & … was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.
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The completed Pretty Rocks bridge in Denali National Park is seen on Sept. 2, 2026. The bridge allows visitors to travel above an ongoing thaw-induced slide that made the park’s sole road impassable at about the midpoint of its 92-mile distance. Vehicle traffic is set to resume next year now that the bridge is completed, the National Park Service said. (Photo provided by the National Park Service)
Visitors to Denali National Park will be able to motor over the full park road starting next year for the first time since a landslide made the route impassable in the late summer of 2021, the National Park Service said Thursday.
Construction crews have completed a 475-foot-long bridge that allows vehicles to avoid an ongoing thaw-induced slide at a spot called Pretty Rocks, located about midway along the park’s 92-mile road.
“This is an exciting milestone for Denali and for everyone who has worked over the past five years to restore access to the west end of the park road,” Brooke Merrell, superintendent of Denali National Park and Preserve, said in a statement.
“Building a bridge across an active landslide in one of the most remote and challenging environments in the country required extraordinary collaboration, innovation and determination. We are grateful to the Federal Highway Administration, our project partners and the many people who made this possible, and we look forward to welcoming visitors back to the west end by bus in 2027,” she said.
Visitors on foot and bicycle are now allowed to cross the bridge to travel on the road beyond, the Park Service said. However, a bit more work must be completed to ensure that the road section on the west side of the bridge is ready for vehicle traffic next year.
The bridge project cost about $230 million, officials said. The money came from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, disaster-response funds and other sources.
The Pretty Rocks landslide is one of about 150 documented slides along the route, which is the sole road running through the park. But it is the slide that has caused the most trouble.
It is located at a high point along the road, near the scenic Polychrome Pass area. At the slide site, the rocky slope on one side of the road has been moving gradually for several years. More recently, the movement accelerated, creating maintenance and safety problems. In August of 2021, when large amounts of slope broke away, the Park Service closed the road to traffic.
The park road is generally closed to private traffic beyond the first 15 miles. Most road traffic is by shuttle buses that deliver visitors to hiking and camping sites. The landslide made the road impassable for those buses.
The chosen fix for the problem is the bridge, which passes above the still-moving landslide, along with some work within the road. One feature of the project is the installation of thermosyphons, devices that slow permafrost thaw by releasing heat from the ground.
Thaw of permafrost and melting within rock glaciers — geologic features that are combinations of rock and ice – have been identified as prime causes of the Pretty Rocks slide and other park landslides.
The steep terrain, presence of permafrost and other geologic characteristics made the project complex.
Previously, the Park Service aimed for completion in time to reopen the full road by 2025. Unexpected problems with clay pushed that target to 2026.
During the years of traffic closures at Pretty Rocks, park managers have directed visitors to alternatives. The area beyond Pretty Rocks remained accessible to those willing to hike a detour route down to the valley floor, using a temporary staircase. Customers of lodges just beyond the road’s edge, on private property at a site called Kantishna, were able to travel there by plane. And park managers have emphasized visitor and recreation opportunities in the park’s more accessible frontcountry.
Despite those accommodations, Denali visitation has been reduced during the Pretty Rocks construction years.
In 2019, the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the park logged about 601,000 visitors. Visitation collapsed by about 90% in the pandemic year of 2020, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Over time, visitation began to recover. The total last year was 543,300, a Denali spokesperson said.
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Congress never built a path from temporary status to permanent residence, leaving many people facing deportation with little recourse.
(The Center Square) – As the federal government faces hundreds of billions of dollars in estimated annual fraud losses, a bipartisan majority of voters want it to use artificial intelligence to help catch waste and abuse, a new poll found.