Follower of Jesus, Married to @davessoapbox, Mom & Gram, Learner, Writer, Photographer - grateful. Love God; love people. Trying to figure it all out.
Richmond, VA
Joined January 2014
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#StockholmSyndrome - A Biblical example of how we are tempted to return to that familiar life that was...even in the reality of the life that's better - debmillswriter.com/?p=34585
Deb Mills retweeted
Being conservative or progressive on every single issue is intellectually lazy & unfaithful. Critique and push back on these flawed ideologies.
Make conservatism sympathize & pursue racial justice.
Make progressivism acknowledge absolute truth & the sanctity of life. #AND2020
Deb Mills retweeted
50 legendary internet rabbit holes you can spend hours exploring👇
1. zoom.earth — Watch the world via live satellite imagery
2. flightradar24.com — See every plane currently in the sky
3. marinetraffic.com — Track all ships at sea in real time
4. windy.com — Live map of winds and storms
5. lightningmaps.org — Watch lightning strikes hitting Earth in real time
6. earthquake.usgs.gov — Live list of recent earthquakes
7. submarinecablemap.com — Ocean cables carrying the internet
8. globalforestwatch.org — Watch forests disappear from space
9. worldometers.info — The world's statistics, second by second
10. internetlivestats.com — Current number of tweets and searches being posted
11. thetruesize.com — Compare the true sizes of countries
12. oldmapsonline.org — Maps from centuries ago
13. davidrumsey.com — Archive of 150,000 historical maps
14. openstreetmap.org — World map drawn by volunteers
15. window-swap.com — Look out the window of a random person around the world
16. virtualvacation.us — Virtual walks through cities
17. mapcrunch.com — Teleport to a random spot on Earth
18. atlasobscura.com — Catalog of the world's strangest places
19. neal.fun — Interactive knowledge experiences
20. htwins.net/scale2 — Scale journey from atom to universe (Updated HTML5 link)
21. eyes.nasa.gov — Explore the solar system in 3D
22. stellarium-web.org — Real sky map in your browser
23. apod.nasa.gov — NASA's astronomy picture of the day
24. images.nasa.gov — NASA's entire visual archive, free
25. pudding.cool — Visual articles told through data
26. ourworldindata.org — The state of the world with real data
27. gapminder.org — What we mistakenly think we know about the world
28. informationisbeautiful.net — Visualizing complex data
29. data.worldbank.org — World Bank's open data
30. data.tuik.gov.tr — Turkey's official statistics database
31. archive.org — Archive of millions of books, films, and software
32. gutenberg.org — 70,000 free books whose copyrights have expired
33. openlibrary.org — Record of every book in the world
34. loc.gov — U.S. Library of Congress digital archive
35. europeana.eu — Europe's cultural heritage archive
36. dp.la — America's digital library collection
37. artsandculture.google.com — Tour museums from home
38. rijksmuseum.nl — Download artworks in high resolution
39. wikiart.org — Archive of 250,000 artworks
40. publicdomainreview.org — Forgotten visual treasures of history
41. openculture.com — Free archive of culture and education
42. metmuseum.org — Met Museum's open collection
43. musicmap.info — Family tree of music genres
44. radiooooo.com — Pick a country and decade to listen to that era
45. listen.hatnote.com — Turn Wikipedia edits into audio
46. wikipedia.org — Random knowledge well
47. timeanddate.com — Time, sunrises, and sky events
48. sciencedaily.com — Live stream of science news
49. arxiv.org — Free preprints of scientific papers
50. observablehq.com — Visualize data with live code
Save this. You’ll definitely need some of these later. 🔖
Follow @justinbrave21 for more useful websites, AI tools & tech resources.
Deb Mills retweeted
Possibly the best ever definition of ‘focus’ - Jony Ive on what Steve Jobs taught him about focus
Deb Mills retweeted
President Bush throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium after 9/11 remains one of the most remarkable moments in sports.
I’ve thrown out the first pitch at a White Sox game, so there are a few things you should know.
First, it’s not easy. You’re standing out there by yourself, everybody is watching, and that 60 feet, 6 inches suddenly feels a LOT farther than it looks.
And George W. Bush did it wearing a bulletproof vest under his FDNY pullover. (As I mentioned yesterday, my grandfather was FDNY, so I loved that.)
Second, he did get to warm up beforehand—which most of us throwing ceremonial first pitches don’t get to do. But the last time Bush had played organized baseball was Little League. Bush himself later joked, “Little League is where I peaked.”
Third, while Bush was warming up, Derek Jeter came by. Jeter asked if he was going to throw from the mound or move up closer.
EVERYONE asks you this once you’ve thrown out a first pitch. There are two questions:
“Did you throw from the mound?” (I did.)
“Was it a strike?” (More on that in a minute.)
Bush asked Jeter what he thought. Jeter told him to throw it from the mound.
Then, as Jeter walked away, he gave the President one more piece of advice:
“Don’t bounce it. They’ll boo you.” 😂
So Bush walks out there—49 days after 9/11, in Yankee Stadium, wearing an FDNY pullover over a bulletproof vest, with the country watching. He gets on the mound. And he throws a strike.
One of the most important strikes ever thrown in baseball.
Twenty-five years later, the clip still gets me.
And, no, mine was not a strike. But it wasn’t embarrassing either. 😂
#NeverForget911
25 years in Heaven - #GenessaWells 25 years in Heaven. debmillswriter.com/?p=28748 remembering her the day before 9/11 with her favorite song by @dennisjernigan
Deb Mills retweeted
New research shows even moderate drinking causes long-term brain shrinkage, challenging long-held assumptions about safe alcohol limits.
For years, social guidelines suggested that moderate alcohol consumption—like a daily glass of wine or pint of beer—was relatively harmless. However, a major study published in Nature Communications has proven that wrong.
By analyzing brain scans from over 36,000 adults, researchers found a direct link between regular alcohol intake and reduced brain volume, affecting both gray and white matter. Strikingly, the negative effects begin at consumption levels equivalent to less than one standard drink per day, with the risk rising exponentially with every additional beverage.
As alcohol intake increases, the biological toll accelerates significantly. In 50-year-olds, transitioning from one to two drinks daily was associated with brain changes equivalent to aging two years, while moving to three drinks a day aged the brain by three and a half years. Beyond accelerated aging, chronic heavy drinking can starve the brain of essential nutrients like thiamine, potentially triggering severe, irreversible disorders such as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, often referred to as 'wet brain.' While the brain possesses some capacity to recover through neuroplasticity when drinking stops, scientists warn that much of the cognitive damage and structural loss can become permanent.
source: Daviet, R., Aydogan, G., Jagannathan, K., Spilka, N., Koellinger, P. D., Kranzler, H. R., Nave, G., & Wetherill, R. R. (2022). Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank. Nature Communications.
Wow! @DavesSoapbox
A Hero That Trusted His Intuition.
The problem wasn’t that Morgan Stanley didn’t believe him.
Rick Rescorla had already been right once. After the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, the firm’s security chief walked the towers, studied the site, and reached a conclusion most people preferred not to hear: the World Trade Center was still a target. Next time, he said, it would not be a truck. It would be an airplane.
An airplane. In a 1993 report.
Executives listened. Then they looked at the lease.
Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the complex—twenty-two floors of the South Tower, thousands of brokers, and a trading infrastructure that could not be packed into boxes and wheeled across the Hudson.
They literally made it a trading center.
The contract with the Port Authority ran until 2006. Walking away from premium Manhattan space of that scale would have meant penalties measured in the hundreds of millions, plus the operational chaos of relocating an entire downtown machine. So the company stayed.
Rescorla adjusted. If they could not leave the building, they would learn to escape it.
He built a protocol and treated it like doctrine. Unannounced drills. No exemptions. Brokers who billed by the minute were pulled off their desks and sent into the stairwells two by two, starting from the top floors, leaving a lane for firefighters coming the other way.
People complained. He did not care. Practice, he believed, was the only thing that would beat panic.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. From the 44th floor of the South Tower, Rescorla could see the fire. Then the Port Authority came over the speakers: the South Tower was secure. Stay at your desks.
Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and ignored them.
He started the drill his people already knew by heart. Floor by floor, two by two, down the stairs. He sang as he moved—Cornish songs from childhood, then “God Bless America”—keeping the line moving, refusing to let the stairwell become a stampede. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane struck the South Tower.
By then, most of Morgan Stanley was already on the way out.
Of the 2,687 employees in the building that morning, all but 13 survived.
It was stunning.
Rescorla could have been outside with them. He went back up instead. Colleagues told him to leave. He said he would, as soon as he was sure no one was left behind.
He was last seen around the 10th floor, heading higher.
The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. They never found him.
He was one of the 13.
He was a hero in every sense of the word.
Remember Rick Rescorla, he remembered for us.
Deb Mills retweeted
In any relationship, there will be frightening spells in which your feelings of love dry up. And when that happens you must remember that the essence of marriage is that it is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. So what do you do? You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling. You may not feel tender, sympathetic, and eager to please, but in your actions you must BE tender, understanding, forgiving and helpful. And, if you do that, as time goes on you will not only get through the dry spells, but they will become less frequent and deep, and you will become more constant in your feelings. This is what can happen if you decide to love.
All Dolly.
Here's a story I did not know about Dolly Parton until now. When she left the Porter Wagoner Show, Wagoner sued her for breach of contract, and she eventually settled it with him. Years later he fell into financial distress, so he sold the publishing rights to his music to an anonymous buyer in order to raise cash to pay off his debts.
As you can guess, the anonymous buyer was actually Dolly Parton. And what she did next was all Dolly. She gave him back the rights to his music catalog as a gift. She never held a grudge. I guess that's why Pat Boone called her the purest person he ever knew.
Wow! @DollyParton You have loved and influenced so many! Enjoy Jesus, Dear One!
Deb Mills retweeted
In 1988 Dolly Parton pulled every 7th and 8th grader in Sevier County into a room and told them to pick a buddy.
She made them sign a contract.. if BOTH graduate, she hands you both $500. One fails, nobody gets paid.
The county dropout rate went from 35% to 6%.
She handed out the checks herself.
In 1989 she offered $500 to every kid in the county who wanted to go to the local college.
When Gatlinburg burned in 2016, she sent 900 families $1,000 a month for six months.
You've probably heard that part.
Here's the part you haven't:
The fund raised more than expected, so she showed up in May and handed every one of those families another $5,000 on top.
Then she quietly put $3 million into the recovery group that handles the years after the news trucks leave.
She built her county an entire hospital.
She played a benefit concert in 2007, Dollywood and the Stampede matched it, and LeConte Medical Center opened in 2010 with a birthing unit and a women's center in it.
In 2022 she started covering 100% of tuition, books, and fees for Dollywood employees.
Full-time, part-time, AND seasonal.
In 1991 she paid for a bald eagle sanctuary because the birds couldn't be released back into the wild, no press release.
And when Hurricane Helene came through here in Western North Carolina, she wrote a personal check for $1 million and her companies matched it.
She didn't owe North Carolina anything, but she helped us anyway.
She started the Imagination Library because her daddy couldn't read or write. Before he passed, he told her it was the most important thing she ever did.
Rest in Peace, Dolly 🇺🇸
So good...in the midst of medical stuff. He is worthy of praise.
Flashback: Even in your hardest times, you still have so much to be grateful for...Christian, make it your commitment to pray in the hardest times and give thanks to God for his many mercies.
challies.com/articles/when-y…
Deb Mills retweeted
No one ever understood her own place in American life more deeply, or embraced it with more gusto, than Dolly Parton. This was a woman who understood the assignment. She was a kind of living national monument—her lines drawn brighter and her colors more saturated than seemed possible in real life. But there she was: realer than real.
Others might have been tormented by the role she was thrust into. But Parton always seemed totally at peace with what she meant to people. She took in all that adoration and desire, a weight of public love that would have crushed a weaker soul, and converted it into ten trillion watts of gratitude and joy. I believe it was her faith that taught her to do that.
When you visit the Grand Canyon for the first time, you think: it can’t really be everything it’s been made out to be, everything it is on the postcards. And then there it is, like a drawing of itself that you’ve stepped into. Watching Dolly was like visiting the Grand Canyon. She really was all that, and no description you wrote of her could do her justice.
Look at the way she works the crowd in this clip: totally in control of her image, totally self-aware about it, standing outside to wink at it while also inhabiting it fully. She was more than a caricature; she was ten times as sophisticated as any knowing commentary on her could ever be. She was like America: simple and sincere yet totally overpowering and bemused by her own wonderful extravagance—me? Here? Would you believe it!
There will never be another. It was her faith that made her heart able to take all that. It will be her faith that leads her home. RIP.
#WorshipWednesday - "The Jesus Way" revisited. And #DollyParton - debmillswriter.com/?p=34501 - @philwickham
Deb Mills retweeted
Dolly Parton’s grandpa pastored a little church called House of Prayer.
That is where she learned to love Jesus.
Don't despise small churches or the power of prayer.
Real love for Jesus makes a big impact.
