Guarding Our Kids Against Monsters is a profound exploration by David Humphrey and Shawn Sellers, lifelong friends and Masonic brothers deeply concerned about child safety in today’s digital world. Drawing on David’s extensive background in law enforcement, business ownership, and anti-human trafficking efforts, alongside Shawn’s expertise in Religious Studies, education, and coaching, the book uncovers the hidden threats facing children, particularly online. Driven by personal and professional experiences, including a disturbing betrayal by a friend involved in child exploitation, David and Shawn illuminate the stark realities of human trafficking and other dangers targeting children. Their work serves as a comprehensive resource, offering practical insights, strategies, and poignant real-life narratives to empower caregivers and young individuals to navigate the complexities of the digital landscape safely. This exploration challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about what the authors metaphorically term the Devil’s Playground—where predators exploit the internet’s anonymity and accessibility to groom and harm children. It underscores the critical need for heightened awareness, vigilance, and proactive measures to protect childhood innocence and ensure a safer online environment. Through expert analysis and passionate advocacy, David and Shawn aim to inspire collective action and foster a community dedicated to shielding children from the unseen dangers lurking in the digital shadows. This book is a call to action for parents, educators, policymakers, and technology companies to unite to defend our society’s most vulnerable members. It offers practical guidance for creating a protective environment where children can thrive and grow without fear of exploitation or harm.

Guarding Our Kids Against Monsters is a profound exploration by David Humphrey and Shawn Sellers, lifelong friends and Masonic brothers deeply concerned about child safety in today's digital world. Drawing on David's extensive background in law enforcement, business ownership, and anti-human trafficking efforts, alongside Shawn's expertise in Religious Studies, education, and coaching, the book uncovers the hidden threats facing children, particularly online. Driven by personal and professional experiences, including a disturbing betrayal by a friend involved in child exploitation, David and Shawn illuminate the stark realities of human trafficking and other dangers targeting children. Their work serves as a comprehensive resource, offering practical insights, strategies, and poignant real-life narratives to empower caregivers and young individuals to navigate the complexities of the digital landscape safely. This exploration challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about what the authors metaphorically term the Devil's Playground-where predators exploit the internet's anonymity and accessibility to groom and harm children. It underscores the critical need for heightened awareness, vigilance, and proactive measures to protect childhood innocence and ensure a safer online environment. Through expert analysis and passionate advocacy, David and Shawn aim to inspire collective action and foster a community dedicated to shielding children from the unseen dangers lurking in the digital shadows. This book is a call to action for parents, educators, policymakers, and technology companies to unite to defend our society's most vulnerable members. It offers practical guidance for creating a protective environment where children can thrive and grow without fear of exploitation or harm.

Satan’s Playground chronicles the rise and fall of the tumultuous and lucrative gambling industry that developed just south of the U.S.-Mexico border in the early twentieth century. As prohibitions against liquor, horse racing, gambling, and prostitution swept the United States, the vice industry flourished in and around Tijuana, to the extent that reformers came to call the town “Satan’s Playground,” unintentionally increasing its licentious allure. The area was dominated by Agua Caliente, a large, elegant gaming resort opened by four entrepreneurial Border Barons (three Americans and one Mexican) in 1928. Diplomats, royalty, film stars, sports celebrities, politicians, patricians, and nouveau-riche capitalists flocked to Agua Caliente’s luxurious complex of casinos, hotels, cabarets, and sports extravaganzas, and to its world-renowned thoroughbred racetrack. Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Louis B. Mayer, the Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and the boxer Jack Dempsey were among the regular visitors. So were mobsters such as Bugsy Siegel, who later cited Agua Caliente as his inspiration for building the first such resort on what became the Las Vegas Strip. Less than a year after Agua Caliente opened, gangsters held up its money-car in transit to a bank in San Diego, killing the courier and a guard and stealing the company money pouch. Paul J. Vanderwood weaves the story of this heist gone wrong, the search for the killers, and their sensational trial into the overall history of the often-chaotic development of Agua Caliente, Tijuana, and Southern California. Drawing on newspaper accounts, police files, court records, personal memoirs, oral histories, and “true detective” magazines, he presents a fascinating portrait of vice and society in the Jazz Age, and he makes a significant contribution to the history of the U.S.-Mexico border.

OVER 500,000 SOLD IN THE PRAYING THE SCRIPTURES SERIES As parents of adult children, we often worry about whether our children will make good choices when they're on their own. Praying the Scriptures for Your Adult Children provides you with biblically based prayers and encouraging stories to guide you as you pray for your adult children through anything they face. Parent and author Jodie Berndt understands what it's like to release children into the world and still care deeply about them and everything they're up against in life. In Praying the Scriptures for Your Adult Children, Jodie shares prayers designed with your adult children in mind, whether they're just leaving the nest, flying well on their own, or struggling to take off at all. Jodie shares advice on navigating all aspects of adulthood with encouraging stories from experienced parents who are praying their children through real-life issues like leaving the church, struggling with health concerns, navigating broken marriages, fighting addiction, dealing with financial problems, and more. In Praying the Scriptures for Your Adult Children, Jodie addresses some of the most difficult questions that confront parents: How can I support my children when they make decisions I disagree with? Is it too late to start praying for my children? What does the Bible teach us about praying for our children? With the grace and wisdom of someone who's been there, Jodie shares the tools and encouragement you need to find the strength to keep praying, even as you doubt yourself and grieve over your children's choices. Whatever you're praying for, Praying the Scriptures for Your Adult Children will help you find confidence and peace taken straight from Scripture, guiding you to the bedrock of God's promises as you release your children to God's shepherding care.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A classic he-said-she-said romantic comedy! This updated anniversary edition offers story-behind-the-story revelations from author Wendelin Van Draanen. The first time she saw him, she flipped. The first time he saw her, he ran. That was the second grade, but not much has changed by the seventh. Juli says: “My Bryce. Still walking around with my first kiss.” He says: “It’s been six years of strategic avoidance and social discomfort.” But in the eighth grade everything gets turned upside down: just as Bryce is thinking that there’s maybe more to Juli than meets the eye, she’s thinking that he’s not quite all he seemed. This is a classic romantic comedy of errors told in alternating chapters by two fresh, funny voices. The updated anniversary edition contains 32 pages of extra backmatter: essays from Wendelin Van Draanen on her sources of inspiration, on the making of the movie of Flipped, on why she’ll never write a sequel, and a selection of the amazing fan mail she’s received. Awards and accolades for Flipped: SLJ Top 100 Children’s Novels of all time IRA-CBC Children’s Choice IRA Teacher’s Choice Honor winner, Judy Lopez Memorial Award/WNBA Winner of the California Young Reader Medal “We flipped over this fantastic book, its gutsy girl Juli and its wise, wonderful ending.” — The Chicago Tribune “Van Draanen has another winner in this eighth-grade ‘he-said, she-said’ romance. A fast, funny, egg-cellent winner.” — SLJ, Starred review “With a charismatic leading lady kids will flip over, a compelling dynamic between the two narrators and a resonant ending, this novel is a great deal larger than the sum of its parts.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred review