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ultrakouka · 5 years ago

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Senators - The Danger of Trump

Dear Senator,

I am sending this information to you as a concerned citizen and as a Christian. ( Yes, there are evangelical Christians in Massachusetts. ) I am upset with the unequivocal backing of Donald J Trump by the Republican Party when , at the start of the 2016 election, the Republican Party did not want him to be their candidate. And now, former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry stated that Donald Trump was chosen by God to be president. He said throughout history God had picked “imperfect people” such as King David or Solomon to lead their people. ( See article below ) This statement mirrors the thrust of the late Doug Coe and his religious group “The Family” who subtely influenced our federal government officials for years. ( See the Netflix special on “The Family” and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Coe ). Yes, God chose David to be king of Israel. Yes, David was imperfect. They failed to continue the story about the affair with Bathsheba and then the murder of her husband. That God punished David severely. ( read 2 Samuel 11 - 2 Samuel 18 ) Here is basically what was said: “ 2 Samuel 12:9 Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. 10 Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.’ “ David sinned in God’s eyes and was punished, severely. Once again read 2 Samuel 11 - 2 Samuel 18.

From the New Testament 1John 3:4 “ Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.” 1John3:10 “This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister.” Please read all of 1John3.

Let’s get back to Rick Perry. He flip flops on policy. “Perry said using foreign aid as a policy tool against foreign countries that violate the human rights of homosexuals was "not in America's interests" and was part of a "war on traditional American values”.” Now Perry wants to use foreign aid as a policy tool? “Two weeks after the inquiry was launched, Trump claimed in a conference call with Congressional Republican leaders that he had only made the telephone call at Perry's urging.” Here is another topic in which Perry did a flip flop. “In 2016, The Texas Tribune wrote that "Perry has long been a critic of building a wall or fence along the border."[118] After Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Perry backtracked and fully embraced Trump's proposed border wall.”

Why am I bringing Rick Perry into the discussion? INC Christianity of which “we found, to have some close ties to conservative politicians, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry and more recently President Donald Trump. Now to the First Amendment to our Constitution to which our President and Representatives have sworn an oath to uphold.

In United States law, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, together with that Amendment's Free Exercise Clause, form the constitutional right of freedom of religion. The relevant constitutional text is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...".

The Establishment Clause was based on a number of precedents, including the Constitutions of Clarendon, the Bill of Rights 1689, and the Pennsylvania and New Jersey colonial constitutions. An initial draft by John Dickinson was prepared in conjunction with his drafting the Articles of Confederation. In 1789, then-congressman James Madison prepared another draft which, following discussion and debate in the First Congress, would become part of the text of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The second half of the Establishment Clause includes the Free Exercise Clause, which allows individual citizens freedom from governmental interference in both private and public religious affairs.

The Establishment Clause is a limitation placed upon the United States Congress preventing it from passing legislation forcing an establishment of religion, broadly making it illegal for the government to promote theocracy or promote a specific religion with taxes. The second half of the Establishment Clause inherently prohibits the government from preventing the free exercise of religion. While the Establishment Clause does prohibit Congress from preferring or elevating one religion over another, it does not prohibit the government's entry into the religious domain to make accommodations for religious observances and practices in order to achieve the purposes of the Free Exercise Clause. Furthermore, it does not prevent the placement of religious symbols on government premises.

The problem that we have here is that the First Amendment does not prohibit the influence of religion on our government, which is exactly what is happening at this very moment. From the conversation.com : “A large number of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that God has chosen Donald Trump to advance the kingdom of God on Earth. Several high-profile religious leaders have made similar claims, often comparing Trump to King Cyrus who was asked by God to rescue the nation of Israel from exile in Babylon.” Here is the problem with INC Christianity: “INC beliefs, however, are different. Most INC Christian groups we studied seek to bring heaven or God’s intended perfect society to Earth by placing “kingdom-minded people” in powerful positions at the top of all sectors of society. These “seven mountains of culture” include business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion. In this form of “trickle-down Christianity,” they believe if Christians rise to the top of all seven “mountains,” society will be completely transformed.

“The goal of this new movement is transforming social units like cities, ethnic groups, nations rather than individuals,” one INC leader we interviewed explained. “If Christians permeate each mountain and rise to the top of all seven mountains…society would have biblical morality, people would live in harmony, there would be peace and not war, there would be no poverty.”

We heard these ideas repeatedly in most of our interviews, at events we attended and in INC media materials.

Most significantly, since the 2016 presidential election, some INC leaders have released public statements claiming that the Trump presidency is part of fulfilling God’s plan to “bring heaven to Earth” by placing believers in top posts, including Perry, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson.”

Here is what Jesus said : John 18:36. “Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.’” What are these INC Christians thinking? “A large number of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that God has chosen Donald Trump to advance the kingdom of God on Earth.” Jesus has said that His kingdom is not here , but “from another place.” Do you know who’s kingdom IS here?��

Read Matthew chapter 4: Matt 4:1 “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted[a] by the devil. “ Matt 4:8 “ Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Why am I writing this? BECAUSE!! It is not God’s plan to have his kingdom here. Please read the following:

Matt 24:29-32

“Immediately after the distress of those days

“‘the sun will be darkened,

and the moon will not give its light;

the stars will fall from the sky,

and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’[b]

30 “Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth[c] will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.[d] 31 And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.

32 “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. 33 Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it[e] is near, right at the door. 34 Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. 35 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

Did we see this? Matthew 24:35 Heaven and earth will pass away.

Will we be sheep or goats?

Matt 25:31-46

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Read Matt24:35 “ Heaven and earth will pass away..”

If Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world” and “Heaven and earth will pass away” Then the INC Christians are wrong in their efforts. Matthew chapter 4 tells us who’s kingdom is here on earth, and it is not the one Jesus or God will establish.

My point: Our representatives in all three branches of our government should not be swayed or even listen to these so called Christians. Our founding fathers insisted as stated in the First Amendment that there was to be a separation of church and state. But, as I have stated before, the amendment is has only one direction - government influence down to control

religion. It does not prohibit the influence of religion up to and through our government. I think that our founding fathers intended the First Amendment to be a two way street, not the one way avenue that it has become.

Why this rant? Back to R Perry and his flip flopping and influence on DJT POTUS. DJT called the Ukranian president after Rick Perry asked him to make the call. Seems like Mr Trump really does not have any clear ideas about what policies he should have and is open to “anyone” influencing those ideas. Because he is so easily influenced , DJT has and is making BAD decisions. He is the President of the United States of America !! He is in charge of our national security! His actions have undermined the office of the President and of Congress. Yes, he was elected to office. But, he is incompetent. Have you heard of the Peter Principle?

To my Democratic Senators : Please vote to Impeach. You are correct that DJT is a threat to our national security. To the threat to our national security please note these reported events about DJT-POTUS :

1) September 18, 2019 Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “played” Pres Trump. Who else has “played” Trump. Maybe the President of Turkey?

2) September 18, 2019 Trump visits the US-Mexico border to talk about his wall. After discussing some of the wall’s technological features, Lt Gen. Todd Semonite, acting head of the Army Corps, says, “Sir, there could be some merit in not discussing that.” Sure - give away military secrets. Isn’t that treason? A high crime?

3) September 9, 2019. CNN reports that the U.S. successfully extracted a high-level covert asset from Russia in 2017 because of “ concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.” The decision came after Trump spilled classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak during a may 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.

To my Republican Senators : Mr Trump is an embarrassment to the office of the President and to this country. The few policies that he does have go counter to my understanding of what a Christian should be. The Democrats have given you the opportunity to remove him from office and to spare this country from more of his idiotic claims and rants. You will still have a Republican in office as President, and control of the Senate. Do us all a favor - remove DJT from office.

And my response to Romans 13:1 “ Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” Jesus did not question the physical authority of the Romans, but he did separate authority on earth from God’s authority in Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, and Luke 20:25 when “He said to them, “Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” . Here is what was happening at that moment :

Luke 20:20-25 “Paying Taxes to Caesar”

20 Keeping a close watch on him, they sent spies, who pretended to be sincere. They hoped to catch Jesus in something he said, so that they might hand him over to the power and authority of the governor. 21 So the spies questioned him: “Teacher, we know that you speak and teach what is right, and that you do not show partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. 22 Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

23 He saw through their duplicity and said to them, 24 “Show me a denarius. Whose image and inscription are on it?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

25 He said to them, “Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

26 They were unable to trap him in what he had said there in public. And astonished by his answer, they became silent.”

Remember John 4:24. “ God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

The truth is that the coming kingdom of God is NOT going to be here on earth. Please do not let anyone influence our government to act in a way that expects that outcome. Resist the one way street that the First amendment has become.

December20, 2019

The following is for your reference :

FROM: Wikipedia ( a web site that DJ Trump likes )

Perry said using foreign aid as a policy tool against foreign countries that violate the human rights of homosexuals was "not in America's interests" and was part of a "war on traditional American values".[96]

In 2016, The Texas Tribune wrote that "Perry has long been a critic of building a wall or fence along the border."[118] After Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Perry backtracked and fully embraced Trump's proposed border wall.

A July 25, 2019 telephone call between Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky led in September to a whistleblower complaint and an impeachment inquiry against Trump. Two weeks after the inquiry was launched, Trump claimed in a conference call with Congressional Republican leaders that he had only made the telephone call at Perry's urging.[165] Perry's spokesperson said that Perry had suggested Trump discuss energy security with Zelensky, but energy was not mentioned in the publicly released memo about the conversations, which instead focused on Trump asking Zelensky to launch investigations into Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Crowdstrike, and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.[166] Per Trump's direction earlier this year, Perry spoke with Rudy Giuliani about Ukraine, which Mick Mulvaney confirmed.[167][168][169] Perry denied ever mentioning the Bidens in his discussions with Trump or Ukrainian officials.[170] Mulvaney had put Gordon Sondland, Kurt Volker, and Perry in charge of managing the Ukraine–United States relations instead of diplomats at the National Security Council and the US Department of State.[171][172]

Perry was mentioned in October 2019 by former U.S. officials in relation to reports he planned to have Amos Hochstein replaced as a member of the board at Naftogaz with someone aligned with Republican interests. Perry denied the reports.[173][174] In November 2019, both Sondland and David Holmes, who serves as counselor of political affairs at the U.S Embassy in Ukraine, testified that Perry had played a senior role in the Ukraine campaign, with Holmes even describing Perry, along with Sondland and Volker, was one of the "Three Amigos" who directly assisted both Trump and Giuliani.[175][176][177][178][179]

US Energy Secretary Rick Perry urged President Donald Trump to talk with Ukraine’s newly elected president, a suggestion that resulted in the telephone call that has triggered House Democrats to launch an impeachment inquiry.

“Secretary Perry absolutely supported and encouraged the president to speak to the new president of Ukraine to discuss matters related to their energy security and economic development,” spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes said Saturday after the Axios website reported on comments it said the president made about Perry and the origins of the call.

According to the website, Trump told House Republicans on Friday during a conference call that he spoke with President Volodymyr Zelensky at Perry’s urging.

The only reason I made the call was because Rick asked me to. Something about an LNG [liquefied natural gas] plant.”

Hynes said Friday that Perry wasn’t on the call between Trump and Zelensky.

As energy secretary, Perry has regularly travelled to Eastern Europe to promote the sale of US-produced natural gas and coal.

Perry told confidants in recent days that he plans to resign from the Trump administration by the end of the year. ( How convenient. Me)

While Perry’s contacts with Ukraine have drawn him into the impeachment inquiry into Trump by House Democrats, three people said his expected departure was not related to the Ukraine controversy, POLITICO reported last week.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment investigation after a whistle-blower lodged a complaint about Trump asking Zelensky to look into investigating former US vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The complaint mentioned Perry, who led a small US delegation to Zelensky’s inauguration in May, replacing US Vice-President Mike Pence.

Trump has openly called on China as well as Ukraine to investigate Biden.

Trump alleges that Biden, as vice-president in 2014, tried to block a Ukraine corruption probe into his son Hunter’s business partner, a Ukraine gas tycoon, using US aid as leverage.

He also alleged the younger Biden used his stature to raise $1.5 billion in 2013 from China for a new investment vehicle in Beijing.

He made “millions” off these investments, Trump alleges.

Biden has responded by calling Trump “the most corrupt president we’ve had in modern history.”

No evidence has surfaced showing wrongdoing by either Biden.

US President Donald Trump fired back at Mitt Romney on Saturday morning, calling the Utah senator a “pompous 'ass'” while defending his calls for Ukraine and China to investigate political rival Joe Biden.

“Somebody please wake up Mitt Romney and tell him that my conversation with the Ukrainian President was a congenial and very appropriate one, and my statement on China pertained to corruption, not politics,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

“If Mitt worked this hard on Obama, he could have won. Sadly, he choked!

“Mitt Romney never knew how to win. He is a pompous ‘ass’ who has been fighting me from the beginning, except when he begged me for my endorsement for his Senate run (I gave it to him), and when he begged me to be Secretary of State (I didn’t give it to him). He is so bad for R’s!” Trump wrote.

FROM: Theconversation.com

In a recent interview with Fox News, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry stated that Donald Trump was chosen by God to be president. He said throughout history God had picked “imperfect people” such as King David or Solomon to lead their people.

Perry is not alone. A large number of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that God has chosen Donald Trump to advance the kingdom of God on Earth. Several high-profile religious leaders have made similar claims, often comparing Trump to King Cyrus who was asked by God to rescue the nation of Israel from exile in Babylon.

Many of these Christians are part of a movement that we call “Independent Network Charismatic,” or “INC Christianity” in our 2017 book.

Leaders such Rick Perry are connected to this movement. Eight years ago – in August of 2011 – more than 30,000 people cheered wildly when Perry, who was then a U.S. presidential candidate and Texas governor, came center stage at “The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis” at Reliant Stadium in Houston. Perry quoted from the Bible and preached about the need for salvation that comes from Jesus. Many of the leaders who organized this event are the same leaders who claim that Trump is God’s chosen to advance the Kingdom of God.

We argue that INC Christianity is significantly changing the religious landscape in America – and the nation’s politics.

Here is what we found about INC

INC Christianity is led by a network of popular independent religious entrepreneurs, often referred to by their followers as “apostles.” They have close ties, we found, to some conservative politicians, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry and more recently President Donald Trump.

Charismatic Christians emphasize supernatural miracles and divine interventions, but INC Christianity is different from other charismatics – and other Christian denominations in general – in the following ways:

It is not focused primarily on building congregations but rather on spreading beliefs and practices through media, conferences and ministry schools.

It is not so much about proselytizing to unbelievers as it is about transforming society through placing Christian believers in powerful positions in all sectors of society.

It is organized as a network of independent leaders rather than as formally organized denominations.

Finding followers

INC Christianity is the fastest-growing Christian group in America and possibly around the world. Over the 40 years from 1970 to 2010, the number of regular attenders of Protestant churches as a whole shrunk by an average of .05% per year, while independent neo-charismatic congregations, the category that includes INC groups, grew by an average of 3.24% per year.

Its impact, however, is much greater than can be measured in church attendance. This is because INC Christianity is not centrally concerned with building congregations, but spreading beliefs and practices.

The influence of INC Christianity can be seen in the millions of hits on many of their web-based media sites, large turnouts at stadium rallies and conferences and millions of dollars in media sales.

In interviews, leaders of Bethel, an INC ministry based in Redding, California, claimed to have had an income of US$8.4 million in media sales in 2013. This included music, books, DVDs and web-based content. Another $7 million came from tuition to the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry.

Sean Feucht, one of Bethel’s popular musicians and worship leaders, is now running for Congress in California’s Third Congressional District.

Appeal of INC

As part of our research, we conducted in-depth interviews with senior leaders, staff and current and former participants in INC Christian ministries. We also conducted supplementary interviews with Christian leaders and scholars with knowledge of the changing religious landscape and attended conferences, numerous church services, ministry school sessions, healing sessions and exorcisms. In all, we conducted 41 in-depth interviews.

Our primary conclusion is that the growth of these groups is largely the result of the informal way in which the network is governed. When compared to the oversight and accountability of formal congregations and denominations, the network allows for more experimentation. This includes “extreme” experiences of the supernatural, unorthodox beliefs and practices, and financing as well as marketing techniques that leverage the power of the internet.

We also witnessed the appeal of INC Christianity, particularly among young people. We saw the thrill of holding impromptu supernatural healing sessions in the emergency room of a large public hospital, the intrigue of ministry school class sessions devoted to the techniques of casting out demonic spirits and the adventure of teams of young people going out into public places, seeking direct guidance from God as to whom to heal or to relay specific divine messages.

‘Seven mountains of culture’

Most Christian groups in America have seen the role of the church as connecting individuals to God through the saving grace of Jesus and building congregations that provide communities of meaning and belonging through worship services.

They also believe in serving and providing for the needs their local communities. Such traditional Christian groups believe that although the world can be improved, it will not be restored to God’s original plan until Jesus comes back again to rule the Earth.

INC beliefs, however, are different. Most INC Christian groups we studied seek to bring heaven or God’s intended perfect society to Earth by placing “kingdom-minded people” in powerful positions at the top of all sectors of society. These “seven mountains of culture” include business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion. In this form of “trickle-down Christianity,” they believe if Christians rise to the top of all seven “mountains,” society will be completely transformed.

We heard these ideas repeatedly in most of our interviews, at events we attended and in INC media materials.

Changing the landscape

INC Christianity is a movement to watch. If it continues to draw adherents in large numbers in the future, as we predict, it will produce a growing number of Christians who see their goal not just as saving souls but as transforming society by taking control over its institutions.

While the Ukraine scandal, family separations at the border, and allegations of corruption have made some evangelical Christians question their support of Donald Trump, most of those steeped in INC Christianity will never abandon their president.

To them, as we found, to oppose Donald Trump is to oppose God who chose him specifically to bring America and the world back to God.

This is an updated version of a piece first published on March 15, 2017.

FROM: Christian Science Monitor. June 18, 2018

When Julie Frady planned to make a poster to protest the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” immigration policy last week, she wanted to find the perfect Bible verse to stand against it, she says, one nobody else would expect.

She’s voted Republican most all of her life, but Ms. Frady, an evangelical Christian who lives in Wichita, Kan., says she’s been “appalled” by the Trump administration’s practice of separating immigrant children from their parents. And she’s been especially appalled, she says, at the administration’s stated purpose to use the practice as a deterrent to other immigrant families thinking of crossing the border illegally.

Since she joined about 60 protesters who marched in front of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Delano, Kan., Thursday, more and more people across the United States, and from across its often-polarized political spectrum, have begun to express deep moral reservations at the logistical realities of the practice.

Former first lady Laura Bush called the zero-tolerance policy “cruel” and “immoral” on Sunday, and first lady Melania Trump spoke out in favor of a resolution that would reunite families as well. Conservatives in Congress, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Trump loyalists, have also voiced their opposition.

But in many ways, it was evangelical Christians, including some of President Trump’s most vocal supporters, who first began to change the course of the national conversation about immigration.

As federal agencies began to put into place the actual protocols of separating, detaining, and then finding suitable care for more than 11,400 immigrant children in custody – including about 2,000 taken from their parents since the Trump administration began its “zero tolerance” policy in April – many Evangelicals began to speak out against it.

Before opposition to the policy began to dominate the national conversation, Frady decided to use a verse from the small Book of Obadiah for her poster. The Hebrew prophet condemns the nation of Edom for closing its borders to Israelite refugees fleeing the Babylonians.

In multiple colors, she drew: “The LORD declares: You should NOT stand at the crossroads to cut down fleeing REFUGEES … in the day of their DISTRESS.”

It’s in many ways a defining feature of American Evangelical identity: the centrality of Scripture for both personal piety and political action.

“I place an extremely high value on the authority of Scripture, and the place it should hold in our lives,” says Frady, a lay leader who often leads Bible studies at Northwest Free Methodist Church, a small congregation in Wichita, where she also plays tenor sax for morning worship. “I would not knowingly go against something I thought the Bible commanded, no matter how I felt about it.”

Indeed, the Bible, and the voices of Evangelicals around the country, have become a focus of the debate.

The Rev. Franklin Graham, one of the president’s most outspoken evangelical supporters, called the policy “disgraceful” last week. “It's terrible to see families ripped apart, and I don’t support that one bit,” he said.

The Evangelical Immigration Table, which includes pastors from the president’s group of faith advisers, wrote a letter to the president earlier this month, calling for the end to the policy. “As evangelical Christians guided by the Bible, one of our core convictions is that God has established the family as the fundamental building block of society,” members of the coalition wrote. “The traumatic effects of this separation on these young children, which could be devastating and long-lasting, are of utmost concern.”

The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the nation and one of the most politically and theologically conservative, overwhelmingly passed an immigration resolution at its annual meeting last week. The resolution called for immigration reforms that would include a path to legal status for those here illegally – which has long been anathema to most Evangelicals. Such reforms should maintain “the priority of family unity,” the convention proclaimed, and should “[honor] the value and dignity of those seeking a better life for themselves and their families.”

“It’s been a really interesting week or so,” says David Gushee, an professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta, and an Evangelical.

“I don't think we should be using Scripture to defend any of these laws. My question is: How does love demand us to act?” said Sister Phyllis Peters, a Roman Catholic nun, speaking at a roundtable in Brownsville, Texas, Monday afternoon after elected officials visited the Casa Padre and Casa Presidents children's shelters in the city. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, (D) of Texas, called on Evangelicals, Mr. Graham, and other religious leaders to act, saying, “It will take that kind of spirit that is nonpartisan, religious, social, and humanitarian, and I think that group is much stronger than the federal government at this time. We must stand up to the federal government when it is necessary, and it is necessary now.”

Still, white Evangelicals have been Trump’s most ardent supporters from the start, and as a group they remain the most supportive of his administration’s immigration policies, polls suggest.

And Evangelicals within the Trump administration, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, invoked the Bible to defend the policy of separating children.

Discussing the “concerns raised by our church friends about separating families,” Mr. Sessions told an audience in Fort Wayne, Ind., last week, “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

Later, Ms. Sanders told reporters that “it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible.”

On the one hand, it speaks to the power and influence that Evangelicals wield in US politics, notes Professor Gushee, given that a political debate over immigration policy became a debate over biblical interpretation. “Only in America, really, and only in America in the 21st century and with a conservative Republican government, would we be having these public biblical arguments about immigration policy.”

The fraught history of Romans 13

Yet after Sessions invoked Romans 13, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established,” Christians, including many white Evangelicals, pointed out the long history of this passage, a passage that Gushee says “has been used and abused by tyrants and governments doing injustice for centuries.”

“There are two dominant places in American history when Romans 13 is invoked,” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, to The Washington Post. “One is during the American Revolution [when] it was invoked by loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution.”

The other was in the middle of the 19th century, to support defense of the Fugitive Slave Act, Professor Fea continued. “I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”

Steven Colbert, a devout Roman Catholic and the host of “The Late Show,” suggested Thursday that the attorney general continue reading the passage on submitting to civil authorities through Romans 13:8-10. “Love thy neighbor as thyself. Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”

Trump has been backtracking from his policy of zero tolerance, falsely asserting that his hands are tied, and that Democrats are the ones responsible for legal requirements that his administration is only enforcing.

But as the Monitor reported in March 2017, the Trump White House has been mulling separating children from their families as a deterrent policy from the first months of the administration. After an outcry from religious leaders, however, the plan was postponed.

‘Prosecutorial discretion’ vs. ‘zero tolerance’

The Obama administration, too, separated immigrant children from their parents, advocates note. And it also greatly expanded a policy of detaining mothers with children in expanded facilities. If a father crossed the border illegally with a child, they would typically be separated.

“The separation of families at the border is not new,” says Christina Fialho, co-executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, who advocates for immigrants being held at places like the private, for-profit Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. “Under the Obama administration, we worked with hundreds of parents who were separated from their family in home raids, including mothers who were still nursing young children.”

The difference, however, was that the Obama administration maintained a policy of “prosecutorial discretion”: the focus of resources on known, dangerous individuals, rather than “zero tolerance,” an adherence to the letter of the law in all instances.

“We realized that we had limited resources in what we could do,” says Kevin Fandl, who worked as a senior counsel for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from 2007 to 2013. “We believed we should target those resources toward the most serious threats to the country, those threats being convicted felons or those with a criminal history, terrorists, threats for national security, and recent border crossers, those people with no ties whatsoever to the United States.”

“Everybody else was considered a really low level for enforcement, which encouraged agents to say, ‘OK, if we spot a family with children, we’re probably not going to spend much time with them,’ ” Mr. Fandl continues. Sometimes, if they were picked up, the policy of “catch and release” allowed families with children to enter the country after being given a Notice to Appear order – which, he admits, no one expected them to do.

For critics, however, this created a perverse incentive. “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” said Stephen Miller, the president’s senior policy adviser, to The New York Times last week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

And as Sessions put it earlier this month: “If people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them. We’ve got to get this message out.”

As a result, however, the system has been severely strained. Sessions said last week that taking care of unaccompanied minors was costing taxpayers more than $1 billion a year, most now under the care of the US Department of Health and Human Services and its Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Logistically speaking, the system is not prepared to handle the care of thousands of children, says Lisa Koop, associate director of legal services for the National Immigrant Justice Center, who represents a number of immigrant woman whose children were taken from them by the US government.

“They did not know what was going on with their kids, and when we finally managed to figure that one of the kids was being detained in New York, the child’s mother [being held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center] said to me, Where is New York? Is New York far away from here?’ ” says Ms. Koop, who recounts stories of mothers having their children literally torn from their arms. “They just have no concept of where their children are, and what conditions they’re in.”

Gushee says he has been heartened by the biblical responses to Sessions’ use of Romans 13, from those on Twitter to the discussions in the media. Biblical passages that have to do with compassion and care for those suffering, and especially for “the least of these” and the most vulnerable in society, he says, “they surfaced when they were needed.”

“But the story is not just the Bible verses,” Gushee continues. “The tears and suffering of human beings whose rights are being violated speaks. That is a language that should be taken seriously. In fact, one might even say this language is revelatory.”

“To see children weeping, to see bereft parents not knowing where their children are, to learn about a man who killed himself in a detention center because he was torn apart over the destruction of his family – these stories speak, too.”

And they have spurred devout evangelical Christians like Frady to action.

“I love America,” says Frady, who wore a purple T-shirt with “Jesus was a Refugee” to the protest near her home in Wichita. “It is my homeland, and I am certainly blessed to be an American.”

“But I am also not naive to its warts,” she continues. “And this is more than a wart.”

Staff writer Henry Gass contributed to this report from Brownsville, Texas.

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dailybiblelessons · 6 years ago

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Friday: Preparation for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Revised Common Lectionary Proper 17 Roman Catholic Proper 22

Complementary Hebrew Scripture Lesson from the Torah: Exodus 32:15-35

Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain, carrying the two tablets of the covenant in his hands, tablets that were written on both sides, written on the front and on the back. The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved upon the tablets. When Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, “There is a noise of war in the camp.” But he said,

“It is not the sound made by victors, or the sound made by losers; it is the sound of revelers that I hear.”

As soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses' anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it.

Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you that you have brought so great a sin upon them?” And Aaron said, “Do not let the anger of my lord burn hot; you know the people, that they are bent on evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’¹ So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”

When Moses saw that the people were running wild (for Aaron had let them run wild, to the derision of their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, “Who is on the Lord's side? Come to me!” And all the sons of Levi gathered around him. He said to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.’” The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day. Moses said, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of a son or a brother, and so have brought a blessing on yourselves this day.”

On the next day Moses said to the people, “You have sinned a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.” So Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Alas, this people has sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written.” But the Lord said to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. But now go, lead the people to the place about which I have spoken to you; see, my angel shall go in front of you. Nevertheless, when the day comes for punishment, I will punish them for their sin.”

Then the Lord sent a plague on the people, because they made the calf—the one that Aaron made.

¹Stephen quotes this verse in his speech to the Sanhedrin. See Acts 7:40.

Semi-continuous Hebrew Scripture from The Writings: Song of Solomon 2:1-7

[The Bride] I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.

[The Groom] As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens.

[The Bride] As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention toward me was love. Sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples; for I am faint with love. O that his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand embraced me! I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the wild does: do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!

The NRSV does not give us any indication of when the speakers change or who the speakers are. The changes and speakers given here are as indicated in the MEV, except that Bride has been substituted for Woman, and Groom has been substituted for Man; the text is from the NRSV. According to the NIV, the divisions and the speakers are sometimes debatable.

Complementary Psalm 15

O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill?

Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart; who do not slander with their tongue, and do no evil to their friends, nor take up a reproach against their neighbors; in whose eyes the wicked are despised, but who honor those who fear the Lord; who stand by their oath even to their hurt; who do not lend money at interest, and do not take a bribe against the innocent.

Those who do these things shall never be moved.

Semi-continuous Psalm 45:1-2, 6-9

My heart overflows with a goodly theme; I address my verses to the king; my tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe.

You are the most handsome of men; grace is poured upon your lips; therefore God has blessed you forever.

Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever. Your royal scepter is a scepter of equity; you love righteousness and hate wickedness. Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions;¹ your robes are all fragrant with myrrh and aloes and cassia. From ivory palaces stringed instruments make you glad; daughters of kings are among your ladies of honor; at your right hand stands the queen in gold of Ophir.

¹In Hebrews 1:8-9 this verse is a description of Jesus.

New Testament Epistle Lesson: James 1:9-16

Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the field; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. It is the same way with the rich; in the midst of a busy life, they will wither away.

Blessed is anyone who endures temptation. Such a one has stood the test and will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him. No one, when tempted, should say, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one. But one is tempted by one's own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved.

Year B Ordinary 22, RCL Proper 17, Catholic Proper 22 Friday

Selections from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, copyright © 1995 by the Consultation on Common Texts. Unless otherwise indicated, Bible text is from The New Revised Standard Version, (NRSV) copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All right reserved. Footnotes in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) that show where the passage is used in the Christian Scriptures (New Testament) from Complete Jewish Bible (CJB) by David H. Stern, Copyright © 1998 and 2006 by David H. Stern, used by permission of Messianic Jewish Publishers, www.messianicjewish.net. All rights reserved worldwide. When text is taken from the CJB, the passage ends with (CJB) and the foregoing copyright notice applies. Parallel passages are as indicated in The Holy Bible Modern English Version (MEV), copyright © 2014 by Military Bible Association. Used by permission. All rights reserved. When text is taken from the MEV, the passage ends with (MEV) and the foregoing copyright notice applies. Footnotes in the Christian Scriptures (New Testament) that show where a passage from the Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) is used are from The Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®), copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. When text is taken from the NIV, the passage ends with (NIV) and the foregoing copyright notice applies. Image credit: The Torment of Saint Anthony, attributed to Michelangelo, via Wikimedia Commons. This is a public domain image.

#B Ordinary 22 Friday #temptation #trial #persevere #Moses #Aaron #calf #tablets #plague #lilly #apples #love #bride #groom

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thejudahite · 5 years ago

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For a much more complete list of known Bible translations and versions, and information of the parties listed in the Bible Lawsuit Click Here: American Standard Version (ASV) - WORDsearch Corp. Amplified Bible (AMP) - Zondervan Bible in Basic English (BBE) - WORDsearch Corp. Centenary Translation of the New Testament - WORDsearch Corp. Common English Bible - Common English Bible Complete Jewish Bible - Jewish New Testament Publications Concordant Literal New testament - Concordant Publishing Concern Contemporary English Version (CEV) - American Bible Society Darby Bible (DBY) - WORDsearch Corp. Douay-Rheims Bible - WORDsearch Corp. Easy-To-Read Version - World Bible Translation Center Elberfelder Bible 1905 - WORDsearch Corp. English Standard Version (ESV) - Crossway Books God's Word Translation (GWT) - Baker Publishing Group Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) - Broadman & Holman Holy Bible From The Ancient Eastern Text - A. J. Holman Company Interlinear Greek-English New Testament - Baker Book House International Children's Bible (ICB) - Thomas Nelson Publishers JPS Tanakh 1917 - WORDsearch Corp. King James Version 1611 - Thomas Nelson Publishers King James Version (KJV) - WORDsearch Corp. King James Version Apocrypha - WORDsearch Corp. Luther Bible 1912 - WORDsearch Corp. Mace New Testament - WORDsearch Corp. Moffatt, The New Testament: A New Translation (MOF) - WORDsearch Corp. New American Standard Bible (NASB) Bundle - Lockman Foundation New English Translation (NET) - Biblical Studies Press The Christian Counselor's New Testament - Baker Publishing Group The Geneva Bible 1599 - Tolle Lege Press The Modern Language Bible: Berkeley Version - Hendrickson Publishers The New Oxford Annotated Bible (RSV) - Oxford University Press The Webster Bible - Durrie and Peck New Century Version (NCV) - Thomas Nelson Publishers New International Version (NIV) 2011 - Zondervan New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) - Doubleday New King James Version (NKJV) - Thomas Nelson Publishers New Living Translation (NLT) - Tyndale House Publishers New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) - National Council of Churches Phillips New Testament Bible - WORDsearch Corp. Revised Standard Version Bible (RSV) - National Council of Churches The Holy Bible, The Great Light In Masonry - A. J. Holman Company The Interlinear Hebrew Greek English Bible - Associated Publishers and Authors, Inc. The Living Bible (TLB) - Tyndale House Publishers The Message (MSG) - NavPress The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures - Watchtower Bible and Tract Society The Septaugint Bible - Shekinah Enterprises The Septaugint With Apocrypha: Greek and English - Hendrickson Publishers Today's English Version (TEV) - American Bible Society Wesley's New Testament - WORDsearch Corp. Weymouth's New Testament (WEY) - WORDsearch Corp. Wuest Expanded Translation (WET) - Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Young's Literal Translation of the Holy Bible (YLT) - WORDsearch Corp.

#bible #heritage #lawsuit #reparations #court #case #information #complaint #form #signup #register #judah #israelite #israelites #12tribe #israel #jews

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giancarlonicoli · 6 years ago

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Daily Cover235,062 viewsFeb 19, 2019, 10:00amThe Greatest Investor You’ve Never Heard Of: An Optometrist Who Beat The Odds To Become A Billionaire

It’s 9 p.m. on the last Saturday night of the 2018 Art Basel in Miami Beach. On the first floor of the palatial Versace mansion, the well-dressed and well-Botoxed are dancing to remixes of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and posing for Instagram by the mosaic-tiled emerald pool.

Upstairs, in a VIP room decorated in a mélange of styles that marry classical Greek and Roman touches, a well-dressed septuagenarian named Herbert Wertheim is sitting in front of a plate of smoked-salmon toast topped with gold leaf and shaved truffles, and scrolling through photos on his iPhone—scenes from what could only be described as a wonderful life. There are fan photos of him cooking pasta fagioli with Martha Stewart, on the slopes with Buzz Aldrin and fishing in Antarctica. There are many with his wife of 49 years, Nicole, on the luxurious World Residences at Sea, a yacht where the Wertheims now live part of each year. He calls these extracurricular activities “Herbie time.”

Dr. Herbie Wertheim in his signature red fedora.Jamel Toppin for Forbes

If it weren’t for his trademark bright-red fedora, Wertheim, who is an optometrist and small businessman, would look like the typical senior living it up in South Florida.

But Wertheim, 79, has no need for early-bird specials. What the photos don’t reveal is that Dr. Herbie, as he is known to friends, is a self-made billionaire worth $2.3 billion by Forbes’ reckoning—not including the $100 million he has donated to Florida’s public universities. His fortune comes not from some flash of entrepreneurial brilliance or dogged devotion to career, but from a lifetime of prudent do-it-yourself buy-and-hold investing.

Herb Wertheim may be the greatest individual investor the world has never heard of, and he has the Fidelity statements to prove it. Leafing through printouts he has brought to a meeting, you can see hundreds of millions of dollars in stocks like Apple and Microsoft, purchased decades ago during their IPOs. An $800 million-plus position in Heico, a $1.8 billion (revenue) airplane-parts manufacturer, dates to 1992. There are dozens of other holdings, ranging from GE and Google to BP and Bank of America. If there’s a common theme to Wertheim’s investing, it’s a preference for industry and technology companies and dividend payers. His financial success—and the fantastic life his portfolio has afforded his family—is a testament to the power of compounding as well as to the resilience of American innovation over the half-century.

“My thing is,” Wertheim says as he reflects on his long career, “I wanted to be able to have free time. To me, having time is the most precious thing.”

Born in Philadelphia at the end of the Great Depression, Wertheim is the son of Jewish immigrants who fled Nazi Germany. In 1945 his parents moved to Hollywood, Florida, and lived in an apartment above the family’s bakery. A dyslexic, Wertheim struggled in school and soon found himself skipping class.

“In those days, they just called you dumb,” he remembers. “I would sit in the corner sometimes with a dunce cap on.”

“My thing is I wanted to be able to have free time. To me, having time is the most precious thing.”

During his teens, in the 1950s, an abusive father prompted Wertheim to run away periodically. He spent much of his time hanging around with the local Seminole Indians, hunting and fishing in the Everglades and selling game, like frog legs, to locals. He also hitchhiked around Florida picking oranges and grapefruits. Eventually, his parents had enough. At age 16 he stood in front of a judge facing truancy charges. Lucky for Wertheim, the judge took pity on him, offering him a choice between the U.S. Navy and state reformatory. Wertheim enlisted in 1956 and was stationed in San Diego. He was only 17.

“That’s where my life changed,” he says. “They give you tests all the time to see how smart you are, and out of 135 in our class, I think I was in the top—especially in the areas of mechanics and organization.”

With a newfound confidence, Wertheim studied physics and chemistry in the Navy before working in naval aviation. This is about the time Wertheim began investing in stocks. It was the Cold War, the military-industrial complex was humming and American industry was on the move. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had finally recovered from the losses it suffered more than two decades before during the Crash of 1929, and aerospace stocks were leading the market. Wertheim made his first investment at 18, using his Navy stipend to buy stock in Lear Jet, which at the time was known for making aviation products during WWII. Wertheim met its founder, Bill Lear, during a visit to a Sikorsky Aircraft factory in Connecticut, where the Navy’s S58 helicopters were manufactured. Wertheim was attracted to Lear’s inventions, like the first auto-pilot systems. (Later, the company would invent the 8-track tape and pioneer the business-jet market.)

“You take what you earn with the sweat of your brow, then you take a percentage of that and you invest it in other people’s labor,” Wertheim says of his near-religious devotion to tithing his wages into the stock market.

Once out of the Navy, Wertheim sold encyclopedias door-to-door before attending Brevard Community College and then the University of Florida, where he studied engineering but never graduated. In addition to taking classes, he worked for NASA—then in its first few years—in a division that improved instrumentation for manned flights. This fueled an interest in the eye and instruments optimized for vision.

His fortune comes not from some flash of entrepreneurial brilliance but from a lifetime of prudent buy-and-hold investing.

In 1963 he received a scholarship to attend the Southern College of Optometry in Memphis and after graduation opened up a practice in South Florida. For 12 years he toiled away, seeing patients who were mostly working-class and who sometimes paid their bills with bushels of mangoes and avocados. Wertheim spent his evenings tinkering on inventions, and in 1969, he invented an eyeglass tint for plastic lenses that would filter out and absorb dangerous UV rays, helping to prevent cataracts.

The Vietnam War was under way, and plastics had become the material of choice for eyeglasses and sunglasses. Demand for Wertheim’s tint grew, and he sold it in a royalty deal for $22,000. But because of contractual breaches, the royalties never materialized.

So in 1970 Wertheim decided to get more serious about his inventions and set up a new company, Brain Power Inc. He founded it as a technology consulting firm, but Wertheim soon returned to his habit of researching and tinkering, developing tints, dyes and other technologies for eyewear.

A year later he concocted one of the world’s first neutralizers, a chemical that restored lenses back to their original clear state. This meant opticians no longer needed to carry large inventories of different-colored lenses or dispose of lenses that were improperly tinted. “I was still seeing patients, I had a little lab,” recalls Wertheim with a smile. He showed his wife a coffee can containing his chemical concoction and said, ‘Nicole, what’s in this can is going to make us millionaires.’ ”

Wertheim occasionally lectures on engineering at Florida International University.Jamel Toppin for Forbes

It did. Between that chemical and the numerous other products Wertheim invented for lenses—some tints for aesthetics, others to help ease the symptoms of neurological disorders like epilepsy and still others to improve UV protection—BPI became one of the world’s largest manufacturers of optical tints, selling to companies like Bausch & Lomb, Zeiss and Polaroid. The company also began making lab equipment, cleaners and accessories for opticians, optometrists and ophthalmologists. Today BPI has more than 100 patents and copyrights in the area of optics, 49 employees and annual revenues of about $25 million.

In less than two decades, Wertheim had gone from ne’er-do-well to inventor and entrepreneur. BPI never achieved hypergrowth, but it currently has a net income of about $10 million a year, according to Wertheim, more than enough to feed his passion for investing and the good life.

“I didn’t want to have a big business,” he says. “But today, I have a 5 or a 6 or an 8 billion-dollar corporation, each of which I own 10% of.”

With BPI cash flowing into Wertheim’s brokerage account, he went to work buying stocks and honing a strategy that can best be described as a mix of Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch, with a touch of Jack Bogle, given that he dislikes fees and primarily uses two discounters, Fidelity and Schwab, to manage his massive portfolio.

With Lear Jet (later known as Lear Siegler) in the late 1950s, for example, Wertheim was practicing “invest in what you know,” the strategy popularized by the famous Fidelity Magellan fund manager Peter Lynch in his 1989 book One Up on Wall Street. Lynch told readers to use their specialized knowledge or experience to gain an edge in their investments.

In less than two decades, Wertheim had gone from ne’er-do-well to inventor and entrepreneur.

Instead of concentrating on the metrics in financial statements, Wertheim is devoted to reading patents and spends two six-hour blocks each week poring over technical tomes. “What’s more important to me is, what is your intellectual capital to be able to grow?” Thanks to his engineering background, the technical nature of optometry and his experience as an inventor, the patent library is Wertheim’s comfort zone. Stocks he invested in based on their impressive patent portfolios include IBM, 3M and Intel.

Like Warren Buffett, Wertheim believes firmly in doubling down when his high-conviction picks go against him. He says that if you put your faith in a company’s intellectual property, it doesn’t matter too much if the market goes south for a bit—the product, he believes, has lasting value.

“If you like something at $13 a share, you should like it at $12, $11 or $10 a share,” Wertheim says. “If a stock continues to go down, and you believe in it and did your research, then you buy more. You are actually getting a better deal.” Whenever possible, he adds, dividends are useful in cushioning the pain of stocks that drift down or go sideways.

“My goal is to buy and almost never sell,” he says, parroting a Buffettism. “I let it appreciate as much as it can and use the dividends to move forward.” In this way Wertheim, like the Oracle of Omaha, seldom reinvests dividends but instead uses the cash flow from his portfolio to either fund his lifestyle or make new investments.

Wertheim points to Microsoft, a stock he has held since its IPO in 1986. “I knew a lot about computers and had been involved in building them,” he says. BPI had been using Apple IIe’s, but after Microsoft released its Windows operating system in 1985, Wertheim became convinced it would be a winner. “Only Microsoft had an operating system that could compete with Apple,” he recalls. The Microsoft shares he bought during the IPO, which have been paying dividends since 2003, are now worth more than $160 million. His 1.25 million shares of Apple, some purchased during its 1980 IPO and some when the stock was languishing at $10 in the 1990s, are worth $195 million.

Wertheim’s returns are miraculous. But merely adding $200 per month to an initial $10,000 in the stock market over the past 61 years would have produced an $11 million portfolio.Source: Investor.gov

Not all of the hundreds of stocks he has owned have fared so well. He invested big in Blackberry. “I believed in the new management and the recovery story,” says Wertheim, who will generally sell if a position reverses on him by 25%. “I watched substantial profits disappear month after month until I decided enough was enough.”

Wertheim sometimes uses leverage, but mostly in a limited way when buying high-yielding stocks. “By using the dividends to offset [the cost of] margin interest, the government is helping you increase your portfolio value,” he explains, noting that margin interest is tax deductible up to the amount of ordinary income.

But in 1982 Wertheim got caught in a margin call after Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker raised the federal funds rate from 12% to 20% and the market sank 20%. The episode cost him $50 million and taught Wertheim a valuable lesson about the dangers of leverage and mark-to-market accounting. Like most other active investors, Wertheim strives for tax efficiency. In order to harvest tax losses in his portfolio, he doubles down on his losers to avoid the IRS’ wash-sale penalties. “If I have a large loss in a stock I like,” he says, “I will purchase more, usually twice to three times the original purchase, and wait the 30 days to sell the original position and book the tax loss.”

As with Buffett, Wertheim says finding companies with strong management has been key to his success. A great example of this is Heico, a family-run aerospace and electronics company based in Wertheim’s hometown, Hollywood, Florida.

Wertheim became friendly with Laurans “Larry” Mendelson during the 1970s, after Wertheim bought a condominium in a building Mendelson owned and docked his boat next to Mendelson’s on Coral Gables Waterway. “He has two daughters around the same age as my two sons,” Mendelson says. “We got to know each other socially.”

A CPA by training, Mendelson was a successful real estate investor who had studied at Columbia Business School under David Dodd, co-author with Benjamin Graham of the seminal book on value investing, Security Analysis. Inspired by the wave of dealmakers getting rich from LBOs in the 1980s, the Mendelsons were looking to find an undervalued, underperforming industrial company to take over.

After they settled on Heico, at the time a small airline-parts maker, Wertheim used his aeronautical knowledge to informally help the family analyze its business and went on to purchase shares of the company—a penny stock priced as low as 33 cents.

“At that time Heico was a disaster, but he came up and understood what we would do to make it a non-disaster,” says Mendelson. Heico was making narrow-body jet-engine combustors, which the FAA mandated be replaced on a regular basis after a plane caught fire on a runway in 1985. Under the Mendelsons, Heico expanded its line of replacement parts, which undercut established original-equipment manufacturers like United Technologies’ Pratt & Whitney and GE. After Germany’s Lufthansa acquired a minority stake in the company in 1997, airline manufacturers and Wall Street took notice, and its share price rose sixfold to more than $2. But this was just the beginning. Heico enjoyed a proverbial moat as one of only a few FAA-approved airplane replacement-parts manufacturers. This translated into steadily growing orders as Heico expanded its product mix and as demand for air travel increased. For the last 28 years, Heico’s sales have compounded at a rate of 16% per year and its net profits at 19%.

Today, Heico trades for $80, and buy-and-hold Herbie is its largest individual shareholder. His original $5 million investment is worth more than $800 million.

Clockwise from top: Wertheim with Warren Buffett; on the World in Bordeaux; sightseeing in the North Pole; with his wife, Nicole, in Corsica; examining eyes in Guatemala.IMAGES COURTESY OF HERBERT WERTHEIM

As Wertheim enters his 80th year, Herbie time has become his chief preoccupation. Besides his $16 million oceanfront home in Coral Gables, Wertheim has a 90-acre ranch near Vail, Colorado, a spectacular four-story home overlooking the Thames in London and two sprawling estates in southern California. He spends many winters with his wife and family vacationing aboard The World, the planet’s largest luxurious residential ship continuously circumnavigating the globe, where he owns two luxury apartments. Right now, in the middle of February, the Wertheims are somewhere off the coast of Sri Lanka.

A signee of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, Wertheim has committed to giving away at least half his wealth, and he intends the bulk of the donations to go to public education—the very system of which he is a product.

“I would not have achieved the education and opportunities that I have had without the help of our public-university education system,” he wrote when he signed the pledge.

Stroll around Florida International University’s main campus, just minutes from Wertheim’s Coral Gables home, and you can’t help but notice buildings emblazoned with his name: the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, the Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing & Health Sciences, the Herbert & Nicole Wertheim Performing Arts Center and the Wertheim Conservatory. He has given $50 million to FIU and committed another $50 million to the University of Florida. Last year he pledged $25 million to the University of California, San Diego, to help create a school of public health. Beyond education, Wertheim says he’s given to hundreds of domestic and foreign nonprofits, including the Miami Zoo and the Vail, Colorado, public radio station.

The former truant and class dunce still gets giddy when he sees his name on the university buildings, asking passersby to take photos—posing in his signature red hat and new Nikes. At the medical school, he put on a stethoscope, excited to test out the latest medical dummies, which breathe, sweat and even talk. In a room designed to study obstetrics, he tries his hand at an ultrasound machine. At a lab that he helps fund, he is enamored with laser imaging and how it can help measure retinal temperature in the eye. (“I’ve fallen in love with proteins,” he says casually, discussing another eye experiment.) At the FIU performing arts center bearing his name, he suggests adding an outdoor amphitheater: “I think it’s time. I’d like to see something big happen.”

“He’s very inspirational in the way he challenges people to think big and imagine what’s possible,” says Cammy Abernathy, dean of the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at the University of Florida.

Still, one gets the sense that devoting time to his stock portfolio provides as much joy for Wertheim as his playful excursions and philanthropies.

He recently doubled down on British energy giant BP and now owns over one million shares. But rather than dwell on its sagging, crude-dependent stock chart, he’s betting on its hydrogen fuel cells and enjoying its 6% dividend yield while he waits for the company to recover.

“They have important intellectual property in that area,” he says of the cells, which create electricity by using hydrogen as fuel, a technology Wertheim believes is the future of both air and road transportation. “We’re going to move to a hydrogen economy.” Contrarian Wertheim also likes the troubled stock of General Electric; he owns over 15 million shares and has been picking up more.

He says he is making a long-term bet on GE’s intellectual property; the 126-year-old company has more than 179,000 patents and growing. Wertheim is especially jazzed about some patents that involve the 3-D printing of metal engine parts.

“You can’t look at what their sales are. You can’t look at anything. What is the future?” he says emphatically, adding, “They hit an all-time low yesterday, and I’m getting hurt. But I feel very, very comfortable with GE because of their technology.”

And Wertheim isn’t in any rush. Playing the long game is what he does best.

To learn more how the most influential billionaire investors invest their money, click here.

For more on the world's richest and brightest entrepreneurs, follow me on Twitter @MadelinePBerg. Got tips or word about a new billionaire? Go to Forbes.com/tips.

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tpanan · 6 years ago

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My Sunday Daily Blessings

January 20, 2019

Be still quiet your heart and mind, the LORD is here, loving you talking to you...........

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (Roman Rite Calendar)

Lectionary: 66

First Reading: Isaiah 62: 1-5

For Zion's sake I will not be silent, for Jerusalem's sake I will not be quiet, until her vindication shines forth like the dawn and her victory like a burning torch.

Nations shall behold your vindication, and all the kings your glory; you shall be called by a new name pronounced by the mouth of the LORD.

You shall be a glorious crown in the hand of the LORD, a royal diadem held by your God.

No more shall people call you "Forsaken,"or your land "Desolate, " but you shall be called "My Delight, " and your land "Espoused."

For the LORD delights in you and makes your land his spouse. As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you.

Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 96: 1-2, 2-3, 7-8, 9-10

"Proclaim his marvelous deeds to all the nations."

Second Reading: 1 Cor 12: 4-11

Brothers and sisters: There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit; there are different forms of service but the same Lord; there are different workings but the same God who produces all of them in everyone.

To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit. To one is given through the Spirit the expression of wisdom; to another, the expression of knowledge according to the same Spirit; to another, faith by the same Spirit; to another, gifts of healing by the one Spirit; to another, mighty deeds; to another, prophecy; to another, discernment of spirits; to another, varieties of tongues; to another, interpretation of tongues.

But one and the same Spirit produces all of these, distributing them individually to each person as he wishes.

Verse before the Gospel: 2 Thes 2:14

Alleluia, Alleluia

"God has called us through the Gospel to possess the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Alleluia, Alleluia

Gospel: John 2: 1-11

There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding. When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come." His mother said to the servers, "Do whatever he tells you."

Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus told the them, "Fill the jars with water."

So they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, "Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter."

So they took it. And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine, without knowing where it came from — although the servers who had drawn the water knew —, the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him, "Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now."

Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.

**Meditation:

Do you recognize the glory and presence of the Lord Jesus in your life? God often reveals his glory to us in the unlikeliest of places - in a cold stable at Bethlehem, at a village wedding party in Cana, on a bloody cross at Golgatha, or on the road to Emmaus. In today’s Gospel reading we see the first public sign and miracle which Jesus performed. The Lord Jesus brought great blessing and joy to a newly wed couple and their wedding party. First by his presence, and second by saving them from embarrassment when the wine ran out. Changing water into wine was a remarkable act of kindness; but giving the best to last was unnecessary and unheard of. In the Old Testament wine is seen as both a gift and blessing of God (Deuteronomy 7:13; Proverbs 3:10, Psalm 105:). That Jesus would miraculously produce 120 gallons of the best wine (many times more than needed) shows the superabundance of the blessings which he came to offer.

This miracle signifies the "new rich wine" of the Gospel and it points to the “wine of the new covenant” and the “bread of life” which Jesus provides for his disciples in the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist. It also points to the Messianic banquet which Jesus will provide at the end of the age when he comes again in his glory. The miracles of Jesus demonstrate the power of God's love and mercy for his people. God's kindness knows no limits. And the ultimate expression of his love is revealed in the person of his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. He became flesh for our sake, and he died for our redemption, and he rose that we, too, might be raised up and glorified with him. Do you thirst for God and for the abundant life and blessings he offers to you?

Sources:

Lectionary for Mass for Use in the Dioceses of the United States, second typical edition, Copyright © 2001, 1998, 1997, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine; Psalm refrain © 1968, 1981, 1997, International Committee on English in the Liturgy, Inc. All rights reserved. Neither this work nor any part of it may be reproduced, distributed, performed or displayed in any medium, including electronic or digital, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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feministmajority · 8 years ago

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June 5, 2017

President Donald J. Trump

The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Trump:

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 national advocacy organizations, and the 106 undersigned organizations, we stand united in expressing our profound concern that the civil and human rights of all Americans are being drastically undermined by your administration’s proposed deep cuts to key civil rights office budgets, the withdrawal of numerous important civil and human rights policies, and the appointment of officials who appear bent on retreating from statutory civil and human rights agency priorities. We call upon your administration to reverse these disturbing trends, and to demonstrate a far greater commitment to the civil and human rights of all people in this country and to the federal laws created to protect them.

Extending equal opportunity in education, employment, housing; protecting the right to vote; reducing hate violence and racial disparities in the criminal justice system; preventing discrimination in health care; and advancing economic security are not simply legal obligations that your administration must meet. Our nation’s civil and human rights laws are a testament to who we are today as a country, a sign of the tremendous progress we have made throughout our history, and a pledge we make to future generations to continue moving ever closer to our ideals of fairness and equity for all. For decades, and for compelling reasons, the vigorous enforcement of these laws has been a core federal responsibility, and should never be seen as optional or as a matter of politics.

Our concerns were recently exemplified by an article in The Washington Post, detailing recent steps your administration has taken to retreat from our nation’s longstanding commitment to civil rights enforcement. The examples cited in that article – such as the proposed elimination of the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, the end of the environmental justice program at the Environmental Protection Agency, and threats of drastic staff cutbacks in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights – are only the most recent signs that your administration is engaged in a significant rollback of civil rights enforcement. They build upon a record that already borders on the unconscionable, which includes a discriminatory Muslim ban, limits on the use of consent decrees to reform troubled police departments, the revival of a failed war on drugs, support of an intentionally racially discriminatory voter ID law, the formation of an illegitimate “election integrity” task force to attempt to justify voter suppression efforts, increased prosecutions and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, proposed defunding of Planned Parenthood, the signing of an executive order that endorses discrimination under the guise of religious liberty, freezes on affirmative litigation, and the rollback of guidance clarifying protections for transgender students.

We were stunned to hear a White House spokesperson claim, in the Post article, that your administration “has an unwavering commitment to the civil rights of all Americans.” Your administration’s actions to date demonstrate the opposite. We urge you to reverse course, before more individuals and communities are harmed, by resolving to take the following steps:

Enforce the law. Federal agencies must vigorously respond to complaints of civil and human rights violations, and must uphold the vital federal role of enforcing our civil and human rights laws and ensuring vulnerable communities are protected from discrimination.

Preserve existing policies. In recent years, federal civil rights offices have issued numerous policies and procedures to clarify the obligations of affected individuals, employers, and governmental entities under federal civil and human rights laws. These must be maintained.

Nominate and appoint qualified individuals. We urge you to ensure that individuals chosen to lead civil rights offices have a demonstrated record of support for federal civil rights laws and marginalized communities. Individuals who are unfamiliar with or hostile to our nation’s civil rights laws and their purpose have no place leading offices charged with protecting people from discrimination.

Prioritize data collection. A key component of civil rights enforcement, in many agencies, is continuing to collect, and make available to the public, disaggregated data to determine existing patterns and to promote better future compliance with federal hate crime and nondiscrimination laws.

Condemn bigotry and violence. Law enforcement agencies and community-based organizations have documented a significant increase in bigotry and hate crimes. We urge you to establish a White House hate crime task force to coordinate federal agency response. You and all members of your administration should use your bully pulpit to clearly condemn bias-motivated violence and bigotry targeting people based on race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability at every opportunity.

Our vision of an America as good in practice as it is in promise is fundamentally undermined by your administration’s apparent agenda of nothing less than an all-out, systemic assault on the progress our country has made since the New Deal. Our nation should honor equal protection for all, view its diversity as its strength, and strive to be an inclusive place where all in America can live, work, study, and participate in our democracy as free and equal people. We call on you and your administration to take affirmative steps to halt the problematic policies and initiatives we have outlined, and to provide positive leadership on these issues in order to promote inclusion and respect for the basic rights and dignity of every person in America.

Sincerely,

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

9to5, National Association of Working Women

A. Philip Randolph Institute

American Association for Access, Equity and Diversity

American Association of People with Disabilities

American Association of University Women (AAUW)

American Baptist Home Mission Societies

American Civil Liberties Union

American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Unions (AFL-CIO)s

American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees

American Federation of Teachers

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

Americans for Financial Reform

Amnesty International USA

The Andrew Goodman Foundation

Anti-Defamation League

The Arc of the United States

Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC

Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD)

Augustus F. Hawkins Foundation

Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law

Bend the Arc Jewish Action

Brennan Center for Justice

Center for American Progress

Center for Community Change Action

The Center for Constitutional Rights

Center for Law and Social Policy

Center for Reproductive Rights

Center for Responsible Lending

Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism-California State University, San Bernardino

Common Cause

Communications Workers of America

Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund

Equal Justice Society

Equality Federation

Family Equality Council

Feminist Majority

FreeState Justice

GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD)

GLSEN

Human Rights Campaign

Human Rights First

interact

Interfaith Action for Human Rights

Interfaith Alliance

International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies

Justice in Aging

Lambda Legal

Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

League of United Latin American Citizens

League of Women Voters of the United States

Legal Aid at Work

MALDEF

Matthew Shepard Foundation

Muslim Advocates

NAACP

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

National African American Drug Policy Coalition, Inc.

National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity (NAPE)

National Association of Social Workers

National Bar Association

National Black Justice Coalition National CAPACD

National Center for Lesbian Rights

National Center for Transgender Equality

National Center for Youth Law

National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC)

National Council of Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA)

National Council of Churches

National Council of Jewish Women

National Council of La Raza

The National Council on Independent Living

National Disability Rights Network

National Education Association

National Employment Law Project

National Employment Lawyers Association

National Fair Housing Alliance

National Health Law Program

National Hispanic Media Coalition

National Immigration Law Center

National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health

National LGBTQ Task Force

National Network for Arab American Communities (NNAAC)

National Organization for Women

National Partnership for Women & Families

National Urban League

National Women’s Law Center

OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates

OutServe-SLDN

People For the American Way

PFLAG

Planned Parenthood Federation of America

PolicyLink

Poverty & Race Research Action Council

SALDEF

SEARAC

Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

The Sikh Coalition

South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT)

Southern Poverty Law Center

Union for Reform Judaism

United Church of Christ, Justice and Witness Ministries

The United Methodist Church – General Board of Church and Society

Whitman-Walker Health

Women of Reform Judaism

YWCA USA

#Equality #civil rights #Trump

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