Author: MontereyBayForum

Vermont Town: Mr Mayor YOU ARE FIRED!

Rutland-VT-WNHow many Syrian refugees are OK  for a Vermont town?

Former Rutland Mayor Chris Louras lost his bid for reelection on Tuesday, in what was described as a referendum on Syrian refugees. Louras, who had been a major proponent of resettling Syrian refugees in Rutland, lost to David Allaire, a “leading critic” of Louras’ plan.  Louras had served as mayor for the past 10 years.

Back in 2015, Louras announced that he hoped to bring 100 Syrian and Iraqi refugees to Rutland, which has a population of about 16,500 (making it Vermont’s third-largest city).

Louras’ plan was controversial as he did not consult with other city officials before contacting refugee resettlement agencies.

President Donald Trump’s executive orders cracking down on immigration from Syria and other Muslim countries scuttled the town’s original   plan to re-settle 100 families.  Only two Syrian families made it to Rutland, Vermont.

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Firenze Sage:   The people’s republic of Vermont can’t even handle the input.

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Healing Prayer and Aging gracefully …

   healing prayer pink colorAging Gracefully with the Graces of Healing Prayer written by Anglican priest William DeArteaga.

“At a conference we attended at Christian Healing Ministries in Jacksonville Florida, Dr MacNutt spoke about healing and aging. He is among the most distinguished figures of the Christian healing renewal, and is now 90 years old. He observed that it is more difficult to pray for the healing of certain age related illness. Thus for instance, it is usually not effective to pray over a bald man in his 60s and expect his hair to grow back as if he were in his 20s. It seems that we are designed to run down in the body even as we continue to grow spiritually (2 Cor 5:1-5).

Dr MacNutt at 90 years old.
He now uses a cane to assist in walking

Prayer cannot nullify aging. But on the other hand it can make aging a gentle process, with much less pain and discomfort and less medications than normal. I became aware of this personally in my last check-up at the VA. I noticed men my age and younger go off with bagfuls of prescriptions for high blood pressure, diabetes, etc. I have two prescriptions that help control my enlarged prostate – that is all.

Prayer enables the Christian to transit into “elders” of ministry with grace and ease, as in my case, from  pastor to writer and conference speaker.

Yours truly on the job as an OSL speaker

My wife Carolyn was at first skeptical of MacNutt’s theory about the difficulty age related healing prayer. But we both came to understand its wisdom when we began a ministry at an assisted nursing home. The folks there naturally had all sorts of medical problems, some quite serious. Our ministry had some successes, but less than at our normal church healing missions. Many of the older people had various stages of arthritis and we were able to pray relief to many of them. Carolyn has always had a gift of praying against pain, and was very helpful in this area. But only a few major healings were accomplished. One  woman had Tourette syndrome, which causes involuntary movements and vocalizing.  She was was healed of this affliction after repeated prayers over many weeks (Carolyn has the gift of divine stubbornness in prayer.). Another lady with rapid macular degeneration had the disease stop, but not reversed.
Carolyn praying over one of the people at the assisted living facility.

But now let me share some of the ways that prayer has softened and graced our aging processes. We use healing prayer on ourselves with great success. Even before we married we prayed for each other regularly. When I first met Carolyn she suffered regular bouts of headaches. After several times praying over her, and teaching he how to pray for herself, they stopped completely.[1]  There is no cessationist obstruction in our home (the theology that wrongly affirms that healing prayer ceased with the death of the Apostles).[2] Besides continuously praying for one another, supplements have also played a role in our “graceful aging.”

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Aptos Psychologist:  The above is written by William DeArteaga.  Find more on his blog.  Yes, healing prayer helps people to age gracefully.

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wiretapping: Has dear olde Saint Obama done it before?

Obama's history of wire tapping
Obama’s history of wire tapping

Has  dear olde Saint Obama engaged in wiretapping other times — before Trump?

Former Ohio Democrat Congressman Dennis Kucinich defended President Donald Trump’s claims about being wiretapped by the Obama administration during the 2016 presidential election.

“It’s important because there are people who are saying about President Trump’s claim, ‘Oh, it could never happen.’ Well, frankly, it happened to me,” Kucinich told Fox News on Friday. Also on Friday, the former congressman penned an article on Fox News describing the incident — a phone call in his congressional office from a foreign leader had been tapped in 2011, and he listened to a recording of it in 2015.

“Members of Congress ought to be aware that my experience was that my phone wasn’t safe in a congressional office,” Kucinich, who served in the House of Representatives from 1997 to 2013, said. “Now, if they can do that to a member of Congress, they can certainly do it to a presidential candidate, and they can do it to private citizens as well.”

The former congressman learned that he had been wiretapped two years after leaving office, when he was approached by The Washington Times. “The newspaper’s investigative reporters called me, saying they had obtained a tape of a sensitive telephone conversation that they wanted me to verify,” Kucinich wrote. “When I met them at a Chinese restaurant in Washington, they played back audio of a call I had taken in my D.C. congressional office four years earlier.”Kucinich recalled that the call had been from Saif el-Islam Qaddafi, a high-ranking official in Libya’s government and a son of the country’s ruler, Moammar Qaddafi. “At the time I was leading efforts in the House to challenge the Obama administration’s war against Libya,” the former congressman recalled. “The Qaddafi government reached out to me because its appeals to the White House and the State Department to forestall the escalating aggression had gone unanswered.”

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Firenze Sage:  Well so much for the most transparent govt in history.

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Want to change the world? Jim Wallis of Sojourners online class forms basis for discussion

change the worldOur current political and world situation provides an incentive for us to learn and act says Pastor Dale with Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA.  This church is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Come  to Christ Lutheran on Sundays  in March at 11:15 for  a series of six classes titled Faith and Public Policy. Location: 10707 Soquel Drive, Aptos, CA.  831 688-5727  www.aptosChurch.org

The classes on Faith and Public Policy  follow  Christ Lutheran’s   10 am Worship service and  time for  Coffee, Food and Fellowship.

Pastor Dale will lead  the discussion sessions based on online lectures and suggested readings by Jim Wallis, President and Founder of Sojourners.

Class 1 is titled  Introduction.  Class 2 is titled  Poverty (Part II) of Jim Wallis’ online lectures.  Class 3 is titled Immigration.  Class 4 is titled Race and Religion.

For information on the online classes available through Jim Wallis:

Faith, Social Justice  and Public Life

https://sojo.net/faith-social-justice-public-life

Breitbart’s perspective of Jim Wallis and Sojourners:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/13/jim-wallis-progressive-cleric-tortures-bible-to-promote-intolerant-islam/

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/23/anti-trump-religious-leader-radical-sixties-group-students-democratic-society-sds1/

Resource for the  Social Statement by Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (1991):

http://download.elca.org/ELCA%20Resource%20Repository/Church_SocietySS.pdf?_ga=1.205253843.2103735961.1488843566

Start small in changing the world?  Garden plots are available at Aptos Community Garden, an outreach of Christ Lutheran Church.  Spade that dirt!  Turn that soil!  Make beautiful vegetables and flowers.

 

 

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Why have a landline? 911 calls one reason

911 call center womanNeed to call 911?  Landline calls pop up instantly to operators with the caller’s name and address.  Cellphone calls only  include a rudimentary location and rarely a name.

On Oct. 25 and 26, 911 centers in a dozen or so U.S. states from California to Texas were overwhelmed by what investigators now believe was the largest ever cyber attack of the country’s emergency response system.

The U.S. emergency system, not a single system, consists of roughly 6,500 separate answering systems run by local authorities with a hodgepodge of technology.

Onky 420 of the 6,500 centers had implemented a cyber security system as of 2015.  In 38 states no money was spent in 2015 for cybersecurity for 911 centers.

Much of the 911 system relies on copper telephone lines a helpful defense against cyber attacks which usually need an internet connectivity.  Smart phones pose a new type of risk as each is essentially a web-enabled computer that can be compromised by malicious software.

An 18 year old youth, Meetkumar Desal, successfully hacked into a loophole in the  the Apple  iPhone operating system iOS.  He currently is charged with four felony charges of computer tampering.

iphoneApple says that a forthcoming system update of the iPhone will plug the loophole that made the attack possible.

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Monterey Bay Forum:  Why not ‘sentence’ that 18 year old iPhone hacker to community service time that will strengthen cyber security.  Use his skills!

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Schwarzenegger: What’s a CA governor to do?

celebrity apprentice“I quit!” says former CA governor Schwarzenegger concerning his job with “The New Celebrity Apprentice”.

The TV show has been on for the last 15 years.  Schwarzenegger’s low ratings were mentioned recently  by President Trump during a prayer breakfast.

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Monterey Bay Forum:  Can anyone remember what the former CA governor did  that helped California?    Somehow —   this makes for a chuckle.

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Rent 3 bedroom in Santa Cruz? Ouch!

cabin with treeCost to rent a 3 bedroom in Santa Cruz is now  $2,285 a month says  ATTOM Data Solutions and recently reported in Santa Cruz Sentinel March 4, 2017.  Ouch!

Santa Cruz Planning staff state  that more accessory dwelling units (ADUs) might ease housing shortage.  Owners respond  that local government fees between $12 to $21 K are  an obstacle to ADUs.  That’s just the government fees.  Current regulations require the owner to live in the main house or the ADU.

 

 

 

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Black children’s worst enemy?

readingLooks like black children’s worst enemy is …. black politicians.

Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Cedric Richmond said, “I expect that Mrs. DeVos will have an incredibly harmful impact on public education and on black communities nationwide.”

Those and many other criticisms of Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos could be dismissed as simply political posturing if we did not have an educational system that is mostly mediocre and is in advanced decay for most black students.

According to The Nation’s Report Card, only 37 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading in 2015, and just 25 percent were proficient in math (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov). For black students, achievement levels were a disgrace. Nationally, 17 percent of black students scored proficient in reading, and 7 percent scored proficient in math. In some cities, such as Detroit, black academic proficiency is worse; among eighth-graders, only 4 percent were proficient in math, and only 7 percent were proficient in reading.

The nation’s high-school graduation rate rose again in the 2014-15 school year, reaching a record high as more than 83 percent of students earned a diploma on time. Educators see this as some kind of achievement and congratulate themselves. The tragedy is that high-school graduation has little relevance to achievement.

In 2014-15, graduation rates at District of Columbia Public Schools, just as they did nationally, climbed to an all-time high. At H.D. Woodson High School, 76 percent of students graduated on time; however, just 1 percent met math standards on national standardized tests linked to the Common Core academic standards. Just 4 percent met the reading standards.

The low black academic achievement is not restricted to high-school graduates of D.C. schools. The average black high-school graduate has the academic achievement level of a white seventh- or eighth-grader. As such, it stands as unambiguous evidence that high schools confer diplomas attesting that students can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade level when in fact they cannot. That means they have received fraudulent high-school diplomas. There are many factors that affect education that educators cannot control. But they have total control over the issuance of a diploma.

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Firenze Sage:  Why would a passel of lying, useless, corrupt politicians not want its constituency to read? 

 

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work from Obama’s new home: Valerie Jarrett

valarie jarrett

Personal life of Valarie Jarrett:   She married and divorced a doctor and has one daughter.  In 1983 Jarrett married William Robert Jarrett, son of Chicago Sun-Times reporter Vernon Jarrett. She attributes her switch from a private to a public career to their daughter Laura’s birth and her own desire to do something that would make their daughter proud.[32]

To one reporter’s emailed question about her divorce, she replied, “Married in 1983, separated in 1987, and divorced in 1988. Enough said.”[32] In a Vogue profile, she further explained, “We grew up together. We were friends since childhood. In a sense, he was the boy next door. I married without really appreciating how hard divorce would be.”[32] William Jarrett died in 1993 at age 40, and at the time of his death was director of obstetrics and gynecology at Jackson Park Hospital.[33]

http://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/news/g2535/obama-new-house-photos/

https://mic.com/articles/170195/who-s-valerie-jarrett-what-to-know-about-obama-s-top-confidant-and-reported-new-roommate#.218VZMFUI

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