Podcasts about kenneth e

Today, listen in as Gail and Linda as they eagerly discuss some of their favorite books. Book recommendations linked below: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Smith, Betty: 9780060929886: Amazon.com: Books A Tale of Two Cities book by Charles Dickens Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe book by George Eliot Middlemarch book by George Eliot The Paradise King: The Tragic History and Spectacular Future of Everything According to Jesus of Nazareth: Eldredge, Blaine: 9798988859604: Amazon.com: Books The Master and his Emissary: The Divided... book by Iain McGilchrist The Power of Christian Contentment: Finding Deeper, Richer Christ-Centered Joy, (Paperback) - Walmart.com ? Hearing and Reading the New Testament book by D. Brent Sandy With All Your Heart Lib/E: Orienting... book by A. Craig Troxel Called into Questions: Cultivating the... book by Matthew Lee Anderson Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes book by E. Randolph Richards Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor, and Shame in the Biblical World: E. Randolph Richards, Richard James: 9780830852758 - Christianbook.com Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels: Kenneth E. Bailey: 9780830825684 - Christianbook.com Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes: Cultural Studies in 1 Corinthians: Bailey, Kenneth E.: 9780830839346: Amazon.com: Books

KMO speaks with science fiction author and cybersecurity professional Kenneth E. Harrell about artificial intelligence, the writing process, and technological change. They explore how AI tools can enhance rather than replace human creativity, with Harrell describing his use of custom GPTs and AI assistants to improve his writing while maintaining his unique voice. The conversation delves into the challenges of emerging AI technologies, including potential security threats and the limitations of current solutions like voice synthesis. They also discuss their favorite science fiction works and influences, from Frank Herbert's Dune to contemporary authors, while examining how science fiction helps us understand accelerating technological and social change. The wide-ranging discussion touches on themes of spirituality, techno-utopianism, and the human relationship with advancing technology.

Happiness is a choice. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fernando-m-de-oca/support

Please join us Right Now, June 26, 2023 at 11:00AM PST as Actor, Publicist, Producer Philip Sokoloff, Actress, Director Ellen D. Williams and Kenneth E. Murray, Sr. and Agent Marques Murrey joins host Ron Brewington on "The Actor's Choice."

Kenneth E. Hughes is a standup comedian and founder of 20/20 productions. He is a self employed and self proclaimed blind sex symbol. He produces a current standup showcase every fourth Sunday of the month called Hilariously Hoppin' at Hoppin GVL, and an open mic every second Sunday of the month. Kenneth also does work on behalf of the non-profit, “Southeastern Guide Dogs” (link below). Also, his guide dog Buddy is a good boy who sometimes joins Kenneth on stage. Really enjoyed getting to know Kenneth in today's interview – make sure to follow him at the links below. Have a great week! #standup #podcast Follow Our Guest: https://www.guidedogs.org/ https://www.facebook.com/kenneth.e.hughes.35 https://www.facebook.com/2020-Productions-148499099202719 https://www.instagram.com/2020productionssc/ Follow My Other Stuff: David on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidbakker7/?hl=en The Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ididthisinsteadofkillingmyself/?hl=en The Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2GGXI851tdRDK1XmiSgcMk David's Twitter… https://twitter.com/davidbakker7 And TikTok…I guess (you don't have to…really. We should all delete this app). https://www.tiktok.com/@davidbakker7 And your mom… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Therefore take up the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you will be able to stand your ground, and having done everything, to stand. Eph 6: 13 (BSB)

On episode five hundred and thirty-six, the story of Kenneth E Stumpf is told and episodes for the rest of July and all of August will be recipients from the Vietnam War. A big thank you goes out to this month's show sponsor, Motor City Munitions. Use promo code TALESOFHONOR for 5% off of your online order today! All your firearm related needs with service so fast it can only come from the Motor City: https://www.motorcitymunitions.com For Leroy's story: https://www.talesofhonorpodcast.com/stories/leroy-a-petry Also want to support the show? Check out the show swag where 50% of profits get donated to the Medal of Honor Museum: https://bit.ly/TOHswag Be sure to visit our website for more information as the show goes on at: www.talesofhonorpodcast.com. Thanks for listening and be sure to share with friends and family!

This week our guest is JAR contributor Kenneth E. Lawson. George Whitefield revolutionized religion in Colonial America, and became one of the famous people on the continent. For more information visit www.allthingsliberty.com

Kenneth E. Nwadike, Jr. is an American documentary filmmaker, motivational speaker, and peace activist popularly known as the Free Hugs Guy. Ken is the founder of the Free Hugs Project, which gained popularity as he made major news headlines for his peacekeeping efforts and de-escalation of violence during protests, riots, and political rallies.In today's episode, Ken shares some insight into his upbringing, from playing with his favorite toy, a Lamborghini Countach Micro Machine, to sleeping in homeless shelters to a full track and field scholarship, and how he came to recognize the power of his story to inspire others.Tuning in, you'll learn how he managed to shut down Hollywood Boulevard for 10,000 runners, why he believes that it was fate that he missed qualifying for the Boston Marathon by just a few seconds, and the story behind the viral moment when he hugged a white police officer in riot gear at the Charlotte protests following the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in 2016, plus so much more!Ken's courageous work as a peace activist is helping to heal and narrow the social, political, and racial divide that exists throughout the US and his energy, passion, and love are changing individual behaviors and group interactions for the better.His story is an example of how every single hardship that we face, almost without exception, will one day come into play when we eventually find our purpose, so make sure to tune in today to learn more about the Free Hugs Guy and the power of love in the face of fear and hatred!

In this week's True Crime Daily The Sidebar podcast: Criminal justice attorney Kenneth E. Belkin joins host Joshua Ritter to discuss cases and court trials in the news, including the Crumbley family and the school shooting in Oxford Township, Michigan; the Ghislaine Maxwell trial in Manhattan federal court; the manslaughter trial of Kim Potter, the police officer who killed Daunte Wright in Minnesota in April; and the Jussie Smollett trial in Chicago. Tweet your questions for future episodes to Joshua Ritter using the hashtag #TCDSidebar See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is "The Leading Voices in Food" podcast but today we're speaking with a leading voice in tobacco control. "How come," you might ask, "why?" So I believe for many years that the parallels between the tobacco industry and food industry practices are nothing short of stunning, and that our field would do very well to learn lessons learned from the pioneers in the tobacco wars. Our guest today is Dr. Kenneth Warner, Distinguished Emeritus Professor and former Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. Ken's research focuses on the economic and policy aspects of tobacco and health. Interview Summary   So Ken, you and I have a long history, and I thought it might be instructive to mention just a little bit of it because you really helped shape some of the ways I think about addressing food policy. So I first became familiar with your work long before I met you in person, when I was teaching classes at Yale. I was assigning papers you wrote on tobacco control and I was especially interested in work that you'd done on tobacco taxes. It really gave me the idea of pushing ahead with food-related taxes. Then finally I got a chance to meet you in person at a meeting that was hosted by the first President George Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, on cancer control. You and I got to talking about similarities between the tobacco industry behavior and the way the food industry was behaving. We were both struck by the similarities. That led us to write a paper together that was published in 2009 in "The Milbank Quarterly." And I have to say, of all the papers I've published over my career, this was one of my favorites because I really enjoyed working with you. I learned a ton from it, and it really, I thought, made some very important points. And I'd just like to mention the title of that paper because it pretty much summarizes what it found. So the title was, "The Perils of Ignoring History: Big Tobacco Played Dirty and Millions Died. How Similar Is Big Food?" In my mind, the playbooks are still very similar, and that's why it's really interesting to talk to you today, get a little sense of what's happening more recently, and importantly, think about what lessons are learned from tobacco control. I wanted to bring up one thing from that paper that I always found fascinating, which was the discussion about something called "The Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers." Could you describe what that was and what role you think it played in history?   Sure. Just to give you some context for it, the first two major papers that implicated smoking in lung cancer were published in major medical journals in 1950. In December of 1952 there was an article in the "Reader's Digest," which incidentally was the only major magazine that did not accept cigarette advertising, that was entitled, "Cancer by the Carton." And this was the American public's first real exposure to the risks associated with smoking, and it led to a two-year decline in cigarette smoking, a very sharp decline, something that was unprecedented in the history of the cigarette. Following that there was some research published on mice and cancer. And needless to say, the tobacco industry was getting pretty nervous about this. So the executives of all the major tobacco firms met in New York City in December of 1953, and they collaborated on what became a public relations strategy, which drove their behavior for many years thereafter. The first thing they did was to publish "A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers" in January of 1954. This "Frank Statement" was published in over 400 magazines and newspapers, and it reached an estimated audience of some 80 million Americans, which would be a very good percentage of all Americans in those years. And they talked about the fact that there was this evidence out there, but they said, "We feel it is in the public interest," this is a quote, "to call attention to the fact that eminent doctors and research scientists have publicly questioned the claimed significance of this research." Then they went on to say, and I quote again, "We accept an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business. We believe the products we make are not injurious to health and," and this is the kicker, "we always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public health," end quote. They went on to say that they would support research on smoking and health, and, of course, that they would always be the good guys in this story. This was designed as part of a strategy to obfuscate, to deceive the public, basically, to lie about what they already knew about the health hazards associated with smoking. And it was essentially a first very public step in a campaign that, one could argue, in many ways has persisted ever since, although, obviously, now the tobacco companies admit that they're killing their customers and they admit that smoking causes cancer and heart disease and lung disease and so on. But that was kind of the beginning of the strategy that drove their behavior for decades.   You know, that was one of the issues we raised in our paper. How similar were the big food companies in talking about concern for the health of their customers, planting doubt with the science, pledging to make changes that were in the interest of public health, agreeing to collaborate with public health officials? All those things played out in the food arena as well. And that's just one of many places where the food industry behave very, very similar to what the tobacco industry has done. But boy, is it interesting to hear that particular anecdote and to learn of the cynical behavior of the industry. So fast forward from there, and you think about the tobacco industry executives testifying before Congress that nicotine wasn't addictive, and you have that same process playing out many years later. These similarities are really remarkable.   So let's talk about your work and some of the issues that I think apply to the food area, and let's talk about taxes at the beginning. So I worked for years on the issue of soda taxes, and these taxes now exist in more than 50 countries around the world and in a number of major cities in the US, including San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Oakland. And these taxes have been shown to have really positive effects, and they seem to be growing around the world. And I'd like to understand what you see as the overall findings from the work on tobacco taxes. But before we do that, you have a very interesting story to tell about how the tobacco control community responded when you first began speaking about taxes. It turns out to be taxes on tobacco have had whopping effects. But what was the initial reaction to people in that field?   Yeah, it is kind of an interesting story. So around 1980, when I first started writing and talking about tobacco taxation as a method of reducing smoking, I used to have public health audiences booing me. If they had rotten tomatoes with them, they would have been throwing them.   You know, Ken, it's hard to imagine because now these taxes are completely routine and accepted.   Yes, they're not only routine and accepted, they are a first principle of tobacco control. They are enshrined in the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. So they really are kind of the first thing we turn to because we know that they work. We know that they reduce smoking.   But let me give you a story about how I learned that this is not only a phenomenon with people smoking. It's a phenomenon with people using all other drugs, and it turns out it's a trans-species law, the Law of Demand. And that law says, basically, that if you increase price, the demand for the commodity will decrease. Well, in the beginning, the public health audiences believed two things. They believed that smokers were so addicted that they would not be affected by price, so it was ridiculous to even think about it. And they said, you have to have intrinsic motivators to get people to quit smoking. They have to care about their kids. They want to see their kids grow up, their spouses, and so on, and not extrinsic forces like a tax. So those were their two objections. So the story that I think is really kind of fun. I was on a plane flying to a small conference in Kansas City. This is sometime in the early '80s. And I happened to be seated next to Jack Henningfield, who is probably the preeminent psychopharmacologist dealing with nicotine, maybe in the world. And we were talking about price response, the fact that cigarette taxes work. And he said, "You know, I've got something I want to show you here." And he pulled out some what are called response cost curves from the psychology literature. And this is where you take a laboratory animal, in this instance addicted to narcotics or other addictive substances, and you give them a challenge to get their drugs. So first, I should note that these animals are so addicted that if they're given the choice between food and their drug, they will choose their drug, and they will in fact end up dying because they place a preference for the drug over food. But it turns out that when you increase the price of the drug to them, they decrease the amount that they consume. So what do I mean by that? If they have to push a lever, a bar, a certain number of times to get a dose of their drug, and you raise the number of bar pushes per dose, they will dose themselves with fewer doses. I took a look at these curves, and basically, a response cost curve for these lab animals is essentially a demand curve as we economists see it. And I calculated the price elasticity of demand, which is our standard measure of the responsiveness to price. And it turns out that addicted laboratory rats have essentially the same price elasticity of demand, the same price responsiveness that human beings do to cigarettes.   That's an absolutely fascinating story. And, you know, I know Jack, and have admired his work, as you have, and it's amazing to think about that conversation on a plane, and what sort of scientific work it led to, and how that, in turn, found its way into policies that exist around the world. So tell us then about tobacco taxes, and how high do they have to be in order to affect consumption in an appreciable way, and have they worked in reducing tobacco use, and what's your overall take on that?   So we have, quite literally, hundreds of studies in countries around the world, and we know a lot but we don't know everything. So we don't know, for example, if there's a particular price above which, you know, nobody will use the product. We don't have even really good data suggesting of, you know, what's the minimum increase in price that you have to have to have a noticeable impact. Overall, the literature suggests that if you increase the price of cigarettes by 10%, you will decrease the quantity demanded by 3 to 4%. Now, what this means is that roughly half of that decreased demand reflects decreases in the number of cigarettes that continuing smokers use, while the other half represents decreases in smoking, people quitting or kids not starting. So the demand is what we call price inelastic. The price change itself is larger, proportionately, than the decrease in consumption. But that decrease in consumption is still substantial and it's enough to have a large impact.   Now, cigarette prices vary all over the world, and cigarette prices vary primarily because of taxation differences. So if you go to the Scandinavian countries, you'll find that a pack of cigarettes will run $15 or more. If you go to Australia, you're looking at $30 or more a pack. In the US, currently, we're looking at an average price in the range of about 7 to $8. In some jurisdictions, like New York City, it's $10 or more. But the prices in the US are actually relatively low among the more developed nations in the world. Any tax increase will have an impact but obviously the larger tax increases will have larger impacts. And there's some good and bad news in tobacco taxation, particularly in a country like ours, and this is, again, true for most of the developed world. Smoking is now concentrated in marginalized populations. I'm talking about low socioeconomic groups, the LGBTQ community, and racial minorities, in particular. If you think of this as an economic phenomenon, when you raise the price on cigarettes, you're going to hit the worst-off economically segments of the population hard. That's the bad news. The good news is that those people, precisely because they are poor, tend to be much more price responsive than high-income smokers, and more of them will quit. So we have this problem that the tax is regressive, it imposes a larger burden on the poor, but the health effect is progressive. It will reduce the gap between the rich and poor in terms of smoking rates. And of great importance, there's an enormous gap between the rich and poor in this country in life expectancy, and as much as half of that may be differences in smoking rates.   Ken, there's a hundred follow-up questions I could ask, and I find this discussion absolutely fascinating. One thing that came into my mind was that some years ago I looked at the relationship of taxes, state by state in the US, and rates of disease like lung cancer and heart disease. And there was plenty of data because there was a huge range in tobacco taxes. Places like New York and Rhode Island had very high taxes, and the tobacco Southern states, like North Carolina, had very low taxes. But what's the sort of recent take on that, and the relationship between taxes and actual disease?   Well, it's still true. And there are, in fact, what you suggest, the southeastern block of tobacco states have unusually low rates of taxation. And I haven't seen any recent data but one presumes that they are suffering more from smoking-related diseases because their smoking rates are higher. I mean, that has to be true. So I don't know that we have any particularly good data recently, but there have been studies that clearly relate tobacco or cigarette prices to health outcomes associated with smoking.   I'm assuming US scientists have played a prominent role in producing the literature showing the negative health consequences of using cigarettes, and yet you said the United States has relatively low taxes compared to other developed countries. Why, do you think?   I think we're going to get into a very philosophical discussion about the US right here. It has to do with individual responsibility. We know for sure that the initial reason the taxes were so low was that the tobacco block was so influential in the Senate, particularly in the days when Jesse Helms, the senator from North Carolina, was in the Senate. He was the most feared senator by the other senators, and if you wanted to get anything done for your cause, you had to go along with his cause, which was keeping cigarette prices low and doing everything they could to support smoking. So there's clearly been a built-in bias in the Senate, and basically in the Congress as a whole, against tobacco policy. You see a huge variation from state to state in tobacco policies, and it's reflective of basically their political leanings in general.   You brought up this issue of personal responsibility, and boy, does that apply in the food area. You know, the food companies are saying: if you have one sugar beverage every once in a while, it's not going to be harmful. And it's not use of the products but it is overuse of the products. Thereby saying, it's not corporate responsibility we're talking about here, it's personal responsibility. That same argument was made by the tobacco industry, wasn't it?   It was. They would be less inclined to do that today, for a couple of reasons. One is that we know that even low levels of smoking are harmful and indeed cause many of the diseases that we were referring to earlier. And I think all the companies have now admitted publicly that smoking does cause all of these diseases that we've long known it causes. And all of them are claiming that they would like to move away from a society with smoking to one that has alternative products that would give people choices and ways to get their nicotine without exposing themselves to so much risk. I mean, we have to remember, the fact that cigarettes kill their consumers is a real drawback as far as the industry is concerned because they're losing a lot of their consumers, you know, 10, 20 years before they normally would, and they have to deal with all these lawsuits. So it's unfortunate for them. Having said that, cigarettes are the goose that lays the golden egg. They cost very little to manufacture. The industry is sufficiently oligopolistic that the profits are enormous, and their profitability has continued even while smoking has dropped rather precipitously ever since the mid-1960s.   Is that because the markets outside the US have been growing?   They certainly have helped. Although now, and this is only true within the last few years, the aggregate cigarette sales in the world are declining. They've actually started dropping. So we were seeing a relatively stable situation as smoking decreased in the developed world and was rising in the developing world. The only place now where we're seeing increases in smoking are areas in Africa, which, by the way, is the one place in the world where we might be able to forego the tobacco epidemic because smoking rates are still quite low in most of the countries, not all of them, and also parts of the Middle East. But elsewhere we've been seeing smoking declining all over the world. That doesn't mean the profits have to drop because one thing that the companies can do, is, they can raise their prices. Now, if prices go up because of taxes that hurts the companies. But if they raise their own prices because demand is inelastic, what that means is that the percentage increase in the price is larger than the percentage decline in the demand for cigarettes. So they're actually adding to their profitability by doing that. They've always played this very interesting game for years of keeping price below what we would think to be the profit-maximizing price. And I think the reason for that has to do with addiction because they know that they have to have what are called replacement smokers, kids coming in to take the place of the smokers who are dying or quitting. And for years, I think, they kept their prices down because they didn't want to discourage young people from smoking. Now, I think they see the writing on the wall. Smoking is declining very rapidly. Smoking prevalence, which was 45% in the mid, early-1960s, is now a little over 12% in the US, and I think they're raising their prices with the understanding that they want to take as much advantage of the opportunity with the addicted smokers, the adults, as they possibly can, even though smoking among kids is becoming vanishingly small.   I think of so many parallels with the soda taxes that now exists in a number of places, and the companies have responded somewhat differently. And perhaps it's the level of addiction issue that kicks in here, and the need to have replacement customers. Maybe that's another key difference. But with the soda taxes, the companies have not increased prices beyond the level of the tax. You know, to delight of public health experts, the companies have tended to pass along the entire tax so the companies are not eating that difference in order to keep prices the same. Higher tax gets reflected in the ultimate price that they charge, but they're not increasing prices beyond that. Do you think it might be the addiction issue that's different here?   I don't know. I mean, that certainly could be an element of it. The other thing is that they're manufacturing other drinks that are being used in place of some of the sodas. So they've got waters, they've got juices. I mean, obviously these sugary juices are no better, but they do make other products. They make the diet drinks. And to the extent that they can find substitutes for those products within their own companies, it may be that they're content to allow people to make those substitutions.   Interesting comment. The results so far on the soda tax suggest that the most common substitution as people drink less soda, is water, which is of course better than a lot of the alternatives that people might be consuming, so that's a bit of really good news. Even though the companies do sell water, Coke and Pepsi have Aquafina and Dasani, for example, they face a basic problem. Number one is that these companies are the biggest sellers of sugary beverages but not bottled water. That happens to be Nestle. So if people migrate to bottled water, they're likely to migrate from the big companies, like Coke and Pepsi, to Nestle. Also, people tend not to be very brand-loyal to water. They tend to buy whatever is on sale or whatever they find available to them, and that creates a problem for these companies like Coke and Pepsi that do rely on brand loyalty for their marketing. So it's very interesting. And also, I wonder, based on the research on food and addiction, if the companies don't take a hit if people switch from full sugar beverages even to diet beverages that they might sell because there wouldn't be as much addictive potential, and therefore the customers wouldn't have to have as much just to keep the habit going. So it's really interesting to think this through.   That's certainly very plausible. The whole thing would also depend on the price elasticity of demand for sodas, and specifically for the brands that they're concerned about. If there is greater elasticity there than what we observe for cigarettes, then raising those prices aren't necessarily going to help them all that much.   You mentioned that the elasticity estimates for tobacco suggested that a 10% increase in price led to a 3 to 4% reduction in consumption, and the numbers are even more positive in the case of the sugar beverages, where if you get a 10%, 15% increase in price, you end up with 10, 15% reduction in consumption. So that's good news in the food arena.   That's good news but it also means that they can't do as easily what the tobacco industry can do, which is to raise their prices and expect to see profits rise. Because if they're losing as much in sales as they're gaining in price, it's no win.   So Ken, let's talk about product formulation because you mentioned that earlier, and this is a really interesting issue that, again, connects tobacco and food products. So you think about the tobacco companies mainly selling cigarettes, but now there's vaping, there's cigarettes with things like menthol and other flavors, or low-fat foods, or artificial sweeteners. The list of product reformulations in order to attract customers goes on and on and on. So I know a controversial topic in your field has been e-cigarettes. Can you explain what these are?   E-cigarettes have been around now for about a decade, let's say. Basically, they're devices that allow people to inhale nicotine and other substances, but the purpose is to give them their nicotine without combustion. And we know that the major problem associated with smoking is the products of combustion. There's 7,000 chemical compounds in cigarette smoke. 70 of them are known human carcinogens, causes of cancer in humans. Many of them are cardiotoxic. They cause lung disease and so on. The e-cigarettes have about two orders of magnitude fewer toxins in their emissions than do cigarettes. And it turns out that the amount of the comparable toxins, when they are in fact comparable, that you find in the e-cigarette emissions is much lower, usually a 10th to a 400th, of what you find in cigarette smoke.   So logically, and based on a fair body of evidence at this point, vaping, use of e-cigarettes to get nicotine, is substantially less dangerous than is cigarette smoking. However, the controversy here is incredible. This is the most divisive issue that I have witnessed in my 45 years of working in the tobacco control field. It has torn the field asunder. The mainstream of public health, and by that I'm including governmental agencies, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the Truth Initiative, the American Cancer Society, heart and lung associations, all of mainstream public health is strongly opposed to e-cigarettes, and for one reason. They're concerned about kids' uptake of e-cigarettes, which has been substantial. It's been decreasing the last couple of years, but it has been substantial. And there are a number of things they're concerned about in that regard, and they're completely ignoring the fact that there's pretty good evidence that e-cigarettes are increasing smoking cessation for a subset of smokers. And a number of us on the science side of this, believe that the net effect of e-cigarettes is beneficial, that it's actually, possibly, a tool to add to the armamentarium of things like cigarette taxation, like smoke-free workplaces, like restrictions on advertising, and that it will help a group of inveterate smokers, those who either can't quit nicotine or don't want to, to move to a less dangerous alternative to smoking. I am not saying that e-cigarettes have no risk associated with them. They almost certainly do. But it is substantially lower.   Now, historically, this is divisive within the field in part because all of the earlier attempts at, quote-unquote, tobacco harm reduction have been produced by the major cigarette companies, and they've been fraudulent. So cigarette filters were manufactured and sold, starting in the 1950s, in response to the scare that I referred to earlier about cancer. And they were sold with a message that the filters block the dangerous stuff but let the flavor through. And people bought this. That decrease in smoking in the early 1950s reversed, smoking went up sharply, as sales of filtered cigarettes went up. By the way, the first successful filtered cigarette was Kent, and it used what it referred to as the miracle Micronite filter. Well, that miracle Micronite filter turns out to have been made of asbestos. And there are lawsuits continuing to the present day by workers in the factories that made the filter tips for Kent cigarettes, who themselves ended up with lung cancer or other diseases due to the asbestos. Then came low-tar and nicotine cigarettes, and we actually have ample evidence from the documents that had been revealed by lawsuits, that the industry knew that this was a public relations device. It was not a harm reduction device. And in fact, because people believed that low-tar and nicotine cigarettes were less dangerous, it's likely that it actually increased the toll of smoking because people who would have quit, switched to low-tar and nicotine cigarettes instead. So there's some pretty awful history here that makes people legitimately concerned about alternative products. A critical element of this story is that the alternative products, in this case, the e-cigarettes were introduced by non-cigarette, non-tobacco companies, and their goal was to replace smoking. Now the major companies are all making their own e-cigarettes as well because they have to do it from a defensive point of view, but basically they don't have any great interest in slowing up the sale of cigarettes. They want to benefit from that as long as they can.   So I should know the answer to this but I don't, but are e-cigarettes taxed? And wouldn't it be optimal to tax e-cigarettes but less than regular cigarettes so you discourage use of both but discourage the use of regular cigarettes more?   That is very insightful. Two colleagues and I actually published a paper saying that in 2015 in "The New England Journal of Medicine," that we should be taxing e-cigarettes modestly, the reason being that we want to discourage kids from using them, and kids are far more price-sensitive than our adults. Kids have a very elastic response to cigarette prices. Adults do not, and in particular, older adults have even lower price responsiveness. So yes, there should be some taxation of e-cigarettes to discourage youth use of it but that taxation should be dramatically lower than the taxation of cigarettes. Some states are now taxing e-cigarettes. Not all of them. The federal government is actually looking into a proposal to double the tax, the federal tax, on cigarettes, which would take it up to $2.01 a pack, and at the same time, to establish an equivalent tax, similar to the $2 tax, on all vaping products. This would be a disaster because it would definitely discourage kids from vaping, but it would also discourage adults from using e-cigarettes as an alternative to smoking, and the most addicted, the inveterate smokers, those are the ones that need these alternatives. So that's a bad policy proposal. A much better one would be to increase the cigarette tax by more than a dollar, raise it to 3 or $4 or something, and impose a modest tax on e-cigarettes. This would discourage people from smoking, both adults and kids, but especially kids. It would discourage kids from using e-cigarettes but it would create a price differential that would encourage the inveterate smokers to switch to e-cigarettes. Now, part of the problem, and this has gotten worse over time, is that the American public believes that e-cigarettes, that vaping, is as dangerous and even maybe more dangerous than cigarette smoking. Nothing could be further from the truth but so far the mainstream of public health has sold that message to the public, and the public, including smokers, believe it.   That's a fascinating story about how the public health field might be getting in its own way with this.   And maybe doing damage to public health.   So let's loop back a little bit to the behavior of the tobacco industry. So in 2017, the Phillip Morris Company funded and launched an organization called Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. So I think, hmm, a tobacco company saying they want less smoking, and one could view this with pretty high cynicism but what do you think about it?   I've always shared your sense of cynicism about it. There's an interesting anecdote related to this. The individual who negotiated the deal by which Phillip Morris offered $1 billion over a 12-year period to establish this foundation, that individual was the main actor in the World Health Organization during the development of the global treaty on tobacco control, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. He also became director of the organization and served in that capacity until just the other day. He has stepped down from being director. But let me give you a little context for it. Philip Morris International that needs to be distinguished from Altria and Philip Morris Domestic, but Philip Morris International sells the leading brand of what is known as heated tobacco products, HTPs. These are products that actually have tobacco in them. E-cigarettes have no tobacco in them but these products actually have tobacco in them. But instead of burning the tobacco, they heat it. They volatilize it, and the nicotine is inhaled. Like e-cigarettes, they appear to be substantially less dangerous than smoking, although it's not clear that they're as less dangerous as, than, e-cigarettes. But they're produced only by the major cigarette companies. Philip Morris is now selling these products successfully in many countries, many cities around the world. While they actually have the authorization to sell an older version of the product in the US, it's not very popular at this point. But in Japan, over the last four years there's been a drop in cigarettes sold of about a third at the same time that there's been this great increase in the use of these heated tobacco products manufactured by Philip Morris International and by Japan Tobacco. They have a product called Ploom. Philip Morris' product is called IQOS, I-Q-O-S, which, I was told, originally stood for I Quit Ordinary Smoking. So they are the leader of the theme song that the industry is singing these days about how they want a smoke-free world and they want to move toward one. But the only way they're ever going to do that, willingly, is if they can sell other products like these heated tobacco products and make large sums of money on them. Philip Morris has a good start at that. They claim that about a third of their revenue now is coming from IQOS, this heated tobacco product.   So whether that foundation ultimately has beneficial effects or not, forget corporate beneficial effects but on the public good, would pretty much depend on who's choosing to use these e-cigarettes, I'm imagining. That if it's people switching from normal cigarettes to them, or using them instead of normal cigarettes, it's one thing. But if they're recruiting new people who otherwise wouldn't smoke, then it would be a bad thing. So how do you think that'll all play out?   That's actually a critically important question, Kelly. And one of the great concerns that the opposition to e-cigarettes has, is that they're addicting lots of kids to nicotine, and that many of them will go on to smoke, and that that will reverse the progress that we made on smoking. Now, it turns out that there is no evidence to support the latter contention. And in fact, there's evidence to the contrary. I think it's entirely possible that some kids who would not have touched a cigarette otherwise are vaping and then trying cigarettes in the future. Whether they become regular smokers, remains to be seen. But I think there certainly are some kids like that. But what we do know is that the rate of smoking among kids, what we call current smoking, and smoking among kids means that they've had at least one puff on a cigarette in the last 30 days, that number has plummeted over the last quarter century, and, and this is the interesting thing, it has gone down at its fastest rate precisely during the period in which vaping has been popular among kids.   So one theory is that vaping is displacing smoking to some extent. That kids who would've smoked are vaping instead. It's a very complicated area and we don't know the answer. Among adults who vape, and they are relatively few in number except for very young adults, we observe mostly dual use, but the question is how much of this is a transition to vaping only, and then, maybe, a transition to nothing after that. In the UK, where vaping has been advertised by the health organizations as a way to quit smoking, and they have encouraged its use, and they use it in their smoking cessation clinics, and you'll even find it in hospitals, in the UK we have seen that more than half of the people who have quit smoking by using e-cigarettes have also quit vaping. So it is no longer the case in the UK that a majority of the people who vape are also currently smoking.   In the US, the data have been moving in that direction but it's still a majority who are dual users rather than vaping only. But we have evidence of four or five completely different kinds of studies, commercial data, other products in other countries, that all lead to the conclusion that vaping is already increasing the rate of smoking cessation in the US and in the UK by probably 10 to 15%. That's a hard thing to see in the data but it is something that, if you dig into the data, you will see it, and as I say, we see it all over the place. Let me give you one example of the tobacco harm reduction story that's fabulous. 40 to 50 years ago, large numbers of Swedish males started using a smokeless tobacco product called snus, S-N-U-S. It's a relatively low nitrosamine product, nitrosamine being a carcinogenic element, and they substituted it for cigarettes largely because cigarette taxes were going way up and there weren't any significant taxes on snus. So what you observe today, some three, four decades or more later, is that Swedish males have the lowest male smoking rate of any country in Europe, and maybe in the world. They do not have a low tobacco use rate. Their tobacco use rate is pretty typical but it consists mostly of snus. And they also have by far the lowest rate of tobacco-related diseases, like lung cancer, of men in all of the European Union countries, and the second lowest is typically a rate twice or more that of what you see in the Swedish males. Swedish females, who did not quit smoking in large numbers and did not take up snus until fairly recently, have rates of lung cancer and other diseases that are average or above-average for the European Union. So that's a great example of tobacco harm reduction in action, and it's one that's been around now, as I say, for decades.   Ken, this is a remarkable history and you're just bringing it alive beautifully. But let me ask you one final question. So given that you've been working in this field for more than four decades now, and have really been a pioneer, a leader, a warrior, and a hero, all those things could be applied to you and your work, if I asked you to sum up what's been learned from all these decades of work on tobacco, what would you say?   There are a lot of lesson. Certainly, we have learned specific kinds of interventions that really matter. You and I spoke about tax at some length. That's the preeminent one. Smoke-free workplaces, including smoke-free restaurants and bars, have not only themselves had a direct impact on health but have also set the tone for a more smoke-free society. So we have seen quite dramatic changes. I mentioned we're going from a 45% rate of smoking for the nation as a whole down to a little over 12%. That, however, has taken us six to seven decades. So it's kind of a good news, bad news story. It's a very complicated area. Tobacco control was ranked by CDC as one of the 10 most important public health measures of the 20th century, and also the first decade of the 21st century. And I think that's completely legitimate, and it is something about which all of us who care about public health can feel very proud about. The problem still remains. It is an enormous problem, as you alluded earlier, in many parts of the developing world, the low- and middle-income countries, and it's a growing problem in some of those countries, and it's just not going to disappear real fast. The lesson that I've taken most recently has been a discouraging one, and that's how divisive our field has become. We really have a chasm between the people who are opposed to tobacco harm reduction and those who are supportive of it. They're good people on both sides, they believe what they're saying, but they can't talk to each other civilly at this point. I hope that that will not become the case for those of you who are fighting the good fight in dealing with unhealthy foods.   Bio   Kenneth E. Warner is the Avedis Donabedian Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Public Health and Dean Emeritus at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. A member of the faculty from 1972-2017, he served as Dean from 2005-2010. Presented in over 275 professional publications, Dr. Warner's research has focused on economic and policy aspects of tobacco and health. Dr. Warner served as the World Bank's representative to negotiations on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, WHO's first global health treaty. He also served as the Senior Scientific Editor of the 25th anniversary Surgeon General's report on smoking and health. From 2004-2005 he was President of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT). He currently serves on the FDA's Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee. In 1996 Dr. Warner was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He is a recipient of the Surgeon General's Medallion, the Luther Terry Award for Exemplary Achievement in Tobacco Control, and the Doll-Wynder Award from SRNT. Dr. Warner earned his AB from Dartmouth College and MPhil and PhD in economics from Yale University.  

Bible Study with Jairus – Romans 12- A Discussion of Gifts Our discussion in Romans 12 begins with a focus on verse 3. This verse says, "For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned." A man asked me a question about this. He said, “What is the direct relationship between this verse and the previous verses? Why does Paul mention this here? What does it mean to think with ‘sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned'?” We must understand that the background of the book of Romans is the fierce conflict between the Jews and the Gentiles. This conflict caused all the Jews to leave Rome in the time of Claudius (Acts 18:2). At that time Priscilla and Aquila left Rome and traveled to Corinth. Corinth is where they met Paul, the apostle. Since all three of them were tentmakers by trade, Paul remained there and helped to build tents.   Perhaps it was prior to the time that Paul was burdened to write the Roman Church. He was also urged to write the book of Romans because he was determined to go to Jerusalem, and he was uncertain if he would leave Jerusalem alive and eventually visit Rome. Racial conflicts in society usually penetrate the church. Therefore, in our study of Romans, we have also mentioned that one of Paul's burdens was a hope that both the Jewish and Gentile believers of the Roman church could accept each other and live in peace. This may also help us understand Paul's words in the highlighted text. Paul is admonishing both Jewish and Gentile believers to see each other's strengths and not to think highly of themselves. Spiritual Gifts in the Body of Christ I shared that there are two great problems with Christians or churches. The first is that they think highly of their own gifts or callings but belittle the gifts and callings of others. Secondly, they look down upon their own gifts and callings but admire or even envy the gifts of others. First of all, this is true among individuals. Paul uses the different parts of the body as a metaphor in Romans 12:4-8. Each of us is a member of the body of Christ, and each of us has our own function. Both the mouth and tongue are parts of the body, but they have different functions. With regards to the function of speaking, they are both indispensable. But if the mouth thinks too highly of its gift and acts like it does not need the tongue's cooperation, it cannot speak alone. If the tongue feels that its work is less efficient than the mouth's, it may belittle itself, become envious of the mouth, and give up its function. Again, the mouth would not be able to speak. This is what “to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” means. We need to know and understand the measure of faith, the calling, and the gifts that God has given us. First, we need to do our part. When we do our part, we can complement each other and accomplish God's work. From the body's perspective, it is important that the mouth does not attempt to control the tongue or likewise. To produce a cohesive outcome such as eating or talking, the two must agree to work together.  The same must also be done spiritually. Therefore, when Paul talked about us being different members of the body of Christ, he specifically mentioned that we use our gifts “according to the grace given to us.” Romans 12:6-8 lists these gifts and how we should use them: “if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. When we are faithful to the talents and gifts that God has given us, God will multiply our gifts. For example, you may only have the gift of preaching at first. You have shared the gospel and people were saved so you are now an evangelist. As you begin to teach these newly saved believers the truths of the Bible, you gradually develop the gift of teaching. Because you need to shepherd them, you will also develop the gift of pastoring. When the number of people or even churches you lead increases, you will become an apostle. Of course, if you pursue the gift of prophecy, you might be an apostolic prophet. My Gifting Allow me to use a personal example to further explain. I left the Local Church Movement (LCM) in 2015 to study in the charismatic church. There I encountered many people with prophetic gifts. When they met me for the first time, many people said, “You have the gift of teaching. God has given you a gift in which once you understand a truth, you can express it in a language that others can understand.” Many people have prophesied to me like this. They have the gift of prophecy and I can confirm this because they do not know about my experience in the Local Church Movement. The LCM practices prophesying in the way of forth-telling [see note at the bottom] and PSRP (pray-reading, studying, reciting, and prophesying). It encourages every brother and sister to learn to speak for the Lord. Therefore, many brothers and sisters in the Local Church Movement have the gift of teaching. The Local Church Movement's position is that everyone prophesies. If speaking is not your natural talent, everyone will say amen and encourage you. Everyone dares to speak over time, and everyone is granted the opportunity to learn to speak. Everyone is afforded the opportunity to speak with boldness.  Since the church encourages everyone to study the Bible diligently, many people have the ability to teach to some extent. Everyone can speak boldly. In 2015, I had been attending meetings in the Local Church Movement for 13 years. My wife and I had been married for almost 10 years but we were infertile. Therefore, it was my hope to seek help from some brothers and sisters who were attentive to the voice of the Lord and could help us understand God's will. We needed direction on how to be healed. But no one could help me in the Local Church Movement.  Later, under the leading of the Holy Spirit, I visited some charismatic churches and met some Christians with prophetic gifts. They could see prophetic visions or receive miraculous revelations after praying. Some people even saw in their prophetic vision that we would have a child and shared that with us, which became our comfort in difficult times. Some of these prophetic words have yet to occur. But in general, there was indeed some hope and comfort for us at that time. Later, God also spoke personally to me. After this, we had our miracle baby! During the process, I realized that the gift of prophecy is real and that I was very eager to pursue it. I studied and completed the prophetic class offered by Randy Clark's Global Awakening. I continued to learn and practice. Gradually I was able to activate the gift of prophecy. Although the gift has been stirred up within me, it must mature. I have started to have many prophetic dreams and some prophetic visions. Although these gifts are very controversial for many Christians, my experience is real, and I did experience an increase in my measure of faith and in my gifts. Because the Local Church Movement does not acknowledge, understand, or teach the gift of prophecy (in the sense of foretelling), it was naturally impossible for me to learn or grow in the gift of prophecy in its meetings. Using your gifts is like exercising.  if you exercise a muscle often, this muscle will be naturally strong; but if you do not exercise or never use a certain muscle, this muscle will not be strong. The reason why the Local Church Movement does not teach the gifts of prophecy in terms of foretelling is based on the inaccuracies of many foretelling prophecies in the Pentecostal churches, including revivals or earthquakes that did not come as prophesied. This judgment is true, but the gift of prophecy was immature at that time when the leaders of the LCM made such conclusions. There have been more developments and progress since that time. But the Local Church Movement completely closed this door based on its bad experience from the past. As the saying goes, they “threw the baby out with the bathwater.” Another saying, “Misuse is not the excuse to not use," does a better job of explaining what they should have done. There are many misuses of gifts in the history of the Charismatic Movement, but the misuse of gifts is not an excuse for us to neglect gifts. The Local Church Movement does not advocate for or teach miraculous healing because they believe that pursuing miraculous healing will make believers pay less attention to spiritual life and growth. However, on the other hand, if our bodies cannot be healed, it would conversely limit the spiritual growth of believers. My own needs were not met in the Local Church Movement. Didn't this prove that I was missing something? My experience is unique to me, but common to the body of Christ. I shared my experience on YouTube and WeChat, and believers from the Local Church Movement in the United States and China wrote to me to affirm my experience. They also discussed with me how to get healed. Although the gift of healing is new to me, it is being developed so that God can use me to help others. After talking to others who share similar beliefs, we all agreed that the Local Church Movement does not teach or exercise the complete five-fold gifts as described in Ephesians 4:11-13. Therefore, in addition to the gift of prophecy, I also pursued the gift of healing. I went to New York to attend the healing meeting of Kenneth W. Hagin, the son of Kenneth E. Hagin, and asked him to pray for me to receive the gift of healing. After some hesitation, He said “This is entirely up to God.” He reluctantly prayed for me. However, I had a prophetic dream that night. In the prophetic dream, I saw Jesus telling me from a high place that He had given me the gift of healing. I said, “I didn't receive it.” Then the Lord said, “Raise your right hand.” I then raised my right hand. A current flowed through my hand. Then the Lord Jesus asked me to raise my right arm again. This time the heat current flowed through my entire arm. Later, many people with prophetic gifts said that God has bestowed on me the gift of healing to help me steadfastly pray for my wife. God healed my wife through my prayers which resulted in a miraculous pregnancy! Just as my prophetic gift is currently dormant, my gift of healing is also limited. In addition to my wife, I have prayed for many other people. Not many have received healing. However, when I look back on my experience over the past few years, my measure of faith and my gifts have indeed increased. Although there is still room for improvement, I have made progress. I am thankful to the Local Church Movement for its help of activating the gift of teaching and spiritual growth.  I also thank the charismatic church for helping me activate the gift of prophecy and the gift of healing. My gifts may be limited, but God's gifts are unlimited. We cannot think highly of the gifts of our teachers and belittle the gift of prophecy in other people (or vice versa). How Teaching and Prophecy Fit Together Rick Joyner, a well-known prophet in charismatic churches, compared the gift of teaching with the gift of prophecy, thinking that these two gifts need to balance each other. He said that prophets often receive revelation from God, but if there is no balance with the gift of teaching, they often are in danger of teaching heresy. For example, in history, "Mountainists" paid a lot of attention to the gift of prophecy. They declared that they had received special revelation. In the end, they taught wrong truths, which had a great impact on the misunderstanding of the gift of prophecy by Christianity in later generations. Another example is William Marrion Branham, who was a prominent figure in the healing and charismatic revival in the 1950s. He had a keen gift of prophecy. He could often tell the symptoms of patients and heal them. But in his later years, he taught heresy and wrong truths, even calling himself Elijah. Therefore, the gift of prophecy needs a balance of the gift of teaching so as not to go to extremes. The gift of teaching also needs the balance of the gift of prophecy. Many traditional churches only give importance to the gift of teaching. They deny, neglect, or belittle prophetic gifts. Gradually, teaching tends to become dogma. If the church lacks prophetic vision, it will gradually face spiritual death. This is the result of over-emphasizing the gift of teaching and neglecting the gift of prophecy. The Bible says that, “Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint.” (Proverbs 29:18). Many people may feel that “casting off restraints” here may be too serious, but the fact is that many churches are spiritually dead. The reason is that they have too much teaching. They lack fresh words from the Lord or fresh encounters with the Lord. It is not that we don't need the gift of teaching. But if we only value the gift of teaching, the situation that Solomon said will happen: "My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12) This does not mean that we should not study, but that studying should be combined with experience. Prophetic visions and prophetic dreams are our subjective communication with the Lord. They belong to the category of prophetic experiences. They are to know the Lord through subjective experience. Meanwhile, reading the Bible and studying are to know the Lord in objective truth. They belong to the category of the gift of teaching. They are to know the Lord through knowledge. These two need to balance each other. We need both the knowledge of the Lord and experiences with the Lord. The Gifts In Practice After I left the Local Church Movement, I visited many churches. I observed that every church has a different assignment before God. Some churches focus on teaching the truth. Some churches focus on worship. Some focus on 24-hour prayer and worship. Some focus on fasting and prayer. Some focus on religious ceremonies. Some focus on saving the children's ministry. Some focus on caring for the poor, and so on and so forth. Every church and every denomination has a call from God. But the disagreement between churches is often because they regard God's call to themselves as God's most relevant call. Actually, this is not the case at all. We might reverence our own call as the most important, but it does not necessarily mean that what we are called to do is the most important thing to God. Because each of us has a limited energy, we can only focus on one thing. God has a titanic size workload.  Therefore, in God's eyes, different churches are different members of His body. They work together to accomplish His perfect plan. If we regard God's calling to us as God's entire work, or as God's most central work, and neglect to learn, understand, and cooperate with other people's callings and gifts, we will easily wither or become biased. Because we are different members of the body, those of us with the gift of teaching need to balance those with the gift of prophecy. Those who have the gift of prophecy need to balance those with the gift of teaching. If you pay attention to the situation of different churches, churches that value gifts but are not solid enough in God's Word are often prone to have wrong teachings on the truth or not have enough spiritual maturity. This type of church falls apart easily as they tend to be lukewarm, unrooted, and not disciplined. The churches that value the teachings of the Bible, but not the gift of prophecy, have a lot of knowledge, but without God's anointing and not exercising gifts at the appointed time, they tend to be confined to their ivory towers. Such churches often think they know the truth, but many of their teachings are full of tradition-based knowledge. Often, they are not strong enough in the operation of the Holy Spirit. They, along with their followers, often die and wither spiritually. Such churches are often prone to legalism. I just cited two gifts -the gift of teaching and gift of prophecy for comparison. There are other gifts that are also vitally important. For example, many churches do not attach importance to the work of deliverance ministry, which will gradually lead to many problems. There are controversies about the gift of apostleship and whether there are apostles in the church today. But I believe the apostolic ministry is still vital today. Due to time constraints, we will not discuss other gifts in detail here. Unity in the Body Therefore, in addition to individual Christians needing to admit that their faith and gifts are limited and thus need to be paired with those of other members of the body, churches must also admit this fact. Unity in the church is not conformity. In order to achieve unity in the church, the church must recognize the diversity in churches and their different callings before God. The unity in the church does not lie in any one method. It comes from a oneness in the understanding of the knowledge of God's truth. Let's consider the following example. In the early years, the Local Church Movement practiced gathering in Los Angeles in accordance with the locality's principles and on the basis of oneness. A group that advocated speaking in tongues had gathered with the Local Church Movement on the basis of oneness. But in the end, everyone had a different understanding of speaking in tongues. This caused a separation. Although the leader hoped that everyone would put aside their differences and attend meetings on the basis of oneness, they still could not be at peace with each other.  I left the Local Church Movement and went to the charismatic movement in 2015. After experiencing the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues there, I realized that speaking in tongues is an important truth in the Bible, which is essential to a Christian's spiritual experience. Speaking in tongues is not what many people think, the smallest gift among the gifts. Speaking in tongues is a very important gift and a requirement for the growth of other spiritual gifts. Many people need to pass this requirement first before they can pursue more gifts, and even spiritual maturity (though speaking in tongues itself will not guarantee spiritual maturity). If used properly, speaking in tongues can help believers to obtain more maturity. There is a lot of controversy about this truth, but remember that Paul specifically asked the church not to forbid speaking in tongues (1 Corinthians 14:39). He said that he spoke in tongues more than anyone else (1 Corinthians 14:18). But many churches have actually forbidden speaking in tongues, which is inconsistent with Paul's teaching. I don't have time here to explain the truth about speaking in tongues. But for people who understand its importance, it is difficult to stop speaking in tongues. Speaking in tongues is a gift.  Although I don't need to speak in tongues in meetings, I know that people who don't speak in tongues lack knowledge of certain spiritual truths and spiritual experiences regarding tongues. I do not force others to speak in tongues, so others do not need to force me to quit praying privately in tongues. The difference in understanding of this basic truth caused the church to split into two major divisions. Who says that speaking in tongues is the smallest gift? If it is, why does the smallest gift cause the biggest split in Christianity? Does this make sense? It is evident that speaking in tongues is a very important truth. It is a truth and gift that the enemy strives to prevent Christians from knowing and practicing. The purpose is to prevent Christians from growing up in their spiritual life and receiving spiritual gifts to fight him. Of course, counterfeit tongues and the fleshy situation of Christians who are speaking in tongues have always existed, whether in the Corinthian church or the modern church. There are also many wrong teachings about speaking in tongues. For example, the statement that “speaking in tongues is necessary for salvation” is not in line with the Bible. This will cause the people who don't understand about speaking in tongues to stumble. But as we said earlier, “Misuse is not the excuse to not use.” In fact, this is another method used by the enemy to attack the truth about speaking in tongues to make people misunderstand it and to stigmatize it. When anything is stigmatized, it is often more important. Consider the example of speaking in tongues. I pointed out that the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movement, which is comprised of 600 to 700 million Christians, cannot be in oneness with other evangelical denominations which have around same number of people. This is because everyone's understanding of the truth is not in oneness, and everyone's lives are not mature enough. Under this premise, any method, including the basis of "oneness in our locality" (which may be a good method and in line with the Bible) won't bring people into oneness. The problem does not lie in the method but in us. Under these circumstances, if you insist on oneness, there will be two results. One is organizational unity, such as the Catholic Pope and the different levels of religious systems trying to maintain oneness. The other is trying to unite us in a coalition. But often you are friends only on the surface. Neither method can achieve true oneness. Andrew Murray said that the division between churches and denominations lies in the fact that they have not allowed themselves to be filled more with God's Holy Spirit. He gave the following example. He said it's like when the tide goes down, shoals appear one after another. Each shoal is like one denomination. There are fish in it. Everyone does their own thing there; they shepherd their own fish. The barriers of the shoals are like the barriers of the denominations. Only when the tide rises will all barriers be removed and will oneness be achieved. The true oneness is for the Holy Spirit and the Lord's glory to fill the earth. People's knowledge of the Lord fills the land as when the water fills the sea. Before this, no method can let us achieve oneness. I told the brother who asked this question that there is no need to pursue oneness just for the sake of pursuing it. Our oneness with the Lord is enough. Slowly, as the body of Christ grows in stature, a better understanding of the truth will slowly bring about oneness. Oneness is made by the Holy Spirit, not by us humans. Before that, learning to love one another is the most important. In conclusion, let us review the four sections of Romans 12, which sums things up well. The first section tells us to “present our bodies as a living sacrifice, which is our spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1). The second section tells us we should “be transformed by the renewal of our minds” (Romans 12:2). The third section tells each of us we should look at ourselves “according to the measure of faith God has assigned.” We should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, and we must use our gifts alongside those of other believers. But at the same time, we must also yearn for an increase in the measure of faith and an increase in gifts. The fourth section is a reminder that there should be love in everything. Love one another with brotherly affection, love your enemies, and live in harmony with one other. (Romans 12:10, 14, 18) When we live out love, we live out oneness. Perhaps this was Paul's burden for the Jew and Gentile believers in the Roman Church.   Note on forth-telling: “Foretelling is the declaration of future events as revealed from the Lord, pertaining especially to the kingdom of God Forth-Telling is to utter forth, declare, a thing which can only be known by divine revelation; declare the divine will, to interpret the purposes of God, or to make known in any way the truth of God which is designed to influence people. It can only be uncovered and revealed through prophets.” Source: https://joycewaiwai.wordpress.com/2016/11/23/prophecy-foretelling-vs-forth-telling/

In this episode of our Wealth Management Leadership podcast series, SIFMA President & CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. sits down with Ken Cella, Principal of the Client Strategies Group at Edward Jones for a conversation on how the pandemic has shaped the way advisors and clients approach the “New Retirement.” We discuss its four pillars of health, family, purpose and finances. We'll also explore how the pandemic led investors to focus more on life's priorities, its impact on retirement savings trends, and how it prompted first-time legacy planning conversations for 44.5 million Americans. For a transcript and more, please visit https://www.sifma.org/resources/news/podcast-wealth-management-leadership-series-ken-cella/

In this episode of our Wealth Management Leadership podcast series, SIFMA President & CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. sits down with Joseph E. Sweeney, President, Advice & Wealth Management, Products and Service Delivery for Ameriprise, Inc., for an introspective discussion on how the advisor-client relationship has evolved in recent decades. We look at the pivotal role that technology has played in changing the way firms, advisors, clients, and employees work, while emphasizing the value of a financial advisor to help investors reach long-term retirement goals and prepare for life's unexpected challenges. For a transcript and more, visit https://www.sifma.org/resources/news/podcast-wealth-management-leadership-series-joseph-sweeney.

In this episode of The SIFMA Podcast, SIFMA President & CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. sits down with Tom Price, Managing Director, Operations Technology & BCP, and Tom Wagner, Managing Director, Financial Services Operations, for a discussion on the financial services industry's cybersecurity efforts. Cyberattacks didn't stop during the pandemic. Rather, they increased. From WannaCry to SolarWinds, attacks have gotten bolder and their threat has grown higher. Here, we discuss how industry-wide efforts over the last decade have also evolved and grown to build effective cyber defenses.

In this episode of our Wealth Management Leadership podcast series, SIFMA president & CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. sits down with Primerica's PFS Investments CEO Estee Faranda for a discussion on reaching middle-income investors.

In this episode of our Wealth Management Leadership podcast series, SIFMA President & CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. is joined by Lisa Kidd Hunt, Executive Vice President, International Services, for Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., for a discussion on the rise of Generation Investor (Gen-I) and the findings from Schwab's new investor survey.

Kenneth E. Tovo United States Army Lieutenant General, Recent Commanding General, United States Army Special Operations Command and National Security Analyst, ABC, National Security and Defense, ABC News: Former Paramilitary Operations Officer, CIA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of our Wealth Management Leadership podcast series, SIFMA President & CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. sits down with Carey Shuffman, Head of UBS's Women's Segment, for a discussion on the unique trends and approaches to serving women investors. For a transcript and more, visit https://www.sifma.org/resources/news/podcast-wealth-management-leadership-series-carey-shuffman/

In this first episode of our Wealth Management Leadership podcast series, SIFMA President & CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. sits down with Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company President & CEO Evamarie Schoenborn for a discussion about how the firm's use of advisory teams has enhanced the advisor-client relationship. For a transcript and more, please visit https://www.sifma.org/resources/news/podcast-wealth-management-leadership-series-evamarie-schoenborn/.

We've all been there before. Someone hurts or disrespects you, and you are so left in such a bitter and angry state. On this episode, we share productive ways to go about telling the person with a bid to arrive at a resolution. Today is dog day. Did you know that the sense of smell for dogs are 4 times that of humans. This is only one of the many facts about this loveable and loyal animal we talked about. Quote of the day: “Central Truth: Prayer is successful only when it is based on the promises in God's Word!” ~ Kenneth E.Hagin Host: TOLA Omoniyi

It is abundantly clear that COVID-19 will have lasting impacts. In this podcast, SIFMA president and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. sits down with Nasser Khodri, President of FIS Capital Markets, to discuss the evolution of operational readiness and how to rebuild for resilience as we chart a path forward.

Craig Hill returns as our guest today on the podcast. Craig and our Rich discuss GTI's upcoming Signature Tour of Turkey and Greece, October 11-24. They walk through the scheduled itinerary (featuring over two dozen sites) and describe some of the highlights of these two amazing countries! In addition to following the footsteps of the Apostle Paul, this tour offers a hot air balloon ride in Turkey, wine tasting in Greece, and some amazing local hospitality. Registration is open! Visit https://gtitours.org/podcast for photos, links, and more from this episode.  Craig Hill is an affiliate Assistant Professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is also a member of the adjunct faculty at Biola University in New Testament. Hill has taught in university and seminary settings for 18 years and has served for over two decades in youth and pastoral ministries. He also works with Standing Stone Ministry, a ministry that provides pastoral care for pastors. Hill serves on the Board of Directors of Hume Lake Christian Camps, one of the largest youth camps in the nation. He has been to Israel on a number of occasions and enjoys teaching the Bible in the context of where it was written. He lives in Irvine, California with his wife Kelly and four kids.Turkey / Greece Signature Tour led by Dr. Craig Hill Oct 11-24, 2021https://gtitours.org/trip/signature-turkey Resources mentioned in the PodcastChristianity in the Greco - Roman World: A Narrative Introduction by Moyer v. HubbardJesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels by Kenneth E. BaileyPaul Through Mediterranean Eyes: Cultural Studies in1 Corinthians by Kenneth E BaileyVideo links from the podcastTurkey / Greece Signature video: https://vimeo.com/348185066Teaching at Pisidian Antioch: https://vimeo.com/336927026Old Loom: https://vimeo.com/336927023Hot Air Balloon: https://vimeo.com/336927011

Un escursionista scomparso, una strana caverna e tante domande.

The face of the individual investor is changing. In part one of this two-part podcast, SIFMA president and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. sits down with Ken Cella of Edward Jones to discuss how financial advice is evolving alongside the changing investor and why it is more critical than ever to work with a financial advisor. In part two, Bentsen and Broadridge’s Dan Cwenar dive into the findings from an unprecedented new study on the retail investor and share some surprising insights.

In the latest in SIFMA’s podcast series, SIFMA president and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. is joined independent financial planning professional Steve Budin, the President of the Budin Group. During their conversation, Steve explains his work on behalf of his clients and community as an independent financial advisor, and why his independent contractor status is important to that work. A bill currently under consideration in Congress known as the ‘PRO Act’ would change how independent contractor status is determined, adversely impacting these hundreds of thousands of independent financial advisors, including Steve.

Brian Joseph, Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and the Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Languages and Linguistics, studies historical linguistics; the history of the Greek language; language contact; Greek, Albanian, and Balkan linguistics; and Sanskrit. He's especially interested in the way that the similar experiences that cultures have with language influence how their language develops. For more of his discussion with David Staley, listen to this week's Voices of Excellence

Bible Study with Jairus - Comparing Local Church Movement and Pentecostal Movement   SYNERGY PAPER   Introduction The literal interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13:8-10 has shaped the general attitude toward prophecy in many modern evangelical churches. Verses 8-10 state, Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.[1]   Those who deny modern-day prophets, or that prophetic gifts exist today, argue that “when the complete comes” refers to the canonization of the Bible. That is, giving and receiving revelation like that which occurs when someone prophesies came to an end after the Bible was written and compiled. Individuals who adhere to this belief are called Cessationist. Dr. John F. MacArthur, a Calvinist pastor and teacher, is one of the leading voices today in support of cessationism. MacArthur supports his view by commenting on what he believes is the conclusion many scholars have reached regarding the meaning of “perfect.” He states, “Significantly, though these scholars disagree on the identification of the “perfect,” they all reach the same conclusion­­—namely, that the miraculous and revelatory gifts have ceased.”   On the contrary, there are others who claim that prophets exist today. In fact, in many Pentecostal and Charismatic churches prophets speak to congregants and prophecy is given in the church setting. I was not brought up spiritually in either of these movements. Rather, I was saved and spiritually educated in the Local Church Movement (LCM) associated with Watchman Nee and Witness Lee. In this denomination, the leaders do not recognize the kind of foretelling prophecy like that which is practiced in modern prophetic movements and Pentecostal/Charismatic churches. They do advocate a form of prophecy though. The LCM practices a unique form of “prophesying.” They practice what is called forthtelling. Charismatics understand prophecy to be foretelling. Nee and Lee's form of prophecy is supported by the interpretation of two scriptures: (1) “Those who speak in a tongue build up themselves, but those who prophesy build up the church” (1 Corinthians 14:4) and (2) “For you can all prophesy one by one” (1 Corinthians 14:31). The LCM rejected “speaking in tongues” since the Scripture suggests “those who speak in a tongue build up themselves.” They believed and encouraged everyone to prophesy so as to build up the church rather than self, just as the second part of the verse states. The LCM uses the acronym “PSRP” (Pray Reading, Study, Recite and Prophesy) to teach their members how to effectively prophesy. While many believers were positively impacted by the LCM's style of prophecy, their understanding and practice of prophecy does not form a complete biblical picture of prophecy because they overlook the aspect of “foretelling.” They also do not promote the baptism or gifts of the Holy Spirit. I learned many things about prophesying from the LCM that helped me grow in my spiritual life, but I also learned a lot from Renewal denominations on how to connect to the supernatural realm through the gift of prophecy. Leading a disciplined and biblically knowledgeable life are essential just as foretelling and moving in the gifts of the Holy Spirit are essential Christian experiences/tools that I had been lacking for many years. My experience has shown me that there exist many genuine prophets and Holy Spirit-led prophecies among persons of the Modern-Day Prophetic Movement. Caution can be given to both kinds of churches—LCM and renewal churches—so as not to become false prophets but neither neglect the gift of prophecy that is still alive today. Among those with a genuine prophetic gift, some may lack a strong basis of biblical knowledge and discipline which could help them understand more of the Word of God systematically. Among the LCM, they have extinguished the flame of the Holy Spirit. Both parties­­ would benefit from embracing each other's practices. This would enhance prophecy for the Charismatic because they would have a more solid understanding of the Word and perhaps more precise interpretations to offer. The LCM, on the other hand, would experience a more abundant life as a congregation and encounter living in greater power. The Lord showed me in a prophetic dream that these two rivers outlined above (denominations/streams) would converge, and a new movement would begin. Combining these two ways of prophesying will bring a convergence of Holiness with Power or Word with Spirit to usher in a new age in church growth and bring revival to China and the rest of the world. This paper will discuss my personal experiences with prophecy in both the LCM and modern-day prophetic churches. The context of the LCM church and my involvement with them will be outlined. My journey into Pentecostal and Charismatic congregations will also be shared. A synergy of the context and my experiences form the basis for this project: that prophecy and the gifts of the Spirit are necessary components for ushering in revival to the body of Christ, Chinese congregants in my context, and the nation of China.    Context   The Local Church Movement The Local Church Movement began with Watchman Nee in the 1920s in China. It was one of the most controversial Christian movements in modern Chinese church history. It is considered by some the only denomination that originated from China and spread all over the world. Though its numbers of congregants are still small compared to many mainline churches, it may be the only denomination that spread outside of China that has a relatively large number of believers who are not Chinese. Watchman Nee's writings also influenced many denominations in the West and other parts of the world.  In later years, Nee's coworker, Witness Lee, established more Local Churches in Taiwan and in the United States. Local Churches spread to many other parts of the world. In 1952, Watchman Nee was put in prison and later sent to a labor camp until he died in 1972. Watchman Nee allegedly entrusted the leadership of LCM to Witness Lee.  However, some coworkers of Watchman Nee did not agree with Witness Lee and, therefore, accused him of teaching heresy. This accusation was further exacerbated when many other allegations regarding the LCM were published in the West in the 1970s. These publications included the infamous books, The Mindbenders and The God-Men. In these books, the authors defamed the LCM by accusing them of several things. Aside from being labeled one of the most dangerous cults in America, they were also charged with engaging in “deceptive, coercive, and destructive practices.”[2] Other accusations included brainwashing, mind-bending, and fear tactics to keep members. The Defense and Confirmation Project of 2017 stated, The first edition of The God-Men [italics mine], written and self-published by the Spiritual Counterfeits Project (SCP), contained gross misrepresentations of the teaching of Witness Lee concerning such things as biblical authority and morality. It also sought to associate Witness Lee and the local churches with mental manipulation and Eastern mystical practices.[3]   In this wave of criticism, the Christian Research Institute in the United States also published an article claiming that the LCM was teaching heresies in the 1970s. The Local Church responded by filing lawsuits against these two books. The Local Church won the lawsuits. In China, people still saw Western and American Christianity as the authority in terms of judging whether a group was heretical or not. As a result of this article and other books originating in the West, the Chinese authorities, despite the court ruling, considered this group heretical and cracked down on some of their meetings. Many Chinese believers in this movement suffered severe persecution in the 1980s. This experience also had damaging effects on the believers who lived in the United States. In early 2000, Christian Research Journal, led by Hank Hanegraaff, held an investigation on the Local Church Movement. They issued a special publication named “We Were Wrong,” as a way of apologizing for their careless article in the 1970s. They accepted the LCM as a genuine Christian movement henceforth.[4] Many other Christian organizations, like Fuller Theological Institute, also issued similar statements declaring the LCM a genuine Christian group.[5]  When the apologies surfaced, I tried to share them with my Chinese Christian friends who thought the LCM was heretical. It seemed other Chinese Christians did not care about this though. Many people today still hold a critical view against the LCM and/or do not care about them. American and other Western churches showed diminished interest in LCM because they did not keep momentum in growth in the United States in the 1970s. Even if the LCM is a genuine Christian movement comprised of genuine believers, some of their teachings and practices are indeed controversial. Although practices of this group may be controversial, there are some positive things that can be highlighted. Rick Joyner, a well-known American prophet, comments in one of his blogs on prophecy that he considers it important to learn from the differences of others that exist within the body.[6] The evidence that God used the LCM or was present in their meetings and years of ministry is clearly seen in the number of conversions they produced, and in the strong centering on Jesus and authority of God's word that it produced. Afterall, the LCM was the only movement that originated in China and spread to the West and the rest of the world. Based on this evidence, I argue that God's Spirit did bless their movement and spread it. The question now is, “What message did the Lord want to bring to the churches in the West and the rest of the world through the LCM?”   Function and Practice of the Local Church Movement The Local Church Movement refers to themselves as the Lord's Recovery. They believed their calling was to recover all the truths that were lost among many generations of the Church. It has been said that Watchman Nee had a vast amount of knowledge from reading a lot of Christian literature throughout history and from reading the Bible hundreds of times. He gleaned a lot from different eras of Christianity. Members of the LCM believed their organization succeeded due to the degradation of Western churches. Some may be offended with this idea, but there are many Christian leaders in the West who agree that there are problems in Western Christianity that prevent the body of Christ there from advancing in spiritual things.  Many teachings and practices from this movement have already impacted Western churches. For example, it was the Local Church Movement thatirst started the model of cell groups or small groups, even as early as the 1940s under the leadership of Watchman Nee. Witness Lee further developed these in Taiwan. In following years, these cell groups were instituted by the famous Korean evangelist David Yonggi Cho and they circulated in Korea. Many western churches also later adopted this model. Nowadays, cell groups or small groups are common in almost every American church. The LCM cannot take credit for being the originators of such groups, but they were pioneers in reintroducing, practicing and promoting small groups to make up for the lack of intimacy in large church gatherings. Other examples of how the LCM functioned are provided. The LCM strongly opposed the typical laity system in Christendom. They removed the position of pastors because they believed every believer should function as a priest to God. Since there were no pastors in the meetings to preach the sermons, the meetings were open to every believer to speak or “prophesy” for the Lord. This was based on their understanding that “you can all prophesy one by one” (1 Corinthians 14:31). The LCM also placed a lot of emphasis on Ephesians 4:12 which says, “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” To them, this meant the body should not be seeking personal gain, but instead seek to build up the church. They encouraged all to speak as a pastor or a professional speaker on behalf of the Lord to edify the congregation. The church developed many practical ways to help people commonly called “lay members” in mainline denominations, to speak the truth of God. They also helped many lay members like me gain biblical knowledge and develop teaching gifts. These opportunities for growth may not be possible in a traditional church setting where only the designated members do most of the speaking. The leaders in the LCM understood that unless every believer immersed themselves in the Word of God and spent time in prayer, one would hardly have anything to share that edifies the church. In the 1940s, an elder in a church in Shanghai Yu, Chenghua, under the leading of Watchman Nee, translated a book called A Short and Easy Method of Prayer into Chinese. In this book, Madame Jeanne Guyon briefly explains how believers may enter the presence of God by praying the Word of God. Her book greatly influenced the Local Church Movement[7]. Witness Lee further developed Guyon's teaching and called it “pray reading.” This was his most impressive practice in the LCM, as commented on by Hank Hanegraaff when he conducted his investigative research into the LCM in early 2000. Pray reading is the first of the four steps developed by the LCM to prepare believers for “prophesying.” The other steps, study, recite and prophesy, form PSRP. In the LCM, prayer and meditation were given top priority. Pray reading is a unique practice, similar to the Catholic Church's practice of “Lectio Divina.” In Protestant terminology, this refers to meditation. Pray reading actively combines both the written Word of God and prayer to God into one practice. It is a simple practice and very easy to employ. Members are encouraged to repeat a single verse or multiple phrases of a verse in prayer, either silently or out loud, for a certain period of time. Believers are encouraged to speak louder than softer when reading. The LCM believed that once a person opened their mouth to make a vocal declaration, it would help them move past the distractions in their mind and engage with their spirit-man more easily. Wesley Campbell, who is a prophet in the modern prophetic movement, teaches something similar. Wesley taught that once a person opens their mouth, their mind does not work. This habitual practice helped members enter the presence of God and receive spiritual revelation. The LCM also practices “calling on the name of the Lord.” This can also be practiced both silently or out loud, though practicing it out loud or vocally was more encouraged to exercise the spirit. Paul teaches that there will be life and peace for the one who sets their mind on the Spirit; death for the one who sets their mind on the things of the flesh (Romans 8:6). A lot of “spiritual death” in the modern church is due to believers setting their minds on the things of the flesh. Teachings like “calling on the name of the Lord” and “pray reading” were developed and promoted to help believers get out of their minds and engage their spirit-man. Christians also claim they do not have time to read the Bible. If they do read it, they often scan through it quickly. It is very hard to absorb Scripture into one's spirit when little is masticated. Many Christians do not experience more spiritual growth, even though they attend church every week and even read the Bible, because they are not meditating on the Word. Members of the LCM encouraged believers to digest the Word of God like a cow digests its food. A cow first takes in the food into its stomach and then regurgitates it many times before fully digesting. In the process of regurgitation, the cow chews its food several times. In this way, the body receives more nutrients from the food. A prophet of the Apostolic-Prophetic Movement (AP), named James Goll, wrote a book called, The Lost Art of Intercession. In it, Goll describes the meditation of the Word of God as a lost art. This seems especially true for many Protestants who abandoned teachings in Catholicism that embraced this practice. Although modern-day church leaders like Goll may think this practice was lost, I do not believe it was. It was greatly endorsed and practiced among the LCM. The LCM understood the importance of filling one's spiritual car with fuel. Diligently studying and reciting the Bible and other spiritual books were greatly encouraged. These represent the next two practices of “study” and “recite.” LCM leaders believed that mental capability was created by God so that one can learn from others alongside receiving inspiration directly from God. They believed that if a person could not remember a quote or took a long time to find the right verse, this would impair one's ability to become a good speaker and hinder the presentation of the Gospel. Instead, if believers committed the Bible to memory, like a pharmacist places and labels all their drugs in order, one could find what they need when the time comes. The LCM even conducted Bible reading competitions and prizes were given to the winners. These prizes included free Bibles, spiritual books, and free airline tickets to join denominational conferences. The last step of PSRP is “prophesy.” This practice in the Local Church setting does not include “foretelling.” The Modern-Day Prophetic Movement recognizes “foretelling” as biblically “prophesying,” but does not only attribute it to the prophets in the Bible. They believe laypeople can also participate in this kind of prophecy. The LCM does not recognize or promote modern-day prophets or prophetic gifts. Their understanding of prophesying is “speaking for God, speaking God forth, and ministering God and Christ into people.”[8] The LCM believes that “speaking God forth” means no one should speak about trivial things. It rather means that one should spend time in prayer to receive revelation from God so that their speaking is indeed a revelation from God. The phrase “minister and dispense God and Christ to people” is measured against its effectiveness. A member, for example, cannot just say they spoke and therefore fulfilled their obligation to build up the church. They must measure their effect by seeing if the message edified other members. To assist in the practice of PSRP, a book called Morning Revival was compiled weekly to give members written material for pray reading and spiritual reading. It also contained suggested Bible reading plans. Members are encouraged to have daily morning prayer time and study the material to prepare for their speaking on Sundays. By using the PRSP model, many members in the LCM learned to speak eloquently and to encourage, edify, and build up other members and the church at large. This practice caused many members to grow up spiritually, because the Word of God was given space to transform their lives. However, this was as far as prophecy went in the LCM. The LCM held caution and neglect toward foretelling prophesy. For my wife and I this was a great disappointment because no one in the LCM was able to predict if we would one day have a child. This was a personal inquiry that I sought answers to after ten years of barrenness.   Ministry Journey   Personal Involvement with LCM I never planned to become involved with the Local Church Movement. I was born and raised in China to a family that worshiped Buddha. My father was an atheist and my mother was a devout follower of Buddha. My great grandparents and grandparents worshipped another local idol. Our house was built on a former Buddhist temple which was demolished during the Cultural Revolution. Reflecting on my early experiences, I now see that God spoke to my heart and led me on a journey to know Him even though I did not realize it at the time.  A Korean prophet confirmed this in 2017 when he told me that the Holy Spirit had been leading my steps onto a path to know Him. I believe this to be true. In high school, I started to sense that I had a calling on my life to do greater things, beyond what I could imagine at that time. I started to prepare myself. The Holy Spirit spoke to my heart concerning which college to attend after I took the college entrance exam. He also placed a strong burden on my heart to study in the United States after graduating. When I failed to be accepted into my college graduate program, I understood it was the Lord closing the door to stay in China. This forced me to go on a journey to the United States but by first studying in England. While I was in my first year of graduate study at the London School of Economics, I had an encounter with God. The weight of the Lord came upon me, convicting me of my need for Him, and I accepted salvation. With three hundred dollars in my pocket and a one-way ticket, I went to the United States for my second year of graduate study at the University of Southern California. I had no money to pay for tuition and no place to stay. After spending a whole day outside the registration office struggling with what to do, I decided it would be better to return to China. In desperation, I prayed, “God, I am such a sinner. Do you still remember me?”  Not too long after, I met a Chinese Christian in the street who was a member of The Church in Los Angeles. He invited and led me to their facility called Brother House. The Brother House was located near my school campus, and there I received practical help and spiritual training. It turns out that all my contact with other ministries during this time of my life were with groups associated with the LCM. According to Jesus, nothing happens if the heavenly Father does not permit it (Matthew 10:29). I believe these occurrences were not a coincidence but a divine setup. It was God leading me. Many other members of The Church believed that I was sent by God to join them. I was astonished by how this time of despair in my life turned around. While living at the Brother House, I saw God's favor. They allowed me to stay there for free the first year. Nobody ever asked me to pay rent. When I started to work a year later, I began to pay rent and gradually pay back what I gained via donations. A lovely Chinese Christian, affectionately called “Grandpa Chen,” led this on-campus group. The group operated in love, and people who opposed Witness Lee and his teachings were also members of this congregation. In this context, even though I was aware of different opinions against the LCM, I was still willing to learn what Watchman Nee and Witness Lee taught. During the first two years of my Christian life, I was very lukewarm and often did not have much to say when it was my turn to “prophesy” in our congregation times. Sometimes I said nothing or said something very shallow. In 2004, I had an encounter with the Lord. Jesus appeared to me during a conference through an internal vision and told me that He would come back once the body of Christ was built up. After this vision, I became enthusiastic in practicing the PSRP steps. I made them a habit in my life. One day when I finished pray reading a verse, I went back to work feeling as if I were walking down the stairs into a cloud. I realized I had entered the presence of God unknowingly by immersing myself in His Word and meditating on it. I am thankful that God used my time in the LCM to develop my teaching gift and a prayer life. Although I enjoyed my time with the LCM, I came to understand that the kind of prophecy taught in the modern prophetic movement is not an incorrect form of prophesying, but biblical. In 2015, I became connected with churches outside the LCM. This is how I became aware of ministries like John Wimber's Vineyard Movement and Randy Clark's Global Awakening. Wimber's teaching on “do the stuff” encouraged everyone to pray for the sick and do the stuff that Jesus taught. Randy Clark's “little ole me” is another saying used to equip many to practice healing. Randy emphasizes that if God can use him, who is just a regular guy, God can use anyone. I began to believe that God wanted to use me in a greater way.   Validity of the Modern-Day Prophetic Movement By 2015, my wife and I had been married for ten years. Although we wanted a child, we were unable to have one. We started to think something might be wrong when we realized we were not getting pregnant without prevention. From 2010 to 2014, we attempted in vitro fertilization (IVF) five times. All our attempts failed. Our IVF journey ended when top medical professionals diagnosed my wife with premature ovarian failure. This meant that we would never be able to have a child naturally. During this time, we also tried Chinese herbal remedies, but they too failed. I felt completely hopeless. Even our egg donor bailed at the last minute. I began to consider that the Lord may have another way of fixing our barrenness. I desired divine healing and prophetic words from the Lord about this. I decided to reach out to the older, more experienced believers in my denomination. They were loving and caring toward my wife and I, but they did not have a vision or prophetic word from the Lord to give to us. Some members said that it was the Father's will for us, and we needed to accept it. Others said that it was God's wisdom for us to have more time to serve Him. We could not help but think it was either our sin or ancestral sins that prevented us from having children. With all their biblical knowledge, my church elders still could not prophetically nor supernaturally minister to us. They could not tell me when or if I would have children, or if there was a reason I did not have them. I came to understand that they could not do this because they did not believe in these practices. I was desperate to hear what the Spirit of God was saying about my situation. Like many other evangelical churches, my wife and I had no interest or knowledge about the Pentecostal movement or AP during this time in our lives. We had general impressions or thoughts about Pentecostals such as, “speaking in tongues may be from the devil,” “false prophecies,” and “deceived by the evil spirits.” Although these negative labels could have given us false impressions, our experiences eventually showed us a different perspective. One preacher in our denomination commented that in his many years of “prophesying” in Local Church settings, he never saw what is described in 1 Corinthians 14:24-25 happening in the LCM. Verse 24 and 25 state, “But if all prophesy, an unbeliever or outsider who enters is reproved by all and called to account by all. After the secrets of the unbeliever's heart are disclosed, that person will bow down before God and worship him, declaring, ‘God is really among you.'” This preacher was commenting on the fact that he had never seen people bow down during LCM meetings claiming that the Lord was truly among them because of a prophecy. I, on the other hand, did see this happen when I later participated in prophetic meetings in Pentecostal/Charismatic churches. I came to realize this preacher's observation pointed to the reality that something was missing in the way the LCM prophesied. In 2014, I made a vow to God that I would never stop praying that year unless I received healing and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The Lord had put a strong burden on me to receive His baptism, but I did not know how due to a lack of teaching and understanding. I would go out every afternoon to a park to pray until I hit rock bottom in the later part of 2014. At this time, the doctor gave us the final diagnosis that we could not have a baby naturally. I had lost all hope in modern medicine, and none of my prayers had worked thus far. This disappointment became a spiritual turning point in my life. I realized the way I prayed might be lacking something. As the Bible says, God's people went to captivity because they lacked knowledge (Isaiah 5:13). I did not know how to receive healing, prophetic words, or the baptism of the Holy Spirit, but I gradually began leaving my denomination and turning to other churches to seek help. I started to listen to teachings on healing and the baptism of the Holy Spirit on YouTube. I began listening to healing evangelists such as Norvel Hayes, Kenneth E. Hagin, and Benny Hinn. I learned there are many healing evangelists nowadays and there were many healing revivalists in the past. I also learned from Andrew Wommack, Derek Prince, Reinhard Bonnke, and many others that being baptized in the Holy Spirit gives a believer access to speak in their own prayer language, tongues. Andrew Wommack states it this way: There are other believers who acknowledge a second experience with the Holy Spirit which releases power, but they refuse the part of speaking in tongues, or at least say it's not for everyone. But the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like a pair of tennis shoes: It always comes with tongues.[9]   As I read more books about the Pentecostal movement and listened to preachers connected to this denomination, my spiritual eyes were opened. I attended as many healing services as I could. In October 2015, my wife and I went to New York to attend Benny Hinn's healing service. They spent a large portion of the service asking for donations. There was also a “prophet” who allegedly sensed and called out people's first names to keep encouraging the audience to give one thousand dollars to receive blessings. After the healing service finished, we were very disappointed. However, during the meeting, Benny Hinn called out a word of knowledge that a lady named Elizabeth was there and that God would give her a child. Though skeptical as a medical professional, my wife said to me that if her name was called out, she would believe all of it was true. Unfortunately, Benny Hinn only called out a lady named Elizabeth. Although reluctant, I still persuaded my wife to stay until the end to receive prayer. When this did not result in anything miraculous, my wife further doubted these healing services. This was our first healing service in a Pentecostal church, and we had put so much hope in it.  Whether my wife believed for it or not, I listened to many teachings from Kenneth E. Hagin and was amazed by his gift of healing. When I heard Hagin's son, Wayne, was having a meeting in New Jersey, I also went there. I asked Wayne to pray that I would have a healing anointing. He said it was up to God, but he still prayed that if God were willing, He would give me a healing anointing. In the evening, I had a dream where Jesus appeared to me and told me that he already gave me a healing anointing. I replied, “No, you did not.” In the dream, Jesus asked me to raise my right hand. I raised my right arm and it felt like it was burning. Then He asked me to raise my right hand again and my right hand burned. I understood that this gift did not manifest in the day service, but in the dream in the evening Jesus showed me that He had given it to me. I came back telling my wife I had a healing anointing to pray for her. I started to pray for her every day. Unfortunately, my wife did not believe me. She told me she did not believe that I could heal even a mosquito. Soon enough, I came across a man named Randy Clark on YouTube. He said a man named James Maloney had the gift of healing and when he prayed, even metal in pacemakers dissolved. I listened to James Maloney and was amazed by his prophetic gifting. When I learned that he was going to take a sabbatical for a year, I decided to fly to his last service in Kentucky. However, when I arrived, I discovered that James had sprained his ankle and did not show up for the meeting. I was so disappointed. One of his associates, who is also a graduate from Randy Clark's supernatural school ministered in his place. I had brought an airplane pillow and asked him to pray over it to heal my wife. This did not seem to work. This man called out many words of knowledge, and one of them was related to nose congestion. I stepped out in faith to claim this healing for myself. It did not come true for me either. Despite these failed attempts, something did happen at this meeting. For the first time, I felt a physical tingling sensation on my face. I was told by a lady who had a connection with Global Awakening that this was the Holy Spirit. When I went back to Maryland, I found a local church to join that was associated with them. While there, I felt an even stronger sense of tingling on my face during worship. I understood this was a confirmation that God wanted me to stay at this church. This is how I became more involved with Global Awakening. During the trip to Kentucky, something else important happened. When I went to the altar to receive prayer from the pastor, I received my first prophetic word. The man said, Brother, you will begin to flow. You are getting an understanding of this. You are going to pray for the sick. You have compassion and deep compassion for sickness and people that are hurting and have no hope. The Lord says, “I will raise you.” You are going to have a voice, and God says, “I am going to use you.”   I never dreamt that God would give me a ministry, especially because in the LCM we were not encouraged to have our own ministries. They taught us to carry out the ministry of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee to help spread the truths God gave to them. I did not know God had plans for my life. Even though the prophetic word sounded simple, my teacher, Kim Maas, from my prophetic class at Global Awakening, encouraged me by saying, “this is a powerful prophecy.” I started to wonder what my future would be like and what that word meant. I began to eagerly pursue the gift of prophecy. I attended more prophetic conferences, read books, and took prophetic certification classes at Global Awakening. In October, I convinced my wife to join me for another trip to North Carolina, to receive prayer from Mahesh Chavda. I had read an article that he once prophesied to a woman, and that woman conceived a year later.[10] He even jokingly says in his own preaching, “When Mahesh comes to town, every woman gets pregnant.” Before going, I told his staff we were coming, through an email. To our surprise, they treated us like VIPs. Not only did they reserve us a front-row seat, but another leading person in his ministry took the initiative to look for us. He arranged both a prophetic and a healing team to pray for us at the same time. He told us he saw a vision of “two lines crossing together” and it could represent a convergence point. That is, the Lord led me to this place and it represented an intersection or convergence point for my life. He said he strongly felt that the Lord was leading me in a different direction. The Word made sense to me because I was secretly learning from the Pentecostal movement but had not officially left my denomination. I was experiencing a lot of internal struggle about leaving the LCM because many believers there helped me. Another man with a prophetic gift told me he saw me with the gift of healing. He told me it was the Lord's will for me to practice healing prayers on my wife, and that the Lord would heal my wife through my prayers. This was my exercise. He confirmed what I experienced in the meeting with Hagin. Another lady saw a vision of the Lord using a sword to cut off the dragon in my wife's family line, removing the ancestral curses. Later, Andrew Canon White and Chavda prayed for us with anointing oil. The prophetic lady said she felt whatever needed to be taken care of in the spiritual realm had been completed, but that it often takes ten months to a year to manifest in the physical realm. This trip blessed us, but we were still unsure if anything would change. When I came back from North Carolina, I joined my first Global Awakening conference called Cultivate Revival in Pennsylvania. At that time, I already experienced a breakthrough in speaking in tongues and received the baptism of the Spirit to some degree. In this meeting, when two Global students prayed for me, the Holy Spirit fell on me as well as two of them, and none of us could stand. We backed up a dozen steps and fell on the chairs behind us. A student prophesied over me as I tried to support a woman receiving prayer while waiting for my turn. I watched her receive deliverance from a demon. It was the first time I had seen anything like this. She kept coughing, and then the demon was gone. The student that prophesied over me said, You are a warrior. You come from a lineage of warriors. The Lord wants you to take the authority that has been given to you while you are in this revival meeting because you are a very powerful man. When you came to pray for this young lady, you brought a force that enveloped her. I felt this, and I can even smell this and taste this. However, I don't know if you can tell what is happening. Man, God has this gift of healing for you, and this is going to come more and more, and become something you can have more confidence in because it is so strong on you. He is assigning this to you right now. Your hand is so mighty in healing and brings freedom and breaks off chains from people. It is all over you, man. He trusts you with His mysteries because you dare to stand before the throne of God and dispel the things that were spoken when you were a young lad. You have come to understand not only the kingdom of God. You have reached the throne of God. Now you have come here to receive the outpouring God has downloaded to you. It is so amazing. God wants to expand His territory in your soul. He is always there in your spirit. He wants you to begin to be there in the morning to see your territory because he is expanding it more. He wants you to feel His presence. He might come and stand beside you. He might stand behind you. He might stand to the side. But He wants you in that territory, so you look out and see the fact that even heavenly hosts come to your territory to find solace from the battle. Even the heavenly hosts come from heaven to your territory to get away from the battle. They come so they can receive the refreshment God has placed in your territory. I know it is deep, but this is what God is telling me. In you, He is providing a place where souls can come to find sanctuary from whatever is going on, to receive refreshment so they can regain strength and go to battle again. In your territory, He is expanding it and making you aware of more and more of this universe that is in you.   I was amazed by these words. I came from an evangelical background where I heard accusations about the prophetic movement that said these prophecies cater to our self or ego. In other words, these so-called prophecies make someone feel awesome about themselves but are from the soul or even of devilish deceit. They supposedly promote a believers' ego, but it does nothing beneficial to their spirit and may even harm their spiritual growth. I was not sure if the prophecy I received was true. Even the student who prophesied told me that it might sound too good to be true to me, but he said it was what the Lord was telling him at the moment. Though I received prophetic words that God would use me greatly, I still did not have many prophetic words regarding whether I would have a baby or not. One Sunday in December the senior pastor of the church associated with Global Awakening suddenly became filled with the Holy Spirit while preaching and prophesied over me saying “your quiver is full.” He quoted this from Psalm 127:3-5: Sons are indeed a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons of one's youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them. He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.   He explained to my wife and I that we would have a child, and that the Lord would make us have more than one child because God was declaring my quiver to be full. I was greatly encouraged but was still not quite sure if it was true because I did not personally hear God telling me this. I continued searching. I discovered that the Elijah List Conference would be held in Albany, Oregon in January of 2016. I went to this conference to seek healing and words from the Lord. Before this trip, I read a book by Chuck Pierce, one of the speakers at this conference. In his book, Chuck wrote about the Lord visiting him in the 1980s. The Lord told him that China would have a great revival, and that this revival would spread to the whole world.[11] When I arrived at the conference, another prophet named Dutch Sheets was speaking. In the end, full of the Holy Spirit, he said, “Today you come here not by coincidence. It is God who leads you here, and from today on, you will hear God speaking to you like you never have before.” I was greatly encouraged, so I went out during the lunch break to ask the Lord to speak to me. When I sat down in a chair outside of a Christian bookstore, my eye caught a 2016 calendar. The cover of that calendar said, “2016 Plan Your Family.” Suddenly, I heard God speak clearly: “2016, plan your family; you will have a child this year.” I was astonished as I had never heard God speaking to me so clearly, and He just said I would have a child this year. I immediately called my wife and told her what I heard. I finally received my prophetic word from God! It was the most powerful thing I have ever experienced. I went back to China to visit my family in February 2016. My mother, who still worshiped Buddha, had been desperately praying to all kinds of idols to help us to have a baby. I had been trying to preach the Gospel to her since 2003 but had seen little effect. Since I heard God's voice clearly saying I would have a child this year, I boldly told all my family members. I even prayed for my two cousins who could not have a baby. My mother was displeased with my behavior. She commented that I should not share such nonsense with others since I could not even take care of my own family matters. Though, I continued to believe the Word I received. When I came back from China, I attended the Voice of Prophets conference held by Global Awakening in May 2016. There were many prophetic people there who gave me words from the Lord without knowing who I was. One day during worship, a lady from England approached me with a word. She said, “At one point in your life, you always went out to pray and dedicated yourself to the Lord, and God the Father was very pleased with you.” This brought tears to my eyes because only God and I knew that I asked Him every day in 2014 if He heard my prayers. I often cried out, “God, where are you?” or “God of Abraham, who can create things out of nothing, where are you?” After these prayers, I would confess my sins and dedicate myself to God and to His calling, even though I did not know what it was. Her words were God's delayed response to those prayers. I experienced 1 Corinthians 14:24-25. The hidden secrets in my heart were revealed and I cried and bowed down to God, amazed that this woman was hearing from Him. God is certainly among these groups of prophetic people. She even saw a vision of a male child running when I asked her to ask God if I would have child. I still hold this word with caution since we only currently have a daughter. The words did not stop there. Another lady saw me with a quiver of three arrows on my back, which matched the prophetic word from my pastor in December 2015. One guy told me that God would use me greatly and he later returned to hand me a key as a prophetic action of God giving me the key to bring many into the Kingdom. I counted these words as true after the Holy Spirit told me the same things in a prophetic dream where I visited heaven. In this dream in 2017, Jesus himself told me He would use me greatly. Though all of the words I received were encouraging, I was eager to receive the fruition of having a child. I became desperate. One day I said to the Holy Spirit, In the Charismatic circle, people always teach that we should have an intimate relationship with you. I have prayed to Jesus and God, the Father, many times and I do not know when this is going to happen. Can you ask the Father and Jesus for me when this [pregnancy] is going to happen?   On the night of May 12, 2016, shortly after this prayer, I had a weird dream. In this dream, a woman (I figured it was the Holy Spirit) pointed to the back of a male figure (I figured it was Jesus). She asked me, “Did He not tell you that you will have a child next month?” I said in the dream, “No, I only sensed in my spirit it was coming soon, but I did not know it was next month.” I told my wife about this dream afterward, but she again had a hard time believing me. Satan launched another fierce attack on my wife and I to make us quarrel. We did not talk for two weeks after I told her his dream. We only reconciled once she found out she was miraculously pregnant on May 28, 2016. Our baby was born healthy in early 2017. My mother was stunned and turned away from her idols that she had worshipped her whole life. She put faith in Jesus Christ, and I baptized her and my father when I came back to visit China in 2018. Ten years of persuasion and preaching could not change my mother's heart, but one prophetic word from God turned things around. This event became a turning point for the salvation of my family members. My older sister also confessed belief in Jesus Christ. Later, the Holy Spirit told me through another prophetic dream that what He did in my family, He would do in many Chinese families through my ministry.   God Gives Me A Ministry In 2016, at the Elijah List Conference, I received another prophetic word from God. This time it was about the ministry I would have. God said to me, “Jairus Bible World Ministry is from me.” At that time, I had begun this ministry in secret as my denomination did not encourage people to have ministries of their own. I used the name “Jairus” as a nickname to spread the revelations that I received from God in an online format. It was mainly directed toward Chinese audiences. When I received the prophetic word, I understood that God spoke this to help me overcome the fear of man so that I could walk in my calling and fulfill my destiny. Upon leaving my LCM community, I struggled a lot. I recalled that they treated me kindly and helped me greatly during difficult times. Many believers there were like family members to me. I was very troubled thinking that I might be harming the unity of the body of Christ upon leaving. I realized afterward that the body of Christ was and is much bigger than just my denomination. To help me through this struggle, the Lord gave me a prophetic picture. He showed me one stream of the Yangtze River, which is in western China. Then He showed me another stream in eastern China, which also flows into the Yangtze River. He reassured me that it was Him who put me in the first stream and now He was taking me to another stream. If I followed His leading, I would remain unified with the body of Christ. This comforted me. In another prophetic dream, the Lord appeared to me and there were two rivers behind Him. He told me these two rivers would converge in Maryland where I live. I received many personal prophecies about this too; words about convergence. I heard prophetic proclamations that “holiness and power” and “Word and Spirit” would converge together during this age and it would represent revival. One day, after coming back from the Elijah conference, I was walking down the street pondering the revival in China that Chuck Pierce talked about in his book. Suddenly, I heard the Holy Spirit ask me, “What is a big revival?” I immediately answered back, “I heard that in China one out of ten people have received the Lord. Is this not a great revival already?” I answered this way because I had no special burden for China at the time. My burden was mainly for the Chinese students overseas. I did not have plans to go back to China to minister there. The Holy Spirit promptly asked me another question, “How about two out of ten?” I was stunned. I quickly calculated that it would be another 100 million people saved. I believe the Holy Spirit was not meaning to limit salvation to only two out of ten Chinese people. Instead, He was trying to challenge and stretch me in my thinking. I had a burden for China after this encounter, and I started to have hundreds of prophetic dreams about a great revival coming to them. In these dreams, I was even brought to future events. I saw the nation change politically after this great revival. Many prophetic words were released over me from other prophetic people saying that I would travel to China extensively in the future to minister to different groups there.   The Synergy and Conclusion It is believed that half or even more of Chinese Christians in China are meeting in Pentecostal or Charismatic churches. If they are following this pattern, I wonder if it is true among them also, that they prophesy well but lack discipline and understanding of the written Word. My assertion may be correct since many of these believers never had the chance to benefit from Witness Lee's teachings or the practice of PSRP, since they had been labeled heretical and were banned. God used the LCM to help me settle into the United States and build a strong life and foundation in the Word of God. I received a teaching anointing in the LCM, and I am a mature, discipled man of God because of them. Their emphasis on holiness prior to engaging in forthtelling ensures spiritual growth and readiness before jumping into making erroneous declarations. To become mature sons and daughters of Christ, ones who partner with God in His Kingdom, we must learn to be intimate friends with Him. This requires us to be holy, disciplined and knowledgeable in His Word. On the contrary, God used Pentecostal and Charismatic churches to help my wife and I receive a breakthrough in healing and teach us about the charismatic gifts. We had a miracle daughter as a result of this, and these churches helped activate my prophetic and healing gifts. Prophecy has been extremely important to my journey of spiritual growth. Even when I was having a difficult time deciding whether I should continue with this doctoral program, God used a woman sitting behind me in a prophetic conference to say, “God wanted you to finish this degree, and He will use this as a knocking brick to open the doors for you to minister in the future.” I cannot imagine where my life would be without prophetic ministry. The synergy of this paper is formed in these two conclusions. I believe my calling is to continue to spread the truths I learned from both the LCM and the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches. I admire the LCM's diligence to the practices of PSRP. It is my conviction that their model of PSRP could help recover a sincere devotion and commitment to knowing God's written Word, that which sometimes feels lost in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches. Also, PSRP affords the body of Christ more opportunity to practice public speaking in the form of prophesying. Comparatively, the LCM and other evangelical churches need to awaken to recognize that God has used modern Pentecostal and Charismatic churches to recover and revitalize the prophetic gifts. These churches have embraced Paul's teachings and have stirred the flame of God into action. They have honored God by honoring His desire to pour out His manifest presence in the form of many gifts to the body. A prophetic word can change a person's life and can change one's direction for life. A genuine prophetic word can also turn a whole family from worshiping idols to worshiping God. A prophetic word from God can even turn a nation around. This thesis project focuses on holiness and prophesy. It is my attempt to be part of the new movement where Word and Spirit meet; holiness and power surge. The American prophet Larry Randolph said he felt what he could do for God is comparative to a drop of water in the ocean. Although so tiny, God still includes us in his plans. He does not need us, but He still gives us the grace to cooperate with Him.[12] This project is about me doing my part in the body of Christ.           BIBLIOGRAPHY   Allan, Stuart and Lynley. No Longer Barren but Fruitful in “Spread the Fire,” (January 2007). In Canada's Christian Library Online. Accessed March 9, 2020. https://www.christianity.ca/page.aspx?pid=10596.     Defense & Confirmation Project. “Contending for the Faith.” Defense & Confirmation Project. Last modified 2017. Accessed April 11, 2020, https://contendingforthefaith.org/en/the-mindbenders-history/.     MacArthur, John F. Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship. Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2013.   Miller, Elliot. “We Were Wrong. A Reassessment of the ‘Local Church' Movement of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee.” In “The Local Church,” edited by Hank Hanegraaff. Special issue. Christian Research Institute 32, no. 6 (2009): 2-52. Accessed on November 27, 2019. http://www.equip.org/PDF/EnglishOpt.pdf.   Fuller Theological Seminary. An Open Letter from the Local Churches and Living Stream Ministry Concerning the Teachings of Witness Lee. DCP & Living Stream Ministry, 2017. Accessed November 27, 2019. https://an-open-letter.org/PDF/Fuller%20Theological%20Seminary%20Statement%20English.pdf     Guyon, Madam Jeanne. A Short and Easy Method of Prayer. Edited by J. Scott Husted. Online Self-Publishing Book Company: Lulu.com, 2011. Accessed April 6, 2020. https://jesus.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/short-and-easy-method-of-prayer.pdf.   Goll, James. The Lost Art of Intercession. Video training. No public link available. Accessed November 27, 2019. https://agodman.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/to-prophesy-is-mainly-to-speak-for-god-and-to-speak-forth-god-into-people/.     Joyner, Rick. “The Application of a Prophetic Word, Part 3- Prophetic in the Body of Christ.” Rick Joyner's Word for the Week, April 26, 2011. Accessed April 11, 2020. https://publications.morningstarministries.org/word-for-the-week/application-prophetic-word-part-3-prophetic-body-christ.     Lee, Witness. The Practice of Prophesying. Anaheim, California: Live Stream Ministries, 1990. Accessed March 18, 2020. Living Stream Ministry. https://www.ministrybooks.org/SearchMinBooksDsp.cfm?id=33E313DFCF.   Pierce, Chuck. God's Unfolding Battle Plan: A Field Manual for Advancing the Kingdom of God. Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 2007.   Randolph, Larry. “Recognizing Revial” (video teaching). MorningStar Classics. October 22, 1996. Accessed April 11, 2020. https://www.morningstartv.com/morningstar-classics/recognizing-revial.   Wommack, Andrew. “Holy Spirit.” Andrew Wommack Ministries. n.d. Accessed April 24, 2020. https://www.awmi.net/reading/teaching-articles/holy_spirit/.               [1] Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Pub., 2004). Unless otherwise indicated, all Bible references in this paper are from the NRSV. [2] “Contending for the Faith,” Defense & Confirmation Project, last modified 2017, accessed April 11, 2020, https://contendingforthefaith.org/en/the-mindbenders-history/. [3] “Contending for the Faith,” Defense & Confirmation Project. [4] Elliot Miller, “We Were Wrong: A Reassessment of the ‘Local Church' Movement of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee,” in “The Local Church,” ed. Hank Hanegraaff, special issue, Christian Research Institute 32, no. 6 (2009): 2-52, accessed November 27, 2019, http://www.equip.org/PDF/EnglishOpt.pdf. [5] Fuller Theological Seminary, An Open Letter from the Local Churches and Living Stream Ministry Concerning the Teachings of Witness Lee, DCP & Living Stream Ministry, 2017, accessed November 27, 2019, https://an-open-letter.org/PDF/Fuller%20Theological%20Seminary%20Statement%20English.pdf. [6] Rick Joyner, “The Application of a Prophetic Word, Part 3- Prophetic in the Body of Christ,” Rick Joyner's Word for the Week, April 26, 2011, accessed April 11, 2020, https://publications.morningstarministries.org/word-for-the-week/application-prophetic-word-part-3-prophetic-body-christ. [7] Madame Jeanne Guyon, A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, ed. J. Scott Husted (Online Self-Publishing Book Company: Lulu.com), 2011, accessed April 6, 2020, https://books.google.com/books?id=R7YAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. [8] Witness Lee, The Practice of Prophesying. (Anaheim, California: Living Stream Ministries, 1990), accessed March 18, 2020, https://www.ministrybooks.org/SearchMinBooksDsp.cfm?id=33E313DFCF. [9] Andrew Wommack, “Holy Spirit,” Andrew Wommack Ministries, n.d., accessed April 24, 2020, https://www.awmi.net/reading/teaching-articles/holy_spirit/. [10] Stuart and Lynley Allan, No Longer Barren but Fruitful in “Spread the Fire,” (January 2007), in Canada's Christian Library Online, accessed March 9, 2020, https://www.christianity.ca/page.aspx?pid=10596. [11] Chuck Pierce, God's Unfolding Battle Plan: A Field Manual for Advancing the Kingdom of God, (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 2007), 273. [12] Larry Randolph, “Recognizing Revial” (video teaching), MorningStar Classics, October 22, 1996, accessed April 11, 2020, https://www.morningstartv.com/morningstar-classics/recognizing-revial.

In this podcast – originally published in March 2020 - Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr., SIFMA’s President and CEO, and Kevin Carroll, SIFMA’s Managing Director and Associate General Counsel, discuss the long-standing securities arbitration system and the rather confounding animus toward it by some policymakers. They also dive more specifically into the FINRA arbitration forum, and the securities industry’s experience in that forum.

In the latest in SIFMA’s podcast series, SIFMA president and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. is joined by Jason Plank, a financial planning professional on the independent platform with Ameriprise Financial in Edina, MN. During their conversation, Jason explains his work on behalf of his clients and community as an independent financial advisor, and why his independent contractor status is important to that work. A bill currently under consideration in Congress known as the ‘PRO Act’ would change how independent contractor status is determined, adversely impacting these hundreds of thousands of independent financial advisors, including Jason.

In the latest in SIFMA’s podcast series, SIFMA president and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. is joined by Ellen Greene, SIFMA managing director, equity and options market structure and Joe Corcoran, managing director and associate general counsel to talk about the current state of the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT.

Avez-vous besoin de guérison dans votre corps ? Nous croyons que suite à cette émission, des guérisons et des miracles vont se manifester dans votre vie ! Michael Lebeau, dans « La Pensée du Jour,» nous rappelle que Dieu est le Dieu de l'impossible et Il veut changer cette situation de maladie ! Ensuite, Audrey Nack répond à la question de Valérie : J'ai reçu ma guérison par la foi, mais elle ne se manifeste pas. Que faire ? Puis, dans la rubrique « Culture & Média », Nadine nous présente le livre de la semaine de Kenneth E.Hagin. Et pour finir, Aurélie nous partage le témoignage d'une femme guérie d'une tendinite sévère grâce à Jésus.

Expanding your search and stopping for directions podcast welcomes my good friend Craig W. HaginCraig and I discuss the excitement of the upcoming conference that is held every year at Kenneth Hagin Ministries in Tulsa, OK; Winter Bible Seminar which is a long standing tradition that has featured Craig's grandfather Kenneth E. Hagin, and now features his entire family including his parents Kenneth W. & Lynette Hagin, and his sister Denise Hagin Burns!*******Expanding your search Guest Bio on Craig W. Hagin*******Rev. Craig W. Hagin is passionate about raising up strong, uncompromising believers who will take a stand for God in today's uncertain world. He teaches extensively on faith and ministers with a strong healing anointing. Craig has been in ministry all his life. At the age of 3, he helped stock the book table at meetings held by his grandfather, Kenneth E. Hagin. Craig serves as co-pastor of Rhema Bible Church Oklahoma City and as Chief Operating Officer for Kenneth Hagin Ministries. He is also an instructor at Rhema Bible Training College. He and his wife, Mia, lead services at Synergy, a ministry for young adults and singles of all ages. Craig earned a bachelor's degree from Oklahoma State University in 1991 and graduated from Rhema Bible Training College in 1993. In his free time, Craig enjoys spending time with his family. He is an avid auto racing fan. You're likely to find him at a race track cheering on his sons.*******Stopping for directions and links to our guest:*******Craigs Website: www.rhema.orgwww.rbtc.orgwww.rhemabiblechurch.comFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/cwhaginInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/chagin1987/Twitter: https://twitter.com/chaginYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/user/RhemaUSAIMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5051400/Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Z6insaSpotify: https://spoti.fi/3qdks1r*******Expanding your search and stopping for directions is a podcast for growing our circles of connections and knowledge together through positive conversations and encouraging communications.*******https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12985720https://facebook.com/expandingsearch/https://instagram.com/expandingsearch/https://twitter.com/expandingsearch/https://bit.ly/34ptz6yhttps://www.amazon.com/Brent-Bailey/e/B0849TKGWMhttps://www.imdb.com/name/nm8178665https://www.linkedin.com/in/revbrentbailey/Available oniHeartRadioApple PodcastsYouTubeRokuAppleTVFireTV*******Growing our circles of connections and knowledge together through positive conversations and encouraging communications.Support the show (https://directionchurch.churchcenter.com/giving)

Kenny Berger is the owner of the Law Office of Kenneth E. Berger, which has offices in Columbia and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He started the firm in 2011 with the philosophy of putting clients first and focusing on values rather than profits. Kenny believes in giving back to his community. A portion of the attorney fees from all DUI accident cases at his firm are donated to organizations working to eliminate drunk driving. Likewise, a portion of any fee earned in a traumatic brain injury case is donated to the TBI-recovery community. In this episode, you’ll learn: How putting clients first leads to more success than a focus on profits. Kenny believes that putting yourself in the client’s shoes each day and treating them with dignity and respect will reap great rewards.   How giving to others brings many rewards back to you and your business. Kenny follows the abundance mentality—you get what you give—and thinks it’s much more fulfilling and has a longer-lasting impact.   Why supporting local charities is important and why you should do it, too. Kenny said, “The more we give away, the more we get back.” He also said your generosity might inspire others and spur them to donate to the same groups.

Craig Hill is an affiliate Assistant Professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is also a member of the adjunct faculty at Biola University in New Testament. Hill has taught in university and seminary settings for 18 years and has served for over two decades in youth and pastoral ministries. He also works with Standing Stone Ministry, a ministry that provides pastoral care for pastors. Hill serves on the Board of Directors of Hume Lake Christian Camps, one of the largest youth camps in the nation. He has been to Israel on a number of occasions and enjoys teaching the Bible in the context of where it was written. He lives in Irvine, California with his wife Kelly and four kids.Turkey / Greece Signature Tour led by Dr. Craig Hill Oct 11-24, 2021https://gtitours.org/trip/signature-turkeyResources mentioned in the PodcastChristianity in the Greco - Roman World: A Narrative Introduction by Moyer v. HubbardJesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels by Kenneth E. BaileyPaul Through Mediterranean Eyes: Cultural Studies in1 Corinthians by Kenneth E Bailey Video links from the podcast- Turkey / Greece Signature videohttps://vimeo.com/348185066-Teaching at Pisidian Antiochhttps://vimeo.com/336927026-Old Loomhttps://vimeo.com/336927023-Hot Air Balloonhttps://vimeo.com/336927011

COME MEET GOSPEL RECORDING & SONGWRITER, ANITA FRANKLIN FROM TALLEHASSEE, FL BIO Christian Contemporary Gospel Recording Artist and Songwriter Anita’s love for music started at a very young age singing in church choirs. At the age of eight she was introduced to the stage as a soloist at a Church of God in Christ (COGIC) State Convention held annually in Jacksonville, Florida. Since then she has gracefully continued the journey of singing. During her college years at Florida A&M University (1981-1984) she was a member of Florida A&M University (FAMU) Gospel Choir under the leadership of the gospel choir’s Founder and Advisor, the late Dr. J.D. Olds. During her years with FAMU Gospel Choir she was blessed to be featured on the gospel choir’s first "Live Recording" as lead vocalist for the albums’ title cut "He Will Bring You Out". In the 1990s’ Anita’s gifts were not only recognized in the church circle but spread in the community when she was invited to join the singing group General Uprising and gospel group "Psalms 8". In 1995 Anita was featured vocalist on National Gospel Jazz Recording artist - Mr. Ben Tankard’s first album "All Keyed Up" singing "Let This Love Live". Anita participated as Apprentice in the State of Florida’s Folk Heritage to study African America blues under the master: the legendary Charles Atkins. This masterpiece of Anita and Charles Atkins studying music is historically placed in the State of Florida’s Department of State Archives of History. Anita’s passion for music and singing open more doors when she was invited by Mr. Earle Lee, Director of the Boys Choir of Tallahassee to travel and perform with them. She has shared the stage with The Boys Choir of Tallahassee for over eight years traveling with them in January 2009 to Washington, DC for the First Inauguration of President Barack Obama and In July of 2009 to travel and perform as lead vocalist with the Boys Choir at the Essence Festival in New Orleans to participate in a tribute to Bishop T.D. Jakes. Anita’s historical moments were performing with the Boys Choir in Selma, Alabama for its annual national "Bloody Sunday Festival" and in 2012 the historical visit to the White House for the White House Holiday Celebration with President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama. As a songwriter Anita has written several songs and on June 2017 Anita released her single entitled "YOU PRAISE HIM" produced by Christopher Lowe which was she was nominated in four categories by the Rhythm of Gospel Music Awards 2018 and received the 2108 Rhythm of Gospel Music Awards “Best Performance by Female Artist and her Christmas project “The Last Time Holiday Love”. Anita has recently been nominated for “Female Soloist of the Year” by the Texas Gospel Music Excellence Awards for their 2019 21st Annual Awards Ceremony to be held in Houston, Texas. PASSION TO SERVE Anita’s heart and passion to serve speaks for itself. She is a member of Celebrate New Life Tabernacle (CNLT) in Tallahassee, Florida, Bishop Joseph Henderson, Senior Pastor, where she serves as coordinator for the Women’s Prison Ministry and has been involved in prison ministry for over 18 years. Anita continue to support her husband as Chair of the organizing committee for The 100 Hall of Fame Legacy Foundation, Inc., founded by her husband Mr. Kenneth E. Hanna. FAMILY Anita believe family is your base and most important foundation that produces positive relationships. Anita has been blessed to have family that has supported her since childhood. Her mother, Evangelist Stella Stallworth and father, Elder Joseph D. Franklin (deceased) has been the most powerful influences in her life. Anita is the proud mother of two (Jacob and Lauren ) and happily married to Mr. Kenneth E. Hanna who continues to support her 100 percent in her music

The son of prominent book collector Kenneth E. Hill, Jonathan A. Hill grew up in a house filled with old books.  After graduating from university in 1974 he served a classic apprenticeship, working for four leading antiquarian booksellers in San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. In 1978 he started his own company and has specialized in science, medicine, natural history, bibliography and the history of book collecting, and early printed books. For the past 20 years he has, partnering with his wife Megumi, also sold antiquarian Japanese, Chinese, and Korean illustrated books, manuscripts, and scrolls.  During the past 43 years the company has issued more than 230 catalogues devoted to these various subjects.   It is thanks to them that I contacted Jonathan. We talk here about his (and Jerry Kelly's) impressive work, and about bookseller catalogues in general.   

SIFMA president and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen and CEO of the Global Financial Markets Association(GFMA)is joined by Allison Parent, Executive Director of GFMA, and Roy Choudhury, Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), to discuss the new report GFMA wrote in collaboration with BCG, “Climate Finance Markets and the Real Economy: Sizing the Global Need and Defining the Market Structure to Mobilize Capital.” Discover more about the report here: https://www.sifma.org/resources/submissions/climate-finance-markets-and-the-real-economy/.

In this podcast, SIFMA president and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. and managing director Tom Price discuss SIFMA’s new white paper on security tokens. The paper, which was co-authored by SIFMA and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, provides a foundational understanding of how distributed ledger technology (DLT) and digital assets such as security tokens interplay with the current securities market. It also describes the key operational challenges faced by U.S. broker-dealers hoping to adopt this technology and recommends where regulatory clarity would be helpful in addressing these challenges. Learn more at www.sifma.org.

SIFMA President and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. and SIFMA Managing Director Justin Sok discuss the proposed New Jersey financial transaction tax (FTT) and the negative impact FTTs have on investors and savers.

Today we feature, "Born Weaponized" by Kenneth E. Piper. Please send your submissions to be featured on the podcast to poetryinmedicine@gmail.com. "In whatever you do, read a poem."

Audible Article by Aradhna Seth and Kenneth E. Sherman

Audible Article by Aradhna Seth and Kenneth E. Sherman

New research from scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that the immune systems of COVID-19 patients can’t do enough to protect them from the virus. A popular theory has it that patients’ immune systems get so revved up fighting the virus that, after several days, a so-called cytokine storm ensues, resulting in potentially fatal organ damage, particularly to the lungs. But new findings from a team of researchers led by Richard S. Hotchkiss, MD, a professor of anesthesiology, and Kenneth E. Remy, MD, an assistant professor of pediatrics, have found that many patients get very sick because their immune systems can’t do enough to protect them from the virus. They’re suggesting that rather than trying to dampen the immune response, a better treatment strategy for COVID-19 would involve boosting immunity. The podcast, “Show Me the Science,” is produced by the Office of Medical Public Affairs at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

It’s book report time! We’re reviewing a couple of sources about one the most enigmatic features of the BWCA-Quetico wilderness: pictographs. We’ll cover the history, science and mystery behind some them as best we can, but at the end of the day they still remain some of the least understood artifacts of the past. Source Materials: Magic on the Rocks: Michael Furtman Selwyn Dewdney and Kenneth E. Kidd Subscribe: Patreon Spotify iTunes YouTube Stitcher Google Play Soundcloud Subreddit Contact: The Answering Machine: (218) 481-0649 Facebook tumblehomecast@gmail.com

Candidate for Montana House District 86, Kenneth E. Allen joins me live to discuss his platform and how he would work to improve the liberties of those in his district.   E-mail: NWLNews@protonmail.com FB Page: northwestlibertynews Twitter: @nwLibertyNews Website: http://northwestlibertynews.com Website: http://eivradio.com Network: http://redstatetalkradio.com   Support the show: Patreon: https://tinyurl.com/u7spjd4 Go Fund Me: https://tinyurl.com/vmam4bq Direct Support: https://tinyurl.com/uwezw2u Bio Stove: https://myprostove.com Great Health: https://bloodboost.net

Dans cette nouvelle émission, Yveline et ses chroniqueurs nous encouragent à ne pas nous troubler durant cette période. Dans la Pensée du Jour, Franck Poulin nous exhorte à nous accrocher à Dieu, à ne pas baisser les bras et à ne pas changer d'attitude malgré les défis que nous traversons. Ensuite, Jonathan Bersot nous explique le sens de la conversion et de la nouvelle naissance. Puis, dans la rubrique Culture et Média, Nadine Kabuya présente un livre appointé pour les temps que nous vivons : Déposez vos soucis sur le Seigneur de Kenneth E.Hagin. Pour finir, nous découvrons le témoignage de Lorette qui découvre une nouvelle dimension dans sa relation avec Dieu.

The Word of Faith movement is often critiqued for its health and wealth Gospel, charismatic abuses, and the antics of its televangelists. What’s talked about less often is its historical ties to the metaphysical cults of the late 1800s, and its doctrinal parallels to New Thought and New Age spirituality. Word of Faith grandfather E. W. Kenyon (1867-1948) was influenced by New Thought teachers such as Phineas Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy, thanks to his extensive metaphysical library and the influence of New Thought at his college of study. These teachings later become adopted and intensified by the father of the modern WOF movement Kenneth E. Hagin, who inspired the likes of Copeland, Roberts, and Hinn. In this series, we are joined by former New Thought proponent Melissa Doughtery and former New Ager Steve Bancarz to document these historical ties and analyze the striking similarities between WOF teachings and the metaphysical cults of past and present.

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is front and center in the United States and across the world. In this podcast, Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr., SIFMA's President and CEO, and Thomas F. Price, SIFMA Managing Director, Technology, Operations and Business Continuity, discuss BCP efforts to protect industry personnel and maintain operational resiliency during the COVID-19 pandemic. SIFMA’s Business Continuity Planning team continues to closely monitor the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and its impact on our industry and the markets; guidance and resources for the industry are available at www.sifma.org/bcp. For a transcript, please visit www.sifma.org/resources/news/podcast-covid19-and-operational-resiliency/ Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. is president and CEO of SIFMA, the voice of the nation’s securities industry. Thomas F. Price is Managing Director, Technology, Operations and Business Continuity at SIFMA.

With a sustained commitment to addressing the risk of money laundering and financial crime through securities firms, as well as strong collaboration between firms and with the regulatory community, much has been achieved by our industry in helping to make our financial system safer and more secure. With that understanding, however, comes the knowledge there will be much more change to come. In this podcast, SIFMA President and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen Jr., is joined by Steve Shine, Chief Regulatory Counsel at Prudential Financial Inc, and Cathy LaFalce, Managing Director and Global Head of AML Compliance Risk Management, Markets and Banking at Citi, to talk about the history of efforts to counter money laundering and other financial crimes in the securities industry and what the future may bring in this space. Learn more about this issue at www.sifma.org.

In this special Christmas edition, Ray and I chat about some popular myths about Christmas such as when Christ was actually born, where He was actually born, when the wise came and even the story of the candy cane.Recommended Resources:Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels by by Kenneth E. BaileyWe Don't Know the Origins of the Candy Cane, But They Almost Certainly Were Not Christian by Rose Eveleth See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Here we are again the latest episode from the triplets of Nerdity, that’s right folks those wacky goofballs have done it again. First up we have Buck bringing us news about new robots using the art of Kirigami. The art of cutting paper, in this case it is cutting and folding paper. This method has been applied to robotics with some awesome results. Now while it is only early days, we ask you to remember the Origami claw we featured a while back. With this in mind you will understand why Buck is excited, and Professor joins in with the excitement. This is just the start of the show and it is already looking fantastic.Next we look at the dismal lack of taste exhibited by the foolish bunch of weirdos in Hollywood behind the Golden Globes. That’s right we said it, actually Buck did if any snipers are being sent for reprisals. But seriously, just get those idiots to go look at some of the amazing work in animation out there. It doesn’t have to be all CGI, honestly Hollywood was built on proper special effects. These days they struggle to do anything outside a computer lab. While we are not meaning to insult CGI and the wonders it can produce, why can’t we have some proper animation and anime getting awards. When can we see some real special effects like we used to get back in the day. Not meaning to sound as grumpy as Buck or as old as a Boomer but seriously the talent involved in special effects was astounding.Last we look at a remake of Sonic 06 that is actually looking good. That is until corporate lawyers realised they could make money by getting it shut down. Take a moment and open the link, doesn’t that look so much better then what was dumped on the market like so much garbage? The amount of work involved must be mind-blowing, but there may be hope for the future. Want to know what that might be, well you will need to listen in to find out. You thought I was slipping and going to tell you everything, but believe me, there is so much more for you.We finish with the regular shout outs, remembrances, birthdays, and special events. As always we hope you take care of yourselves, look out for each other and stay hydrated.Self-folding robots using kirigami- https://techxplore.com/news/2019-12-robots-self-folding-kirigami-materials.html- https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/12/11/1906435116/tab-figures-dataAnime Movies snubbed from Golden Globes - https://www.cbr.com/golden-globes-shuts-out-anime-films-promare-weathering-with-you-i-lost-my-body/Sonic 06 Remade by a Fan - https://www.engadget.com/2019/12/11/sonic-p-06-unity-pc-fan-remake/Games currently playingBuck– Pirates Slay - https://www.crazygames.com/game/pirates-slayRating: 4.5/5DJ– Frenzy Retribution - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1108560/FrenzyRetribution/Rating: 4/5Professor- Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition - https://store.steampowered.com/app/813780/Age_of_Empires_II_Definitive_Edition/Rating: 4.733/5Other topics discussedKirigami Definiton (variation of origami that includes cutting of the paper, rather than solely folding the paper as is the case with origami, but typically does not use glue.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirigami- https://www.origami-resource-center.com/kirigami-for-kids.htmlT-1000 (A fictional character in the Terminator franchise. A shape shifting android assassin, it was created by Skynet. The T-1000 is described in Terminator 2 as being composed of liquid metal, or a mimetic polyalloy (nanorobotics) that it can manipulate to assume various forms.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-1000Origami Gripper (A team at MIT CSAIL have been working on a solution to this problem, which they call the Origami gripper. The gripper consists of a flexible, folding skeleton surrounded by an airtight skin.)- https://hackaday.com/2019/03/18/origami-gripper-is-great-for-soft-and-heavy-objects/Microbots (tiny nanobots constructed by Hiro Hamada from Big Hero 6)- https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/MicrobotsPoisoned books in universities- https://theconversation.com/how-we-discovered-three-poisonous-books-in-our-university-library-98358Shadows from the Walls of Death (printed in 1874 it is a noteworthy book for two reasons: its rarity, and the fact that, if you touch it, it might kill you. It contains just under a hundred wallpaper samples, each of which is saturated with potentially dangerous levels of arsenic)- https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/shadows-from-the-walls-of-death-bookSouth Korean Cinemas suing Disney over Frozen 2- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/03/disney-sued-frozen-2s-monopoly-south-korean-cinemas/Banana on the wall masterpiece and aftermath- https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/the-banana-on-the-wall-was-a-masterpiece-until-somebody-ate-it-20191209-p53i0u.html- https://nypost.com/2019/12/09/banana-wall-vandalized-with-jeffrey-epstein-theory-at-art-basel/PPAP (Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen) (is a single by Pikotaro, a fictional singer-songwriter created and portrayed by Japanese comedian Daimaou Kosaka.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPAP_(Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen)Banksy painting purchased and shredded- https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/banksy-s-shredded-painting-stunt-was-viral-performance-art-who-ncna921426Money Heist (Spanish television heist crime drama series.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_HeistThe Grand Tour (created by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May, and Andy Wilman, produced by Amazon exclusively for its online streaming service Amazon Prime Video)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_TourBlack Sails (American historical adventure television series set on New Providence Island and written to be a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sails_(TV_series)P.T. (initialism for "playable teaser") is a first-person psychological horror video game developed by Kojima Productions, under the pseudonym "7780s Studio", and published by Konami. The game was directed and designed by Hideo Kojima, in collaboration with film director Guillermo del Toro.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game)Fan Remake Of P.T. for free (indie developer managed to remake the P.T. demo and give it out to the general public for free, so for everyone who missed out on it years ago can play the fan remake right now.)- https://www.cinemablend.com/games/2444440/you-can-play-a-fan-remake-of-pt-for-freeKonami shuts down P.T fan remake- https://www.cinemablend.com/games/2450779/the-pt-fan-remake-was-just-killed-by-konamiP.T fan remake Developer offered an internship- https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/13/17570252/pt-on-pc-fan-remake-cease-desist-pulledMarkets (Age of Empires 2 building)- https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Market_(Age_of_Empires_II)Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (also known as Soviet Ukraine, was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union from the Union's inception in 1922 to its breakup in 1991.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Soviet_Socialist_RepublicShoutouts17 Dec 1989 – First episode of The Simpsons airs in the United States with the episode titled Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire, although it was titled onscreen as "The Simpsons Christmas Special" -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Roasting_on_an_Open_Fire17 Dec 2003 – SpaceShipOne, piloted by Brian Binnie, makes its first powered and first supersonic flight, which was also the one-hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers' historic first powered flight. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne17/12/2019 - Shoutout to the New South Wales and Queensland Fire fighters along with their Rural Fire Association Queensland Raffle- https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/very-unpredictable-fire-conditions-forecast-for-nsw-amid-soaring-temperatures-volatile-winds/live-coverage/76f62241194e47b012e83caf81c535a8- https://www.rfbaq.org/au75Remembrances20 Nov 2019 – Tony Brooker, British academic, was a computer scientist known for developing the Mark 1 Autocode language. He also designed the compiler-compiler which is a programming tool that creates a parser, interpreter, or compiler from some form of formal description of a programming language and machine. He died at the age of 94 in Hexham - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/technology/tony-brooker-dead.html17 Dec 1907 - William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Irish-Scottish (of Ulster Scots heritage) mathematical physicist and engineer who was born in Belfast in 1824. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form. Absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in his honour. While the existence of a lower limit to temperature (absolute zero) was known prior to his work, Kelvin is known for determining its correct value as approximately −273.15 degree Celsius or −459.67 degree Fahrenheit. He died from a severe chill at the age of 83 in Largs, Ayrshire - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelvin17 Dec 2016 - Henry Judah Heimlich, American thoracic surgeon and medical researcher. He is widely credited as the inventor of the Heimlich maneuver, a technique of abdominal thrusts for stopping choking, described in Emergency Medicine in 1974. He also invented the Micro Trach portable oxygen system for ambulatory patients and the Heimlich Chest Drain Valve, or "flutter valve", which drains blood and air out of the chest cavity. He died after complications from a heart attack at the age of 96 in Cincinnati, Ohio - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_HeimlichFamous Birthdays17 Dec 1905 - Simo "Simuna" Häyhä, nicknamed "White Death"by the Red Army,was a Finnishsniper. He is believed to have killed 500 men during the 1939–40 Winter War, the highest number of sniper kills in any major war. He used a Finnish-produced M/28-30 rifle, a variant of the Mosin–Nagant rifle, and a Suomi KP/-31 sub machine gun. His unit's captain Antti Rantama credited him with 259 confirmed kills by sniper rifle and an equal number of kills by sub machine gun during the Winter War. Häyhä never talked about it publicly but estimated in his diary that he killed around 500. He was born in Rautjärvi, Viipuri Province. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A417 Dec 1920 - Kenneth Eugene Iverson, Canadian computer scientist noted for the development of the programming language APL. He was honored with the Turing Award in 1979 "for his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL; for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice". He was born in Camrose, Alberta - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_E._Iverson17 Dec 1929 - Jacqueline Hill, British actress known for her role as Barbara Wright in the BBC science-fiction television series Doctor Who. As the history teacher of Susan Foreman, the Doctor's granddaughter, Barbara was the first Doctor Who companion to appear on-screen in 1963, with Hill speaking the series' first words. She played the role for nearly two years, leaving the series in 1965 at the same time as fellow actor William Russell (who played the companion Ian Chesterton). Hill returned to Doctor Who in 1980 for an appearance in the serial Meglos, as the Tigellan priestess Lexa. She was born in Birmingham - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Hill17 Dec 1975 - Milica Bogdanovna "Milla" Jovovich, American actress, model, and musician. Her starring roles in numerous science fiction and action films led the music channel VH1 to deem her the "reigning queen of kick-butt" in 2006. In 2004, Forbes determined that she was the highest-paid model in the world. Jovovich gained attention for her role in the 1991 romance film Return to the Blue Lagoon, as she was then only 15. She was considered to have a breakthrough with her role in the 1997 French science-fiction film The Fifth Element, written and directed by Luc Besson. She and Besson married that year, but soon divorced. She starred as the heroine and martyr in Besson's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. Between 2002 and 2016, Jovovich portrayed Alice in the science fiction horror film franchise Resident Evil, which became the highest-grossing film series to be based on video games. She was born in Kiev, Ukrainian SSR - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milla_JovovichEvent of interest17 Dec 1903 – The Wright brothers make the first controlled powered, heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It flew about four miles (6.4 km) for four times. Today, the airplane is exhibited in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. The U.S. Smithsonian Institution describes the aircraft as "the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard. The flight of Flyer I marks the beginning of the "pioneer era" of aviation. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Flyer17 Dec 1957 – The United States successfully launches the first Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The missile named (R&D) Atlas A 12A which was an SM-65A Atlas landed in the target area after a flight of 600 miles. This was the first Atlas with a functional guidance system.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65A_Atlas- https://web.archive.org/web/20060204073649/http://www.geocities.com/atlas_missile/Chronology.html18 Dec 1971 – On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the sixth in the James Bond series was released, with its premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square in London. As On Her Majesty's Secret Service had been filmed in stereo, the first Bond film to use the technology, the Odeon had a new speaker system installed to benefit the new sounds. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Her_Majesty%27s_Secret_Service_(film)- https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/movies/ohmss_premiere?id=04625IntroArtist – Goblins from MarsSong Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJFollow us onFacebook- Page - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/- Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/440485136816406/Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamatedSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrSiTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rssInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/nerds_amalgamated/General EnquiriesEmail - Nerds.Amalgamated@gmail.com

The passage of bipartisan legislation, the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement – better known as the SECURE Act - marks the biggest legislative change to America’s retirement system in more than a dozen years. In this podcast, SIFMA president and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. and SIFMA managing director and associate general counsel, Lisa Bleier, explain what the SECURE Act means for retirement savers.

Under the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT, broker-dealers will be required to report every equity and options transaction, as well as certain personal information of retail and institutional clients, to a database operated by 24 SROs. SIFMA and its members are supportive of the CAT and its regulatory intent – however, we have repeatedly expressed strong concerns regarding the risks to customer information. Data security must be a paramount concern with a database this large. In this podcast, SIFMA president and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. is joined by SIFMA’s Ellen Greene to discuss the risks posed by the CAT, who bears the liability in the event of a data breach and why reasonable access limits are needed now. For more information, visit www.sifma.org/consolidated-audit-trail

Welcome to SIFMA’s podcast from our annual State of the Industry media briefing. In this segment, our leadership discusses the state of the capital markets and priority issues for the financial services industry in 2019. Please welcome the Chair of our Board of Directors, Joseph E. Sweeney, President of Advice & Wealth Management, Products and Service Delivery for Ameriprise Financial and SIFMA’s President and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr.

Joseph and Dayne sit down with Kenny Berger of the Law Office of Kenneth E. Berger to discuss his work as a personal injury attorney whose area of practice includes life-changing injury and wrongful death. Find out what drew Kenny to this particular area of the legal field and hear his thoughts the dos and don'ts of legal marketing.You can learn more about Kenny's practice at www.bergerlawsc.com/.Follow Direct Examination on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.Send questions or suggestions to directexaminationpodcast@gmail.com.Theme music by 630 Band.

Quantum Dawn V, a global cybersecurity exercise coordinated by SIFMA, was completed on November 7, 2019. What scenario did participants respond to? In this podcast, SIFMA president and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. is joined by Tom Price, SIFMA Managing Director, Operations, Technology & BCP and Tom Wagner, SIFMA Managing Director, Financial Services Operations and Technology. Together, they describe the main takeaways immediately following the exercise and the next steps in communicating the lessons learned with the Financial Services industry. The exercise was carried out with over 700 individuals from over 200 financial institutions and government agencies around the globe—including participants from Australia, Canada, Europe, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, and the U.S. For more, visit www.sifma.org/cybersecurity/

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” Helen Keller When was the last time you planned where you wanted to go in life? I mean really plan it. What age do you want to retire? What car do you want to drive in ten years? How about the job you want to work for the rest of your life? If we don't paint a picture of the life we want to live, someone else is sure to do it for us. Often times that image isn't what we really want. Sometimes, we have a vision for where we want to go in life but the universe has other plans. On occasion, we find ourselves having to change our plans or adjust to a new life. It's especially hard when we don't see that change coming. What if you spent most of your life knowing something was wrong but couldn't find the validation or proof to back it up? How would you feel if people around you were constantly placing labels and blame on the outcomes that were simply beyond your control? For most of us, we wouldn't be able to handle it well. Fortunately my guest today isn't most of us. Kenneth E. Hughes is a local, natural-born comedian in the Greenville area who began developing his craft at an early age. Coming from a large family with southern roots, family gatherings automatically became Kenneth's first stage. In his early 20s, Kenneth’s life changed when he was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), a hereditary disorder causing gradual and progressive blindness. By his 30s, Kenneth lost the majority of his vision and was forced to leave a job he loved. Not knowing what life had in store for him, Kenneth soon found his own niche among the comedy scene. Being black, blind and gay, he is proud to wield the title of a “Triple Minority”. He is also self-proclaimed as the world’s first blind sex symbol, to which many whole-heartedly agree when personally asked by him. In 2017, Kenneth founded 20/20 Productions and has been producing his own shows featuring the talents of many comedians from the Upstate and Southeast region. In addition to managing his production company, he is also proud to work for Able South Carolina as an Independent Living Specialist offering peer support to others in the disabled community. Be sure to connect with Kenneth below: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/2020-Productions-148499099202719/?eid=ARAYgceVRnSvq7Z-kZ8WFmfh0d_PBKtNrjdWUdYCi22t_g76kNW8N3Zx5sHz8UG-mvDZTq_CPle7AOO1&timeline_context_item_type=intro_card_work&timeline_context_item_source=1415112716&fref=tag Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/2020productionssc/ As always, share with a friend and subscribe if you enjoyed this episode. Comments and ratings are greatly appreciated and help us grow and improve the podcast. I hope you enjoy this episode of "No Rain... No Rainbows." #LetsGrow

On October 8, the five federal financial regulatory agencies responsible for the Volcker rule announced they finalized revisions to simplify its compliance requirements. While the revisions do not in any way negate the statutory prohibition on proprietary trading by banks, they do provide market participants with much-needed clarity on compliance issues. In this podcast, SIFMA president and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. is joined by Robert Toomey, Managing Director and Associate General Counsel for SIFMA. Together, they explain why these revisions - such as the removal of an accounting prong - are important to the markets and the economy. For more, visit www.sifma.org/volcker.

Episode 4: Busting Shroud Myths, Part 2:  In one statement, John Walsh (His book The Shroud) observed: “The Shroud of Turin is either the most awesome and instructive relic of Jesus Christ in existence ... or it is one of the most ingenious, most unbelievably clever, products of the human mind and hand on record. It is one or the other; there is no middle ground.”  I did a recent - July, 2019 - survey of Baptist Pastors on The Shroud of Turin. Of those that responded to the poll - only 3.5 percent believed that the Shroud was the genuine burial cloth of Jesus. Half of them were agnostic - it was an interesting historical artifact that could not be verified, and just slightly under half 41 percent - believed the Shroud to be a forgery. I did a much larger poll in The Astonishing Legends facebook group - a group of people that are quite open and interested in paranormal things. In that survey, 132 out of 350 - 38 percent - believed the Shroud to be a hoax, which is very similar to the Baptist pastor's percentage. However, there were more true believers in the paranormal group, with 37 out of 350 - 11 percent - believing that the Shroud was the genuine burial cloth of Jesus. Shroud agnostics - believing the Shroud to be interesting, but unverifiable - represented 181 out of 350 respondents, just over half at 52 percent. Therefore, based on my informal surveys of a little over 400 people - roughly half of those respondents are just like me - uncertain about the Shroud. Over the next few episodes of this podcast, we are going to cover the history of the Shroud of Turin, and the most modern research and findings. Maybe by the time we are done, we'll all still be Shroud agnostics, but maybe - just maybe - we will together unearth enough information to change our minds and develop a clearer and more definitive view of one of the most controversial and noteworthy artifacts of church history.   Today, we are continuing to bust some myths about the Shroud. Next episode we will present 10-25 arguments in favor of the authenticity of the Shroud, some arguments against it, and likely conclude this series. Myth: The Shroud has always been owned by the Catholic Church, and they have officially endorsed it. In fact, it appears that the Catholic Church did not have official possession of The Shroud until 1983 when the royal House of Savoy conveyed ownership of The Shroud to The Holy See. If you remember your AP Modern European History, you might remember that the Savoys began as a small ruling family in the Alps northwest of Italy proper, and grew to become the dominant royal family in Italy, reigning over the country from 1861-1946, and also briefly ruled Spain in the 1800s. Although the Catholic church does not have an official position on The Shroud, several Popes and other church officials have commented favorably about it, including: Cardinal Ratzenberger/Pope Benedict, who called The Shroud, “A truly mysterious image, which no human artistry was capable of producing. In some inexplicable way, it appeared imprinted upon cloth and claimed to show the true face of Christ, the crucified and risen Lord".” (This was said when Ratzenberger was a Cardinal, and was not said officially/Ex Cathedra, so it was not considered an official endorsement of the whole church. Pius 11, 1936, “These are not pictures of the Blessed Virgin, it is true, but pictures that remind us of her as no other can. Since they are pictures of her Divine Son, and so, we can truly say, the most moving, loveliest, dearest ones that we can imagine."   What a strange quote - am I wrong that it seems to be suggesting that pictures of Mary, mother of Jesus, would be more remarkable than pictures of Jesus, the son of God? When any theology places more attention, emphasis and weight on Mary than they do on Jesus, this is where I have a massive difference with them. Source of quote “The Shroud, a Guide” by Gino Morreto. (I note here that I can't find this quote by Pius 11 elsewhere) Pope John Paul II  "Since it is not a matter of faith, the church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions," the late Pope John Paul II said in 1998. ALSO:  “The Holy Shroud is the most splendid relic of the Passion and Resurrection [of Our Lord Jesus Christ]. We become what we contemplate... Why don't we contemplate the Icon of Icons: The Holy Face of Jesus!" Instead of icons made by man, let us venerate the greatest icon of all: The Holy Face of Jesus!” and also, “The Shroud is an image of God's love as well as of human sin ... The imprint left by the tortured body of the Crucified One, which attests to the tremendous human capacity for causing pain and death to one's fellow man, stands as an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age." Most recently, Pope Francis commented on The Shroud during his first Easter address: Dear Brothers and Sisters, I join all of you gathered before the Holy Shroud, and I thank the Lord for offering us this opportunity, thanks also to new devices. We do not merely “look” if we are looking at it, it is not a simple look, but it is a form of veneration, a look of prayer and also it is a way of letting him look at us. This face has eyes that are closed, it is the face of one who is dead, and yet mysteriously he is watching us, and in silence he speaks to us. How is this possible? How is it that the faithful, like you, pause before this icon of a man scourged and crucified? It is because the Man of the Shroud invites us to contemplate Jesus of Nazareth.  This image, impressed upon the cloth, speaks to our heart and moves us to climb the hill of Calvary, to look upon the wood of the Cross, and to immerse ourselves in the eloquent silence of love. Let us therefore allow ourselves to be reached by this look, which is directed not to our eyes but to our heart. In silence, let us listen to what he has to say to us from beyond death itself. By means of the Holy Shroud, the unique and supreme Word of God comes to us: Love made man, incarnate in our history; the merciful love of God who has taken upon himself all the evil of the world to free us from its power.  This disfigured face resembles all those faces of men and women marred by a life which does not respect their dignity, by war and violence which afflict the weakest… And yet, at the same time, the face in the Shroud conveys a great peace; this tortured body expresses a sovereign majesty. It is as if it let a restrained but powerful energy within it shine through, as if to say: have faith, do not lose hope; the power of the love of God, the power of the Risen One overcomes all things. So, looking upon the Man of the Shroud, I make my own the prayer which Saint Francis of Assisi prayed before the Crucifix: Most High, glorious God, enlighten the shadows of my heart, and grant me a right faith, a certain hope and perfect charity, sense and understanding, Lord, so that I may accomplish your holy and true command. Amen. One Catholic commentator on St. Francis' speech above noted, “"The shroud draws [people] to the tormented face and body of Jesus and, at the same time, directs [people] toward the face of every suffering and unjustly persecuted person." This is condemning/damming the Shroud with faint praise and reinforces that Pope Francis really does think (wrongly) that the Shroud is just another fake icon.” I agree with that commentator - reading between the lines of St. Francis' pronunciation, speech, it is quite clear that he is either a Shroud Agnostic, or possibly even thinks it is a forgery.  So - it would seem that, in the Catholic church, the opinions on the authenticity of The Shroud are quite varied. It appears that more Catholic leaders consider The Shroud authentic than do leaders of other major religious groups, but the fact that The Vatican has stopped short of pronouncing the Turin Shroud should possibly give us pause. Do they have reason to suspect it is inauthentic - unreleased reasons? Possibly.  I'll say this - I don't understand religious veneration of objects. That seems completely contra to the clear teachings of the Old and New Testaments. Some branches of Christianity do this, but I think they are missing it. If The Shroud is authentic, then it is fascinating and wonderful, but not at all worthy of a single drop of religious devotion. If it is inauthentic, then it is less so.  Either way, it is a fascinating artifact.  If genuine, it is one of the great treasures of history and should be in our finest museum. Just don't worship it - it is a linen cloth. It didn't die for you. It has no power to save you. I see no indication that it holds any special significance to God. I own a collectible card with a verified piece of a jacket that Elvis Presley sang in and wore. If I had the whole jacket - what would that avail me? Would it help me dance better? Sing better? Become more famous? Could I bring it to Graceland and get free entry for wearing it? Could I take it to surviving members of Elvis' family, and ask to become an honorary Presley? None of those things. And The Shroud would get you less far in Heaven than The Presley jacket would get you in Graceland.  What should we do if it is inauthentic? Burn it, throw it away? Of course not! I still believe it belongs in our finest museums of art (as opposed to history) If it is art - it is incredible art. Mystifying and awe-inspiring.  Whatever it is - The Vatican isn't saying for sure one way, or another. They appear to be fans, but in a mostly unofficial capacity. Maybe Myth: The Shroud has been fully replicated. One of the major issues that has surrounded The Shroud from the beginning has been that, up until recently - even skeptics agreed that the way The Shroud was produced is unknown and thus postulating a medieval forgery was quite difficult, because nobody knew how a person could forge such an image with medieval equipment. There have been other ancient technologies that have been a mystery to modern man. Damascus steel, for instance, has not been inarguably replicated by modern blacksmiths. Roman Concrete has a kind of durability that modern concrete lacks, and scientists are only recently discovering some of the secrets to its longevity. Archimedes is said to have developed a sort of heat ray that was powerful enough to burn up boats from a significant distance away, but it is difficult for us to replicate such a ray using the technology that Archimedes would have had 200 years before the birth of Jesus. To that list, we should certainly add The Shroud, for if it is a forgery - it is an incredibly sophisticated, impressive and technologically advanced one. N.D. Wilson's amazing 2005 article in Christianity Today, entitled “Father Brown fakes The Shroud” is a must read for Shroud enthusiasts. Unfortunately, the only possible way to read it is to get your hands on that 2005 magazine in a library somewhere, or pay CT $30 for a digital subscription - which is what I did. 15 years ago N.D. Wilson supposedly figured out how one might fake The Shroud of Turin, and since that time, I have heard several people say or intimate that The Shroud had conclusively been proven a fraud with the 1-2 punch of #1 1988 medieval dating and #2 Wilson's reproduction. Wilson's method of duplicating The Shroud is ingenious. Basically, he and an artist friend painted a reverse image on a large pane of glass, and then had the sun shine through that image onto a Linen cloth over a period of several days. The sun bleached the cloth - lighter in areas of heavy paint and darker in areas of light paint. The resulting image does indeed look fairly authentic and Shroud-like to the naked eye. It does prove that it is possible, with the right equipment,  to put a negative-like image like The Shroud onto a linen cloth. Here are some objections that have been raised: 1. The cloth contains pollen from plants only found in Palestine - that would be difficult for a European forger to get. For one, he would have no idea that such a thing could potentially authenticate The Shroud. Wilson notes that the cloth could have been procured from a first century, Jewish grave, which I suppose is technically possible.  2. The figure in the Turin Shroud is pierced through his wrists, not through his hands. In recent years, it has been discovered that crucified people would have to have been pierced through their wrists (and not their hands) in order to actually be suspended from a cross. This does not at all contradict the Passion accounts in all four Gospels in the Bible, because the Greek word used for ‘hands' can also include the wrist area, unlike our English, which more clearly delineates between the two. Almost the totality of medieval art depicts the nails used during the crucifixion of Jesus being located in the hands, rather than the wrists. If the Shroud were a forgery, it is remarkable in the extreme that the forger would have known to include nail holes in the wrists, rather than in the hands. 3. I am not an expert on 1300s era glass technology, but some who are have argued that the kind of large and flat pane windows that would have been needed to sun-bleach the painted image of a man onto a large linen cloth would not have been available in the early medieval period. This is a fairly strong objection that I don't believe Wilson's article - as thorough as it is - addresses fully. 4. The figure on the Shroud has real wounds and real blood. This, of course, means that it was more than merely a sun-bleached image. Wilson contends that somebody had to have been murdered in order for forgers to make The Shroud using his method. Again, such a thing is technically possible. 5. It appears to some that the figure in The Shroud has coins in its eyes - and the type of coins appear to be first century coins that would have been commonly used in Israel during the time of Christ. That a medieval forger would be able to add such a detail is fairly astonishing. Of course, as with everything surrounding The Shroud, others (and Wilson, I presume) argue that there are no coin impressions in the eyes of the Shroud-figure. 6. Finally, if The Shroud is a forgery, those who painted the image on the glass had a remarkable and accurate knowledge of both the full details of Roman crucifixion and how the body would have responded to such crucifixion. Additionally, the anonymous forgers would have had to have a strong knowledge of anatomy and wound-effects, as the wounds on The Shroud figure are consistent with what modern medical technology would expect. Wilson contends that there were many medieval people with deep and accurate knowledge of anatomy, and the only reason we don't expect the forgers to have such knowledge is because we have a sort of bias against people from the past and assume they are unsophisticated and unintelligent. Such bias is certainly real, I will readily admit, though it does seem that medical history of the last 500 years demonstrates that medieval medicine and anatomy was indeed quite primitive. So - did Wilson definitively prove that medieval forgers could have produced The Shroud? Maybe, maybe not. Even Wilson admits, “I have not proved much. Or, I do not think that I have. Men and women who have believed in the Shroud will continue to believe. There is a fireman somewhere in Italy who risked his life to save the Shroud. I have a great deal of respect for that man. Perhaps I've given those who disbelieve more reason for noses lifted in the air, but I have not proved that the Shroud was faked. What I have done is crudely demonstrate that such an image could easily be produced in a matter of weeks by wicked men with no scruples, a little imagination, and a little more skill. The fact that it could have been faked does not mean that it was, though I believe it to have been. ”   I'll say this - Wilson's supposed forgers would have had to be: remarkably intelligent, gifted with art, well supplied with very rare (if existent) glass panes, and have an astonishing - for the time - knowledge of medicine, Roman history and human anatomy. Additionally, they would have had to be in possession of a cloth from Palestine, and possibly even pollen that had come from Palestine as well.  There have been other attempts to recreate the Shroud as well. In 2009 the University of Pavia organic chemistry professor and skeptic society member Luigi Garlaschelli produced a fairly convincing (at first glance) reproduction. He describes his attempt: "What you have now is a very fuzzy, dusty and weak image, Then for the sake of completeness I have added the bloodstains, the burns, the scorching because there was a fire in 1532." Garlaschelli says his work disproves the claims of the shroud's strongest supporters. "Basically the Shroud of Turin has some strange properties and characteristics that they say cannot be reproduced by human hands,"For example, the image is superficial and has no pigment, it looks so lifelike and so on, and therefore they say it cannot have been done by an artist." "The procedure is very simple. The artist took this sheet and put it over one of his assistants," "His good idea was to wrap the sheet over the person underneath because he didn't want to obtain an image that was too obviously a painting or a drawing, so with this procedure you get a strange image, Time did the rest,"  As you might imagine, there are several people who disagree that Garlaschelli has produced a convincing replica. Dr. Thibault Heimburger has written an extensive and scientific rebuttal of Garlaschelli's method, essentially arguing that it does not really duplicate all of the elements of the Shroud, but is only a superficial likeness. His paper, linked in the shownotes, concludes:  L.G. concluded: “We have also shown that pigments containing traces of acidic compounds can be artificially aged after the rubbing step (…) in such a way that, when the pigment is washed away, an image is obtained having the expected characteristics as the Shroud of Turin. In particular the image is pseudo negative, is fuzzy with half-tones, resides on the top-most fibers of the cloth, has some 3D embedded properties and does not fluoresce”. I think to the contrary that the image has none of these characteristics (except negativity and nonfluorescence). L.G. used a sophisticated method and a new interesting hypothesis, and he got the best Shroud-like image today. It is interesting to notice that even so, the properties of his image remain in fact very far from the fundamental properties of the Shroud image. 9 For the moment, the Shroud image remains unfakeable. Source: https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/thibault-lg.pdf Shroud blogger Stephen Jones has also debunked the replication of Garlaschelli: http://theshroudofturin.blogspot.com/2018/08/my-critique-of-borrini-m-garlaschelli-l.html  3. The complex herringbone twill pattern of the Shroud was not possible in the first century.  Some Shroud skeptics have speculated that the particular pattern of sewing used on the Shroud is too complex and advanced have been created in the first century.  In the Summer of 2000, archaeologists James Tabor and Shimon Gibson stumbled upon a freshly robbed first century grave outside of Jerusalem. Amazingly, the grave still had bodies in it, and one of them was encased in a somewhat intact first century shroud - the first shroud of that era that has been recovered in or around Jerusalem. Tabor writes of this discovery in a way that is very dismissive of the Turin Shroud:  Although 1st century cloth has been found at Masada and in caves in the Judean Desert, nothing of this sort had ever been found in Jerusalem. Apparently that niche, sealed with a blocking stone, had a geological fissure that kept water from seeping in and rotting the material. The tomb had any number of interesting features. DNA studies were done on all the individuals represented in the tomb—the first time, so far as we know, that this had even been done in an ancient Jerusalem tomb of this period. Textile analysis was done on the cloth—it turned out to be a mixture of linen and wool, not woven together but layered with a separate head piece. It had a distinctive 1st century weave—in contrast to the Shroud of Turin.  News articles from major sites like BBC and CNN concluded that this was yet more evidence that the Shroud was a fake. From the CNN article:  “And in addition, the weave of the shroud raises fresh doubts about the Shroud of Turin, which many people believe was used to wrap the body of Jesus. According to researchers involved in the excavation and subsequent testing, the recently discovered shroud lends more credible evidence that the Shroud of Turin does not date to Roman times when Jesus died but from a later period.” SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/12/16/mideast.ancient.shroud/index.html However, it should be noted that none of the researchers actually engaged in much textile research, nor were they textile experts. They were simply taking the design and weave  of one 1st century burial cloth and concluding that all other 1st century burial cloths from that area would have a similar weave-pattern. That seems plausible at first, but it turns out that it is not true.  Hamburg textile expert Mechthild Flury-Lemberg is a recognized art historian and expert on the restoration of ancient textiles. She was able to examine and work on restoration/repair of the Shroud in 2001/2002 and published a book on it. She concludes on chapter of that book by saying:  “The seam that connects the 8 cm wide strip to the larger segment is not a simple one. The type of seam construction chosen clearly displays the intention to make the seam disappear on the face of the cloth as much as possible. This is another reason to believe that the Shroud was planned and produced by professionals. The sewing has been done from the reverse of the fabric and the stitches have been executed with great care and are barely noticeable on the face of the Shroud. The seam appears flat on the face and raised like a roll on the reverse of the fabric . Examples of this same kind of seam are again to be found among the textile fragments of Masada, already mentioned above. To conclude this chapter it can be said that the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin does not display any weaving or sewing techniques which speak against its origin as a high quality product of the textile workers of the first century A.D.” SOURCE: Sindon by Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, pages 59-60, December 2001. John Tyerer, a chartered textile technologist, “It would be reasonable to conclude the linen textiles with ‘Z' twist yarns and woven 3/1 reversing twill similar to the Turin Shroud could have been produced in the first century Syria or Palestine.” (Source: The Shroud and The Controversy by Gary Habermas and Kenneth E. Stevenson, pg. 69)  4. The Shroud was myth-busted by John Calvin, among many others, who show us that The Scripture demands TWO burial cloths (one for the head, one for the body) and not ONE.  The Sudarium of Oviedo, long believed to be the "napkin" that was wrapped around Our Lord's head after His crucifixion and death, has been shown to have 120 "points of coincidence" with the Shroud, including the same AB blood type. Researchers assert, "The only possible conclusion is that the Oviedo sudarium covered the same face as the Turin Shroud." John Calvin:  4 Arguments against The Shroud:  THERE ARE MULTIPLE ‘SHROUDS' THAT CLAIM TO BE GENUINE.   It is now time to treat of the “sudary,” about which relic they have displayed their folly even more than in the affair of the holy coat; for besides the sudary of Veronica, which is shown in the Church of St Peter at Rome, it is the boast of several towns that they each possess one, as for instance Carcassone, Nice, Aix-la-Chapelle, Tréves, Besançon, without reckoning the fragments to be seen in various places.Now, I ask whether those persons were not bereft of their senses who could take long pilgrimages, at much expense and fatigue, in order to see sheets, of the reality of which there were no reasons to believe, but many to doubt; for whoever admitted the reality of one of these sudaries shown in so many places, must have considered the rest as wicked impostures set up to deceive the public by the pretence that they were each the real sheet in which Christ's body had been wrapped.  Answer: That counterfeits exist does not at all prove that there is no genuine article. Rather, a counterfeit shroud (or three) can be a fairly convincing proof that - at least at one time - there was a significant genuine shroud. 2. THE BIBLE DOES NOT RECORD A CLOTH WITH AN IMPRESSION ON IT.  St John, in his Gospel, relates even how St Peter, having entered the sepulchre, saw the linen clothes lying on one side, and the napkin that was about his head on the other; but he does not say that there was a miraculous impression of our Lord's figure upon these clothes, and it is not to be imagined that he would have omitted to mention such a work of God if there had been any thing of this kind. Answer: John 21:25 25 And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which, if they were written one by one, I suppose not even the world itself could contain the books that would be written.  This is a clear argument from silence. That doesn't mean it carries now weight - it does indeed carry some weight...but not enough to actually disprove the veracity of the Shroud. It should be pointed out that the miracle of the Shroud IF it happened and IF it was noticed by the ladies or the disciples would NOT have been all that significant in comparison to the resurrection of Jesus or the appearance of angels at the tomb. One can quite easily answer this argument from silence with another plausible argument from silence, and it is one I've not heard before. Consider how short, relatively speaking, each of the Gospels are - the Longest is Luke, checking in at just under 20000 words. In total, all four Gospels are approximately 65,000 words - not very lengthy. This is about the size of a shortish paper-back novel.  Given the relative brevity of these accounts, I find it remarkable that ALL FOUR Gospels mention the grave clothes of Jesus. Why? It would seem there would be little reason to record any details about the grave clothes unless...possibly...something remarkable happened to them. Now - is that argument enough to convince a skeptic? Of course not - because it is a very, very weak argument! So is Calvin's argument here that the Gospels would have mentioned it if something miraculous happened with the grave-wrapping of Jesus.  3. THE CLOTHES WERE GUARDED AND LEFT IN THE GRAVE.  Another point to be observed is, that the evangelists do not mention that either of the disciples or the faithful women who came to the sepulchre had removed the clothes in question, but, on the contrary, their account seems to imply that they were left there. Now, the sepulchre was guarded by soldiers, and consequently the clothes were in their power. Is it possible that they would have permitted the disciples to take them away as relics, since these very men had been bribed by the Pharisees to perjure themselves by saying that the disciples had stolen the body of our Lord ?  This one is not terribly difficult to answer. None of the gospels record the detail of removing the clothing, which could be because they did indeed remove it, but did not notice an image imprinted on it. It is highly unlikely they would have left cloth behind in the grave for reasons both sentimental and practical. As well, it should be noted that the Gospels do not record the presence of a guard at the tomb AFTER the resurrection of Jesus.  4. THE SHROUD IS ONE CLOTH AND THE BIBLE CLEARLY SHOWS THAT TWO CLOTHS SERVED TO BURY JESUS. I shall conclude with a convincing proof of the audacity of the Papists. Wherever the holy sudary is exhibited, they show a large sheet with the full-length likeness of a human body on it. Now, St John's Gospel, chapter nine teenth, says that Christ was buried according to the manner of the Jews ; and what was their custom ? This may be known by their present custom on such occasions, as well as from their books, which describe the ancient ceremony of interment, which was to wrap the body in a sheet, to the shoulders, and to cover the head with a separate cloth. This is precisely how the evangelist described it, saying, that St Peter saw on one side the clothes with which the body had been wrapped, and on the other the napkin from about his head. In short, either St John is a liar, or all those who boast of possessing the holy sudary are convicted of falsehood and deceit. * * This is probably Calvin's most well known argument contra the Shroud and the one that I hear most well-educated Protestants make when I bring up the Shroud to them That the Bible suggests a plurality of gravecloths, but the Shroud is only one cloth. On the surface, this might seem like a pretty compelling claim against the Shroud, but it is not quite as open and shut as Calvin would have us believe.  The most relevant passage in the Bible to this discussion is John 20:  6 Then, following him, Simon Peter came also. He entered the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there. 7 The wrapping that had been on His head was not lying with the linen cloths but was folded up in a separate place by itself. Pretty clear, right - according to John's Gospel, there were not ONE but TWO burial cloths that wrapped Jesus. One, mentioned in vs 6 (Greek: ὀθόνια (othonia)/PLURAL)  and the other in verse 7 - a cloth wrapped around Jesus' head. (Greek: σουδάριον Soudarion)  Here's the thing, though - Many Shroud researchers, including Kenneth Stevenson, Gary Habermas, Ian Wilson, Barrie Schwortz and others contend that the Shroud shows evidence that there was a head cloth wrapped around the Shroud figure's neck and head - most likely to hold the jaw in place.  It would appear that the Sudarion was not a very significant part of the grave cloths that wrapped Jesus, as Matthew, Mark and Luke do not mention it in particular. Consider:  Mark 15:46 46 After he bought some fine linen, he took Him down and wrapped Him in the linen. Then he placed Him in a tomb cut out of the rock, and rolled a stone against the entrance to the tomb. Luke 23:53 and 24:12  52 He approached Pilate and asked for Jesus' body. 53 Taking it down, he wrapped it in fine linen and placed it in a tomb cut into the rock, where no one had ever been placed...12 Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. When he stooped to look in, he saw only the linen cloths. So he went home, amazed at what had happened. And Matthew 27: 59 So Joseph took the body, wrapped it in clean, fine linen, 60 and placed it in his new tomb, which he had cut into the rock. He left after rolling a great stone against the entrance of the tomb. So, the three synoptic gospels - Matthew, Mark and Luke - don't mention the head-wrapping, or the sudarion, but John does. Could this indicate that the sudarion was a smaller garment - one that would not have left much of an imprint on the Shroud? Possibly. But, again, I emphasize - The Shroud seems to allow for the existence of a head-scarf type wrapping, as well as ones around the wrists and feet. Rather than the Biblical account disproving The Shroud, it actually seems to describe it quite well. 5. THE ABUNDANCE OF FAKE RELICS PUT FORWARD BY MEDIEVAL CATHOLICS PROVES THE SHROUD IS ALSO FAKE.  St Honoratus has a body at Arles, and another at the island of Lerins, near Antibes.St Giles has a body at Toulouse, and a second in a town bearing his name in Languedoc.I could quote an infinite number of similar cases. I think that the exhibitors of these relics should at least have made some arrangement amongst themselves the better to conceal their barefaced impostures. Something of this sort was managed between the canons of Trêves and those of Liége about St Lambert's head. They compounded, for a sum of money, not to show publicly the head in their possession, in order to avoid the natural surprise of the public at the same relic being seen in two different towns situated so near to each other. But, as I have already remarked at the commencement of this treatise, the inventors of these frauds never imagined anyone could be found bold enough to speak out and expose their deceptions. This is really more of a subset of argument #1, and it is a fairly strong argument. However, it must be said that not every statement made by a dishonest person is a lie, and it is perfectly possible that not every relic claimed by the medieval Catholic church was fake. Most likely were. Were they ALL fake?  I'm not convinced they were.  So - Hopefully you've enjoyed this little bit of busting myths.  You can probably tell that I want the Shroud to be the real thing. There's several reasons for this, but none of them are apologetics-related. In other words, I don't want the Shroud to be the real burial cloth of Jesus because I think that would help prove the Bible to be reliable, or Jesus to be the resurrected Son of God. No article could prove such a thing. I do, however, want the Shroud to be real and genuine in the same sort of way that I want there to be a real Loch Ness Monster, or an extant Holy Grail somewhere out there. The world is a more interesting place with a legit Nessie swimming around in the cold waters of Scotland, and it is a more interesting place with real, tangible artifacts from the time of Jesus. Does that bias me? Possibly it does, and I don't want to enter this discussion biased. It does make me consider the claims of debunkers with a greater skepticism, however, and that might not be a bad thing.  I love John Calvin and am quite persuaded by his soteriological leanings in the realm of theology. That said, I believe his debunking of The Shroud is somewhat ham-handed, especially his contention that it is easily proved false by John 20 argument that the Bible says there were two different kinds of grave-clothes. I believe that there were indeed two different kinds of graveclothes used on Jesus - the Bible is explicit about this - there was a linen cloth that the body of Jesus was wrapped in, and a head covering (of some sort) that went along with it. That said, the Shroud appears to show evidence of there being a head scarf or head wrapping of some sort, and even if it didn't, one could easily see how the Shroud figure could have been wrapped in more than one cloth. I have little patience for people who believe the extraordinary simply because somebody told them it was so - gullibility is delightful in children, but unbecoming and unsophisticated in adults. I also have little patience for those who claim to debunk complex objects and possibilities with overly-simplistic and reductionist arguments. It is definitely possible - even plausible - that the Shroud of Turin is a medieval forgery, but the fact that John 20:7 mentions a sudarion that was on the head of Jesus does not necessarily debunk the authenticity of The Shroud in any sore of logical, philosophical or archaeological way.  Ok - that was a long episode. ONE more Shroud episode coming up - a summation of sorts. I hope to have 20-25 reasons to believe the Shroud could be authentic as well as a number of reasons to NOT believe in the authenticity of The Shroud. Thanks for being patient, and thanks for listening. Please leave a positive review if you are so inclined. 

The U.S. housing market is a critical piece of the general economy. It represents one-fifth of U.S. GDP and 35% of all private, non-financial debt in the country. The U.S. Treasury Department just announced that Fannie and Freddie will retain their earnings, a step in moving the companies out of conservatorship and back into the private sector. In this podcast, SIFMA president and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. is joined by Chris Killian - Managing Director and head of SIFMA's securitization practice. Together, they explain how that one small move fits into the Administration's overall goals for housing finance reform. Learn more about this issue at www.sifma.org.

Money market funds are investment vehicles that invest in debt securities with short maturities and minimal credit risk. They are a significant source of cash for the repo markets, where a money market fund or other asset manager lends cash to a broker-dealer or hedge fund in exchange for securities, often Treasury notes. Last week, a confluence of events negatively affected liquidity in the repo markets; a change in the availability of cash to lend caused market rates to nearly double and significant funds to be withdrawn from money market funds. A series of operations by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York injected liquidity into the system and stabilized markets. In this supplement to our recent podcast, What Just Happened in the Repo Markets?, SIFMA president and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. walks through the basics of money market fund operations and explains how they relate to the recent dislocation in repo markets. He is joined by Timothy C. Cameron - Managing Director and Associate General Counsel and head of SIFMA's Asset Management Group (SIFMA AMG) - and Robert Toomey - Managing Director and Associate General Counsel and head of SIFMA's capital markets practice.

The financial system relies on short-term money markets every day to fund operations. A crucial but little-known market that ordinarily hums steadily along, this week we saw a shortage of cash cause a massive spike in repo rates. What happened? In this podcast, SIFMA president and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. discusses the confluence of technical factors that caused the market dislocation - and what policymakers can take away from it. He is joined by Robert Toomey - Managing Director and Associate General Counsel and head of SIFMA's capital markets practice - and Carter McDowell - Managing Director and Associate General Counsel and head of SIFMA's prudential and capital practice. Get SIFMA's fact sheet on the repo markets at https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/us-repo-market-fact-sheet-2019/

A decade ago, the Federal Reserve implemented the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) process as part of its stress testing framework to assess and regulate capital sufficiency at large bank holding companies. A new study released by SIFMA uses statistical analysis of stress testing scenarios to answer a simple question: does the available evidence indicate that the current Global Market Shock (GMS) and Large Counterparty Default (LCD) shocks from recent CCAR cycles are plausible? In this podcast, SIFMA president and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. discusses the study's analysis and findings with Joseph Seidel, SIFMA’s Chief Operating Officer; Carter McDowell, SIFMA’s Associate General Counsel and Managing Director; and Coryann Stefansson, Senior Advisor to SIFMA. For more on prudential regulation and its effect on the capital markets, visit www.sifma.org/prudential.

The Bible encourages us to trust in the Lord with our hearts and not lean on our understanding. This shows that having faith in the heart means not leaning on the thoughts that flood through our minds.

With the heart, man believes unto righteousness. Our spirit man (often referred to as the heart in scripture) is what gets transformed at the new birth, and the channel through which he experience the God life.

It has been a few years since my husband Steve was on the show, and a lot has changed since I last brought him on. Rather than him and I just talk about our lives, we thought we would pass it over to you to ask your questions. We answered almost all of them, and I hope you enjoy getting to know Steve better. Here are the questions we answered (not in the order we answered them). Advice for tapering-Elzedomaityte Any awkwardness/insight/challenges that come from having your spouse coach you?-Sara Tell us about airport tina-alissmarie What does it feel like to have a famous and awesome wife?-Erin Do you structure cross training for injured athletes or is it up to them? Jen How are you enjoying being a father and what are you excited about experiencing with bailey? - cfluffy Do you lose benefit when you spilt your easy runs up into a morning and afternoon. (Easy runs are normally 6 to 7 miles).- Bridgett Hughes Why are my 10K and half marathon race paces the same and how do I fix this?- Alex Myroon How do you manage the balance between husband/wife relationship and running relationship? My boyfriend and I are both runners and have about the Same level and amount of experience, but sometimes it’s hard to see when we just need to support the other with running without butting in and giving advice and when a little bit of pushing with running is appropriate- Bridget Wiberg What is it like to coach your wife? What do you do if she disagrees with the plan? How do you separate running life from family life? - Kenneth E. Johnson Do you think runners can truly get accustomed to and excel in hot/humid weather, or are we doomed to have a rough experience every time Mother Nature brings summer fury? Asking as a Florida runner...any tips for this are appreciated, too! -Katy Pierce Cook What differences do you find between coaching college athletes and elites(Tina) or recreational athletes? What challenges do you face and how do you overcome them?- Mike Capka How do you balance/decide when a fatigued runner needs a day off or should run threw the fatigue? How do you decide when to scrap a workout or drop it down to an easy effort run?- Mike Capka How do you find the right balance when building a training plan for someone you are coaching? Are there staples you always put in?- Virginie Serre Have you considered training plans that are less than 40mpw?- Lucy Eichenwald What do you think about doing speed works/repeats on a treadmill vs road. How do they compare? -Judy Sherman How much running does Steve do? Does he have a future goal race in mind? Have you two ever raced each other? -Ashton Swinford If you are training to improve your times, when is training for a marathon “good enough” and when should you postpone your goal race to the next season? This season I’ve been sidelined 2x for 2-3 weeks. The first time totally off those weeks, the second time reduced mileage by 25% and didn’t do workouts. Definitely only feel like I did 75-80% of what would be ideal training. For other races I think this is maybe OK but possibly not for marathon?- Emily Hass Ryan Has becoming a father to beautiful bailey changed your coaching philosophy? Liz Ansley  Thoughts on managing expectations and knowing when your goals are unrealistic. -Karen Scobie What are your three pieces of advice for a successful relationship?-Alon Metser Any hacks to speed up your learning curve for the effort scale (it took me most of the first training segment to get comfortable with it, but I might just be a slow learner).  Why are there such relatively long runs in the taper? -David Skytte After your personal experience racing Boston #NoWatchMe, do you or Steve have any new advice or insights about marathon race strategy that might help keep one feeling good throughout most of the race? -Ashton Swinford   Thank you to Bodyhealth and Athletic Greens for being the wonderful sponsors of this episode of The Running For Real Podcast.   If you are struggling to recover quick enough from your training, my little secret is to use BodyHealth Perfect Amino to get you there. It contains all the essential amino acids, and is very easy for your body to use and begin the repair process. Click the link and use code TINAMUIR10 for 10% off.   Athletic Greens is a simple and easy way to get 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients. Just to help my immune system be stronger and greater! It is so simple to do and it taste good as well. Now you can get a free travel pack with 20 servings with your first purchase, Visit here to learn more! Thanks for Listening! I hope you enjoyed today's episode. To share your thoughts: Leave a note in the comment section below. Join the Running for Real Facebook Group and share your thoughts on the episode (or future guests you would like to hear from) Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. To help out the show: Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews will really help me climb up the iTunes rankings and I promise, I read every single one. Not sure how to leave a review or subscribe, you can find out here. Thank you to Steve, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the show.

Esta semana foi dominada pela chegada de um novo ciclone em Moçambique, o Kenneth que varreu a região norte do país, pouco mais de um mês depois da passagem do ciclone Idai. Também a marcar a actualidades desta semana, a Páscoa sangrenta do Sri Lanka com mais de 250 mortos em ataques coordenados contra igrejas e hóteis da ilha. Estes e outros assuntos foram abordados com os nossos convidados.

In this week's episode we share a few more reading tips and discuss the following books that are on my current reading list: The Spirit and the Word by J. C. HollowayThe Life of Christ by R. C. FosterWhat the Old Testament Authors Really Cared About by Jason S. DeRouchieLove Your God With All Your Mind by J. P. MorelandHandbook to the New Testament Use of the Old Testament by G. K. BealeFrom Paradise to the Promised Land by T. Desmond Alexander1 & 2 Chronicles by Richard L. Pratt ( A Mentor Commentary)2 Samuel by Dale Ralph Davis (Focus on the Bible Commentary Series)Christ Centered Exposition: Exalting Jesus in 1+2 Samuel by Heath Thomas and J. D. GrearPaul Through Mediterranean Eyes by Kenneth E. BaileyTyndale Commentary on 1 Corinthians by Thomas Schreiner 

Jarrett Earnest is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018), editor of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2017  by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams, June 2019) and curator of "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner, NY (February 21 - April 13, 2019).  "The Young and Evil" press release from David Zwirner; David Zwirner is pleased to present The Young and Evil, a group exhibition curated by Jarrett Earnest, at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. The exhibition will feature significant works from the first half of the twentieth century by Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Charles Henri Ford, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Tooker, Jensen Yow, and their circle. This group of artists and writers looked away from abstraction toward older sources and models—classical and archaic forms of figuration and Renaissance techniques. What might be seen as a reactionary aesthetic maneuver was made in the service of radical content—endeavoring to depict their own lives. Drawn from important public and private collections, key works include a painting from Paul Cadmus’s infamous sailor trilogy, Shore Leave (1933), on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art; a major canvas by Pavel Tchelitchew featuring vignettes of George Platt Lynes at work; rare paintings by Margaret French and works on paper by Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein; and never-before-seen erotic drawings and photographs from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. On the occasion of the exhibition, a fully illustrated, comprehensive catalogue featuring new scholarship by art historians Ann Reynolds and Kenneth E. Silver is forthcoming from David Zwirner Books. Both images - George Platt Lynes, c. 1930, silver gelatin print. courtesy David Zwirner and Vincent Cianni/Monroe Wheeler Archive, Newburgh, NY.

Episode #4 begins with some helpful reading practices, discusses last week's assigned reading, introduces some books that arrived in the mail, and opens a discussion topic on Calvinism.  The largest portion of the episode features a discussion of the high points from chapters 7 & 8 of T. Desmond Alexander's "From Paradise to the Promised Land".  Alexander's book is currently featured in the weekly reading assignments.  There are also brief reviews and introductions to "Kingdom Come" by Sam Storms, "Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes" by Kenneth E. Bailey, "Drawing Water From The Wells Of Salvation"Doug Edward, "Practicing Proverbs" by Richard Mayhue, "Jesus the Sage" by Ben Witherington, "Seriously Dangerous Religion" by Iain Provan, "Elect in the Son" by Robert Shank, and "The Gospel Plan of Salvation" by T. W. Brents.  If you have a favorite book to recommend on the topic of Calvinism, please send us the title and author's name to ChristianResearcher@gmail.com. 

Sahar Francis of Addameer This week, I spoke with Sahar Francis, the Director of Addameer. Addameer is a non-governmental organization, or NGO, based in Ramallah in the West Bank in occupied Palestine that focuses on human rights advocacy, political prisoner support & public education efforts like Know Your Rights trainings. Addameer is one of the projects that is receiving a portion of the profits of the 2019 Certain Days: Political Prisoners Calendar that we've you've heard of in past episodes. For the purposes of broadcast, we had to cut some portions of this chat for the radio. If you're listening to the radio version, check out our podcast version for a few more minutes of chat. More instructions below. For the hour, Sahar tells us about aspects of the Palestinian struggle of the last 70 years against the domination of the Israeli state and a little about the refugee situation of the 10 million Palestinians in the region as they await their Right of Return to their homeland. Addameer (which translates to “Conscience” from Arabic) works to highlight the treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories by the military court system of Israel, in particular the situation of youth as young as 12 years old who face harassment and torture, administrative detention of months and years on end with seemingly no end, and the impunity of the military system's use against Palestinians, and the unequal treatment of Palestinians and Israeli Jewish Settlers in the Occupied Territories. We also speak of the movement towards widening the death penalty under military law and the difficulty of Palestinian lawyers offering defense in the Israeli military courts who aren't usually fluent in Hebrew or proficient in Israeli law, as they study Palestinian law in college. Addameer, as a human rights organization, frames it's work in terms of International Human Rights law as enshrined in the United Nations (UNRWA, The Geneva Convention in hopes of eventual international intervention against the ongoing genocide at the hands of the Israeli government. We even cover the incarceration of Palestinians (in Israel or the Occupied Territories) for publishing critique of the Israeli occupation on social media (1,000's, including Tareen Tatour in 2015). In a segment comparing Settler-Colonialism in the U.S. & Israel/Palestine, Sahar speaks about two Bedouin villages under threat of demolition by Israel, Khan al-Ahmar in the occupied West Bank as well as Umm al-Hiran in order to clear way for Israeli colonial design. . ... . .. If you visit our website, thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org you can find all of our episodes going back to 2010. To never miss an episode, click the “podcasting” link, where you can find instructions on how to subscribe to our podcast using iTunes or whatever music app or program you like, including our soon-to-be resurrected Error451 podcast, an occasional tech security podcast from an anarchist perspective. In the near future we hope to bring you perspectives on encryption from the pEp (or Pretty Easy Protection) Foundation, LEAP (or Leap Encryption Access Project) and more. Stay tuned next week for an overview of the 2018 Nationwide Prison Strike with an incarcerated organizer named Dee from Jailhouse Lawyers Speak.   Announcements Phone Zap for Comrade Malik Washington This didn't make it into the recording for today, but this Tuesday, November 13th, BRABC with the backing of IWOC is inciting a phone zap in support of Keith “Comrade Malik” Washington to get Malik out of segregation. Malik has been continuously punished and persecuted, including instances of medical endangerment and solitary confinement with out reason given or recourse. He's also had his property, including legal documents, taken and his communication is greatly stifled at the moment (including legal). Read more by visiting the above links. Digital Security Self-Defense at Firestorm If you're in the Asheville area coming up, on Saturday, November 17th from 4-6pm at Firestorm Books and coffee, Blue Ridge Anarchist Black Cross will be giving a free, interactive presentation on online hygene and security self-defense threat modeling the far-right. But, whether you're concerned about what info's online that might fall into the hands of the fash, a stalker or just want to tie up loose ends, a lot of the tools and tips are the same. Bring a laptop, tablet or phone to work on. And a few hours later there'll be a concert by Nomadic War Machine at the Bottle Shop, an electronic assault by Margaret Killjoy that you're welcome to swing by. SF Bay View Newspaper Updates In an update to our past episode featuring Mary Ratcliff of the SFBayView National Black Newspaper from August, we have good news! Amani Sawari, who we interviewed in July about the Nationwide Prison Strike as an outside spokesperson for Jailhouse Lawyers Speak prisoner organization, will be stepping up to take on the editorial position at that paper and giving Mary and Dr. Willie Ratcliff a long-deserved break. There's an online fundraiser to help get Amani situated in the Bay Area where you can support the transition and hopefully long next phase for the paper. You can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/sfbayview Anti-Anti-Semitism Action In light of the murder of eleven people at the Tree of Life synagogue, Anti-Anti-Semitism Action is asking for your support to take action against anti-Semitic organizers and to defend Jews. We are raising funds which we need to spotlight specific anti-Semitic organizers—especially those who use platforms that cater to the Alt Right such as Gab—to spread their toxic conspiracy theories. Funds will be used to expose and run public campaigns against activists who spread anti-Semitism, as well as those promoters who bring anti-Semitic speakers to their towns. Remaining monies will be used to provide security and protection for Jewish activists who are targeted by anti-Semites. This includes hiring security for public appearances, and arranging security measures at activists' residences. The ADL raises millions of dollars a year to “fight anti-Semitism” but they refuse to do the nuts and bolts work of taking action against anti-Semitic organizers or protecting Jews who are targeted. 100% of your donations will go directly to this. Donate to this fundraiser here Support Craggy Prisoner, Dayvon Person Dayvon Person is a prisoner being accused of inciting a riot on September 24 at the Craggy Correctional Institution, just outside of Asheville, NC, where he was just about to reach minimum security levels. It's requested that people call officials to press them to hear is appeal of innocecence. He is asking that folks on the outside call with persistence, and ask these persons to hear his appeal for this false accusation. You can call: Kenneth E. Lassiter (Director of Prison Facilities): 919 838 4000 919 838 3755 David Rogers (State Representative): 919 733 5749 Ralph Hise (NC Senator representing District 47): 919 733 3460 Express your concern through calling or writing the North Carolina Department of Public Safety: 512 North Salisbury Street Raleigh, NC 27604 919-733-2126 . … . .. Playlist

Marty Solomon and Brent Billings look at the gospel of Luke and wrestle with the many perspectives regarding his audience and his agenda.The Evangelists’ Calendar by M. D. GoulderPoet & Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes by Kenneth E. Bailey

In the first, "preview" episode of Systematically, we do some introductions and then settle into a discussion of the conceptual and moral questions around forgiveness. Then we recommend way too many books. Show notes below: TITLES NAMED IN MAIN SEGMENT Derrida, Jacques. “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible.” In Questioning God, edited by John Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael Scanlon. 21-51. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. “On Forgiveness,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. New York: Routledge, 2001. Heaps, Jonathan. “Tweeting the Impossible Forgiveness: Some Resources from Continental Philosophy for Thinking about Charleston, Mercy, and Social Media.” The Other Journal 25 (2015): 77-83. http://theotherjournal.com/2015/11/09/tweeting-the-impossible- forgiveness-some-resources-from-continental-philosophy-for-thinking-about-charleston- mercy-and-social-media/. Lonergan, Bernard J.F. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. 5th Edition. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 3. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Lonergan, Bernard J.F. Method in Theology. Edited by Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 14. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Volf, Miroslav. Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006. Walsh, J. P. M. The Mighty from Their Thrones: Power in Biblical Tradition. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004. “TREASURES OLD AND NEW” Blondel, Maurice. Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice. Translated by Oliva Blanchette. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1984. Boersma, Hans. Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018. Byrne, Patrick H. The Ethics of Discernment: Lonergan’s Foundations for Ethics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Kirk, Kenneth E. Vision of God. New edition. Ingram Publisher Services, 2001. Peguy, Charles. The Portal of the Mystery of Hope. Translated by David Louis Schindler Jr. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at https://archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV “14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track. Follow us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Special Guests: Kenneth E. Hall, Joseph McBrideGuest Co-Hosts: Jon Cross, Ben BuckinghamWe travel back to the days of yesteryear with a look at the 1962 film from director John Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The film stars Jimmy Stewart as Ransom Stoddard, a lawyer who comes out west only to get robbed by the titular Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). The film also stars John Wayne as Tom Doniphan, a man of action and the living embodiment of "The Old West".Joseph McBride and Kenneth E. Hall discuss the works of John Ford while Jon Cross and Ben Buckingham join Mike to talk about Liberty Valance and revisionist Westerns. 

Special Guests: Karen Fang, Kenneth E. Hall, Barna William DonovanGuest Co-Hosts: Beth AccomandoAfter a brief hiatus, The Projection Booth returns with a discussion of John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1986). The film is seen as a hallmark of the “heroic bloodshed” subgenre of action films, doing for gunplay what a generation of Hong Kong films had done with swords.The film tells the tale of Ho (Ti Lung), a criminal whose younger brother, Kit (Leslie Cheung), is a police officer. He's betrayed by a fellow gangster (Waise Lee) and sent up the river. When he returns to Hong Kong he wants to stay on the right side of the law which is more difficult than it should be.The film speaks to loyalty, brotherhood, and put Chow Yun-Fat on the map as a bankable action star.Cinema Junkie's Beth Accomando and Mike wax fondly about the glory days of HK Cinema, twin brothers, strange sequels, and the true colors of a hero. 

Welcome to SIFMA’s podcast from our annual State of the Industry media briefing. In this segment, our leadership discusses the state of the capital markets and priority issues for the financial services industry in 2018. Please welcome the Chair or our Board of Directors, Lisa Kidd Hunt, Executive Vice President, Business initiatives for Charles Schwab and SIFMA’s President and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr.

AIDS Lecture with Kenneth E. Sherman, MD, PhD, Gould Professor of Medicine Director, Division of Digestive Diseases University of Cincinnati College of Medicine

This week I talk with Kenneth E. Parris III about growing up artsy, balancing two careers, and the gross yet wonderful benefits of kombucha. You can see his work at www.Parris3.com

Kenneth E. Millers' latest book, WAR TORN, focuses on stories of civilians in war zones and the courage and resilience they exhibit to survive their incredible scenarios. Many of these people end up becoming refugees, some of who are now banned from entering our country in the sweeping and shocking executive order by President Trump over the weekend. Kenneth is available for interview immediately and is the perfect resource to help audiences learn about the populations affected by these immigration policy changes. https://www.psychologytoday. com/blog/the-refugee- experience/201701/5-myths- about-refugees With some 200 million people affected by armed conflict or genocide, refugees are appearing in record numbers. War Torn takes us beyond the headlines into the lives of civilians caught up in war's destructive power in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Guatemala, and Sri Lanka. Alongside stories that convey the destruction and heartbreak of armed conflict, he captures the courage and resilience he calls “a remarkable kind of light,” an essential counterpoint to the grief and trauma that war creates. The stories in War Torn are powerful, heart-wrenching, and unforgettable. After reading them, we welcome the rich list of options Miller offers (at the end of the book) for ways we can help. Drawing on his extensive research and clinical experience, Miller also offers a nuanced critique of the overly narrow focus on PTSD among survivors of armed conflict. “In evocative and powerful prose, [Miller] captures the remarkable human capacity for resilience in the face of great adversity. He also writes with compassion about the lasting damage that war has on the human heart and mind, when the limits of resilience have been surpassed.” —from the foreword by James Garbarino, author of Lost Boys and No Place to be a Child An international expert on the impact of armed conflict on civilians, psychologist Kenneth E. Miller has been working with war-affected communities since 1991 as a researcher, clinician, organizational consultant, and filmmaker. A professor of clinical and community psychology for much of his career (San Francisco State University, Pomona College), in 2015 he joined the Dutch NGO War Child Holland and is currently based in Amsterdam. His website is www.kennethemiller.com “The courage and resilience on display in these eye-opening and heart-wrenching accounts is matched only by Miller’s brave and unflinching resolve to spend his life working in refugee camps and on the front lines, bearing witness to the individual horrors of armed conflict, while trying to help the victims heal, however imperfectly. With clarity of thought and prose, he also reminds us that "while people may be deeply wounded by the hardships they’ve endured, their spirits or psyches are seldom irreparably broken.”-- Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper's Wife “War Torn provides harrowing first-hand insights into human suffering across contexts burned into global consciousness as theatres of late 20th century and early 21st century inhumanity: Guatemala, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Syria. But the extraordinarily sensitive and insightful text ultimately communicates most powerfully regarding the humanity that endures in such adversity. This humanity is observed in those humanitarians seeking to respond to those in need but, above all, in the determination, humor, and love shown by those struggling against the destruction of their communities and identities by civil conflict. Miller’s narrative doesn’t lapse into sentimentality, however. The humanity that it witnesses to is a bloodied one, born of labor, sacrifice, and suffering. In the year when the UN Secretary-General, through the World Humanitarian Summit, is calling for recognizing our shared humanity as the key driver of our decision-making and collective action, we would benefit from this book being compulsory reading for all who need to grasp that that sharedness is not a principle, but a visceral, tortured and consoling reality.” —Alastair Ager,Director of International Health and Development at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. Author of Faith, Secularism, and Humanitarian Engagement: Finding the Place of Religion in the Support of Displaced Communities, editor of Refugees: Perspectives on the Experience of Forced Migration “War Torn is an exceptional, gripping account of the impact of war—a must-read for anyone interested in how war profoundly touches and shapes people. Ken Miller merges the expressive writing of a novelist with compassion and the profound understanding of a seasoned mental health professional. This collection of personal experiences and mosaic of situations provides rich and unique insights into the complexities of war torn countries.” —Dr. Mark Jordans, King’s College London "Ken Miller weaves together for us tragic stories of war, loss and injustice with tales of friendship, family, and laughter. Ken's gift is the way he listens, which takes him and his readers beyond simple categories of war victim or trauma to the complex experiences people have in settings torn apart by violence. I'm grateful for the way he has captured the simultaneously disabling and inspiring coexistence of darkness and light in these places." --Jeannie Annan, PhD, Director of Research, Evaluation, and Learning at the International Rescue Committee

Host Cyrus Webb welcomes psychologist and author Kenneth E.Miller to #ConversationsLIVE to discuss his fascinating new book WAR TORN and what it's been like for him to travel the world and see the way war affects those most impacted by it---and what we can learn from them and the after effects.  Stay connected with Kenneth at his website www.kennethemiller.com. 

The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History: 3 vols.Edited by Kenneth E. Hendrickson IIIFrom the publisher: The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History is a three-volume work of over 1,000 entries on the rise and spread of the Industrial Revolution across the world. Entries comprise accessible but scholarly explorations of topics from the “aerospace industry” to “zaibatsu.” Contributor articles not only address topics of technology and technical innovation but emphasize the individual human and social experience of industrialization. Entries include generous selections of biographical figures and human communities, with articles on entrepreneurs, working men and women, families, and organizations. They also cover legal developments, disasters, and the environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution. Each entry also includes cross-references and a brief list of suggested readings to alert readers to more detailed information. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810888876/The-Encyclopedia-of-the-Industrial-Revolution-in-World-History-3-Volumes#

Today we are fortunate to welcome Dr. Kenneth E. Wood, current Associate Chief Compliance Officer for the University of Maryland Medical Center as well as the new Director of the Maryland Critical Care Network. Dr. Wood just recently joined us from the Geisinger Health System, where he was the Chief Medical Officer as well as the Director of the IAA Geisinger Center for Healthcare Systems Re-Engineering. AND before that he was the Director of Critical Care Medicine and the and Program Director for the Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin.... Needless to say, he has spent a majority of his life making medicine run like an efficient machine. However, today Dr. Wood explains the real issue plaguing our society. Quite simply, the United States health care system is failing to do its most fundamental duty: take care of it's people. This is a lecture I assure you cannot be watched just once...

Episode notes:At one point we wonder if a bird we see is a grebe. We know that there aren't any grebes that have winter ranges in Western New York, but this has been a strange winter and less likely things have happened.Questions that came up during the episode:Although it was cut during editing, Bill and Steve wondered during recording, “Why do flamingos stand on one leg?” Bill thought he had come across the answer in the past, but had forgotten it. Steve just plain didn’t know. The answer? No one knows! While many theories are out there, no one has found a definitive answer (yet). The folks at How Stuff Works have done their usual great job of collecting solid information, and they present the reigning theories here: http://animals.howstuffworks.com/birds/flamingos-stand-on-one-leg.htmAnd for a relatively recent study on one researcher’s efforts to get to the bottom of the flamingo-on-one-leg mystery, check out this article: http://www.livescience.com/5732-flamingos-stand-leg.htmlMistakes:While Steve was correct about the Red Knot (Calidris canutus), Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis), Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), American Robin (Turdus migratorius), and House Sparrow (Passer domesticus), he was incorrect about the scientific name for the White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis) which he thought was Sitta canadensis (Red-breasted Nuthatch); idiot!Additionally, Steve said "hyperthermia" instead of "hypothermia" when talking about swimming in winter; double idiot!Surprise surprise, Steve also explained phenotypes and genotypes rather poorly. In his excitement, he described both in terms of "changes in" observable characteristics and genes, respectively. What he should have said was that a genotype is an individual's gene for a trait, and that a phenotype is the observable expression of a gene; triple idiot!But the quadruple idiot award for this episode goes to Bill, who insisted emphatically that House Sparrows were not Sparrows at all, but Weaver Finches. This is incorrect. Following the release of this episode, Steve researched Bill's claim, and being a great guy, he didn't call Bill a moron, but sent him a few Wikipedia links with the kind message, "I think you might be wrong about House Sparrows..." After just a few minutes of internet searching, Bill found out why he thought what he did. Old editions of the Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds places House Sparrows in the Weaver Finch family, but all recent references (within the past 30 years) Bill could find to their taxonomy refer to them as "Old World Sparrows," the family Passeridae. National Geographic Complete Birds of North America states, "Old World Sparrows are not closley related to New World sparrows in the family Emberizidae. Instead their closest alliance is with the family Ploceidae, in which they were formerly placed." Ploceidae is the Weaver Finch family. So, basically, House Sparrows used to be considered Weaver Finches but research has revealed that they are only closely related to them.Work Cited:Björklund, Mats, et al. "Increase in body size is correlated to warmer winters in a passerine bird as inferred from time series data." Ecology and evolution 5.1 (2015): 59-72.Brittingham, Margaret C., and Stanley A. Temple. "Use of winter bird feeders by black-capped chickadees." The Journal of wildlife management (1992): 103-110.Brodin, Anders. "Why do hoarding birds gain fat in winter in the wrong way? Suggestions from a dynamic model." Behavioral Ecology 11.1 (2000): 27-39.Carr, Jennie M., and Steven L. Lima. "Wintering birds avoid warm sunshine: predation and the costs of foraging in sunlight." Oecologia 174.3 (2014): 713-721.R. R. J. Chaffee, et al. “Studies on thermogenesis in cold acclimated birds.” Canadian Journal of Biochemistry and Physiology, 41 (1963): 2215-2220Coughlan, Neil E., et al. "Humid microclimates within the plumage of mallard ducks (Anas platyrhynchos) can potentially facilitate long distance dispersal of propagules." Acta Oecologica 65 (2015): 17-23.Ederstrom, H. E., and S. J. Brumleve. "Temperature gradients in the legs of cold-acclimatized pheasants." American Journal of Physiology--Legacy Content 207.2 (1964): 457-459. Houston, Alasdair I., and John M. McNamara. “A Theoretical Investigation of the Fat Reserves and Mortality Levels of Small Birds in Winter”. Ornis Scandinavica 24.3 (1993): 205–219. Klaassen, Raymond HG, et al. "When and where does mortality occur in migratory birds? Direct evidence from long‐term satellite tracking of raptors."Journal of Animal Ecology 83.1 (2014): 176-184. Koskenpato, Katja, et al. "Is the denser contour feather structure in pale grey than in pheomelanic brown tawny owls Strix aluco an adaptation to cold environments?." Journal of Avian Biology (2015).Macdonald, Christie A., et al. "Cold tolerance, and not earlier arrival on breeding grounds, explains why males winter further north in an Arctic‐breeding songbird." Journal of Avian Biology (2015).Martinson, Tammie J., and David J. Flaspohler. "Winter bird feeding and localized predation on simulated bark-dwelling arthropods." Wildlife Society Bulletin (2003): 510-516.Mori, Emiliano, and Sandro Bertolino. "Feeding ecology of Long-eared Owls in winter: an urban perspective." Bird Study 62.2 (2015): 257-261.Murray, Molly. "Did You Know? Nature's Winter Survival Strategies." www.delawareonline.com. 20 Jan. 2015. Web. 9 Dec. 2015.Petit, Daniel R., Lisa J. Petit, and Kenneth E. Petit. "Winter caching ecology of deciduous woodland birds and adaptations for protection of stored food." Condor (1989): 766-776.Reinertsen, Randi Eidsmo, and Svein Haftorn. "Different metabolic strategies of northern birds for nocturnal survival." Journal of Comparative Physiology B156.5 (1986): 655-663.Robb, Gillian N., et al. "Winter feeding of birds increases productivity in the subsequent breeding season." Biology letters 4.2 (2008): 220-223.Roth, Timothy C., and Steven L. Lima. "Hunting behavior and diet of Cooper's hawks: an urban view of the small-bird-in-winter paradigm." The Condor 105.3 (2003): 474-483.Sibley, David. Sibley field guide to birds of eastern North America. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.Smit, Ben, and Andrew E. McKechnie. "Avian seasonal metabolic variation in a subtropical desert: basal metabolic rates are lower in winter than in summer." Functional Ecology 24.2 (2010): 330-339.Swanson, David, et al. "Relative roles of temperature and photoperiod as drivers of metabolic flexibility in dark-eyed juncos." The Journal of experimental biology 217.6 (2014): 866-875.Thompson, John N., and Mary F. Willson. “Evolution of Temperate Fruit/bird Interactions: Phenological Strategies”. Evolution 33.3 (1979): 973–982.

Lecture 477 (26 July 2004). Full title "Oaks from Acorns? The Historical Turning Points of American Learned Libraries"

Michael D. Butler Book Publisher at BEYONDPUBLISHING.co and Author Launch Expert at BookSellingSystem.com building the World’s Fastest Growing Community of Authors and Book Launch Experts on Facebook. Michael D. Butler has been called a Book Launch Expert and his clients have been seen on Fox News, CNN, Dr. Phil, Fox Business, Inc 500, Garnered 2 Movie Deals, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle and many more “We help authors, speakers and entrepreneurs sell more books Online so they can charge more for speaking and consulting,” says Butler. Michael has delivered a thousand keynotes and seminars speaking topics include: I'm on Amazon Now What?; Creating and Leveraging Best Seller Status; and Author Marketing Best-Seller Strategies. He’s conducted interviews with or shared the stage with Brian Tracy, Governor Mary Fallin, Senator Orrin Hatch, Jill Lublin, Fox Business Contibutor- Judy Hoberman, Berny Dohrmann, Billy Joe Daughtery, Eric Lofholm, Cindy W. Morrison, Dr. Jeff Magee, Kenneth E. Hagin, Colleen J Payne, Lisa DeMayo, Olympian Jake Dalton, Mia Davies, Devin D. Thorpe and many more. Michael believes that communication is the key ingredient to any and all successful ventures. As a young boy, he was teased and bullied because of a stutter. He knows how difficult it is to know what you want to say, but don't have the tools or the means to deliver it. Michael harnessed the power of creativity through a strong devotion to success and hasn't looked back since. Well, that's really not fair... if you know Michael then you know he wouldn't turn his back on anyone, but you know what I'm getting at. Butler’s clients have been featured on: Fox News, CNN, Dr. Phil, Fox Business, Inc 500, Garnered 2 Movie Deals, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle and many more. “We help authors, speakers and entrepreneurs sell more books Online so they can charge more for speaking and consulting,” says Butler. Michael D. Butler - The Interview As with any interview, I felt the nerves prior to interviewing Michael because I really wanted to do a good job. I was little nervous because of who he is and what he's accomplished. Any nerves or unease quickly faded away from the moment I started talking with Mr. Butler. While we had touched bases in the past here and there, I never had the chance to really talk with him. I am so glad he accepted my invitation. Not only did he deliver in a big way, he offered some amazing insight into the world of book publishing and marketing. Successful people tend to surround themselves with other successful people and that does hold true for Michael, but he also embraces people entering this market without the stories of success...yet. During the call, he offered to provide a 20-Minute FREE consultation to talk with Michael D. Butler himself. Not someone from his staff, but anyone who took the time to listen to this episode of the Stop Riding the Pine show, gets full access to Michael to ask any questions you want. I HIGHLY recommend taking advantage of this - all you have to do is send him an email to CEO@MichaelDButler.com and mention you heard Michael on the Stop Riding the Pine podcast show. We covered several topics, but one of the topics in particular was extraordinary and fascinating. He was involved in helping bring to market a book written about human trafficking. He worked with author Pamala Kennedy, a distant relative to the Kennedy family, to both publish and market her book. Due to the success of her book, in large part due to Micheal's efforts, Mrs. Kennedy was offered a movie deal. Here's an interview Mr. Butler gave on Fox News about human trafficking: What's Next for Michael? Michael Sr. has a lot of things coming down the pipe most of which are still secrets; however, I did manage to get him to talk about one event coming up. He is real excited about the distribution of Europe, Australia and South America.

Kenneth E. LaRoeIn 2009, Mr. LaRoe opened First Green Bank, the first bank with an environmental mission in the eastern United States. He is the largest shareholder, CEO and Chairman. In 1999, Mr. LaRoe founded Florida Choice Bank and was its largest shareholder, Chairman, CEO, and President. He grew the bank to over $400 million in assets by 2006 when the bank was sold to Alabama National Bancorp.Mr. LaRoe began his career with Flagship Bank in Tavares, Florida and rose to the position of vice president and branch manager. He joined SouthTrust Bank in Deland, Florida in 1987 as senior lender and rose to county executive for Lake County. In 1996 Mr. LaRoe joined Colonial Bank as president of the Lake County bank and was instrumental in the conversion of a troubled thrift to a viable commercial bank. He has served on numerous civic and non-profit boards including: The Sunrise ARC (Association for Retarded Citizens), BankServe, and The Florida Bankers Association.He served as chairman of Group 5 of the Florida Bankers Association and also as chairman of Florida BankPac. He is a member of the Florida Bar Association, and the Lake County Bar Association.A committed environmentalist, he served as chairman of Preserve Lake, a political action committee instrumental in passing a bond referendum for $36 million to purchase public land. He also served as chairman of the PLAAC (Public Lands Acquisition advisory Committee).Born, raised, and schooled in Eustis, Florida, where First Green Bank is located, Mr. LaRoe earned a B. S. in management at Florida State University and a J.D. at The University of Florida College of Law. Mr. LaRoe is also a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Accredited Professional (LEED AP).

Kenneth E. LaRoeIn 2009, Mr. LaRoe opened First Green Bank, the first bank with an environmental mission in the eastern United States. He is the largest shareholder, CEO and Chairman. In 1999, Mr. LaRoe founded Florida Choice Bank and was its largest shareholder, Chairman, CEO, and President. He grew the bank to over $400 million in assets by 2006 when the bank was sold to Alabama National Bancorp.Mr. LaRoe began his career with Flagship Bank in Tavares, Florida and rose to the position of vice president and branch manager. He joined SouthTrust Bank in Deland, Florida in 1987 as senior lender and rose to county executive for Lake County. In 1996 Mr. LaRoe joined Colonial Bank as president of the Lake County bank and was instrumental in the conversion of a troubled thrift to a viable commercial bank. He has served on numerous civic and non-profit boards including: The Sunrise ARC (Association for Retarded Citizens), BankServe, and The Florida Bankers Association.He served as chairman of Group 5 of the Florida Bankers Association and also as chairman of Florida BankPac. He is a member of the Florida Bar Association, and the Lake County Bar Association.A committed environmentalist, he served as chairman of Preserve Lake, a political action committee instrumental in passing a bond referendum for $36 million to purchase public land. He also served as chairman of the PLAAC (Public Lands Acquisition advisory Committee).Born, raised, and schooled in Eustis, Florida, where First Green Bank is located, Mr. LaRoe earned a B. S. in management at Florida State University and a J.D. at The University of Florida College of Law. Mr. LaRoe is also a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Accredited Professional (LEED AP).

Join Chubtoad and the man, the myth, the legend Kenneth E. Hayes as they discuss the last two episodes of the Walking Dead, "The Grove" and "US". So take a look at the flowers, get ready for Terminus and take a listen to what these nerds heard!

A very ill Chubtoad and The Man, The Myth, The Legend, Kenneth E. Hayes discuss Walking Dead episode 4x13 'Alone' Where the gang heads to Terminus as Beth and Daryl attend a funeral.So grab your jar of pickled pig's feet and listen to what these nerds heard!

Chubtoad and the man, the myth, the legend Kenneth E. Hayes sit down to discuss Walking Dead episode 4x11 'Claimed'. They postulate theories of where the story is going and discuss the importance of Crazy Cheese in the zombie apocalypse. So get you some crackers and crazy cheese and listen to what these nerds heard!

Hello listener(s)! Chubtoad is finally on vacation and not travelling for work any longer. Chubtoad is in Texas for the holidays and met up with the man, the myth, the legend Kenneth E. Hayes, the Danger Ace and the Blue Mollusk. Chubtoad had the portable recorder with him and the gang decided to record an impromptu episode of Nerd Heard. We had no planning, no notes and were not prepared at all, so this episode went off the rails a few times. Listen at the end for a classic Nerd Heard holiday treat. So if you need something to fall asleep to, then plug this episode in and take a listen to what these nerds heard!

In this episode of Nerd Heard the man, the myth, the legend Kenneth E. Hayes leads Chubtoad and you through the recent DW50th special "Day of the Doctor" So open up this episode, discover that it is a bigger episode inside and take a listen to what these nerds heard!

Becky Jhelming, Senior Manager of Product Strategy for Vision Solutions will discuss how to fight back from a natural or man made disaster. Joseph Berardo Jr. CEO of CEO of MagnaCare talks about how healthcare insurance exchanges will affect small businesses. Dr. Kenneth E. Lehrer will analyze the current ecnomic outlook and what the future holds for small businesses,

Boulding, Kenneth E. (1976): Die Ökonomie als mathematische Wissenschaft, in: Ders. Ökonomie als Wissenschaft. München: Piper, S. 105-122. Eine Videoversion des Podcasts findet sich hier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dtMyZzC_wc

In episode #022, Kenneth E. Volpert, CFA, discusses the following: TIPs mechanics -- Strategies used by active managers with TIPs -- Where are real rates versus history -- Inflation and TIPs performance outlook.