James L. Paris's Blog, page 194

Secret Service RENTS Bike Racks For $15 Million For Pope's Visit

Despite not being a Catholic myself, I am happy to see the Pope visiting our country, as I know how much joy this brings to the Catholic community. Yes, the Pope is officially considered a 'head of state' as the Vatican enjoys the status of a sovereign power (granted to it through a treaty in 1929). The reality, however, is that the Vatican has less than 1,000 citizens and occupies a space of just 110 acres. Even if it is technically considered a sovereign country by international law, based on its size and population it hardly justifies the money U.S. taxpayers are shelling out for this visit. Protestant leaders get no such treatment, or can you remind me of the last time Billy Graham was given a parade in a major city in the U.S.?

What took the cake for me was reading this morning that the U.S. Secret Service paid $15 million dollars to rent bicycle racks to be used as barricades for security. I guess I need to go into the bike rack rental business... My view is that these kinds of expenses should be paid for with private donations. This Pope is all against capitalism and financial superpowers, but seems just fine letting U.S. taxpayers foot the bill. If it was $15 million for just the bike rack rentals, I don't even want to know what the total tab is here. 

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James L. Paris 
Editor-In-Chief ChristianMoney.com 
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The Fourth Blood Moon And Bible Prophecy

The long anticipated final month of September 2015 is here and Bible prophecy scholars are warning that it could be a major week for prophetic events. The Pope will be at the White House and also addressing a joint session of Congress. The fourth blood moon of the tetrad comes in just a matter of days. Jim also comments on the Pope's visit to Cuba, Donald Trump's Muslim controversy, new loan requirements for those with student loans, and major changes coming to the FAFSA student loan application process.

27 Year Old British Murder Linked To International Money Laundering Scheme

In November 1988, Hugh John Simmonds CBE, Margaret Thatcher���s favorite speechwriter and the author���s best friend, boss and political mentor, turned up dead in a woodland glade a few miles from their sleepy suburban hometown 20 miles west of London. To learn why his best friend was murdered, Geoffrey Gilson journeyed into the dangerous world of international arms deals, covert intelligence operations and high-level political corruption and discovered a secret that explains much of contemporary history.

A quest for truth which, after 20 years of high-risk adventure coupled with painstaking research and firsthand interviews, uncovered the ugly reality that, for some 30 years, the various governments of Great Britain have loaned their country���s military and intelligence services to the United States, allowing presidents from Reagan to Obama to pursue their covert foreign and military policies without the encumbrance of congressional oversight.

What If You Could Never Buy Anything Again?

By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Large

I���ve talked about minimalism off and on through this space, as well as through the Christian Money Plus members-only site, and I���ve done so with some admiration for those who have been able to make the break from a consumer-oriented lifestyle���to one centered on owning as absolutely little as possible. In my own life, while it would be inaccurate to say I have devoted myself to minimalism, I have been slowly winnowing my possessions in the interest of working to get my life to as uncomplicated a configuration as possible. Granted, coming to have a truly uncomplicated life involves more than just unburdening oneself of physical trappings, but it is funny how much of your life can be altered by owning more���or less.

In that same vein, there���s a good article���recently published on Lifehacker���that asks the question, ���What if I could never buy anything?��� The author, Eric Ravenscraft, doesn���t ask you to ask the question out of deference to philosophical concerns; his purpose is to encourage you to live, as much as possible, the idea of being unable to purchase anything ever again, in order to help ensure that you���re living as financially sound an existence as possible. His position is that if you reprogram your mind to think of consuming anything, going forwarded, on an as-needed basis���and take the matter of buying something because you ���want��� it and putting it permanently in your rearview mirror���you will take amazingly good care of that which you already own, and, as a result, save all kinds of money in the process.

Even though living a simpler life is not really the point of Ravenscraft���s article���while financial solvency is���what he puts forth is another narrative by which you can have both. I have largely reconfigured my own life this way explicitly because of the dual benefit it provides; I want to be sure that, for the rest of my days, financial worries are a thing of the past, and also, I want to live a life that affords me the mental space to appreciate ���the little things.��� There are different psychological mechanisms you can employ to help arrive at those places, and Ravenscraft���s is certainly a good one.    

What Does The Fourth Blood Moon Mean For Christians?

ChristianMoney.com Staff Writers

September 28 is just a week away. To most people, there���s nothing noteworthy about that date, or the day on which it falls (Monday). To them, it���s just one more day on the calendar.

To prophecy-minded Christians, however, it is a date of great significance, and one in possession of the most ominous of implications: To some, September 28 is the date of the ���blood moon apocalypse,��� a moment in time when Biblical foretelling and the present, significant upheavals in evidence around the globe will come to a head, resulting in the dramatic end times events (some even say the start of the biblical tribulation).

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The blood moon apocalypse, according to believers, will come at the behest of the final event of the current lunar tetrad. A ���tetrad��� is a series of four lunar eclipses, occurring roughly six months apart. Each time this happens, the moon appears red, which is the reason for the term ���blood moon.��� Furthermore, on September 28, the date of the fourth and final blood moon eclipse in this tetrad, the event will result in a ���supermoon,��� wherein the moon actually appears to be larger than normal. For the prophecy-oriented, what is particularly noteworthy is that each of the eclipses in this cycle has fallen on Jewish holy days: April 14, 2014 (Passover); October 8, 2014 (Feast of the Tabernacle); April 4, 2015 (Passover again); and September 28, which marks the first day of the Feast of the Tabernacle. It is the ninth time since the life of Christ on earth���that the tetrad has coincided with Jewish holy days. The Biblical root of the significance of these events for those who take them seriously is found in Joel 2:31 ��� ���The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.���

According to Christian pastor John Hagee, well-known for his prophecy declarations and author of Four Blood Moons: Some is About to Change, two blood moons in this tetrad have heralded major events in the Middle East, and the last one here, on September 28, may usher in a day unlike that which the world has ever seen before; could this be the day that Old Testament prophecy is fulfilled?  

High School Kid Earns $80,000 For College From Website

By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Larg e

With the support of a variety of groups and organizations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Facebook, and the University of Pennsylvania, there���s an innovative website out there now through which high school students can earn ���micro-scholarship��� money for smaller individual achievements realized throughout their high school careers. Raise.me is something ���new and improved��� in the world of college scholarships, where everyday students can earn money as they make their way from freshmen to seniors; the opportunity makes scholarship money accessible for young people in a way that has not existed previously.

Eligible achievements include a wide variety of things, such as earning an ���A��� in a class, participating in an after-school activity, and performing community service. Each time a student completes a ���bite-sized��� achievement, a college that the student as selected to ���Follow��� through the Raise.me website will credit money to the student���s account, which can be cashed in at the time the student formally enrolls in that school.

A student has to choose to ���Follow��� a participating college in the Raise.me platform in order to receive credits of scholarship money for his eligible achievements. Each participating college will have its own requirements as far as eligibility to receive their scholarship dollar credits, but none of the requirements seem terribly onerous. A student can ���Follow��� as many participating colleges as he wants, but may only cash in credits from the school he eventually decides to attend. The money is paid by the school at the time the student���s financial aid package is calculated.

If you have a high school student at home, or know someone who does, by all means, look into Raise.me. Right now, there are over 100 schools presently participating, but that list is expected to grow significantly in the near term. I don���t know of another program like Raise.me, but it may well prove to be the first of many such platforms that helps, through its unique approach, to rein in the cost of college for young people who are finding that cost to be increasingly prohibitive.

Man Urinates On Fellow Passengers On Jet Blue Flight

There have been several articles in this space over the last few months discussing various in-flight upheavals involving both passengers and crew. Things don���t seem to be improving. Recently, a passenger on a JetBlue flight traveling from Anchorage, Alaska to Portland, Oregon shocked and disgusted the passengers and crew around him when he rose from a nap he was taking and proceeded to urinate on the travelers seated in front of him. Yes���you read that correctly.

Jeff Rubin, 27, had apparently been sleeping through most of the flight when he awakened about a half-hour before landing and started to urinate on the passengers in front of him, according to a police report. As if that wasn���t bad enough, Rubin apparently lost his balance somehow while he was in the act, and fell backwards, continuing the process of relieving himself throughout and making a bigger, even more disgusting mess���as hard as that might be to believe. When police boarded the flight in Portland, Rubin was back in his seat and sleeping. He has been charged with one count of criminal mischief and one count of offensive littering, both misdemeanors (offensive littering?).

So, here we are again. Flying, which was once treated as the most special of events, for which travelers dressed in their best attire and strove to be on their best behavior, has devolved into something akin to riding a third-rate bus service; the passengers are behaving worse than ever, and, as we���ve seen from recent news reports, the crew isn���t always a whole lot better, either. Add into the mix the increased security hassles from TSA workers who���ve been caught short in their jobs plenty of times, and you end up with an experience increasingly worth avoiding, if you can find another way to get from Point A to Point B.

Retirement Plans Double As Asset Protection Tool

By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Large

We are a sue-happy nation. Some (lawyers, mostly) would tell you that it���s a sign of a more evolved system of justice that it is now possible for people to seek civil redress as easily as they can through the court system, but most of us accept that notion with at least a few grains of salt; even though there are all kinds of sound, legitimate reasons for which people sue others each day, the ease with which people can file a lawsuit in America has also allowed for an approach by which all kinds of bases for suing another���no matter how ridiculous���are flung against the wall to see what sticks.

This feature to our society has made more prominent the concerns over asset protection. Significant levels of asset protection can be cost-prohibitive for all but the wealthiest folks (who are usually the most at risk), but even ���average��� people have some relatively ready-made mechanisms at their disposal to help shield their hard-earned dollars���and they come in the form of retirement plans.

The best and most recognizable of those is the 401(k). 401(k) plans are covered under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). ERISA-qualified plans (there are a few others, like defined benefit and profit sharing plans) are completely protected from creditors by federal law. This means that even if someone had to file for bankruptcy in the face of a judgment, whatever he had in his 401(k) would be protected. Traditional and Roth IRAs, which are not ERISA plans, enjoy some protection in this way from federal law, but it is not complete; IRAs are protected up to $1.25 million, but many states now fully protect IRA assets, so you should check the laws in your state to see just how protected your IRA is.

Asset protection is a complex issue, a fuller treatment of which falls outside the scope of this piece, and if you have concerns in this area, you should consult with an attorney who specializes in this area of the law. However, for most of us, it���s good to know that the retirement plans we generally have at our fingertips also double as asset protection vehicles; remember that, the next time you find yourself debating whether to bother making your contribution.

The Shemitah Is Here Now What?

As the former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Francis Rooney shares unique insights and observations about the history and present day operations of the Vatican. What level of security does the Pope actually have? What is the significant of the Pope's upcoming visit and why has there been a chill in relations between the Obama administration and the Vatican? How has the churches complex legal structure shielded it from lawsuits. What was the Vatican's involvement in World War II and did it help Hitler? Does the Vatican really maintain secret archives? What steps does the Vatican take to comply with international banking and money laundering laws?  

The Mysteries And Myths Of The Vatican

As the former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Francis Rooney shares unique insights and observations about the history and present day operations of the Vatican. What level of security does the Pope actually have? What is the significant of the Pope's upcoming visit and why has there been a chill in relations between the Obama administration and the Vatican? How has the churches complex legal structure shielded it from lawsuits. What was the Vatican's involvement in World War II and did it help Hitler? Does the Vatican really maintain secret archives? What steps does the Vatican take to comply with international banking and money laundering laws?