True to yourself.

Roman Catholic nuns and brothers in robes along with conservative activists and lawmakers, all surrounded Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as he signed  religious freedom law. Smiling and proud, some of them had cheered the bill as a way to protect religious business owners from having to provide cakes and flowers to same-sex weddings.

Later, the state’s top Republican legislative leaders announced they were changing the law to specify that it will not authorize discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity. A different cast stood behind them, including a prominent gay businessman and corporate leaders from Eli Lilly, the Indiana Pacers........

The winds have shifted swiftly, leaving some Conservative Christian leaders unsettled and uncertain about what may come next for religious freedom state laws.

Here is what's coming:

"'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye? 5"You hypocrite.......

"For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.…"

"Treat others the same way you want them to treat you.

"for all have sinned and fall short "

Count on it.    Just a thought.

Less Pasta

Pope Francis is being warned by Italian doctors to “eat less pasta, walk more often, and lose a little weight to take some strain off his aching back,”.

The workaholic 78-year-old Francis, who’s not been shy about his love of pizza and who typically rises at 4:30 a.m. to start his busy days, also admitted in his Holy Thursday homily that he’s just exhausted.

Last month, Francis suggested he, too, had retirement on his mind when he told the Mexican broadcast outlet Televisa that he felt his papacy would last only “four or five years …

An overbooked, stressful schedule has forced Francis to miss his daily walks, and the weight gain has made the pope fatigued and is causing him back issues. A healthier diet and more regular exercise should help with all of his health issues, according to the doctors.

You may be the "Pope" of your family, so that is what you have to do.

 Just a thought.

Newly Wed-II

Police in Washington, D.C., arrested a woman in connection with the killing of a lawyer who was found stabbed to death inside a district hotel room.

Police charged Jamyra Gallmon, 21, with first-degree felony murder while armed in connection with the death of David Messerschmitt. His body was found inside a room at the Donovan Hotel 2/2010.

Messerschmitt, 30, had sent a text message to his wife the day before his body was discovered, saying he'd be home in an hour.  But when the newlywed didn't return to his home in Capitol Hill, his wife, Kim Vuong, filed a missing persons report. 

Police didn't say what evidence led investigators to charge Gallmon but said they believe she was pictured in a surveillance video released by police. She will appear in court soon.

Last week, Vuong asked for help finding her husband's alleged killer,  "In one day, I lost the most important person in my life and the man I loved so much," she said. 

Real life stories can be stranger than fiction. Just a thought.

Run...*!

Anthony Stokes, 17, was driving a car that matched the description of a car used to flee a home burglary, in which a masked person allegedly shot a gun at an 81-year-old woman who was home, Roswell Police spokeswoman Officer Lisa Holland told ABC News.

The driver allegedly refused to stop, and they chased him. "The car lost control at an intersection, ran over a curb, hit a pedestrian and ran into big, metal pole," Holland said.

Stokes had an enlarged heart in 2013 and was given six months to live without a heart transplant. At the time, doctors said they wouldn't give him a transplant because of "noncompliance," which means they didn't think he could be trusted to follow medical directions.

His mother told ABC News, at the time, that she thought doctors made their decision to deny Anthony because he had low grades and trouble with the law.   Stokes died from injuries sustained in the crash.                   Why running from the police? It always end badly.

Just a thought.

Idiologies

To create a successful investment process you’re bound to have competing ideologies at times depending on where we are in the investment cycle.

Buy and hold strategy only works if you’re able to both buy and hold when markets crash. And while it can be difficult to follow your plan during a market crash you have to have a completely different mindset during a bull market.

To practice buy and hold you have to be a practicing contrarian when stocks are going down and a practicing trend-follower when stocks are going up. You have to be willing to use two competing schools of thought at different times. That’s not always so easy to pull off.

In many ways this is similar to the two most well-known quantitative investing strategies value and momentum. Each of these strategies seeks to take advantage of over- and under-reactions made in the market, but in very different ways. With a value strategy, stocks that have performed poorly for one reason or another become cheap as investors over-react by selling first and asking questions later. With a momentum strategy, stocks that have done well recently tend to continue doing well for short periods of time because investors initially under-react. Value and momentum each rely on mean reversion, but in different ways and over different time frames.

Both Value and Momentum have historically been shown to work well as stand-alone strategies. But these two contrasting ideas actually work very well when you pair them together because they can make up for each other’s deficiencies during certain market environments. Therefore, diversifying these two return streams helps increase risk-adjusted returns.

But the implementation of a value/momentum combination will never work if the investor isn’t willing to accept that there are two schools of thought that can complement one another.  Really this idea of dealing with competing ideologies will be true of any successful long-term investment strategy.

At certain times you will have to be willing to take an uncomfortable stance. Sometimes that means going against the crowd. Other times it’s going to mean going along with the crowd.

I think an actual contrarian strategy can be one in which an investor is willing to combine different approaches and consistently follow them throughout various points in the market cycle to manage risk and improve long-term performance.   [Ben Carlson]

Sad Gathering

One Pilot...

 







A lawsuit filed relates to a New York-to-Las Vegas JetBlue flight on March 27, 2012, in which the pilot, Clayton Osbon, told his co-pilot that “we need to take a leap of faith” and that “we’re not going to Vegas,” among other bizarre actions, according to federal investigators.

The co-pilot locked Mr. Osbon out of the cockpit and diverted the flight to Texas, where federal authorities charged Mr. Osbon with interfering with the flight crew.
A federal judge in Texas found Mr. Osbon, 52 y.o., not guilty by reason of insanity.

The suit claims breach of contract and negligence by JetBlue for allowing him to fly on the day of the incident despite evidence that he was suffering from mental-health issues. He is seeking more than $14 million from JetBlue.

Mr. Osbon said in the filing that he suffered from a “complex partial brain seizure” and that his actions before the flight—including missing the preflight meeting and struggling to complete the preflight checklist—should have made clear he was mentally unfit to fly.

Mr. Osbon was one of JetBlue’s first pilots, hired shortly after the airline formed in 2000. Shortly after the incident, then-JetBlue CEO Dave Barger said that he knew him “personally for a long period of time and there’s been no indication of this at all in the past.”

Good Luck with that.!!!!!!   Just a thought.

Anna Cross- Ebola

A British army reservist who contracted Ebola while working as a volunteer nurse in Sierra Leone has fully recovered after becoming the first patient in the world to receive an experimental new treatment.

Anna Cross, 25, was discharged from the Royal Free Hospital in London where she was taken earlier after being evacuated from west Africa on a military plane. "

"Anna is the first patient in the world to have received a new special treatment for Ebola, MIL 77,"  "The treatment went very well, it caused no side effects that we could elicit."

The new treatment was produced in China and was similar to ZMapp, a cocktail of three antibodies that cling to the virus and inhibit its reproduction.

Cross, who works as a nurse in the state-run National Health Service, was exposed to the virus while treating patients but said she did not know exactly when this might have happened.

 

Just a thought.

Spies everywhere.

When blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng arrived in the United States he was given a fellowship at New York University, use of a Greenwich Village apartment, and a pile of gifts from supporters, including smartphones and an iPad, at least two were bugged.

Chen accused NYU of bowing to pressure from China by ending the fellowship. The allegations are vigorously denied by NYU.

Bob Fu runs the Christian group ChinaAid, which supports underground churches and victims of forced abortions,  and his wife presented the I-Pad gifts. 

"These people supposedly were out to help him and they give him a kind of Trojan horse that would have enabled them to monitor his communications secretly,".

The spyware issue was not publicized at the time and has only surfaced because of the recent scrutiny of NYU's arrangement with Chen. 

So, it's unclear if the software was added by ChinaAid, spies infiltrated NYU's tech department, or the entire incident was made up. The bugged Apple equipment certainly isn't as exciting, but what it lacks in innovation it makes up in intrigue.

I think it is a habit.  Just a thought.

Officials' ...

Senior DEA agents working overseas allegedly participated in “sex parties” with prostitutes funded by drug cartels, according to DOJ Inspector General report.

The conduct occurred over a period of years. In addition to soliciting prostitutes, the foreign officers interviewed for the report allege three DEA supervisory special agents were “provided money, expensive gifts, and weapons from drug cartel members."

Some DEA agents denied knowing about cartel involvement, but the IG report says “information in the case files suggested they should have known the prostitutes in attendance were paid with cartel funds.”

The sex parties occurred in government leased living quarters where “agents’ laptops, BlackBerry and other government- equipment were present,” posing a security risk and “potentially exposing them to extortion, blackmail, or coercion.”

In another instance, two DEA special agents allegedly solicited prostitutes for a farewell party for a senior DEA official.

An official allegedly had “sexual relations with prostitutes” and there were “ operational funds may have used as Payment”.   One prostitute [allegedly] was assaulted following a payment dispute. 

One case of alleged sexual harassment involved an FBI “Supervisory Management and Program Analyst’s repeated unprofessional behavior, including cornering his subordinates in their cubicles and displaying the size of his genitals by tightening his pants,”.  The analyst was eventually suspended, demoted and reassigned to another office.

Prostitution in these countries are legal business and the violations here is relating to the provider of the services and the funds used. Just a thought.