Obama’s And Holder’s Selective Constitutional Deafness

Often a phenomenon of bad marriages, “selective deafness” is when one hears only what is convenient. The same failing manifests itself in government when politicians and judges hear the Constitution talk only when it sings their tune. Worse still, sometimes these people behave as if the document says things it doesn’t. This is the equivalent of hearing things.

And Kansas governor Sam Brownback heard something recently. He received a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder stating that Kansas’ newly enacted legislation prohibiting government agents from enforcing federal gun laws in the state “directly conflicts with federal law and is therefore unconstitutional.” Unconstitutional, Eric? My, how antebellum of you.

Meanwhile, the South Carolina House just passed a law criminalizing the enforcement of ObamaCare within its state, a move that critics will also attack with talk of the Supremacy Clause.

Speaking of supremacy, AG Holder also told Brownback that the feds would litigate if necessary “to prevent the State of Kansas from interfering with the activities of federal officials enforcing federal law,” which means that the case would end up before the Supreme Court.

So now the administration that created ObamaCare, refuses to enforce immigration law, illegally bypassed the Senate to make recess appointments, and has a DOJ that won’t offer whites voting-rights protections cites constitutionalism in defense of its agenda. This is a bit like serial-killing abortionist Kermit Gosnell seeking to avoid the death penalty by preaching the sanctity of life.

For Brownback’s part, he defended Kansas’ law by pointing out that the right to bear arms is enshrined not only in the US Constitution but also the Kansas Bill of Rights. This is true, but as Cicero learned 2000 years ago and hate-speech apparatchiks insist today, the truth isn’t always a defense. And the truth is, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. We now live in a place where the rule of law has been supplanted by the rule of lawyers.

G.K. Chesterton once noted that “[t]here are only two ways of governing: by a rule and by a ruler.” We should note that in our nation it increasingly is the latter and that the pretense of constitutionality is now often used as a pretext for unconstitutional designs. The contemporary left’s attitude is much like that of the Jim Carrey lawyer character in Liar Liar who, subject to a spell that precluded his lying for 24 hours, responded to a judge’s question about why he objected to an argument in court by saying “Because it’s devastating to my case!” While the left is never that honest, their definition of a proper legal argument is similar: whatever works for them at the moment. Unfortunately, they have also managed to appoint many judges who work for them.

Thus, when leftists such as Eric Holder say, “We’ll see you in court,” our response should be, “I’ll see your court and raise you a state executive branch.” After all, how else do you respond when dealing with a stacked-deck Supreme Court that, using the greasiest of lawyer-craft, rubber stamps blatantly unconstitutional ObamaCare? How can the High Court be ascribed deific infallibility when it reads the same document in different times and draws different conclusions?

First remember here that the Supreme Court is only meant to be supreme among courts. And what of judicial review, the principle that courts shall be the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning for all branches of government?

It is found nowhere in the Constitution.

It originated with the 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision in which Chief Justice John Marshall declared the right for the Court.

In other words, the Supreme Court was given big-kahuna powers by…the Supreme Court. So George Washington refuses to be made king, and shortly afterwards, like Napoleon crowning himself emperor, the Court makes itself an oligarchy. And we abide by this…why?

If thus characterizing the Court smacks of typical modern hyperbole, note that Thomas Jefferson warned that an oligarchy is precisely what the institution would become if judicial review were accepted. He said about the branches of government that it wasn’t correct to give “one of them alone, the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others…” and that if Justice Marshall’s opinion held sway, “then indeed is our constitution a complete felo de se” — this means a suicide pact.

Yet there is an even larger point. I am a staunch constitutionalist, but this is much like saying you’re an avid boxer: you can only indulge your passion with the cooperation of others. If your opponents refuse to abide by Queensbury rules, “boxing” becomes impossible as you’re reduced to a no-holds-barred, outlaw fight. And then insistence on unilaterally abiding by the rules only ensures painful defeat. Likewise, what happens when you play by constitutional rules despite your opponents’ subscribing to no-holds-barred, outlaw governance?

The point is that our constitution is the contract the American people have with one another. But when a party subject to a contract repeatedly violates its terms for the purposes of benefitting itself and disadvantaging the other parties, that contract is rendered null and void. For it has then become a suicide pact — especially for those who insist on fighting fair with barbarians.

This can be illuminated further by expanding on the boxing analogy, with the rules of boxing being the Constitution, your opponent representing the feds’ interests, boxing’s ruling body being the legislature, and the ringside judges being the Court. While the ruling body makes the rules, the judges’ role is to simply apply them, and your opponent has an obligation to follow them. But what if your opponent consistently violates them to gain an advantage? What happens when the judges, operating with an idea that the rules are “living,” only apply them in a way that suits whatever rooting interest they have at the time? Furthermore, what if your opponent has a majority of the judges in his pocket and they will ensure his victory? You’d have to be punchy to even step into that ring.

A prerequisite for any civilized endeavor — be it a game or government — is the necessary degree of civility on the part of those involved. Barring this, the wise move is to walk away and, in no uncertain terms, serve notice that you won’t play until there is agreement to follow the rules. And if your opponents are so intent on domination that they follow you outside the ring to fight, then you know it’s a back-alley brawl and proceed accordingly. Remember that when people will yield to neither reason nor law, there is only one thing left that can make them yield.

What we often forget when preaching constitutionalism is that the principle is conditional. As our second president John Adams explained, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” “Moral and religious” describe neither the leftists controlling our federal government nor those voting them into power. So love it though we may, our constitution is no more suited to much of modern America than it is to the Taliban. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we’ll free ourselves from the shackles of the left’s selective law just as it long ago freed itself from the guide rails of all law.

Going Against God “Just For Fun”

Today we’re hearing a lot about Spiritism or Spiritualism, not to be confused with spiritual or spirituality, as in “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual,” or “I’m into spirituality.”  The term Spiritism has replaced what was once called animism and other religious practices involving the invocation of spiritual beings.

Some religions meld Spiritualism with Christianity.  For example, a blend of Christian and African folk beliefs that originated in Brazil is now practiced in the U.S.   Spiritualism is much the same as Spiritism only it has adopted Christian rites and prayers.  People visiting Spiritualistic services can be misled into thinking they’re Christian churches.  The problem is Christianity cannot be melded with any other religion or practice.

One of the major tenets of Spiritism is reincarnation.  The classic form of reincarnation originated in India in the 9th century BC.  Reincarnation has become a hot topic in our post-modern culture.

There are a whole host of beliefs about reincarnation.  The most widely touted belief  is that upon death one’s spirit exits the body in search of another body to inhabit. Believing in reincarnation gives hope for continuing one’s existence in further lives to work off one’s karma.  Karma is broadly defined as the consequences of one’s actions.

Ask professing Christians as they flow through the doors of a Sunday worship service if they believe in reincarnation, some will give you a cavalier “Yes,” as if it’s no big deal for believers to mix Christianity with mystical beliefs.  However, believing in reincarnation is a very big deal for the serious Christian.  For example, reincarnation is a central tenet within Hinduism, not Christianity!

The thing Christians need to come to terms with is that belief in reincarnation goes against what the Bible teaches regarding the soul’s final judgment by a holy God.  What Jesus Christ clearly taught is that unrepentant sinners are condemned to an eternity in hell.  Jesus never mentioned reincarnation – not once!

Hebrews 9:27 reveals what occurs when human beings die:

And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.

Listen to what Paul says happens when we die:

We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.(2 Cor. 5:8)

It is imperative that serious Christians view mysticism as evil.  When Paul came face to face with the Jewish mystic Elymas, he charged him with being a child of the devil and an enemy of righteousness. Moreover, he accused the mystic of perverting the right ways of the Lord.  (Acts 13:10)  Through the power of the Holy Spirit, Paul caused him to go blind.  Not only did he put out the sorcerer’s eyes, he also put him out of a job! When it came to confronting evil, Paul never backed down, never hesitated, wavered or vacillated.  He had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer when it came to evildoers.

God forbids any sort of participation in paganism for our own protection.  His reason is simple: its roots are steeped in pagan idolatry and drug use.  The occult world is an open door to Satan’s world.  Those who enter find themselves on a quest for ‘hidden wisdom’ or ‘deeper truth.’  And, not surprisingly, the sought after ‘hidden wisdom’ is not meant for everyone, it’s meant for a select few such as New Age disciples and gurus.

We call those who possess supernatural power (power’s what it’s all about) shamans, witchdoctors, clairvoyants, trance channelers, spiritists, and the list goes on.  So, how does a spiritist go about getting in contact with the spirit world?  By receiving radiation, frequencies or vibrations from the dead.  “Communication from the spirit world manifests itself in psychical phenomena (e.g., telepathy, clairvoyance, trance speaking, and apparitions) and in physical phenomena (e.g., levitation, automatic writing, and poltergeist and ectoplasmic activities).” (Source)

The Bible tells us that it is God who instigates communication, not man.  Generally the Lord will use angels as His envoys to humans.  We know very little about angels, either the elect or the fallen.  However, the scriptures inform us that on occasion the Lord sent a holy elect angel to Earth to deliver messages. And He also sent angles to minister to people, to protect them, and also to execute His judgment.  The angels have one purpose: to glorify God’s holy Name and to carry out His will.

There are also fallen angels – the rebellious ones!  The most notorious of the lot is Lucifer aka Satan.  The Bible refers to the fallen angels as demons, spirits of darkness and evil spirits.  The ones that rebelled against God fell from grace.  Consequently, they were hurled out of heaven, lock stock and barrel.  Bible expositor John MacArthur elucidates what happened next:

At that point, Satan gained the rulership of the world, and the term world took on a third meaning: the evil system opposed to God that now dominates this planet. The system that Satan began will continue to develop up to the time period known as the Great Tribulation.

As I have made clear, Christianity and Spiritism have nothing in common whatsoever.  I mean, think about it. Can you trust God and Satan at the same time?  Here’s what Paul said:

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?

And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the uncleanthing; and I will receive you, And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. (2 Cor. 6:14-18)

Satan is known as the “father of lies.”  Even those who are guided by an “inner voice” can be deceived, warns occultist Nicholas Weeks:

Channels such as [Alice] Bailey are sincere and convinced that their inner voices and visions are real Masters. Unhappily, sincerity is no protection from delusion. In 1884 Master KH wrote to a psychic of that time, giving an explanation for the befuddling of a channel or seer. ‘Since you have scarcely learned the elements of self-control, in psychism, you must suffer bad consequences. You draw to yourself the nearest and strongest influences “often evil” and absorb them, and are psychically stifled or narcotised by them. The airs become peopled with resuscitated phantoms. They give you false tokens, misleading revelations, deceptive images. Your vivid creative fancy evokes illusive Gurus and chelas [disciples], and puts into their mouths words coined the instant before in the mint of your mind, unknown to yourself. The false appear as real, as the true, and you have no exact method of detection since you are yet prone to force your communications to agree with your preconceptions. (Source)

And to think, many Christians are now engaged in magical mystical practices such as contemplative prayer that can give the practitioner misleading revelations and deceptive images, where the false may appear real.  (See a column I wrote on contemplative prayer here.)

Keep in mind that the spirits that speak through the mouths of the willing are demons.  People who get themselves into a mind-altering trance with the purpose being to channel a benevolent spirit may end up becoming demon possessed!  Granted, some channelers are really nothing more than convincing actors who write the script as they go along.  These are the charlatans who do it for money or fame – or both.  However, there are many dupes that allow their bodies to be used by spirit entities that use the occasion to spew anti-Christian propaganda!

The Bible tells us to, “Prove [test] all things; hold fast that which is good.” (1 John 4:1). We’re also told to flee (run like a maniac) from the devil who “walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5:8) Now, picture a lion hiding in the brush to pounce on an unsuspecting wildebeest.  The devil’s like the hungry lion, only he’s waiting to pounce on Christ’s sheep!  Unfortunately many Christians fail to obey God’s command to resist the devil, which is one of the reasons Christianity’s in the sorry state it’s in today.

Far too many followers of Jesus Christ are unaware that our Lord quite literally detests all forms of sorcery. There are no exceptions!  Sorry to be a wet blanket, but even astrology is banned.  And it doesn’t matter if it’s done “just for fun.”  One cannot be a Presbyterian on Sunday and a spiritist the other six days of the week.

This brings me to two blogs I stumbled on.  Both male bloggers declare their love for Christ and state that the Bible is the standard by which they live their lives.  One studies apologetics; the other is a youth pastor.  They both have their Zodiac signs on display.  That way if you land on aspiring apologist’s blog, you’ll know that he’s a Gemini; likewise, if you land on youth pastor’s blog, you’ll discover that he’s a Virgo.  One can only assume that these young men have not yet read Leviticus 19:26, Deuteronomy 18:9-12, Exodus 22:18 and other similar passages where God commands His people to steer clear of sorcery.  And yet these so-called Bible believers find time to read up on astrology?

Christians who are confronted with an evil practice must lace up their trusty running shoes and high tail it out of there, pronto!  Keep away from horoscopes (astrology), numerology, séances, tarot cards, tealeaves, palm reading, crystal balls, talking boards, omens or signs.  Moreover, do not get involved in wizardry, witchcraft, the study of Kabbalah, nature religion (Wicca), and the practice of yoga (its sole purpose is purely spiritual). Believers must flee from any and all pagan customs and practices.  Those who are currently involved in any of the above must bring it to an end today!

Since dabbling in sorcery is a sin against God, repentance is of paramount importance.  So if you’ve been dabbling, repent! And never return to any sort of evil practice — even if it’s “just for fun.”

Bear in mind that the demonic powers operating in the realm of the occult are very real.  These spirits are stronger and more dangerous than people realize.  The Bible warns us to “regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the LORD your God.” (Lev. 19:31).

The Apostle Paul understood all too well that evil forces are ever present in the “heavenlies.” Hence, he admonished followers of Christ to wear the “armor of God” to protect against familiar spirits that prey on gullible humans.  He even gave specific instructions to the Church in Ephesus:

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: (Ephesians 6:1-12).

Christian — take Paul’s instructions to heart and daily put on the full armor of God to protect against the rulers of the darkness of this world.

Recommended:

The Old Serpent and the Slacker—an allegory on the “Armor of God” By Marsha West
Are You Armed for Battle? By Marsha West
Occult – On Solid Rock Resources
Angels – On Solid Rock Resources
New Age Movement – On Solid Rock Resources
Contemplative Prayer – On Solid Rock Resources
Christian Yoga? – On Solid Rock Resources

Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, And Diane Sawyer: The Three Stooges

I think, at the very least, YouTube should censor them. Well, wait a minute. Not censor, but put up a notice on all their videos:

“It’s come to our attention that these three characters are as annoying as a bad case of fleas. Caution: watch and listen at your own risk.”

The three stooges. Three schmucks in the fountain. Send in the clowns, don’t bother, they’re here.

If people are beginning to get the idea I’m waging a war against against elite media, they’re right.

At the same time, I’m fascinated. How do these anchors do it? How do they lie so consistently, and with such aplomb, day in and day out, without going up in puff of smoke and vanishing?

The Big Three anchors are a miracle, in the sense that they need a whole construction company to build the walls that permanently separate them from the truth…so they can sit in a television studio in New York and believe they’re in the wheelhouse of Real News.

When you see the Big Three are discussing their own footage, but you find visual clues as big as the moon that their analysis is 180 degrees away from actual fact—as has been happening from Aurora to Sandy Hook to Boston—and the Stooges just sit there and drone on…well, that’s a CSI or a Law&Order you just can’t get if you pay the best scriptwriters in the world to come up with it.

“The bomb was a pressure cooker.”

Right, and the Twin Towers went down because two planes flew into them.

Because the Web has been alive and humming, media coverage of every major catastrophe since 9/11 has been rejected by extraordinary numbers of people.

The elite network anchors have been trying to hold the fort, but they’re failing.

Their long-running stage play is closing down.

Despite their traditional skills and technological backup, they’re coming across like cartoon hacks.

These days, it’s better to be a marginally believable doofus like Diane Sawyer, who chooses to affect a persona based on depression, than to be the eternal boy wonder, Brian Williams. Williams, the smoothest of the smooth, comes across like the biggest liar, because he’s the most dedicated of the lot when it comes to defending the indefensible.

And Scott Pelley is Scott Pelley, the hospital doctor you’d least like to show up at your bedside. He might tell you you need an amputation just because he’s having a bad day.

“Who do we need for the most important anchor’s job in the world?”

“How about Pelley? He’s utterly convinced the lies we feed into the propaganda machine are the last word.. He’s sold. He couldn’t look outside the box if we drilled holes in it and let him see a mountain of gold bars and 50,000 naked bureaucrats running down Broadway at high fucking noon.”

The Big Three strut their stuff on the evening news, executing well-oiled, high-priced transitions from one completely false/basically deceptive story to another completely false/basically deceptive story.

Recall the often-quoted George Burns pearl? “In acting, sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” But suppose the sincerity isn’t faked? Then, the schmuck becomes king.

My late friend and colleague, hypnotherapist Jack True, described the television-news audience: “Mind control is accepting what you know to be false. You do it because you think the only other alternative is a vacuum: you either buy the news or you’re left with nothing.”

Once in a while, you can see cracks. Scott Pelley, stewing in his juices, looks like he’s ready to pull his uncle’s old revolver out of his pocket and fire a few rounds at the teleprompter.

Diane Sawyer appears to be on the verge of sagging to her right and collapsing out of her chair, on her way to a fit of copious weeping.

Brian Williams wants to say, more than anything, “Live From New York, it’s Saturday night!” Then a few coiled springs pop out of the top of his head and he winds down and stops moving.

Subliminally, the three stooges are announcing: “We’re showing you the most important stories of our time, and each one has a television lifespan of ninety seconds, after which they no longer exist.”

Television news is really all segue all the time. That’s what it comes down to.

The word “segue,” pronounced “segway,” refers to a transition from one thing to another, a blend.

Ed McMahon once referred to Johnny Carson as the prince of blends, because Carson could tell a clunker of a joke, step on it three times, and still move to the next joke without losing his audience.

Television news is very serious business. A reporter who can’t handle segues is dead in the water. He’s a gross liability.

The good anchors can take two stories that have no connection whatsoever and create a sense of smooth transition.

Brian Williams can say, “The planes were recalled later in the afternoon. And a man was castrated in a horrific accident in Idaho today…” And no one says, WHAT? WAIT!

You take an elevator up to the 15^th floor in an office building. The door opens and you step into a medieval dungeon. That doesn’t compute in real life, but it does on the news.

The networks basically have, on a daily basis, fragmented stories, and they need an anchor who can do the blends, the segues, and get away with it, to promote the sense of one continuous flow.

So the audience doesn’t say, “This is just an odd collection of crap.”

The news is all segue all the time.

Not just nationally. On the local level, too. The pounding lead-in music at the top of the show is a segue, to prepare the audience. A) Music. B) “Tonight, our top story: a man ate a hot dog and died …”

The voice of the anchor is the non-stop blending machine that ties all news stories together. That’s why the elite network stars earn their paychecks.

Good segue people are stage magicians. They can move the viewer’s attention from item A to item B without a tremor or a doubt.

It’s often been said of certain actors, “He could read from the phone book and you’d listen.” Well, an elite anchor can hold the viewer’s mind as he reads a sentence from the phone book, another one from a car-repair manual, a third from a cookbook, and a fourth from a funeral-home brochure. Without stopping.

And afterward, the viewer would have no questions.

The news is surreal because the stories are mostly fool’s gold to begin with; and they’re unrelated. They’re rocks lying around on the floor. The anchor picks them up and invents the illusion of One Flowing Stream.

This is what the audience wants. It feels like a story. It feels like unity. It feels like a stage play or a movie. It feels, when all is said and done, good.

The anchor (as his title suggests) holds the fragments together in one place. For the audience, he’s the focus. He’s the maestro. The hypnotist.

You can’t pull anyone off the street and have him describe car crashes, murders, storms, threats of war, political squabbles, 300 cats living in a one-room apartment, a new piece of Medicare legislation, genitalia picture tweets, and the dedication of a library, while placing and keeping millions of people in a light trance.

Katie Couric couldn’t do it. People were waiting for her to break out into an attack of Perky and giggle and cross her legs. Diane Sawyer does it poorly. She seems to be affecting somber personal grief as her basic segue-thread. Scott Pelley is competent, but he sits like a surgeon ready to signal the anesthesiologist to clamp a mask on your face, before he cuts into your stomach.

Brian Williams is the current king of segue. He does smooth-serious-affable-employee-of-the-month-I-know-all-the-news-is-true.

None of these elite anchors can hold a candle to Cronkite or Chet Huntley, the past masters. Ed Murrow was the first star-practitioner of the television-news form. He was working a kind of sepulchral spin-off of Hemingway prose.

Murrow got his first break, right out of college, working for the Institute of International Education, a pathetic front for what they used to call “internationalists” (aka globalists). Elihu Root founded the organization. Root was also founding chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In other words, one world together actually meant: all you peons down there and we wise men on top…

Anyway, all anchors can do segue. They are dedicated to The Blend. They put their souls, such as they are, into transitions.

“What do you want to do when you grow up, Brian?”

“I want to take people from A to B.”

Whereas, a true version of the news would go something like this: “Today, in fact just now, I moved from a tornado in Kansas to the removal of restrictions on condom sales, and I’m blending into penguins in Antarctica. I’m doing Salvador Dali and you’re not noticing a thing.”

What does all this tell us? The news, if it were taken apart into its component pieces, would look quite surreal. And the anchor, by blending, manufactures a hypnotic illusion of interconnection.

The audience wants to be put in a trance. Even a several-day event, like the Boston bombing, with all its twists and turns, doesn’t mitigate that basic big sleep. Television news, with a good anchor, with the television screen itself, with the electromagnetic emissions and frequencies, can attain and hold the hypnotic state.

Therefore, the content of the news sinks in below the level of the rational mind.

But with each shift in story line, with each new breaking bit of revelation, with each disturbing image, the anchor must be there to execute the segues.

He is basically saying to the audience, “I’m a few feet inside your personal landscape, your mind, feeding you all the turns in the river, and I’ll always be here, so things are all right…”

Elite anchors invent and maintain certain tones of voice, certain rhythms, certain cadences, certain variations of musical pitch, throughout the stage play, in order to sustain the sense of continuity.

They’re mechanics of voice.

They use their skills to report the false facts handed down to conceal ops and staged events.

They need to believe in what they’re doing. They need to be that stupid. Talent search: 130 IQ, inherently stupid.

They can know they’re actors on television, but they have to believe they’re acting out the truth. Ends justify the means. Of course, “truth” often means to them: that which will bind us all together.

What is the role they’re cast in? It’s: Normal. It’s a heavy part in the play, because this joke of a society has a prime-cut value called Normal.

“Okay, look,” the Broadway director says to the veteran actor he’s interviewing for the lead, in a billion-dollar production. “This may sound strange, but you’re going to have to do Normal as it’s never been done before. That’s what the audience wants. You’ve got to come across as very, very smart and very, very Normal. Get it? I mean, you can emit a few rays of Elite here and there, but you have to do that Normal dance. The audience has to believe you somehow fit in with being a solid American, whatever the hell that is. You can be the news boy down the street, riding his bike, tossing papers on front porches (Brian Williams), wholesome as Wonder Bread, or you can be a socialite on the Upper East Side teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown (Diane Sawyer), or you can be a doctor moving briskly through his morning hospital rounds telling the interns trailing behind him what incompetent assholes they are (Scott Pelley)…but it has to be Normal at the same time. You’re the brain of every other brain. You’re the conscience of every other conscience. You’re just as walled off from the conspiracy to own every inch of America and grind down the people into dust-bowl hell as all Americans are walled off from knowing about it. You know as little as they do. You’re just as clueless as the great unwashed, but you put your stupidity on display with some measure of grace and style. Got it? You’re clean, sanitary, loyal as a dog, dumb as fog but very smart. You spew absolute nonsense every second of your time on stage, but it sounds plausible, and again, Normal. You constantly change subjects, and the subjects are in no way related to each other, but you make it all seem sensible. It’s a joke. But you’re serious. And you have to Believe, as if you’ve always believed, from the moment you emerged out of your mother’s body.

“And if you need a model for all this, just watch the news every night on the three major networks and focus on these geniuses.”

See the bomb exploding, the one that emits a puff of smoke straight up in the air? The one that was built in a pressure cooker? The bomb that didn’t tear the flags to pieces and didn’t shred the blue canopy right next to it? The bomb that didn’t cause the men in yellow jackets standing in front of it to even blink? That bomb vectored at a very low angle and took out people’s legs in the Boston street. That right, America. It did. I swear it did.

See the purple and pink pigs flying over the White House? They’re bringing food from Mars for all the bureaucrats who push paper in the city every day, the people who can’t be fired during the Sequester, while flights all over the country are delayed. That food from Mars keeps the paper pushers going. It does. It has special vitamins in it. See how fat the pigs in the sky are? How do you think they got that way? They ate the food. It’s so healthy. It’s mystical and magical. It’s just part of the largesse coming to you from your eternal government. Wait a little while longer. It’ll be here. There are lots more flying pigs. They’ll drop off little bags of Martian tasties on your street any week now. It’s the new Normal. Get used to it. We know what you want, and we’re going to give it to you.

We know what you want and we’re going to give it to you.

If you have any doubts and need more information and assurance, just watch Brian, Scott, and Diane every night. They’re narrating the Days of Our Lives. They’re from Mars. They’re the advance scouts for the pigs.

Brian’s the happy pig. Diane’s the sad pig. Scott’s the cold pig.

They’re America. The best of America.

This is why the Colonies fought a revolution against the British. So you could suck up stories, like a vacuum cleaner, from the three little pigs.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Source: Jon Rappoport’s Blog

A Storm In A Korean Teacup

On April 4 the Pentagon announced that it was sending a mobile missile defense system to Guam as a “precautionary move” to protect the island from the potential threat from North Korea. The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) comprises ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California, as well as naval vessels capable of shooting down missiles.

On the same day, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that North Korea posed a “real and clear danger” to the island, to U.S. allies in the region, and even to the United States. Its leaders have “ratcheted up their bellicose, dangerous rhetoric,” Hagel told the National Defense University in Washington. Areas at risk include South Korea and Japan, he added, as well as Guam, Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States. “We have to take those threats seriously,” he said.

It is the job of defense secretaries to take all threats seriously, but there is less than meets the eye to this one. While media coverage of tensions with North Korea makes it appear that its recent threats in response to the ongoing “Foal Eagle” U.S.-South Korean military exercises came unexpectedly, Pyongyang has a long history of objecting vehemently to such war games. North Korea is using bizarre rhetoric—as it has done many times before—but there is no “real and present danger,” because the country’s nuclear and missile delivery capabilities are rudimentary now and will remain so for years to come. Its three nuclear tests thus far—in 2006, 2009 and on February 12 of this year—amounted to a total yield of around 10 kilotons, or less than one-half the power of the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in August 1945. At least two, and possibly all three, of those tests used plutonium as the fissile material. Crude and bulky, plutonium devices cannot be fitted onto a missile.

North Korea’s claims to have miniaturized its latest device are unproven and probably untrue: no tell-tale isotopes indicative of weapons-grade uranium have been detected. In addition, at the moment, its uranium-enrichment facilities are not producing requisite quantities of highly-enriched uranium (HEU). The Yongbyon site—the country’s main nuclear facility—has been limited to electricity generation for the past five years, as part of a disarmament-for-aid deal signed in September 2005. The agreement’s implementation was always wrought with difficulties, however. Last month, the regime vowed to restart all facilities at Yongbyon—presumably including uranium enrichment to weapons-grade levels (HEU). They have the technical ability to do this, but even if the enrichment program proceeds immediately North Korea will be several years away from producing a deliverable device on a reliable missile.

In the final months of Kim Jong-il’s life it appeared that the talks with the U.S. on the control of North Korea’s nuclear facilities would be restarted. After he died in December 2011, his young son and successor Kim Jong-un soon shifted emphasis from hoped-for cooperation to confrontation. In February 2012, Pyongyang unexpectedly announced that it would suspend nuclear activities and observe a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests in return for American food aid. That agreement was suspended after North Korea unsuccessfully launched a rocket carrying a satellite a year ago, which caused major embarrassment to the regime. A successful launch came last December, swiftly followed by the tightening of international sanctions in January (this time supported by China), a third nuclear test in February, and the ongoing escalation of warlike rhetoric since early March.

That rhetoric is a mix of bluster and bravado. Even if it had the theoretical wherewithal to threaten the United States—which it does not have—North Korea could not do it credibly: a single missile, or two, or five, would be fairly easy to intercept and destroy, and the ensuing retaliation would turn much of the People’s Democratic Republic into a parking lot. In the fullness of time the North may develop a device capable of fitting into a warhead, but it will have no guidance system necessary for accuracy and no re-entry technology to bring an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) back to Earth. According to the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, North Korea has something that can hit American shores, but a “functioning nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile is still at least several years away.”

Even if it were to miniaturize a half-dozen nuclear weapons and perfect some form of functioning delivery system, North Korea would not be able to use them as a means of blackmail to alter the regional balance of power. The U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel have possessed nuclear weapons for decades. None of them has ever been able to change the status quo in its favor by threatening to use the bomb. The possession of nuclear weapons by one of the parties did not impact the outcome in Korea in 1953, or Suez in 1956, or prevent the two superpowers’ defeats, in Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively. It makes no difference to China’s stalled efforts to bring Taiwan under its control. South Africa had developed its own nuclear arsenal in the 1980s—it has been dismantled since—but this did not enhance its government’s ability to resist the pressure to dismantle the Apartheid in the early 1990’s. The political effect of a country’s possession of nuclear weapons has been to force its potential adversaries to exercise caution and to freeze the existing frontiers. There is no reason to think that North Korea will be an exception to the rule.

The root causes of North Korea’s apparently reckless behavior are predominantly domestic, as usual. Kim Jong-un, the third absolute ruler in the dynasty established by his late grandfather Kim Il-sung, is young (29), untested and insecure. When his father Kim Jong-il died on December 17, 2011, the military and Party leadership accepted his third son as the designated successor, but it was not immediately clear whether Jong-un would in fact take full power right away. A cult of personality started developing right away. With no track record of achievement and no sign of outstanding talent, he was hailed as the “great successor to the revolutionary cause,” “outstanding leader of the party, army and people,” “respected comrade identical to Supreme Commander Kim Jong-il,” even as “a great person born of heaven”—an eccentric metaphor for a society nominally based on the teaching of dialectical materialism. The titles followed: within days of his father’s death, Kim Jon-un was declared Supreme Commander of the Korean Peoples Army, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and “supreme leader of the country.” In March of last year, he was appointed first secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea; three months later, he was awarded the rank of a field marshal.

The plethora of titles does not mean that Kim Jong-un automatically commands the same level of authority and unquestioning obedience enjoyed by his father and grandfather before him. According to a psychological profile put together by U.S. intelligence, Kim Jong-un may feel compelled to prove just how tough he is in order to make up for his inexperience. One of the CIA’s former top experts on North Korea, Joseph DeTrani, regards him as a young man insufficiently well prepared for the position, with limited foreign exposure, who has the urge to prove his toughness to his own military by emulating his grandfather, Kim Il-sung. But the heir is unlikely to start a general war, which he knows he cannot win, and in which China—his often reluctant backer—would likely remain aloof. “It would probably mean his defeat, and his defeat would probably mean the downfall of his regime and, very probably, the end of him as well,” according to the Telegraph’s David Blair. “Assuming that he’s not suicidal, he is very unlikely to start a general conflagration.” The danger remains, however, that North Korea, having ratcheted up the rhetoric for so long and having issued so many blood-curdling threats, feels that it has to do something.

My hunch is that in the end Kim the Third will do nothing. South Korea refrained from retaliation when one of its naval vessels was sunk under mysterious circumstances in disputed waters in March 2010, or when North Korea bombarded the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong in November of that year. This time the leaders in Seoul appear determined to respond to any hostile act. While China is urging all sides to tone it down, its warnings are primarily directed at North Korea. Beijing has conveyed a warning to Pyongyang that any incident would subject the North to swift and vigorous retaliation. It is noteworthy that there are no significant troop movements along the 38^th parallel, and the feverish tone of North Korea’s state media appears to have abated in recent days. The specific warnings that preceded the Yeonpyeong attack are now absent. The regime is well aware of North Korea’s inadequacies in the nuclear and missile technologies. Economically it is a mess. According to the CIA economic assessment issued last month, North Korea’s industrial and power output have receded to pre-1990 levels, while frequent crop failures since the catastrophic 1995 famine have produced chronic food shortages and malnutrition. Its people depend for survival on international food aid deliveries, mainly from China.

Once this latest teacup storm is over, a coherent long-term American response should address the question as to why North Korea feels it needs nuclear weapons in the first place. This is not because Kim Jong-un plans to reunify the peninsula by force—that he cannot do, with or without the bomb—but because Pyongyang regards the United States as a real threat. North Korea is one of the tightest despotisms in existence, but ever since it was designated the eastern pivot of the “Axis of Evil” in President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address its leaders have rational grounds to feel threatened. According to President Obama, the nuclear test offered only an illusion of greater security to North Korea. This is incorrect. The possession of nuclear weapons, far from providing an “illusion” of greater security, is the only reliable insurance policy to those states that Washington may deem fit for regime change. Had Serbia had the bomb in 1999 or Iraq in 2003, they would not have been subjected to illegal American attacks on patently spurious grounds.

Some imagination is needed in Washington, including a rethink of the old orthodoxy that nuclear proliferation is inherently dangerous. It is not. Since 1945, there have been many wars, but no catastrophic ones on par with 1914-1918 or 1939-1945. This long peace—lasting for close to seven decades thus far—is due almost entirely to the existence of nuclear weapons and to their possession by an expanding circle of powers. Contrary to the will of the United States—whose leaders do not want other countries to possess what America has possessed, and used, since 1945—nuclear proliferation has been a major factor in the preservation of peace. The “Balance of Terror” is a grim term which denotes a comforting reality, and its logic applies to the lesser powers, such as India and Pakistan, which went to war three times after the Partition—in 1947, 1965, and 1971—but not since then. On previous form, the violence in Kashmir in March 2008 and the Pakistani-linked terrorist attacks in Bombay in November of that year would have reignited the conflict—but they did not. The possession of nuclear weapons by both adversaries has been a major war-inhibiting factor for over four decades, and it will likely remain so for many years to come.

What is valid for the Subcontinent should apply to the North Korean peninsula. Sanctions or no sanctions, Pyongyang will not give up its bomb. For the sake of regional peace and stability, South Korea should acquire one as well—and there is no reason for Japan not to follow suit. Back in the 1970’s, the Ford Administration induced South Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program in return for not withdrawing American soldiers. Now is the time to reverse the sequence. Washington should grant a free nuclear hand to Seoul in return for the mutually agreed U.S. troop withdrawal. The latest crisis strengthens the case for the long-overdue withdrawal of the remaining 28,000 American troops from the Korean peninsula. It is high time to let the countries directly affected by Pyongyang’s actions—South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia—deal with North Korea themselves, to the best of their abilities.

The Global Elite Are Very Clearly Telling Us That They Plan To Raid Our Bank Accounts

Don’t be surprised when the global elite confiscate money from your bank account one day.  They are already very clearly telling you that they are going to do it.  Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem is the president of the Eurogroup – an organization of eurozone finance ministers that was instrumental in putting together the Cyprus “deal” – and he has said publicly that what has just happened in Cyprus will serve as a blueprint for future bank bailouts.  What that means is that when the chips are down, they are going to come after YOUR money.  So why should anyone put a large amount of money in the bank at this point?  Perhaps you can make one or two percent on your money if you shop around for a really good deal, but there is also a chance that 40 percent (or more) of your money will be confiscated if the bank fails.  And considering the fact that there are vast numbers of banks all over the United States and Europe that are teetering on the verge of insolvency, why would anyone want to take such a risk?  What the global elite have done is that they have messed around with the fundamental trust that people have in the banking system.  In order for any financial system to work, people must have faith in the safety and security of that financial system.  People put their money in the bank because they think that it will be safe there.  If you take away that feeling of safety, you jeopardize the entire system.

So exactly how did the big banks in Cyprus get into so much trouble?  Well, they have been doing exactly what hundreds of other large banks all over the U.S. and Europe have been doing.  They have been gambling with our money.  In particular, the big banks in Cyprus made huge bets on Greek sovereign debt which ended up failing.

But what happened in Cyprus is just the tip of the iceberg.  All over the planet major financial institutions are being incredibly reckless with client money.  They are leveraged to the hilt and they have transformed the global financial system into a gigantic casino.

If they win on their bets, they become fabulously wealthy.

If they lose on their bets, they know that the politicians won’t let the banks fail.  They know that they will get bailed out one way or another.

And who pays?

We do.

Either our tax dollars are used to fund a government-sponsored bailout, or as we have just witnessed in Cyprus, money is directly confiscated from our bank accounts.

And then the game begins again.

People need to understand that the precedent that has just been set in Cyprus is a game changer.

The next time that a major bank fails in Greece or Italy or Spain (or in the United States for that matter), the precedent that has been set in Cyprus will be looked to as a “template” for how to handle the situation.

Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem has even publicly admitted that what just happened in Cyprus will serve as a model for future bank bailouts.  Just check out what he said a few days ago…

“If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be ‘Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalise yourself?’. If the bank can’t do it, then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders”

Dijsselbloem insists that this will cause people “to think about the risks” before they put their money somewhere…

“It will force all financial institutions, as well as investors, to think about the risks they are taking on because they will now have to realise that it may also hurt them. The risks might come towards them.”

Well, as depositors in Cyprus just found out, there is a risk that you could lose 40 percent (and that is the best case scenario) of your money if you put it in the bank.

Why would anyone want to take that risk – especially in a nation that is already experiencing very serious financial troubles such as Greece, Italy or Spain?

As if that was not enough, Dijsselbloem later went in front of the Dutch parliament and publicly defended a wealth tax like the one that was just imposed in Cyprus.

Dijsselbloem is being widely criticized, and rightfully so.  But at least he is being more honest that many other politicians.  His predecessor as the head of the Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, once said that “you have to lie” to the people in order to keep the financial markets calm…

Mr. Dijsselbloem’s style contrasts with that of his predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister, who spoke in a low mumble at news conferences and was expert at sidestepping questions. Mr. Juncker once even advocated lying as a way to prevent financial markets from panicking—as they did Monday after Mr. Dijsselbloem’s comments.

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie,” Mr. Juncker said in April 2011. “If you have pre-indicated possible decisions, you are feeding speculation in the financial markets.”

But Dijsselbloem is certainly not the only one among the global elite that is admitting what is coming next.  Just check out what Joerg Kraemer, the chief economist at Commerzbank, recently told Handelsblatt about what he believes should be done in Italy…

“A tax rate of 15 percent on financial assets would probably be enough to push the Italian government debt to below the critical level of 100 percent of gross domestic product”

Yikes!

And as I wrote about the other day, the Finance Minister of New Zealand is proposing that bank account holders in his nation should be required to “take a haircut” if any banks in his nation fail.

They are telling us what they plan to do.

They are telling us that they plan to raid all of our bank accounts when the global financial system fails.

And calling it a “haircut” does not change the fact of what it really is.  The truth is that when they confiscate money from our bank accounts it is outright theft.  Just check out what the Daily Mail had to say about the situation in Cyprus…

People who rob old ladies in the street, or hold up security vans, are branded as thieves. Yet when Germany presides over a heist of billions of pounds from private savers’ Cyprus bank accounts, to ‘save the euro’ for the hundredth time, this is claimed as high statesmanship.

It is nothing of the sort. The deal to secure a €10 billion German bailout of the bankrupt Mediterranean island is one of the nastiest and most immoral political acts of modern times.

It has struck fear into the hearts of hundreds of millions of European citizens, because it establishes a dire precedent.

And when you cause paralysis in the banking system, a once thriving economy can freeze up almost overnight.  The following is an excerpt from a report from someone that is actually living over in Cyprus…

As it stands now, nowhere in Cyprus accepts credit or debit cards anymore for fear of not being paid, it is CASH ONLY. Businesses have stopped functioning because they cannot pay employees OR pay for the stock they receive because the banks are closed. If the banks remain closed, the economy will be destroyed and STOP COMPLETELY. Looting, robberies and theft are already on the rise. If the banks open now, there will be a massive run on the bank, and the banks will FAIL loosing all of its deposits, also causing an economic crash. TONIGHT there are demonstrations at most street corners and especially at the parliament building (just 2 miles from me).

Many are thinking that the ECB and EU are allowing Cyprus to fail as a test ground for new financial standards.

Just wanted all you guys to know the real story of whats going on here. Prayers are appreciated (although this is very interesting to watch) many of my local friends have lots of money in the banks.

Would similar things happen in the United States if there was a major banking crisis someday?

That is something to think about.

In any event, the problems in the rest of Europe continue to get even worse…

-The stock market in Greece is crashing.  It is down by more than 10 percent over the past two days.

-The stock markets in Italy and Spain are experiencing huge declines as well.  Banking stocks are being hit particularly hard.

-The Bank of Spain says that the Spanish economy will sink even deeper into recession this year.

-The latest numbers from the Spanish government show that Spain’s debt problem is rapidly getting worse…

“The central government’s interest bill surged 15 percent last year to 26 billion euros, while tax receipts slumped 21 percent. The cost of servicing debt represented 30 percent of the taxes collected at the end of December, up from 20 percent a year earlier.”

-The euro took quite a tumble on Thursday and the euro will likely continue to decline steadily in the weeks and months to come.

For a very long time I have been warning that the next major wave of the economic collapse is going to originate in Europe.

Hopefully people are starting to see what I am talking about.

As this point, the major banks in Europe are leveraged about 26 to 1, and that is close to the kind of leverage that Lehman Brothers had when it finally collapsed.  As a whole, European banks are drowning in debt, they are taking risks that are almost incomprehensible and now faith in those banks has been greatly undermined by what has happened in Cyprus.

Anyone that cannot see a crisis coming in Europe simply does not understand the financial world.  A moment of reckoning is rapidly approaching for Europe.  The following is from a recent article by Graham Summers…

At the end of the day, the reason Europe hasn’t been fixed is because CAPITAL SIMPLY ISN’T THERE. Europe and its alleged backstops are out of money. This includes Germany, the ECB and the mega-bailout funds such as the ESM.

Germany has already committed to bailouts that equal 5% of its GDP. The single largest transfer payment ever made by one country to another was the Marshall Plan in which the US transferred an amount equal to 5% of its GDP. Germany WILL NOT exceed this. So don’t count on more money from Germany.

The ECB is chock full of garbage debts which have been pledged as collateral for loans. If anyone of significance defaults in Europe, the ECB is insolvent. Sure it can print more money, but once the BIG collateral call hits, money printing is useless because the amount of money the ECB would have to print would implode the system.

And then of course there are the mega bailout funds such as the ESM. The only problem here is that Spain and Italy make up 30% of the ESM’s supposed “funding.” That’s right, nearly one third of the mega-bailout fund’s capital will come from countries that are bankrupt themselves.

What could go wrong?

Right now, close to half of all money that is on deposit at banks in Europe is uninsured.  As people move that uninsured money out of the banks, the amount of money that will be required to “fix the banks” will go up even higher.

It would be wise to try to avoid the big banks at this point – especially those with very large exposure to derivatives.  Any financial institution that uses customer money to make reckless bets is not to be trusted.

If you can find a small local bank or credit union to do business with you will probably be better off.

And don’t think that this kind of thing can never happen in the United States.

One of the key players that was pushing the idea of a “wealth tax” in Cyprus was the IMF.  And everyone knows that the IMF is heavily dominated by the United States.  In fact, the headquarters of the IMF is located right in the heart of Washington D.C. not too far from the White House.  When I worked in D.C. I would walk by the IMF headquarters quite a bit.

So if the United States thought that confiscating money from bank accounts was a great idea in Cyprus, why wouldn’t they implement such a thing here under similar circumstances?

The global elite are telling us what they plan to do, and the game has dramatically changed.

Move your money while you still can.

Unfortunately, it is already too late for the people of Cyprus.

 

Source: The Economic Collapse

Barbarian Rhapsody: Ten Years Deeper Into Hell

US and UK Drowned Iraq in Blood…

All forms of political media — in print, on line, on the air — have been awash in recent weeks with retrospectives on the tenth anniversary of the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Amidst the mountainous heap of drivel and falsehood such an occasion inevitably produces among the vast and vapid army of analysts who happily spend their days chewing the cud of whatever happens to be the conventional wisdom of the day, there have been a few outstanding pieces that put this continuing war crime in stark perspective.

One of the better short pieces I’ve seen on the subject comes from — of all people — an actual Iraqi. Sami Ramadani, a dissident forced into exile by Saddam, has been one of the most insightful observers — and vociferous opponents — of the atrocities inflicted on his country by Western elites and their local collaborators (including, of course, for many decades, Saddam Hussein). From the Guardian:

Ten years on from the shock and awe of the 2003 Bush and Blair war – which followed 13 years of murderous sanctions, and 35 years of Saddamist dictatorship – my tormented land, once a cradle of civilisation, is staring into the abyss.

Wanton imperialist intervention and dictatorial rule have together been responsible for the deaths of more than a million people since 1991. And yet, according to both Tony Blair and the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the “price is worth it”. Blair, whom most Iraqis regard as a war criminal, is given VIP treatment by a culpable media. Iraqis listen in disbelief when he says: “I feel responsibility but no regret for removing Saddam Hussein.” (As if Saddam and his henchmen were simply whisked away, leaving the people to build a democratic state). It enrages us to see Blair build a business empire, capitalising on his role in piling up more Iraqi skulls than even Saddam managed.

As an exile, I was painfully aware of Saddam’s crimes, which for me started with the disappearance from Baghdad’s medical college of my dearest school friend, Hazim. The Iraqi people are fully aware, too, that Saddam committed all his major crimes while an ally of western powers. On the eve of the 2003 invasion I wrote this for the Guardian:

“In Iraq, the US record speaks for itself: it backed Saddam’s party, the Ba’ath, to capture power in 1963, murdering thousands of socialists, communists and democrats; it backed the Ba’ath party in 1968 when Saddam was installed as vice-president; it helped him and the Shah of Iran in 1975 to crush the Kurdish nationalist movement; it increased its support for Saddam in 1979…helping him launch his war of aggression against Iran in 1980; it backed him throughout the horrific eight years of war (1980 to 1988), in which a million Iranians and Iraqis were slaughtered, in the full knowledge that he was using chemical weapons and gassing Kurds and Marsh Arabs; it encouraged him in 1990 to invade Kuwait…; it backed him in 1991 when Bush [senior] suddenly stopped the war, exactly 24 hours after the start of the great March uprising that engulfed the south and Iraqi Kurdistan…”

But when it was no longer in their interests to back him, the US and UK drowned Iraq in blood.

…We haven’t even counted the dead yet, let alone the injured, displaced and traumatised. Countless thousands are still missing. Of the more than 4 million refugees, at least a million are yet to go back to their homeland, and there still about a million internal refugees. On an almost daily basis, explosions and shootings continue to kill the innocent. … Lack of electricity, clean water and other essential services continues to hit millions of impoverished and unemployed people, in one of the richest countries on the planet. Women and children pay the highest price. Women’s rights, and human rights in general, are daily suppressed.

And what of democracy, supposedly the point of it all? The US-led occupying authorities nurtured a “political process” and a constitution designed to sow sectarian and ethnic discord. Having failed to crush the resistance to direct occupation, they resorted to divide-and-rule to keep their foothold in Iraq. Using torture, sectarian death squads and billions of dollars, the occupation has succeeded in weakening the social fabric and elevating a corrupt ruling class that gets richer by the day, salivating at the prospect of acquiring a bigger share of Iraq’s natural resources, which are mostly mortgaged to foreign oil companies and construction firms.

Warring sectarian and ethnic forces, either allied to or fearing US influence, dominate the dysfunctional and corrupt Iraqi state institutions, but the US embassy in Baghdad – the biggest in the world – still calls the shots. Iraq is not really a sovereign state, languishing under the punitive Chapter VII of the UN charter.

Yes, it has certainly been, as Barack Obama memorably characterized it, a “remarkable achievement.” It is also, more and more, a forgotten “achievement.” America’s amnesia regarding the war crime in Iraq and its continuing ramifications — not only the repression and death still going on there, but also the catastrophic impact of this atrocity on America itself, including the tsunami of suicide, homelessness and PTSD among its soldiers, and the back-breaking costs of this orgy of corruption and war-profiteering — is indeed remarkable. It is no longer a reality — a living, anguished, ongoing human tragedy — but simply fodder for commentary, for partisan point-scoring, for barroom blather. This has always been the case with our misbegotten wars of imperial domination (for an especially acute and egregious example of our chronic amnesia, see this review of Nick Turse’s new book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam), going back to the 19th century. And the “paradigm-changing” iadvent of the internet has done nothing to change that; despite today’s easy access to unprecedented levels of information about the realities of the Iraq war (and other high crimes and atrocities), the amnesia and willful ignorance remains as profound as ever.

So here we are. Ten years on from the frenzied paroxysm (or was it an orgasm?) of mass violence — which was itself the culmination of years of the bipartisan war-by-sanctions that American officials have openly acknowledged killed more than half a million Iraqi children — what is the central “moral” issue of our national politics today? This once-unimaginable, horribly depraved and obscene question: Should the president be allowed to murder any American citizen he chooses, or should there perhaps be be some kind of secret Congressional oversight of the secret killing program? (The idea of restricting the president’s power to kill any filthy foreignerhe chooses is not in question anywhere in our national politics, of course; Rand Paul wasn’t filibustering against that idea. No, any debate on the “ethics” of state murder is restricted to its application to Americans, who, as we know, are the only fully human beings on the face of the earth.)

Given the current trajectory of our plunge into barbarism, I predict that in just a few years we’ll be “debating” whether the president has the right to stick the severed heads of “terrorists” on spikes outside the White House, or if the heads should be passed around discreetly to members of the relevant Senate committees before being dumped in the ocean.

Source: Empire Burlesque

Israel Instructs Obama: “Iranian And Syrian Sanctions Are Not Painful Enough!”

Damascus – Iran is expected to meet with other world powers in Astana, Kazakhstan to discuss its nuclear program. Discussions that the occupiers of Palestine fervently hope will not be successful. It is toward this end that their key demand this week to the US Congress, the White House and the European Union is “to cast responsibility on the Iranians by blaming them for the talks’ failure in the clearest terms possible.”

According to the Al-Monitor of 3/19/13, Israel also demands that the countries meeting in Kazakhstan “make it perfectly clear that slogans such as ‘negotiations can’t go on forever’ are their marching orders to the White House, and they want the Kazakhstan attendees to act “so severely that the Iranians realize that they face a greater threat than just Israeli military action.”  “The message must be that this time the entire west, behind Israel’s leadership, is contemplating the launch of a massive military action.”   Unsaid is that “the entire West” is expected to confront Iran militarily while Tel Aviv’s forces will mop up Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Syria if necessary.

Pending the above arrangements, Israel this week is further demanding that the Obama White House issue another Executive Order dramatically ratcheting up the US-led Sanctions against Iran and Syria while it prepares for a hoped for “ game changing international economic blockade, including no-fly zones enforced by NATO.

To achieve yet another lawyer of severe sanctions, and at the behest of AIPAC, a “legislative planning” meeting was called by Congressman Eliot Engel, who represents New Yorks 17^th District (the Bronx) and who is the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Ros-Lehtinen (Florida’s 27^th District), Chair of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa. The session was held in a posh Georgetown restaurant and participant’s included representatives from AIPAC, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain plus half a dozen Congressional staffers.

Congressman Engel has co-sponsored virtually every anti-Arab, anti-Islam, anti-Palestinian, anti-Iran, and anti-Syrian Congressional broadside since he entered Congress a quarter-century ago. His campaign literature last fall stated: “I am a strong supporter of sanctions against those who repeatedly reject calls to behave as responsible nations. (Israel excepted-ed).  I have authored or helped author numerous bills which have been signed into law to impose sanctions against rogue states including Iran and Syria.” Ros-Lehtinen and Engel led all members with AIPAC donations on the House side in last fall’s Congressional elections. They are ranked number one and two respectively as still serving career recipients of Israel-AIPAC’s “indirect” campaign donations.

Some Congressional operatives accuse Rep. Ros-Lehtinen of being a bit lazy and neglecting the bread and butter needs of her Florida constituents. But others argue that it depends on which constituents one has in mind. Her election mailings and her Congressional website claim that the Congresswoman  “led all Congressional efforts tirelessly to generate votes to block what she views as anti-Israel resolutions offered at the former UN Commission on Human Rights.”

A big fan of US-led sanctions against Iran and Syria, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen introduced the Iran Freedom Support Act on January 6, 2005, which increased sanctions and expanded punitive measures against the Iranian people until the Iranian regime has dismantled its nuclear plants. Rep. Ros-Lehtinen also introduced H.R. 957, the Iran Sanctions Amendments Act, which she claims “will close loopholes in current law by holding export credit agencies, insurers, and other financial institutions accountable for their facilitation of investments in Iran and sanction them as well.”  In addition, H.R. 957 seeks to impose liability on parent companies for violations of sanctions by their foreign entities.  She also co-sponsored H.R 1357 which requires “U.S. government pension funds to divest from companies that do any business with any country that does business with Iran.”  Her campaign literature states that, “She was proud to be the leading Republican sponsor of H.R. 1400, the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act. This bill applies and enhances a wide range of additional sanctions.”

In addition, last year Illeana introduced H.R. 394, which enlarges US Federal Court Jurisdiction regarding claims by American citizens their claims in U.S. courts. Unclear is whether she realizes that one consequence of her initiative would be to open even wider US courtroom doors to Iranian-Americans and Syria-Americans who today are being targeted and damaged by the lady’s ravenous insatiable craving for civilian targeting economic sanctions.

But Ileana and Elliot appear to be fretting.

So is Israel.

The reasons are several and they include the fact that the US-led sanctions have failed to date to achieve the accomplishments they were designed to produce. These being to cripple the Iranian economy, provoke a popular protest among the Iranian people over inflation and scarcity of food and medicines,  weaken Iran as much as possible before adopting military measures against it, and, most essentially, achieving regime change to turn the clock back to those comfortable days of our submissive, compliant Shah.

Zionist prospects for Syria aren’t any better at the moment.  Tel Aviv’s to intimidate the White House into invading Syria have not worked. Plan A has failed miserably according to the Israeli embassy people attending the Engel-Ros Litinen’s informal conflab.  Neither did the “how about we just arm the opposition” plan that originated last year with David H. Petraeus and was supported by Hillary Clinton while being pushed by AIPAC. The goal was to create allies in Syria that the US and Israel could control if Mr. Assad was removed from power. Moreover, the White House believes that there are no good options for Obama. It has vetoed 4 recent Israeli proposals including arming the rebels and is said to believe that Syria is already dangerously awash with “unreliable arms.”

The recent shriveling of Israeli prospects for a dramatic Pentagon intervention  in Syria reflect White House war weariness.  And also Israel’s predilection to bomb targets itself in Syria, as it did recently to assassinate a senior Iranian officer in the Quds force of the Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Hassan Shateri. Contrary to the false story that Israel attacked a missiles convoy, some unassembled equipment was damaged but that was not the primary target according to Fred Hof, a former U.S. State Department official. Gen. Shateri was.

Making matters worse for Tel Aviv, the Israeli military is reportedly becoming skittish due to its deteriorating political and military status in the region and its troops have recently completed subterranean warfare drills to prepare them for a potential clash with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the Jerusalem Post reported on 2/20/13. “Today during training, we simulated a northern terrain, that included what we might encounter,” Israeli Lt. Sagiv Shoker, commander of a military Reconnaissance Unit of the Engineering Corps, based at the Elikim base in northern Israel near the border with Lebanon explained. Shoker added that his units spent a week focused on how to approach Hezbollah’s alleged underground bunkers and tunnels  in South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley quietly and quickly.  Israeli forces commander Gantz has been complaining recently to the Israeli cabinet that Hezbollah Special Forces are gaining much valuable experience in Syria fighting highly skilled and motivated al Nusra jihadists and his troops may not be prepared to face them on the battlefield if a conflict erupts. It has been known since 2006 that Israeli soldiers “are having motivation deficits” as Gantz and others have complained.

Ordinary citizens in Iran and Syria with whom this observer met recently, including some with whom he has shared lengthy conversations while posing many questions, cannot ignore the burden of the US-led sanctions in various aspects of their lives.  Nor can the Iranian or Syrian governments or their economic institutions. At the beginning of the summer of 2010, and even more so since the summer of 2012, the US-led civilian targeting sanctions imposed were significantly tightened by the Obama administration and its allies. The administration realized that the sanctions imposed on Iran until then were ineffective and understood that Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear power capability would quickly leave the US with no alternative than the acceptance of a nuclear Iran. But the administration, according to former State Department official Hof, believed that unless it took more drastic measures against Iran, Israel would launch a military strike against Iran which would likely destroy Zionist Israel- a prospect not every US official and Congressional staffer privately laments. Congressional sources report that the White House now feels that Iran has achieved deterrence and that Israel would be dangerously foolhardy to attack the country.

While Israel advocates an economic blockade of Iran and Syria, under binding rules of international and US law, economic blockades are acts of war. They are variously defined as surrounding a nation with hostile forces, economic besieging, preventing the passage in or out of a country of civilian supplies or aid. It is an act of naval warfare to block access to a country’s coastline and deny entry to all vessels and aircraft, absent a formal declaration of war and approval of the UN Security Council.

All treaties to which America is a signatory, including the UN Charter, are binding US law. Chapter VII authorizes only the Security Council to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, or act of aggression (and, if necessary, take military or other actions to) restore international peace and stability.” It permits a nation to use force (including a blockades) only under two conditions: when authorized by the Security Council or under Article 51 allowing the “right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member….until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security.”

As International law Professor Francis Boyle reminds us, Customary International Law recognizes economic blockades as an act of war because of the implied use of force even against third party nations in enforcing the blockade. Writes Boyle, “Blockades as acts of war have been recognized as such in the Declaration of Paris of 1856 and the Declaration of London of 1909 that delineate the international rules of warfare.” America approved these Declarations, thereby are became binding US law as well “as part of general international law and customary international law.”  US presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy, called economic blockades acts of war.

So has the US Supreme Court.

In Bas v. Tingy (1800), the US Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of fighting an “undeclared war” (read extreme economic sanctions). It ruled the seizure of a French vessel (is) an act of hostility or reprisal. The Court cited Talbot v. Seaman (1801) in ruling that “specific legislative authority was required in the seizure. In Little v. Barreme (1804), the Court held that “even an order from the President could not justify or excuse an act that violated the laws and customs of warfare. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that a captain of a United States warship could be held personally liable in trespass for wrongfully seizing a neutral Danish ship, even though” presidential authority ordered it.

“The Prize Cases” (1863) is perhaps the most definitive US Supreme Court ruling on economic blockades requiring congressional authorization. The case involved President Lincoln’s ordering “a blockade of coastal states that had joined the Confederacy at the outset of the Civil War. The Court….explicitly (ruled) that an economic blockade is an act of war and is legal only if properly authorized under the Constitution.”

Iran and Syria pose no threat to the US or any peaceful law abiding nation. Imposing a blockade against either violates the UN Charter and settled international humanitarian laws as well as US law. It would constitute an illegal act of aggression that under the Nuremberg Charter is the designated a “supreme international crime” above all others. It would render the Obama administration and every government of other participating nations criminally liable.

Contrary to what the occupiers of Palestine may fantasize, if the White House wants an economic blockade of Iran or Syria it must declare war, letting the American people be heard on the subject and convince the UN Security Council to pass a UNSCR under Chapter 7.

The White House cannot legally, morally or consistently with claimed American humanitarian values continue to target civilian populations with economic sanctions on the cheap.

All That Pivots Is Gold

To quote the immortal line in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, as filmed by John Huston, “Let’s talk about the black bird” – let’s talk about a mysterious bird made out of gold. Oh yes, because this is a film noir worthy of Dashiell Hammett – involving the Pentagon, Beijing, shadow wars, pivoting and a lot of gold.

Let’s start with Beijing’s official position; “We don’t have enough gold”. That leads to China’s current, frenetic buying spree – which particularly in Hong Kong anyone can follow live, in real time. China is already the top gold producing and the top gold importing nation in the world.

Gold accounts for roughly 70% of reserves held by the US and Germany – and more or less the same for France and Italy. Russia – also on a buying spree – is slightly over 10%. But China’s percentage of gold among its whopping US$3.2 trillion reserves is only 2%.

Beijing is carefully following the current shenanigans of the New York Federal Reserve, which, asked by the German Bundesbank to return the German gold it is holding, replied it would take at least seven years.

German financial journalist Lars Schall has been following the story since the beginning, and virtually alone has made the crucial connection between gold, paper money, energy resources and the abyss facing the petrodollar.

Whenever Beijing says it needs more gold, this is justified as a hedge “against risks in foreign reserves” – aka US dollar fluctuation – but especially to “promote yuan globalization”. As in, suavely, having the yuan compete with the US dollar and the euro “fairly” in the “international market”.

And here’s the (elusive) heart of the matter. What Beijing actually wants is to get rid of the US dollar peg. For that to happen, it needs vast gold reserves. So here’s Beijing pivoting from the US dollar to the yuan – and trying to sway vast swathes of the global economy to follow the path. This golden rule is Beijing’s Maltese Falcon: “The stuff dreams are made of”.

Have drone, will travel

Qatar also does pivoting – but of the MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) kind. Doha has been financing Wahhabis and Salafis – and even Salafi-jihadis – as in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) rebels in Libya, Free Syrian Army gangs in Syria, and the pan-Islamic gang that took over northern Mali.

The State Department – and later the Pentagon – may have woken up to it, as in the arrangement brokered by Doha and Washington together to spawn a new, more palatable Syria “coalition”. But still very potent are those dangerous liaisons between the francophile Emir of Qatar and the Quai d’Orsay in Paris – which gathered plenty of steam already during the reign of King Sarko, aka former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Every informed geopolitical observer has tracked leak after leak by former French intelligence operatives to the deliciously wicked satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, detailing Qatar’s modus operandi. It’s a no-brainer. Qatar’s foreign policy reads as Muslim Brotherhood Here, There and Everywhere (but not inside the neo-feudal emirate); this is Qatar’s Maltese Falcon. At the same time Doha – to the delight of French elites – is an avid practitioner of hardcore neoliberalism, and a top investor in France’s economy.

So their interests may coalesce in promoting disaster capitalism – successfully – in Libya and then – still unsuccessfully – in Syria. Yet Mali is something else; classic blowback – and that’s where the interests of Doha and Paris diverge (not to mention Doha and Washington; at least if one does not assume that Mali has been the perfect pretext for a renewed AFRICOM drive.)

Algerian media is awash in outrage, questioning Qatar’s agenda (in French). Yet the pretext – as predicted – worked perfectly.

AFRICOM – surprise! – is on a roll, as the Pentagon gets ready to set up a drone base in Niger. That’s the practical result of a visit by AFRICOM’s commander, General Carter Ham, to Niger’s capital Niamey only a few days ago.

Forget about those outdated PC-12 turbo props that have been spying on Mali and Western Africa for years. Now it’s Predator time. Translation: chief-in-waiting John Brennan plans a Central Intelligence Agency shadow war all across the Sahara-Sahel. With permission from Mick Jagger/Keith Richards, it’s time to start humming a remixed hit: “I see a grey drone/ and I want it painted black”.

AFRICOM does Niger is indeed sweeter than cherry pie. Northwest Niger is the site of all those uranium mines supplying the French nuclear industry. And it’s very close to Mali’s gold reserves. Imagine all that gold in an “unstable” area falling into the hands of … Chinese companies. Beijing’s Maltese Falcon moment of finally having enough gold to dump the US dollar peg would be at hand.

The Pentagon even got permission for all its surveillance gear to refuel in – of all places – crucial Agadez. The French legion may have been doing the hard work on the ground in Mali, but it’s AFRICOM which will ultimately reap the profits all across the Sahara-Sahel.

Don’t you know about the (Asian) bird?

And that brings us to that famous pivoting to Asia – which was supposed to be the number one geopolitical theme of the Obama 2.0 administration. It may well be. But certainly alongside AFRICOM pivoting all over the Sahara/Sahel in drone mode, to Beijing’s growing irritation; and Doha-Washington pivoting in their support of the former “terrorist” turned “freedom fighter”, and vice-versa.

And we did not even mention the non-pivoting involved in this noir plot; the Obama 2.0 administration keeping its appalling embrace of the medieval House of Saud and “stability in the Arabian peninsula”, as recommended by an usual suspect, a mediocre – yet influential – “veteran intelligence official“.

Play it again, Sam. In that outstanding Maltese Falcon scene at the start of our plot between Humphrey Bogart (let’s say he plays the Pentagon) and Sydney Greenstreet (let’s say he plays Beijing), the official is the goon, the third guy in the picture. The pivoting to Asia is essentially a product of Andrew Marshall, an allegedly Yoda-like totem of US national security.

Marshall has been behind the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) – all of you Donald Rumsfeld freaks know about it – failed Shock and Awe (which only served to destroy Iraq almost beyond repair, even with disaster capitalism involved); and now the concept calledAir Sea Battle.

Air Sea Battle’s premise is that Beijing will attack US forces in the Pacific, which is, frankly, ridiculous (even with help from a monster false-flag operation). The US would then retaliate via a “blinding campaign” – the naval equivalent of Shock and Awe. Both the US Air Force and the US Navy loved the concept because it implies a lot of hardware spending to be stationed in plenty of sophisticated Pacific bases, and in the high seas.

So even as David Petraeus-style counterinsurgency has pivoted to John Brennan’s CIA shadow wars, the real deal is the pivoting to Asia; a pseudo-strategy, concocted to keep the Pentagon budget at exorbitant levels, promoting a new cold war with China. “They will never amass enough gold to impose their evil plans”, one could hear Marshall say about China (without Bogart or Greenstreet’s aplomb, of course). Hammett would be appalled; Marshall’s Maltese Falcon is the stuff (war) dreams are made of.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2008). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Source:  Asia Times

County Sheriff: Power To Protect

The local FOX affiliate in Salt Lake City, Utah, has reported that the Utah Sheriff’s Association has written a strongly worded letter to President Barack Obama regarding any potential federal laws that would restrict the citizens of the State of Utah from practicing their Second Amendment rights. The letter was signed by every sheriff in the State of Utah except one. The letter reads in part:

“With the number of mass shootings America has endured, it is easy to demonize firearms; it is also foolish and prejudiced. Firearms are nothing more than instruments, valuable and potentially dangerous, but instruments nonetheless. Malevolent souls, like the criminals who commit mass murders, will always exploit valuable instruments in the pursuit of evil. As professional peace officers, if we understand nothing else, we understand this: lawful violence must sometimes be employed to deter and stop criminal violence. Consequently, the citizenry must continue its ability to keep and bear arms, including arms that adequately protect them from all types of illegality.”

The letter also states: “We respect the Office of the President of the United States of America. But, make no mistake, as the duly-elected sheriffs of our respective counties, we will enforce the rights guaranteed to our citizens by the Constitution. No federal official will be permitted to descend upon our constituents and take from them what the Bill of Rights–in particular Amendment II–has given them. We, like you, swore a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and we are prepared to trade our lives for the preservation of its traditional interpretation.”

In addition, Utah Representative Brian Greene, R-Pleasant Grove, has introduced legislation that asserts State power over federal power regarding gun control. Rep. Greene’s bill “would go so far as to allow local police the authority to arrest federal agents should they try to seize any firearms.”

The report added: “‘Acting upon those will be a third-degree felony in this state, punishable by up to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine,’ Greene said.”

See the report at:

Proposted Legislation Asserts State Power Over Gun Control

Tim Mueller, the sheriff of Linn County, Oregon, has also written the White House a similar letter. Mueller’s letter said in part, “Any federal regulation enacted by Congress or by executive order of the president offending the constitutional rights of my citizens shall not be enforced by me or by my deputies,” adding, “Nor will I permit the enforcement of any unconstitutional regulations or orders by federal officers within the borders of Linn County, OR.”

Read the report and Sheriff Mueller’s letter at:

Second Sheriff Refuses To Enforce Gun Confiscation

Several sheriffs in the State of Oregon have followed Sheriff Mueller’s example and issued similar statements: Sheriff Jim Hensley of Crook County, Sheriff Larry Blanton of Deschutes County, Sheriff Glenn Palmer of Grant County, Sheriff Craig Zanni of Coos County, and Sheriff John Hanlin of Douglas County.

In fact, sheriffs from all over America have begun taking similar stands. One of the first was Sheriff Denny Peyman of Jackson County, Kentucky. Also add Pine County, Minnesota, Sheriff Robin Cole. Sheriff Cole said, “I do not believe the federal government or any individual in the federal government has the right to dictate to the states, counties or municipalities any mandate, regulation or administrative rule that violates the United States Constitution or its various amendments.” The sheriff said that the right to bear arms is “fundamental to our individual freedoms and that firearms are part of life in our country.”

A news report on the story noted, “The Sheriff said he would refuse to enforce any federal mandate that violates constitutional rights, and that he would consider any new federal regulation on guns to be illegal.”

Also include Madison County, Alabama, Sheriff Blake Dorning; Smith County, Texas, Sheriff Larry Smith; and Martin County, Florida, Sheriff Bill Snyder to the list of sheriffs who are vowing to protect their citizens from the unconstitutional overreach of the federal government.

See the report at:

Many More Sheriffs Vow Not To Enforce Federal Gun Control Laws

This is exactly the kind of response that is needed! No law enforcement action of any kind (county, State, or federal) can take place without the approbation of the county sheriff. Constitutionally, he is the highest law enforcement officer of the county. This is why I have repeatedly said that ultimately our freedom will be won or lost at the State and local levels.

Big Government toadies love to quote the so-called “supremacy clause” in Article. VI. Paragraph. 2. of the US Constitution. It reads, “This Constitution and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme law of the land…” This clause, they say, gives carte blanche to federal lawmakers to usurp, negate, or expunge any local or State law–or even the Constitution itself. Such an interpretation is absolutely ludicrous!

Notice that those federal laws that are considered to be “the supreme law of the land” must be made “in Pursuance” of the existing Constitution. Nowhere is it written that federal laws that contradict the existing US Constitution are to be considered lawful. In fact, just the opposite is true. Laws, even federal laws, which contradict the Constitution, are deemed to be null and void.

In the Marbury v Madison Supreme Court decision (1803), the Constitution was firmly established as the “supreme law of the land”–not legislative acts which contradict the Constitution. In the landmark ruling, Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the majority, said, “So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution, disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty.

“If then the courts are to regard the constitution; and the constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the legislature; the constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.

“Those then who controvert the principle that the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law, are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the constitution, and see only the law.

“This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions. It would declare that an act, which, according to the principles and theory of our government, is entirely void; is yet, in practice, completely obligatory. It would declare, that if the legislature shall do what is expressly forbidden, such act, notwithstanding the express prohibition, is in reality effectual. It would be giving to the legislature a practical and real omnipotence, with the same breath which professes to restrict their powers within narrow limits. It is prescribing limits, and declaring that those limits may be passed at pleasure.”

The decision concludes, “Why does a judge swear to discharge his duties agreeably to the constitution of the United States, if that constitution forms no rule for his government? if it is closed upon him, and cannot be inspected by him.

“If such be the real state of things, this is worse than solemn mockery. To prescribe, or to take this oath, becomes equally a crime.

“Thus, the particular phraseology of the constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument.”

See the Marbury decision at:

MARBURY v. MADISON

How could this decision be any more clear? The US Congress has no authority to pass laws, and the President has no authority to execute laws which contradict the US Constitution, and any such laws that are passed should be considered null and void.

In addition to the Court, the founders also expected that the states would serve as a check and balance on potential encroachments upon the people’s liberties by the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.

At this point, allow me to quote my constitutional attorney son, Timothy Baldwin:

“One of the constitutional tools by which socialist and nationalist ideologues have incorporated political principles of centralization and state annihilation is through the ‘Supremacy clause’ of the U.S. Constitution, which states, ‘This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.’ (USC, Article 6) To many people, this phrase has been construed to mean whatever laws and treaties those in the federal government pass, execute and uphold are binding on the people of the states and their respective governments. Admittedly, this concept has taken a stronghold in America and has been treated as the accepted principle of constitutional law for generations. Undoubtedly, every law student attending an ABA accredited law school is taught this as fact, just as I was when I attended Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. Not everyone agrees with this construction, however.

“Big-government and monarchist himself, Alexander Hamilton sheds light on the error of this position in 1787 when he addressed the concerns of those Americans who rejected the U.S. Constitution because of the fear that the expected effect of the ‘Supremacy clause’ would be to subvert the sovereignty of the States to govern themselves according to their constitutions. Hamilton attempts to calm their fears, saying, ‘It will not follow from this doctrine [of supremacy] that acts of the large society [i.e., the union] which are NOT PURSUANT to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land.’ (Federalist Paper 33) Perhaps everyone in America would concede this, but what is not agreed upon is what the States can and should do about those laws that are NOT PURSUANT to the constitutional powers of the federal government. Many place the burden of correcting that grievance on the U.S. Supreme Court, as if a body of nine judges appointed by the executive of the federal government are an adequate remedy for the machinations of that distorted philosophy broadly accepted by those in federal office. Contrarily, those who believe in the principles of a federalist system should recognize that each unit of the union (i.e., States) have the duty to do what Hamilton suggested in response to those laws contrary to the constitution: ‘These [laws] will be merely acts of usurpation, and WILL DESERVE TO BE TREATED AS SUCH.’ (FP 33, emphasis added) These laws should be treated as no law at all, and moreover, as attacks on liberty, and should be resisted on every level of the union, from federal to state to local governments, as well as individuals.”

See Tim’s website at:

LibertyDefenseLeague

Sheriffs Mueller, Peyman, Cole, et al. are dutifully fulfilling their oaths of office and are exemplary examples of what it means to be a constitutional sheriff.

I strongly urge readers to take a copy of Sheriff Mueller’s letter to the White House to your own county sheriff and ask him where he stands on protecting your Second Amendment liberties. And if your sheriff balks at his duty of standing firm for your liberties, vote him out of office as quickly as possible and replace him with a true constitutionalist sheriff. Remember, without the approbation and cooperation of your county sheriff, no federal police agency has any ability to implement Senator Dianne Feinstein’s semi-automatic rifle ban or high capacity magazine ban, should Congress pass such a ban.

Sheriffs are not elected to be paper pushers or attend Rotary Club meetings or a hundred other mundane tasks; primarily, sheriffs are elected to protect the liberties of the citizens in his or her county–even if that means defying unconstitutional laws handed down from Washington, D.C.

Kudos to the sheriffs of the State of Utah; kudos to Sheriff Mueller, Peyman, Cole et al. Come on folks! Find out NOW whether you have a real sheriff in your county or just a political opportunist who wears a badge. Your liberties hang in the balance.

The “New Breed” of Christian Fashion

A couple of weeks ago, while I was surfing the net for articles to include in the Email Brigade News Report, I came across a piece entitled “Provocative Clothing Company Creates Tees to Help Christian Girls be ‘Playful’ for Jesus.” For obvious reasons the headline grabbed my attention.

Featured in the article is a picture of an attractive young woman in a sexy pose seated on a bed wearing a tank top with the words “God knows my secrets.”

From the Christian News Service story:

A California-based clothing company is targeting professing Christian girls who seek to be provocative and “playful” in the way that they dress, all in the name of Jesus Christ.

The company Heart OMG says that its line of clothing for girls is “heavenly inspired” and is “a delightful mix of fun, fashion, faith and love.”

“At Heart OMG, we believe in sharing our faith and love through fashion, while embracing our fun and characteristic lifestyle, as well as giving back to the ones in need,” the clothing company’s website states. “Every single irresistible Heart OMG piece is wonderfully made to complement those playful and fashion forward individuals who celebrate life, and are eager to make their faith and love a true influence to the world.”

If you visit Heart OMG’s website (although I don’t recommend it) you’ll discover the story of “New Love and True Love”:

Once upon a time three lovely girls found a new love in Jesus Christ.

God had gifted each girl with a special talent.  They gathered their gifts and became the worship crew at church.  Through music they expressed their faith & love.  This love grows stronger every moment.

The girls soon realize that this new love is definitely the “True Love” they had been looking for.

It all starts on a sunny Sunday morning.  Scroll down the page and you’ll see photos of the trio sitting in a convertible in front of a church.  Two girls are wearing off the shoulder t-shirts and, it appears, nothing is worn underneath.  On the front of one of the shirts is the graphic “Worship Crew.”

Another photo shows the titillating trio decked out in short shorts, four inch heels and a pound and a half of makeup on their faces as they stroll up the walk toward the church…looking like hookers.

Further down the page the girls are now lounging on a bed together in suggestive poses.  One of them is sporting a pink night shirt with a large graphic of an ice cream sundae with a cherry on top. “Sweet Jesus” adorns a purple cup.

Under the heading “When New Love Becomes True Love” one of the girls is reading a Bible (hopefully 1 John).  The shirt she’s wearing has a graphic of two large red apples.  You can guess where the apples are purposely placed.  What does this tell you about the creative minds that designed a whole collection of “Christian” t-shirts?

Another photo shows the trio in church perched on what appears to be the edge of the stage, hands clasped in prayer.  The girl wearing the “Worship Crew” shirt has an open Bible on her lap.  Two of the girls are wearing off the shoulder shirts that are, well, way off the shoulder…in church.

If the trashy apparel Heart OMG produces is “heavenly inspired” like they claim, I’m the Angel Gabriel.

As I investigated the website I discovered this tidbit in the “About” section:

EVERY SINGLE IRRESISTIBLE HEART OMG PIECE IS WONDERFULLY
MADE TO COMPLEMENT THOSE PLAYFUL & FASHION FORWARD
INDIVIDUALS WHO CELEBRATE LIFE, AND EAGER TO MAKE THEIR
FAITH & LOVE A TRUE INFLUENCE TO THE WORLD.

If the advertisements/photos on the site depict the fashion trend for the “new breed” of Christian women, then the visible Church is in far worse shape than I thought.

Before I move on I need to make something clear.  I’m not saying that the girls in the photos are Christians.  I came across an acknowledgment at the bottom of the page stating only that they’re models.  But that’s neither here nor there.  The fact of the matter is that whoever owns Heart OMG has hired models who presumably are Christians.  Certainly the girls who visit the site think they are!  And let’s not forget that a photographer is involved and perhaps a marketing person as well.  I’m going to presume these people are professing Christians.  And if that’s indeed the case, my question to them is, why do you choose to participate in pushing a clothing line that dishonors God?

For years I’ve reported on the ways Hollywood and the liberal elite have made it their goal to sexualize young girls (here, here, here, here and here).  However, this is the first time I’ve dedicated an entire article to so-called Christians who seem bent on sexualizing teens and tweens.

I first wrote about tawdry church attire in 2006 and conveyed how the pastor of my former church handled a sticky situation:

The church I attend once held outdoor services during the summer. Not anymore. The reason given by our pastor–with no apology–is the “inappropriate way people dress.” When it’s hot outside some folks show up pretty much undressed, and I am not prone to exaggeration. Women attend services dressed in short shorts, low-cut clingy tops, or crops. In some cases skintight low-rider jeans are worn as low as they go so that permanent artwork (tattoos) etched into backs and hips can be viewed by all. Excuse my bluntness, ladies, but exposing your butt crack in church is unacceptable, even if you’re sporting a Rembrandt across your back.

I also objected to the clothing worn by young guys, the ones who aren’t the least bit concerned with their grungy appearance.  But my point here is that Bible believing, God honoring Christian females mustn’t wear flashy, flamboyant, tight fitting, low cut, sexually explicit clothing to church – or anywhere else!  Being uninhibited and unreserved may be A-ok with “Sweet Jesus.”  But being “too sexy for my shirt” is not A-ok with the Jesus of the Bible.

In 1Timothy 2:9, 10 Paul reminds women:

In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness [modesty of appearance and manner] and sobriety [self-restraint].

Likewise, Peter had something to say to women in the early church:

But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price. (1 Peter 3:4)

Jesus Christ gives His followers this command:

As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance: But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy. (1 Peter 1:14-16)

Getting back to my’06 article, I pointed out that one of the problems with trying to be cool is that, followers of Jesus aren’t supposed to be cool; they’re supposed to be holy. But few pastors preach on holiness these days. Even though we serve a holy God and are called to be holy as He is holy, the message of sin and repentance has been diluted to appeal to the “felt needs” of today’s self-absorbed audience. People want to leave the church feeling good about themselves. No one wants to hear anything “negative” anymore. “That’s what liberalism is,” says Gene Edward Veith, “changing your theology to fit whatever the culture is.”  (Source)

Our younger generation is being preyed upon by adults that will do anything for a buck. Adults are the ones who peddle the raunchy products that hyper-sexualize the culture.  Young people, especially, are demeaned and exploited for profit.  A word of warning to sleaze peddling “Christians”: God deems what you’re doing a grave sin. Repent!

Back in 2008 I penned a piece entitled “Hyper-sexualizing girls.” In it I described how even professing Christians are participating in this terrible offense against God.  I asked,

And what, pray tell, is the Church doing to put a stop to the madness? The sad fact is that many Christians have yielded to the culture. And those that have are just as complicit in hyper-sexualizing youngsters as liberals are. So I pose this question to followers of Jesus Christ: Why do you suppose the world doesn’t believe what Christians have to say?

The answer is that Christians don’t live what they say they believe. Instead they live like the world.

“The Christian life,” says Warren Weirsbe, “is not a playground, but a battlefield.” [Read Eph. 6:11-12] Those who commit to follow Jesus Christ have got to get off the playground and make haste to the battlefield. Your children’s future is at stake. And I’m not talking to you nominal Christians. I’m talking to those who are serious about their commitment to Christ. Yes, fighting the culture is an uphill fight. But we can win some battles! “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). (Source)

In closing, I’ll restate what I said above. Bible believing Christians who really want to glorify God must steer clear of the “new breed” of Christian fashion and dress modestly.  Believers must pray that so-called Christians who are promoting trashy clothing to impressionable girls will have a change of heart.  What can change hearts and minds? The Gospel of Jesus Christ!

Recommended reading:
Should Christians “judge” others? You betcha!—By Marsha West

Piers Morgan Takes Aim At The Bible

You’ve got to hand it to bloviating Brit Piers Morgan. While he got most of the facts wrong in his recent targeting of the Second Amendment, it hasn’t stopped him from moving on to even more formidable targets.

Such as the Bible.

He says the book is “inherently flawed” — and needs to be amended.

Piers handed down his decree while interviewing SaddlebackChurch pastor Rick Warren on the December 24^th “Piers Morgan Tonight.” Yes, on Christmas Eve. When other hosts might be discussing love, brotherhood, salvation, and all things ethereal, Captain Morgan was giving us the world according to Piers. And how would he improve the Good Book? Said he, “Both the Bible and the Constitution were well intentioned, but they are basically, inherently flawed. Hence the need to amend it. My point to you [Warren] about gay rights, for example; it’s time for an amendment to the Bible.”

Well, Piers, we’re so blessed to have you to correct both America’s founding document and the most influential book in history. We had to suffer more than 200 years with one and more than 2000 with the other, but the right god-man has finally come along. Oh, and when you’re done with that, old boy, can you contact the Genome Project and rewrite the human genetic code for us? We’re flawed, too.

To Warren’s credit, he politely but firmly disagreed, responding to the amendment call by saying:

What I believe is flawed is human opinion because it constantly changes. […]What was hot is now not. […]My definition of Truth is: if it’s new, it’s not true. If it was true a thousand years ago, it’ll be true a thousand years from today; opinion changes, but Truth doesn’t.

To this Morgan quite predictably responded, “We’re going to agree to disagree on that.”

Warren then noted how pleasant their exchange had been, prompting Morgan to concur and say, “The debate should always be respectful. By the way, it applies to politics, too. The moment it becomes disrespectful, and discourteous, and then rude, and then poisonous, you never achieve anything.” Talk about amendment — without making amends. If that’s what Morgan now believes, he has definitely discovered a new “truth” since his recent interview with Larry Pratt.

This brings us to what lies at the very heart of modern liberalism and confuses the head of Piers Morgan. When Morgan disagreed on the unchanging nature of Truth, he was espousing moral relativism. This is the notion that what we call “morality” is determined by man and thus is relative to the time, place, and people. It is also something virtually every liberal believes.

And while Morgan’s relativistic statement was almost made in passing, and was allowed to pass — perhaps partially because of time constraints — it was actually the most significant comment of the exchange (relativistic sentiments always would be). Why? Because that was precisely when Morgan, completely and abjectly, lost the debate. And if you understand what I’m about to explain, you’ll be able to cut any liberal off at the knees — anytime.

While many will say, as Warren might have implied, that relativism reduces morality to opinion, even this is both too generous and a misunderstanding. “Opinion” often refers to a thesis about what may be the answer to a particular question, about what may be true. But this presupposes that there are answers to be found, that there is such a thing as “true.” In other words, Mars exists not because everyone believes it does, but because its existence is a physical truth. And the question is, does moral Truth exist in the same way, apart from man and his imagination? If not, then saying that something is morally “true” would make as much sense as saying that planet Vulcan exists simply because you felt it did. Delusion does not a truth make.

So relativism does not reduce morality to opinion. It implies something else.

That morality doesn’t exist.

After all, to say that society determines “morality” is to simply put lipstick on the pig of man’s preferences about behavior. To analogize the matter, if we learned that 90 percent of the world preferred vanilla to chocolate, would this somehow make chocolate “wrong” or “evil”? No, it would simply be an issue of taste. But then how does it make any sense to say that murder is “wrong” if the only reason we do so is that the majority of the world prefers that one not kill in a way the majority calls “unjust”? If this is all it is, then murder falls into the same category as flavor: taste. Again, delusion does not a truth make.

More intellectually nimble moral relativists have thought the above through and — although their ultimate conclusion is wrong — they don’t fool themselves the way Morgan, Richard Dawkins, and virtually every other leftist do. For example, I know of a fellow who has echoed the Protagorean mistake “Man is the measure of all things” and said, “Murder isn’t wrong; it’s just that society says it is.” He takes liberals’ cherished relativism to its logical conclusion (or at least close to it).

This brings us back to Morgan’s philosophical juvenility. He repeatedly stated in his Warren interview that the Bible was “flawed,” but such a concept is incomprehensible in a relativistic universe. For what yardstick is he using to judge the Bible?  He certainly cannot refer to any transcendent Truth (a redundancy). And the times, places, and people that extol(led) Scripture certainly don’t align with his judgment, and who is he to impose his values on them? “What you espouse is your ‘truth,’ Piers; theirs is different. Don’t be so judgmental.” That’s how easy it is to hoist liberals on their own petards.

The same applies to homosexual “rights.” If “morals” are values and values just reflect tastes, how can respecting homosexuals be morally superior to persecuting them? How can any behavior preference rightly be judged at all? I think here of how the robot in the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day repeatedly asked the adolescent John Connor why he shouldn’t kill people. “Why? Why?” The machine was just being logical, unlike the liberal organic robots (atheism=no souls=man is merely chemicals and water) that entertain meaning-inducing illusions. In a relativistic universe, moral principles do not compute. This is why any relativism-buttressed point collapses upon itself.

Feelings can become fashions, but never morals. “The Bible isn’t flawed; it’s just that secular society says it is. Respecting homosexuals isn’t right; it’s just that secular society says it is. And what Adam Lanza did isn’t wrong; it’s just that all of society says it is.” Does that sound sociopathic, Piers? It is.

It is also what your relativism implies.

That is Philosophy 101. And if you can’t understand even that, Mr. Morgan, you’re going to start to seem, to use your own words, like an “unbelievably stupid man.”

Should Christians Hold Prayer Vigils With Apostates?

During the 2012 election, the New Religious Right (NRR) held prayer vigils all throughout the United States. Their rallying cry: “If my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14

There is nothing wrong with Christians gathering together to pray for a common cause.  There is nothing wrong with asking God to return our country to biblical principles for the simple reason that those of us who profess Christ believe that there’s something diabolical going on, and our country is in the grip of evil.  The way we see it, spiritual forces of wickedness have invaded virtually every aspect of society.  And this reality is what drives us to our knees to plead with God to intervene on our behalf.  As the election drew close, we appealed to the Creator to spare us from an administration that aims to transform America into a socialist utopia.

Even though large groups of conservatives from many religious systems joined together and prayed their brains out, God did not spare America.

What struck me as odd is that many professing Christians met in large groups to pray with people that reject the God of the Bible even knowing that those from other religious faiths do not pray to the God of Christianity. So the purpose for praying with unbelievers is….?

Now consider this. The Bible teaches that anyone who is not born again is not indwelled by the Holy Spirit.  I tackled this subject in “Are you praying to the only true God”:

Scripture speaks of God the Holy Spirit residing within all who believe in the Son of God. The Spirit guides, instructs and empowers believers. (John 14:16-17) As well, the “Spirit of truth” confirms everything about Jesus. (John 15:26) The unregenerate (unsaved) person is not Spirit filled. God does not hear anyone’s prayer unless it is put into words by the Holy Spirit. So if we want our prayers to be heard and answered we must pray to the right God. (Source)

Paul drives home the point in 1 Timothy 2:5:

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

As mediator, Jesus Christ stands between God and men to reconcile man to God.  According to Scripture, God does not hear the prayers of the unrepentant sinner. “Sin had made a quarrel between us and God; Jesus Christ is the Mediator who makes peace.”

Returning to the election, Albert Mohler believes it was a “catastrophe” and a “disaster” for evangelicals. He said in a New York Times interview:

It’s not that our message—we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong—didn’t get out. It did get out.  It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed. An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.

Perhaps the NRR leaders should put their priorities in order and do what the Bible commands.  First and foremost followers of Jesus Christ must share the Good News of the Gospel with the lost.  (1 Corinthians 15:3-4, Mark 16:15) We may defeat the evils of our day through political means and we may change laws. But unless man’s sinful heart is changed, evil will persist.

We must also oppose the evolutionary secularist worldview.  Many pro-family groups have been in the trenches for decades, fighting to “take back America for God.”  It has been an up-hill battle — and expensive to boot.  But let’s be honest; in spite of all our efforts and the money we’ve poured into winning the culture war, liberals are winning!

After months of pleading with God to oust Obama, we’re now asking, “Why did God allow his re-election?”

In a word: Judgment.

So with that in mind, the question we should be asking ourselves is, “Why is God judging America?”

Again, in a word: Sin.

When I was a child and disobeyed my parents I got a spanking.  But before the boom was lowered I’d cry out, “Don’t spank me! I’ll be good, I promise!” All the pleading in the world did not work with my parents. They’d give me a licking because I deserved one.

Well, America is getting a licking because we deserve one. It would seem that God has closed his ears to our pleas and stale promises. We the Peeps have not repented of our sins and turned from our wicked ways.  In fact, most Americans could care less what God thinks of their lascivious behavior.  So for now, at least, God will allow us to continue wallowing in filth.

I believe one of the reasons God has turned us over to a reprobate mind, to do what should not be done (Rom. 1:28) is that, like the world, the visible Church is awash in sin.  A whole host of self-professed Christians are deep in sin simply because they have no clear understanding of what God deems sinful — and they have no desire to find out!

Satan uses syncretism to separate God from His people.  Religious syncretism is the blending of differing systems of belief.  “Syncretism relies on the whim of man, not the standard of Scripture.”  Syncretism in Protestantism occurred when elements of other religious beliefs were integrated into mainstream denominations. So, what’s the big deal?

The big deal is blending historic Christianity with other philosophies!  Listen to Deuteronomy 12:29-31:

When the LORD thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land; Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.

The LORD was not kidding around.

Syncretism slithered into the Church through liberalism.  But well intended evangelical conservatives who make up a large part of pro-family groups are also responsible.  In their desperation to “bring America back to God” groups such as the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, Americans for Working Families, Wall Builders, Traditional Values Coalition, Liberty Council and Concerned Women for America reached out to a slew of controversial Christians (false teachers), including men and women in theological cults!  And they’re routinely invited to participate in spiritual and political endeavors — even prayer rallies!

Over the years religious renegades have shared the platform with GOP candidates, congressmen, entertainers, heads of pro-family groups, and other conservative superstars.  Now, I’m not saying that people on stage with renegades share their beliefs; what I’m saying is that when highly regarded leaders unite with heretics and cultists, the public sees it as an endorsement!

“If the New Religious Right were truly committed first and foremost to sound biblical theology and doctrine,” says Brannon Howse, “they would not be involved in spiritual enterprises with those who participate in the New Age Movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, ecumenicalism, globalism, communitarianism, the Church of Rome, the Word of Faith movement, social justice, and the social gospel.”

As Brannon rightly pointed out, the Word of Faith movement is not committed to sound biblical doctrine. What they teach is heretical!

Here CRI exposes word-faith teaching:

God created man in “God’s class,” as “little gods,” with the potential to exercise what they refer to as the “God-kind of faith” in calling things into existence and living in prosperity and success as sovereign beings. Of course, we forfeited this opportunity by rebelling against God in the Garden and taking upon ourselves Satan’s nature. To correct this situation, Jesus Christ became a man, died spiritually (thus taking upon Himself Satan’s nature), went to hell, was “born again,” rose from the dead with God’s nature again, and then sent the Holy Spirit so that the incarnation could be duplicated in believers, thus fulfilling their calling to be what they call “little gods.” Since we’re called to experience this kind of life now, we should be successful in virtually every area of our lives. To be in debt, then, or be sick, or (as is even taught by the faith teachers) to be left by one’s spouse, simply means that you don’t have enough faith — or you have some secret sin in your life, because if you didn’t, you would be able to handle all of these problems.

Further…

In every instance, the “Word-Faith” teaching is guilty of presenting an inflated view of man and a deflated view of God, thereby compromising God’s message as revealed in the Bible. This fast-growing movement has disastrous implications and, in fact, reduces Jesus Christ to a means to an end — when in fact he is the end. If the New Age Movement is the greatest threat to the church from without, “positive confession” may well be its greatest threat from within. (Online source)

Another movement mentioned by Brannon Howse is the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).  The NAR, aka dominionists, hold that God is restoring the lost offices of church governance, namely the offices of Prophet and Apostle.  The leaders fancy themselves modern-day apostles and prophets and believe they have the same gifts as the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles.  In a piece I wrote entitled “Dominionists are on the move…and they mean business” I brought to light some of their unbiblical beliefs:

The NAR/dominionist’s goal is to transform society into the kingdom of God on earth. How? By controlling various aspects of society. The term they use is the “Seven Mountains,” or “Seven Spheres” of society. The Seven Mountains are: 1) Arts and Entertainment; 2) Business/Economy; 3) Education; 4) Family; 5) Government; 6) Media; 7) Religion. The NAR holds that as they accomplish ridding the world of evil, things will get better and better and then Jesus Christ will return to set up His kingdom.

The goals of the CR [Christian Right] and the NAR seem like a good idea, right? I mean, who could argue with wanting to influence the seven spheres of society that are dominated by secular humanists. Christians are not wrong in desiring to have a society based on Judeo-Christian principles. But here’s the problem. This “mandate” the NAR mob subscribes to did not come from the Lord Jesus Christ. In John 18:36 Jesus made it clear: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

However, dominionists never let a little thing like what Jesus said get in the way of their lofty goals. One of the most troubling aspects of their “theology” is the unbiblical teaching on spiritual warfare. They believe they have a kingdom mandate to do “strategic-level spiritual warfare” which is “a popular charismatic method of casting out demons from geographical locations or territories. It identifies three levels of demonic control on earth. Firstly, are “Ground-Level” demons, which possess people. Secondly, “Occult-Level” demons empower witches, shamans, magicians. Finally, “Strategic-Level” demons which are the most powerful of the three, are said to rule over certain regions or territories. Their main purpose is to hinder people from coming to Christ.”

Hence, dominionists go hither and yon to do strategic-level spiritual warfare to tear down demonic strongholds established by Satan and his demons. This is not local; it’s global. (Source)

The fact of the matter is that the word-faith/positive confession movement and the NAR have many of the same heretical beliefs.  In Matthew 7:15-17, Jesus warned:

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. You shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree brings forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit. … Therefore by their fruits you shall know them.

In Ephesians 5:11 Paul tells us to “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them.”  We are not only to expose them, we are to call them what they are – evil!  We have many examples in the Bible of name calling. For example, in Matthew 23 Jesus called the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites and “whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones.”  He called these same men serpents and a brood of vipers, looked them squarely in the face and said, “how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?”

But instead of exposing unfruitful works of darkness as we are commanded to do, New Religious Right leaders, many of whom profess Christ, organize prayer events with them!

So – did God hear those prayers?  Consider who He hears according to Scripture and draw your own conclusion.

Resources:

New Apostolic Reformation articles—On Solid Rock Resources
Televangelists & Word of Faith Movement—On Solid Rock Resources
Are you praying to the only true God? By Marsha West
Liberals created the culture of evil and death, part 2 By Marsha West
How the Religious Right Assisted in the Re-Election of President Obama And Are Hastening God’s Judgment of America By Brannon Howse

Climate Change, Economic Crisis And The Violence of War

“Nuclear, ecological, chemical, economic — our arsenal of Death by Stupidity is impressive for a species as smart as Homo sapiens” ¹

The hurricanes, the typhoons, the heat waves … the droughts, the heavy rains, the floods … ever more powerful, ever new records being set. Something must be done of course. Except if you don’t believe at all that it’s man-made. But if there’s even a small chance that the greenhouse effect is driving the changes, is it not plain that, at a minimum, we have to err on the side of caution? There’s too much at stake. Like civilization as we know it. Carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere must be greatly curtailed.

The three greatest problems facing the beleaguered, fragile inhabitants of this lonely planet are climate change, economic crisis, and the violence of war. It is my sad duty to report that the United States of America is the main culprit in each case. Is that not remarkable?

Why does Barack Obama not pursue the battle against climate change with the same intensity he pursues war? Why does he not seek to punish the American bankers and stockbrokers responsible for the financial calamity as much as he seeks to punish Julian Assange and Bradley Manning?

In both cases he’s putting the interests of the corporate world before anything else. No amount of fines or penalties will induce corporate leaders to modify their behavior. Only spending some hard time in a prison cellblock might cause the growth in them of their missing part, the part that’s shaped like a social conscience.

Only prosecuting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their partners in bombing and torture will discourage future American war lovers from following in their bloody footsteps.

The recent election result can only embolden Obama. He likely took it as an affirmation of his policies, although only 29.3% of those eligible to vote actually voted for him. And an unknown, but certainly significant, number of those who did so held their nose while voting for the supposed lesser of two evils. Hardly indicative of impassioned support for his policies.

Last week the United Nations Climate Summit was held in Doha, Qatar. The comments which came from many of the activists (as opposed to various government officials) were doomsdayish … “Time is running out … time has already run out … the climate has already changed … Hurricane Sandy, rising sea levels, the worst is yet to come.” The Kyoto protocol is still the only international treaty stipulating cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a touchstone for many environmentalists. But the United States has never ratified it. At the previous conferences in Copenhagen and Durban, the US blocked important global action and failed to honor vital pledges.

At the Doha conference the US was acutely criticized for failing to take the lead on planet protection, especially in light of its standing as the largest historic contributor to the current levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. (“The most obdurate bully in the room”, declared the Indian environmentalist, Sunita Narain. ²)

What motivates the American representatives, now as before, as ever, is concern about corporate profits. Cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions can hurt the bottom line. A suitable epitaph for the earth’s tombstone. Shamus Cooke, writing on ZSpace, sums it up well: “Thus, if renewable energy is not as profitable as oil — and it isn’t — then the majority of capitalist investing will continue to go towards destroying the planet. It really is that simple. Even the best-intentioned capitalists do not throw their money away on non-growth investments.”

A brief history of Superpowers

From the Congress of Vienna of 1815 to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to the “Allies” invasion of Russia in 1918 to the formation of what became the European Union in the 1950s, the great powers of Europe and the world have gotten together in grand meeting halls and on the field of battle to set the ground rules for imperialist exploitation of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Australasia, to Christianize and ‘civilize’, to remake the maps, and to suppress revolutions and other threats to great-power hegemony. They have been deadly serious. In 1918, for example, some 13 nations, including France, Great Britain, Rumania, Italy, Serbia, Greece, Japan, and the United States, combined in a military invasion of Russia to “strangle at its birth” the nascent Bolshevik state, as Winston Churchill so charmingly put it.

And following World War 2, without any concern about who had fought and died to win that war, the Western powers, sans the Soviet Union, moved to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO, along with the European Union, then joined the United States in carrying out the Cold War and preventing the Communists and their allies from coming to power legally through elections in France and Italy. That partnership continued after the formal end of the Cold War. The United States, the European Union, and NATO are each superpowers, with extensive military, as well as foreign policy integration — almost all EU members are also members of NATO; almost all NATO members in Europe are in the EU; almost all NATO members have had a military contingent serving under NATO and/or the US in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere.

Together, this Holy Triumvirate has torn apart Yugoslavia, invaded and devastated Afghanistan and Iraq, crippled Iran, Cuba and others with sanctions, overthrown the Libyan government, and are on the verge now of the same in Syria. Much of what the Triumvirate has told the world to justify this wanton havoc has concerned Islamic terrorism, but it should be noted that prior to the interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria all three countries were secular and modern. Will the people of those sad lands ever see that life again?

In suppressing the left in France and Italy, and later in destabilizing the governments of Libya and Syria, the Holy Triumvirate has closely aligned itself with terrorists and terrorist methods to a remarkable extent. ³ In Syria alone, it would be difficult to name any Middle East terrorist group associated with al Qaeda — employing their standard car bombings and suicide bombers — that is not taking part in the war against President Assad with the support of the Triumvirate. Is there anything — legally or morally — the Triumvirate regards as outside its purview? Any place not within its geographical mandate? Britain and France have now joined Turkey and Arabian Peninsula states in recognizing a newly formed opposition bloc as the sole representative of the Syrian people. “From the point of view of international law, this is absolutely unacceptable,” Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev declared. “A desire to change the political regime of another state by recognizing a political force as the sole carrier of sovereignty seems to me to be not completely civilised.” France was the first Western state to recognize the newly-formed Syrian National Coalition and was swiftly joined by Britain, Italy and the European Union. ⁴ The neck irons tighten.

The European Union in recent years has been facing a financial crisis, where its overriding concern has been to save the banks, not its citizens, inspiring calls from the citizenry of some member states to leave the Union. I think the dissolution of the European Union would benefit world peace by depriving the US/NATO mob of a guaranteed partner in crime by returning to the Union’s members their individual discretion in foreign policy.

And then we can turn to getting rid of NATO, an organization that not only has a questionable raison d’être in the present, but never had any good reason-to-be in the past other than serving as Washington’s hit man. ⁵

The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo — 21 years in a row

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We don’t hear that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions):

Year	Votes (Yes-No)	No Votes
1992	59-2	US, Israel
1993	88-4	US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994	101-2	US, Israel
1995	117-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996	138-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997	143-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1998	157-2	US, Israel
1999	155-2	US, Israel
2000	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002	173-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003	179-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2004	179-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005	182-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006	183-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007	184-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008	185-3	US, Israel, Palau
2009	187-3	US, Israel, Palau
2010	187-2	US, Israel
2011	186-2	US, Israel
2012	188-3	US, Israel, Palau

 

Each fall the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does not completely control the opinion of other governments.

How it began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” ⁶ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo against its eternally-declared enemy.

Placing American presidents in their proper context

“Once upon a time there was a radical president who tried to remake American society through government action. In his first term he created a vast network of federal grants to state and local governments for social programs that cost billions. He set up an imposing agency to regulate air and water emissions, and another to regulate workers’ health and safety. Had Congress not stood in his way he would have gone much further. He tried to establish a guaranteed minimum income for all working families and, to top it off, proposed a national health plan that would have provided government insurance for low-income families, required employers to cover all their workers and set standards for private insurance. Thankfully for the country, his second term was cut short and his collectivist dreams were never realize.
His name was Richard Nixon.” ⁷

Films on US foreign policy

The Power Principle is a series of three films by Scott Noble. Part one, “Empire”, is the only one I’ve seen completely so far and I can say that it’s great stuff. The three parts, with their times, are:

• Part 1: Empire (1h 35m)
• Part 2: Propaganda (1h 38m)
• Part 3: Apocalypse (1h 10m)

Featured in the films are Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, John Stockwell, Christopher Simpson, Ralph McGehee, Philip Agee, Nafeez Ahmed, John Perkins, James Petras, John Stauber, Russ Baker, Howard Zinn, William Blum, Nancy Snow, William I. Robinson, Morris Berman, Peter Phillips, Michael Albert, and others of the usual suspects.

To comment about these films or others by Scott Noble, write to him at dmacab9@hotmail.com.

Much more publicized is the new film and book by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. Entitled The Untold History of the United States, it is a 10-part series appearing on Showtime. Only Stone’s name could get this dark side of US history and foreign policy on mainstream television. It will be interesting to observe what the mass media has to say about this challenge to some of America’s most cherished beliefs about itself.

Notes

1. Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times, September 17, 2009 ^↩
2. Democracy Now!, December 7, 2012 ^↩
3. For France and Italy, see Operation Gladio Wikipedia; and Daniele Ganser, Operation Gladio: NATO’s Top Secret Stay-Behind Armies and Terrorism in Western Europe (2005) ^↩
4. Agence France Presse, November 26, 2012^↩
5. For the best coverage of the NATO monolith, sign up with StopNATO. To get on the mailing list write to Rick Rozoff at r_rozoff@yahoo.com. To see back issues at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato ^↩
6. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991), p.885 ^↩
7. From the review of the book: I am the change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism by Charles Kesler. Review by Mark Lilla, The New York Times Book Review, September 30, 2012, p.1 ^↩

The Cashless Society Is Almost Here – And With Some Very Sinister Implications

Among the long list of items bundled by consensus reality merchants under the banner of ‘conspiracy theory’, is a world without cash – where technocrats rule over the populace, and everything and anything is exchanged via plastic and RFID chips.

In this sterile and controlled Orwellian hi-tech society, the idea of cash being passed from hand to hand would be as archaic as the thought of carrying around a rucksack of tally sticks today.

Still, despite the incredible penetration of credit and debit card transactions into economic aggregate, and the boom in internet shopping, few will comfortably admit that a cashless society is nearly upon us. In part, it’s a natural denial by many fueled by the idea of our society is indeed on a collision course with the sort of dystopic impersonal future like that depicted in the 1970′s sci-fi film classic, ‘Logan’s Run’.

Cashless money is here, and growing rapidly.

Over the years, futurists and commentators alike seemed to agree that a cashless society would be a slow creep, and cash would automatically phase itself in simply by virtue of the sheer volume of electronic transactions that would gradually make paper less available and more costly to redeem and exchange. This is still true for the most part. What few counted on, however, was how the final push would take place, and why. Some will be surprised by these new emerging mechanisms, and the political and sinister implications they will ultimately lead to.

What’s the time frame on all this? Difficult to say, but what is certain is that the initial phases are already in motion…

Introduction of Parallel Currencies 

There has been a lot made about the ‘cashless society’ in media, but this cannot fully happen until there is a cashless currency.

Every revolution needs a good crisis in order to germinate its seed. The cashless revolution is no different. It should be abundantly clear by now that the global financial meltdown has been engineered at every juncture of its unfolding by the very private central banks who expand and contract the money supply. A dollar or euro collapse will trigger a global economic crisis, which is a prime opportunity to introduce the next phase.

In the summer of 2012, at the height of the European Central Bank (ECB) ritualistic raping of the Greek economy, financial expert Max Keiser, alongside Mexican billionaire Hugo Salinas Price, traveled to Athens to promote the idea of a silver Drachma as a parallel currency to the ever-failing euro. In theory and in practice, this parallel currency was ‘sound money’ for individual Greeks and would allow them to retain some say in their financial destiny, and also allow them to accumulate real wealth. It should have caught on.  But this great idea did not go down well with media moguls and technocratic elites loyal to their overlords in the ECB, Wall Street and the City of London. Still, too many people remain unaware of how money is created, entered into circulation and how their private central banks control inflation, and Greece is no different.

Watch this clip from Greek television:

The US dollar is pure fiat, but it does have a theoretical backer. It is an oil-backed currency – and for better of for worse, it’s on its way to losing its long-lived status as the world’s reserve currency. There are signals that China is moving towards a gold-backed currency and has already agreed to buy the majority of its oil supply from Russia off of the US dollar peg. This could mean two things: the US could be forced to fight a war to maintain dollar supremacy, or the dollar will begin to drop as the top dog. This shift will open up a window of opportunity for money masters to insert not only a brand new global currency, but also its universal cashless attributes as well.

Common sense and free market wisdom would expect to see a sound money option replace the current fiat disaster, but as we saw in Greece, a great solution was not taken up and straddled with the dysfunctional euro, that society will continue to pay the cost of that reality.

The euro crisis was a great opportunity to throw out the euro in favour of something that could create wealth, rather than debt. As the fiat currencies continue to slide downhill, globalist are preparing their solution behind closed doors.

Enter the Cashless Currency…

It’s arguable that we approaching the cusp of that US Dollar collapse, and perhaps a Euro implosion on the back end of it. Risks of hyper inflation are very real here, but if you control the money supply might already have a ready-made solution waiting in the wings, you will not be worrying about the rift, only waiting for the chaos to ensue so as to maximise your own booty from the crisis.

Many believed that the global currency would be the SDR unit, akaSpecial Drawing Rights, implemented in 2001 as a supplementary foreign exchange reserve asset maintained by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). SDRs were not considered a full-fledged currency, but rather a claim to currency held by IMF member countries for which they may be exchanged for dollars, euros, yen or other central bankers’ fiat notes.

With the SDR confined to the upper tier of the international money launderette, a new product is still needed to dovetail with designs of a  global cashless society.

Two new parallel currencies are currently being used exclusively within the electronic, or cashless domain – Bitcoin and Ven. 

Among the many worries Ben Bernanke listed in his speech at the New York Economic Club last week  was the emergence of Bitcoin. But don’t believe for a second that these digital parallel currencies are not being watched over and even steered by the money masters. Couple this latest trend with done deals by most of the world’s largest mobile networks this month to allow people to pay via a mobile ‘wallet’, and you now have the initial enabler for a new global electronic currency.

These new parallel cashless currencies could very quickly end up in pole position for supremacy when the old fiat notes fade away as a result of the next planned economic dollar and euro crisis.

Both Bitcoin and Ven appear on their surface to be independent parallel digital money systems, but the reality is much different. In April 2011, Ven announced the first commodity trade priced in Ven for gold production between Europe and South America. Both of these so-called ‘digital alternatives’ are being backed and promoted through some of the world’s biggest and most long-standing corporate dynasties, including Rothschild owned Reuters as an example, which should be of interest to any activist who believes that a digitally controlled global currency is a dangerous path to tread down.

The Electronic Deutsche Mark

Much is made of Germany’s prominent financial position within the EU, with a popular talking point being that, “Germany is carrying the majority of the load in ‘bailing out’ countries such as Greece in the south”. If the Euro is ‘heading south’ as many a financial commentator are claiming, then how would a country like Germany – or even the US Federal Reserve for that matter, hedge their bets with an impending currency collapse looming just over the horizon?

Economics professor Miles Kimball from the University of Michigan thinks he knows the answer:

“In short, for a smooth transition, a reintroduced mark needs to be an electronic mark. I recently made the case for the electronic dollar in a previous Quartz column, “E-Money: How paper currency is holding the US recovery back.” The trouble with paper money is that the rate of interest people earn on holding paper money puts a floor on the interest rate they are willing to accept in doing any other lending. For the US, I proposed making the electronic dollar the “unit of account” or economic yardstick for prices and other economic values, and having the Federal Reserve control the exchange rate between electronic dollars and paper dollars to make paper dollars gradually fall in value relative to electronic dollars during periods of time when the Fed wants room to make the interest rate negative.

In the case of Germany, there would be no need to reintroduce a paper mark along with the electronic mark, since the euro itself could continue in its current role as a “medium of exchange” for making purchases in Germany, alongside the electronic mark. A “crawling peg” exchange rate could be used to let the electronic mark gradually go up in value relative to the euro, without causing a huge rush into the mark, since with no paper mark other than the euro itself, interest rates in Germany could be close to zero when measured in euros, which would make them strongly negative in terms of marks.”

A dollar or euro crash could be the perfect storm for the introduction of a major global digital currencies, and this will do nothing but fast-track our entry into the new cashless society.

Contactless Payments

This past year’s Summer Olympic was a beta testing exercise for a number of new programs. We witnessed troops deployed en mass for the first time to marshal the international sporting event and new facial recognition technology tested to monitor its attendees. One of the chief sponsors of London 2012 Olympic was VISA, used the event as a springboard to launch its new ‘contactless payment’ technology, acclimatising the international public to making routine payments via smartphones. VISA now predicts that this new method will carry 50 per cent of its transaction volume by the year 2020.

Mastercard has also rolled out its own version called Paypass, andBarclaycard has already implemented its own mobile phone payment chip in 2011. It conceivable here, that a bank like Barclays could one day takeover a major mobile service provider in order to streamline the endless profits it could accrue from monopolising cashless payment facilities for its customers. A recent edition of Marketing Week further explains how this is program is being rolled out:

“Barclays launched Pingit this year, a mobile payment service that allows customers to send and receive money with a mobile phone number, which has sparked The Payments Council to work on a similar project. And the three leading mobile operators in the UK – EE, Vodafone and O2 – are working on a joint project under the name Weve, one of the aims of which is to develop standardised technology for ‘digital wallets’ on mobile.

These industry innovations reflect the changing attitude and behaviour by consumers to cashless payments. Barry Clark, account director at Future Foundation, which identified the trend towards a cashless society in its recent report into the changing face of payments, explains that this move towards digital is a “banking nirvana” for brands, since replacing cash with electronic payments takes high costs out of the system.”

These mobile enablers will effectively cover the small services and contractor’s market for the cashless society. In addition, digital payment terminals like iZettle and Square (created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey), have brought in most small traders, including taxi drivers, plumbers etc, and street side retailers – meaning that the barrier for entry into the new cashless society has been effectively dissolved.

The Socialist ‘Oyster’

The darker aspect of a cashless society, is one which few are debating or discussing, but is actually the most pivotal in terms of scial engineering and transforming communities and societies. In London, the electronic touch payment Oyster Cardwas introduced in 2003, initially for public transport, and since that time the card has been co-opted to be used for other functions, as the UK beta tests the idea of an all-in-one cashless lifestyle solution.

Ironically, and alongside biometric chipping now in India, it’s the United States, supposedly the birthplace of modern capitalism, who is beta testing its own socialist technocracy.  As the ranks of the poor and unemployed grow and dollar inflation rises in America, more and more people are dependent on traditional ‘Food Stamp’entitlements in order to feed their families. The US has now introduced its own socialist ‘Oyster’ to replace the old Food Stamp program. It’s called the ‘EBT’, which stands for “Electronic Benefit Transfer“, as a means of transferring money from the central government to people living below the poverty line. Advocate Mike Adams for Natural News describes it another way:

History Will Repeat Itself

Whenever the status quo is seen as a failure, the architects of society will rarely allow the whole show to come to a grinding halt, for fear that new and non-centrally controlled organic systems of organisation will emerge. The ruling establishment will spare no opportunity to tell society this, over and over, making people truly believe that it is in their best interest to adopt whatever alternative is handed down to them. This is why, when faced with a crisis, society will almost always seek to implement a parallel alternatives, rather than rethink the whole system.

In 2008, the public had an opportunity to collapse the predatory banking system that has been trading insolvent and gambling on thin air. But the very same ruling establishment who engineered the crisis to  begin with, masterfully presented their own solution as the remedy by establishing the precedent of the state bailing out any gambling losses incurred by the banking community.

In the end society relented, and with help of pro-banking political leadership on both sides of the Atlantic, they adopted the pre-packaged belief that a cluster of bloated and corrupt financial institutions were simply too big to fail. Aside from being a massive redistribution of wealth upwards into the hands of the speculative elite classes, this was merely a test by the establishment to see how far they could go in robbing the public, pushing up inflation, hoovering up real assets, robbing pension funds and enslaving taxpayers to generations of debt the bankers created – all in one swoop.

It has long been the dream of collectivists and technocratic elites to eliminate the semi-unregulated cash economy and black markets in order to maximise taxation and to fully control markets. If the cashless society is ushered in, they will have near complete control over the lives of individual people.

The financial collapse which began in 2007-2008 was merely the opening gambit of the elite criminal class, a mere warm-up for things to come. With the next collapse we may see a centrally controlled global digital currency gaining its final foothold.

The cashless society is already here. The question now is – how far will society allow it to penetrate and completely control each and every aspect of their day to day lives?

Source: Patrick Henningsen | 21stCenturyWire

Flooding Syria With Foreign Arms: A View From Damascus

Across Syria these days, one is able to examine massive evidence that this ancient civilization, the historic bastion of nationalist Arabism and since the 1948 Nabka, an essential pillar of the growing culture of Resistance to the Zionist occupation of Palestine, is becoming awash with foreign arms being funneled to “rebels” by countries advocating regime change.

This observer has been researching foreign arms transfers into certain Middle East countries since last summer in Libya, where to a lesser degree the identical foreign actors were involved in facilitating the transfer of arms and fighters to topple the then, “Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”

During a recent stay in Syria, I was able to observe first hand, substantial demonstrative evidence supporting the thesis that American, Zionist and Gulf intelligence agencies as well as private arms dealers from these countries top the list of more than two dozen countries benefiting from the crisis in Syria by injecting arms. These countries gain politically and financially, via governmental and black market arms transfers.

Which countries are sending the most weapons into Syria to arm militia?

A list of the top 24  countries, among the more than three dozen that are currently involved in sending weapons to Syria to achieve regime change include: USA, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, UK, France, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Brazil, Portugal, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, and Argentina.

Above:  one of the periodic lists complied of foreign weapons confiscated from foreign fighters in Syria. Aug.-late September, 2012

Nearly two-thirds of the above listed arms suppliers are members of NATO and constitute almost half of NATO’s 28 country membership.

Russia is not included in the above list because it is the main supplier of arms to the Syrian government.  Yet, one finds older USSR era weapons and even some more recent vintage Russian arms in rebel hands, the latter from the decade (12/79-2/89) of Soviet, occupation of Afghanistan. Also offering Russian weapons are a growing number of black market arms dealers of whom there is no shortage along the Turkey-Syrian border and elsewhere.  This recent visitor to Syria was offered near the Old City, AK 47’s (Russian Kalashnikovs) or Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPG) for $ 1,800 (in Lebanon today and before the Syrian crisis the price was around $800.  After some bargaining and starting to walk away a couple of times, the “special one-time only price for an American friend” dropped to $ 750 each. Russian made Dragunov sniper rifles are being offered at $ 6,500 but can be bought for around $ 5000.Buying arms these days in Syria is a caveat emptor proposition. Fake weapons and military rejects/defects are also being offered by hustlers from nearby countries including Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey.

The involvement of numerous countries in the Syrian crisis as arms suppliers and political operatives was tangentially referenced by the recent UN Security Council Statement of 12/25/12 which admits the existence of foreign actors and implies their arms supplying activities by urging “all regional and international actors to use their influence on the parties concerned to facilitate the implementation of the (Eid al Adha) ceasefire and cessation of violence.”

Syria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Bashar al-Jaafari observed last week: “This part of the [Security Council] press statement, mentioned for the first time, proves Syria’s view repeated since the beginning of the crisis on the existence of Arab, regional and international parties influencing the armed groups negatively or positively. Therefore, those parties need to be addressed.”

One of the key challenges for  the UN and Arab League envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi whose aides told this observer at the Dama Rose hotel on 10/22/12 where we were staying, is:  “We  need to persuade key countries in the Middle East, but also internationally,  not to support the rebels with arms.

The failed initiative of envoy El  Brahimi, was the third ceasefire attempt to date following the December 2011Arab League proposal and the April 2012 Kofi Annan initiative, both of which were endorsed by the Syrian government and most of the world community.  Some rebel militia, but not nearly enough, did endorse the Brahimi four day Eid al Adha ceasefire only to have it collapse this past weekend.  To his credit, Brahimi continues his work.

The same Brahimi sources suggested that the United States may also be supplying man-portable air-defense systems (Manpods) to rebels in Syria.   According to Russian Foregin Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich, speaking on 12/15/12: “At the same time, it is also well-known that Washington is aware of supplies of various types of arms to illegal armed groups operating in Syria. Moreover, the United States, judging by admissions by American officials that have also been published in American media, is conducting coordination and providing logistical support for such supplies.” NBC News, based in New York reported in July that Syrian insurgents had obtained two dozen US MANPADS, delivered from Turkey.

A month after the October 2011 death of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in Tripoli that the U.S. was committing $40 million to help Libya “secure and recover its weapons stockpiles.”  Congressional sources report that the Obama administration is fully aware that quantities of these arms are current in Syria and more in transit.

With respect to arms moving from Libya to Syria, on the night of Sept. 11 Libya time, in what was his last public meeting, US Ambassador Christopher Stevens met with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, and accompanied him to the consulate front gate just before the assault began. Although what was discussed has not yet been made public, Washington sources including the pro-Zionist Fox News speculate that Stevens may have been in Benghazi negotiating a weapons transfer, from Libya to Syria.

Earlier this year, Assistant Secretary of State for Political and Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro expressed concerns that the increasing flow of Libya arms was far from under control. Speaking to the Stimson Center in Washington D.C. on 2/10/12 Shapiro said: “This raises the question — how many weapons and missiles are still missing? The frank answer is we don’t know and probably never will.”

According to a 10/14/12 report by the Times of London, a vessel flying the Libyan flag named Al Entisar (Victory), loaded with more than 400 tons of cargo, docked in southern Turkey 35 miles from the Syrian northern border. While some of the undeclared cargo was likely humanitarian, staff accompanying UN envoy Brahimi during his recent Syrian trip report the Al Entisar also carried the largest consignment of foreign weapons to date, including surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles, RPG’s and MANPADS destined for Syria.

Partly because of the jihadists and arms entering Syria from its northern border, southern Turkey is increasingly referred to here in Damascus as “New Afghanistan”, given its matrix of jihadists, salafists, wahabists, and battle-hardened panoply of arriving foreign would-be mujahedeen  and al Qaeda affiliates.

One teenage al Qaeda wannebe explained to the author that his specialty was making and using homemade specialized knives as shown in this photo.  He also delivered a mini-lecture he said was based on a Koranic Hadith explaining why severing heads of animals and adversaries is actually the most humane method. He gave earnest assurances that if allowed to perform a one-time demonstration, this observer would feel no pain and he would post the photo on Facebook!

Remarkably, as was witnessed in 2007, during the conflict at the Nahr al Bared Palestinian refugee camp in north Lebanon, some of the arriving eager jihadists in “New Afghanistan”  actually believe that they are fighting against Zionist forces near occupied Palestine and not killing fellow Arabs in Syria.

Some, but not all of the  many types of small arms flowing into Syria in large numbers, and viewed by this observer include:

7.62mm Tabuk (Yugoslavia) rifles, Mass rifles (UK), 7.62 mm rifles (Poland), 12 mm rifles (Italy), 7.62 mm Kalashnikovs (several countries versions), 9 mm ‘fast gun’, (Austria), 7.62 mm Val (Belgium), G3 7.62 mm G3 rifles (Germany), 7.5mm model 36 rifles (France), M16 and a variety of sniper and other rifles (USA), 7.62 rifles (Bulgaria, 10.5 Uzi and other automatic machine guns, three types of hand grenades  (Israel), 9 mm guns (Canada), 7 mm guns (Czech Republic), 7 mm guns (Brazil).

Israeli weapons are among the most frequently found in Syria as was the case in Libya. Israeli arms dealers are claimed to have recently intensified links with Blackwater International and also are currently smuggling through the Golan Heights, the tri-border area of south Lebanon, occupied Palestine and Syria.

The observer also examined and was briefed on M72 LAW and AT-3 anti-tank missiles developed by the United States. But the extent of their use is difficult to verify. Most of the arms shown in accompanying photos are from the main urban centers and near the Turkish, Iraqi, Lebanese and Jordanian borders.

In tightly built up urban areas such as Homs, Idlib and Aleppo, door to door fighting includes a battle among snipers. According to one Syrian military intelligence source in whose Damascus office this observer discussed the subject, the most frequently confiscated sniper rifles currently being found in the hands of “rebels” include:

·  the  U.S. Army & USMC M1903-A4 (also: USMC M1903-A1/Unertl), the U.S. Army & USMC M1C & M1D and U.S. Army M21;

·  the Israeli M89SR Technical Equipment International 7.62x51mm NATO Semi-automatic, Galil Sniper Rifle and the T.C.I. M89-SR,
·  the British  .243 Winchester, 7.62x51mm NATO/.308 Winchester,.300 Winchester Magnum, and the 338 Lapua Magnum Bolt action sniper rifles.

A few Afghanistan era Russian Dragonov SVD and SV-98 sniper rifles have also been confiscated among an assortment of others.

Foreign jihadists have some access to Soviet-era DShK heavy machine guns or ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft cannons which are used for anti-aircraft and fire support. Both use fairly scarce high-explosive rounds and armor-piercing rounds, which are capable of penetrating the armor of the Syrian military’s BMP infantry fighting vehicles. The ZU-23-2 “Sergey”, also known as ZU-23, is a Soviet towed 23 mm anti-aircraft cannon. Vehicle mounted Zu-23-2’s are relatively easy to spot by government aircraft and artillery units are used to attack a target and quickly flee to avoid counter strikes.

On 10/25/12 Russia reiterated its claims that the US assists and coordinates arms deliveries to foreign-sponsored insurgents battling the Syrian government forces. Russia’s chief military officer said that Syrian armed groups have acquired US-made weapons, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. This observer saw many weapons from more than a dozen types of IED’s (improvised explosive device) to medium sized artillery pieces but no missiles.

Improvised Explosive Devices are a key rebel weapon with many arriving from Iraq and camps near Hataya, Turkey. Many DIY (do it yourself) improvisations have been uncovered across Syria in both urban and rural areas. This observer examined and was briefed on several types, including those shown above.

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry issued statement of 10/25/12, “Washington is aware of the deliveries of various weapons to illegal armed groups active in Syria. Moreover, judging by the declarations of US officials published in US media, the US coordinates and provides logistical assistance in such deliveries.”

Some analysts in Damascus claim that Syria’s potential military strength has not been as effective as it could be in the current urban fights against rebels. The government appears very strong militarily if one studies the statistics regarding Syria’s large and disciplined army which continues its support and also given its sophisticated long range missiles, air defense systems that have deterred an airborne attack from Israel. One reason progress has at times appeared slow against the “rebels” according to some local analysts was a certain initial unpreparedness to confront highly motivated guerrilla militia in downtown densely populated areas. These kinds of battles, it is claimed, require a mobile infantry, armored flexibility and very effective use of light arms.  The Assad government’s “adapt, catch up and go on the offensive” paradigm is developing rapidly according to US Senate Armed Service Committee sources who assert that the Syria army has actually become battle hardened,  tougher, stronger and more disciplined over the past several months. But it has taken time and has incurred a significant cost.

Weapons examined by this observer in Syria during 10/12 include some of the more than 1,750 new American sniper rifles channeled from Iraq and NATO supply stores to rebel militia.

How foreign weapons are entering Syria

As widely speculated particularly in the regional media, foreign supplied weapons to “rebels” arrive by air, sea and mainly by land from Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and occupied Palestine.

Israel is reported, by some researchers in Damascus who have been covering the crisis for nearly 20 months, to be sending arms to Syria from Kurdistan, having had much experience in Africa, South America and Eastern Europe via Mossad and Israeli black market arms dealing. What Israel did in Libya in terms of a wide spread arms business it is also trying to do in Syria.  Israeli arms, according to Syrian and Lebanese sources are being transported into Syria from along the tri-border area of South Lebanon, near Shebaa Farms, close to Jabla al-Saddaneh, and Gadja. In addition, Israeli smugglers have increasingly, over the past five months, been seen by locals moving arms inside Syria via the Golan Heights. These violations of  Syrian and Lebanese sovereignty raise serious questions about the vigilance of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force Zone (UNDO) based in the Golan Heights as well as the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the Lebanese Army as well as National Lebanese Resistance units near the ‘blue line’ to stop the illicit Israeli arms transfers.

The recent arrival in southern Turkey and along the northern Syrian border of Blackwater mercenaries is expected to increase the foreign arms flow.  Currently using the name Academi (previously known as Xena- Xe Services LLC, Blackwater USA and Blackwater Worldwide) Academi is currently, according to Jane’s Defense Weekly, the largest of the US governments “private security” contractors.  Details of its relationship with the US Defense Department and the CIA are classified.
Is there a coherent US policy toward the Syrian crisis?

Secretary of State Clinton has been announcing recently that the U.S. is increasing its “non-lethal support” (i.e. direct shipments as opposed to boots on the ground or ballistic weapons) according to her Congressional liaison office. She also confirmed that Washington is working with its friends and allies to promote more cohesion among the disparate Syrian opposition groups with the aim of producing a new leadership council following meetings scheduled for Doha in the coming weeks.

Examples of US, UK and NATO “non-lethal aid” equipment taken from militia in south and north Syria between 5/2011 and 10/2012.

However, to the consternation of the State Department, General David Petraeus the former US commander of NATO forces in Iraq, now director of the CIA acknowledged, during his senate confirmation hearings. “Non-lethal aid to combatants, including communication equipment, is sometimes more lethal and important than explosive devices due to the logistical advantages they provides on the battlefield.”

In tandem with the US, the UK and several European governments are supplying “non-lethal” aid to the Syrian opposition, including satellite communications equipment according to Syria security sources.

There is also plenty of anecdotal and demonstrative and probative evidence in Syria of human weapons patterned on the “Zarqawi model” which refers to the bloody al Qaeda in Mesopotamia campaign named for its leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi after U.S. troops occupied Iraq.

In a speech this week in Zagreb, Croatia, this week, Secretary of State Clinton insisted that any group seeking to oust President Bashar al-Assad must reject attempts by extremists to “hijack” a legitimate revolution.  She added, “There are disturbing reports of heavily armed foreign extremists going into Syria and attempting to take over.” Clinton used her strongest words to date concerning risks that the uprising in Syria could be overtaken by militants who do not seek a democratic replacement or the reforms that the current government claims it is trying to implement. She told her conferees:  “We made it clear that the SNC can no longer be viewed as the visible leader of the opposition. They can be part of a larger opposition, but that opposition must include people from inside Syria and others who have a legitimate voice. We also need an opposition that will be on record strongly resisting the efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution. There are disturbing reports of heavily armed extremists going into Syria and attempting to take over.” Clinton advised her colleagues that the US has become convinced that the SNC does not represent the interests of all ethnic and religious groups in Syria and that it has little legitimacy among on-the-ground activists and fighters, and has done little to stem the infiltration of Islamist extremists into the opposition forces.

Clinton’s language is being interpreted by some as evidence that a post-election Obama Whitehouse, she he win on November,  may move toward the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian position and away from, what one Congressional source  derisively  labeled,  “ the view from the Gulf gas stations”  i.e. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and some other despotic monarchies.
The intervention in Syria by more than three dozen countries supplying weapons must be stopped. Both sides of the Syrian crisis need to manifest by actions, not just words, a serious commitment to meaningful dialogue. The above noted arms supplying countries, and others off stage, have a solemn obligation to their citizens and to the world community to immediately halt the shipment of arms.

They should, and their people should demand that they do without further delay, honor the words of Isaiah 2:3-5….”and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Granted, perhaps a cliché and certainly far easier said than done.

Yet, as Oregon’s late great US Senator Wayne Morse used tell audiences around America during the Vietnam War, quoting General George Marshall, “The only way we human beings can win a war is to prevent it.”

It’s time for the international community to end the Syrian crisis diplomatically, stop funneling arms and cash fueling hoped for regime change elements. Instead, they must demand that all the involved parties immediately engage in serious dialogue and settle their differences.

Rick Warren And Joel Osteen Acquiesce To Oprah

Is there no end to the lack of spiritual discernment within the Christian community?  Even some of our Church leaders are showing a startling lack of discernment.  And if we can’t trust our leaders to help us stay on the straight and narrow path, who can we trust?

On October 5^th, Southern Baptist preacher Rick Warren sat down with New Age/New Thought high priestess Oprah Winfrey for an interview.  Although Oprah claims to be a Christian she most assuredly is not as I clearly demonstrate here and here.  Joel Osteen, who is said to be “one of America’s most influential spiritual leaders,” appeared on the show prior to Warren to promote his new book, “I Declare: 31 Promises To Speak Over Your Life.”  Around 45,000 people attend Lakewood Church each Sunday to hear Osteen preach the word-faith prosperity gospel “lite.” It’s really not surprising that he was invited to appear on “Oprah’s Life Class.”  The duo has become fast friends ever since she and Tyler Perry attended a Lakewood service some months back.  They soon discovered how like-minded they are.  In fact, Osteen has this Oprahesque declaration on his website:

The words we speak set the course for our life. If you want to know what you’re going to be like in five years, listen to the words you are saying about yourself today.

Egads!

Osteen not only teaches a false gospel, he apparently has scant knowledge of the scriptures which is the main reason the man who pastors the largest megachurch in America is unaware that the Lord has called His followers to “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Tm 2:15).

Rick Warren’s claim to fame is his books “The Purpose Driven Church” and “The Purpose Driven Life.” PDL is the best-selling hardback non-fiction book in American history and is translated into more than 50 languages.  By using modern marketing methods he helped lay the foundation for the Church Growth movement (CGM).  Largely due to the popularity of his purpose-driven books the CGM has spread through churches like a windstorm sweeping across the Great Plains, ushering in a “new paradigm” of transformational leadership to meet the challenge of the new century.   CGM “emphasizes mainly missionary work combined with sociological awareness of the target population.” In other words, it utilizes slick marketing techniques.  The object is to reach the “unchurched” using the age-old principle: You can draw more flies with honey than with vinegar.  Hence, the “seeker-sensitive” label.

Over the years Pastor Warren has become controversial, and rightly so, for a multitude of reasons which I’ve tackled here and here.  For one reason or another controversy continually swirls around “America’s Pastor.”  Still, he is highly regarded by many in the Christian community and likewise the press.   What’s stunning is that he’s often invited to speak at events with New Calvinist luminaries like John Piper, Mark Driscoll, James MacDonald and Matt Chandler.  Before I move on, I must bring to light influential Reformed theologian John Piper’s recent endorsement of Rick Warren.  Many of us in the discernment ministries were both surprised and troubled by his endorsement.  Christine Pack observed:

[Piper] gave his “stamp of approval” by having Warren be a keynote speaker at Dr. Piper’s annual Desiring God conference. This was an event that caught many in evangelicalism off guard and resulted in a flurry of articles and blog posts over a number of months. The problem with Dr. Piper welcoming Rick Warren into the fold is that Dr. Piper has long been known as a champion and protector of the purity of the gospel message. (Source)

Pastor celebrity James MacDonald was once asked to comment on the “seeker movement” and he replied, “The seeker movement [should be] subtitled: How to Fill Your Church with Tares.”  Later he publically affirmed Rick Warren in a tweet even knowing that the seeker movement that filled churches with heathens was the brain child of “possibility thinker” Robert Schuller.  His most recognized disciples are Bill Hybels and Rick Warren. Excuse me, but a shepherd’s duty is to point out error and guard the flock from wolves in sheep’s clothing, not to invite them into the sheep pen!

Sorry to digress.

Another prominent pastor who shares the stage with Rick Warren is Greg Laurie of Harvest Christian Fellowship, a Calvary Chapel in Riverside, CA.  Laurie is best known as the founder and featured speaker for Harvest Crusades.

So, what is going on in the visible Church?

Glad you asked.  In a word: syncretism. Syncretism occurs when elements of other religious beliefs are mashed into mainstream Protestant denominations. In a piece entitled Purpose Driven Dismantling of Christianity, I examined the effect syncretism has on the Church:

Satan uses syncretism to separate God from His people. God loathes syncretism:

“When the LORD thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land; Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.” (Deuteronomy 12:29-31)

Grievous wolves (Acts 20:29) masquerading as evangelicals introduced false religious beliefs (abominations) into mainline churches. Many of them are forthcoming about what they’re doing, others not so much. Their main goal is … change. The plan (yes, they have a plan) is to dismantle historic orthodox Christianity and usher in a “new paradigm,” a “new kind of Christianity.”

Wolves are skillful at drawing people in. They’ve learned how to use TV, radio, the Worldwide Web, human potential seminars, psycho-therapeutic counseling, so-called Christian entertainment that includes movies, DVDs, books and music. Some believers are drawn in through political groups. As you can see, a whole host of lures are used to bait the hook.

Many professing Christians have accepted the blending of religious beliefs with no questions asked. They sit in churches where they’re not taught the truth but are fed a steady diet of half truths and outright lies! Jesus wanted those who believe in Him to read and understand the Word. “Sanctify them through thy truth,” He prayed. “Thy Word is truth!” (John 17:17 ) (Source)

Now, let’s get to my questions: Why did Rick Warren agree to do an interview with Oprah? Moreover, why would he want to be associated with word-faith heretic Joel Osteen?  We discover after the fact that he did not use the opportunity to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the lost, many of whom were tuned into the show.  No.  Instead he used his time with Oprah to pass on his sage advice to the audience, peppered with a few Bible quotes — taken out of context!

Former New Ager and astrologer Marcia Montenegro watched the 3 hours of live taping on Oprah’s Life class.  I think the following excerpt about what she observed clearly identifies the sort of pastor Rick Warren is:

Although Rick Warren has had New Age Dr. Oz at his church (along with a supposedly Christian doctor who also endorses some New Age practices), I was hoping he (RW) would somehow give the gospel in the midst of his motivational advice, but he never did. He used the imagery of a poker game to explain we are dealt certain cards, and then gave a teaching on this that sounded like moralistic self-help programs I’ve heard so many times, throwing in a few Bible quotes taken out of context or misquoted. It was something almost any New Ager could accept. God becomes a tool for self-improvement and success.

Warren referred to Jesus, but took scripture out of context and applied things said to believers to everyone. He also misused the Proverbs passage that says “as a man thinketh, so is he.” This passage is a famous passage misused by New Thought proponents and is used in “The Secret.”

What was really hard to watch is when a woman in Norway Skyped to say she realized she needed God but wanted to know who God is and she asked, “What should I do?” It was clear that she was ripe to hear the gospel and needed Jesus! It was a great opportunity to share the gospel with her, and at the same time, for Oprah to hear it. Instead of giving the gospel, Rick Warren seemed uncomfortable and finally just said something like, ‘Go to God and find your purpose.” It was a terrible moment! The woman looked surprised and sad, like she was expecting something else. I prayed for her later and am hoping that the many Christians who witnessed this will pray for her.

Not only that, but when Oprah referred to God, as she often did, Rick Warren agreed with her as though she was referring to the biblical God, which she was not. He even said a few times, “Oprah has a good point.” No, she never did! She was speaking totally out of her New Thought/New Age beliefs. I am grateful that RW recommended that people read the gospel of John. That was the best thing he said. (Read Marcia’s entire piece here)

Why do so many followers of Jesus Christ view Rick Warren as dangerous?  Evangelist Tony Miano’sindictment is blunt:

Plastic pastors transparent enough to see through, like Joel Osteen, are not as dangerous as Rick Warren. Modalistic moguls of the painfully-obvious-money-hungry prosperity movement, like T.D. Jakes, are not as dangerous as Rick Warren. Self-serving sorcerers of the false signs and wonders movement, like Todd Bentley, are not as dangerous as Rick Warren. No. None of the before-mentioned personalities or groups are all that dangerous because what you see is what you get. They all lack the ability to change their appearance to accommodate a change in environment. They lack the chameleon-like ability, the self-serving ability, to say what needs to be said in order to keep people in every camp liking them. 

Now listen to former Catholic Priest Richard Bennett:

Warren teaches that God ‘created the church to meet your five deepest needs’ just as the Roman Catholic Church says, ‘The Church is the mother of all believers.’ Warren, like Rome, has switched from obedience to the Word and Person of the Living God to submission to a church to achieve one’s needs. It is the oldest and cleverest temptation known to man. 

I’ll close with warning from the Lord Jesus:

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous [ferocious] wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?  Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.  A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.(Mat. 5:15-20)

Recommended:

Word of Faith articles—On Solid Rock Resources
Creating Community – Part 1: Purpose-Driven Change through Transformational Leadership–By Berit Kjos
James Sundquist’s rebuke to Desiring God participants regarding Rick Warren

Joel Osteen:
Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ZTeOEG6a4&feature=related
Read: Joel Osteen and The Prosperity Gospel

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