A Culture of Counterfeit Christians

Have you ever run over a dead skunk in the road?  I have, during a heat wave.  The smell got into my tires and permeated our garage for days!  I’ll go out on a limb and say that no one takes pleasure in the highly offensive smell of skunk spray, dead or alive. My point in telling you this is that to God the stench of sin is much worse than skunk.  For an example of just how much the Lord hates sin, grab a cup of coffee and read  and  Kings.  Given our penchant for getting things fast, here’s an illustration of the way in which God dealt with Baasha, one of Israel’s most ruthless kings:

Since I exalted you out of the dust and made you leader over my people Israel, and you have walked in the way of Jeroboam and have made my people Israel to sin, provoking me to anger with their sins, behold, I will utterly sweep away Baasha and his house, and I will make your house like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat.Anyone belonging to Baasha who dies in the city the dogs shall eat, and anyone of his who dies in the field the birds of the heavens shall eat.  ()

God had already destroyed Jeroboam for his flagrant sins, yet Baasha repeated the same mistakes.  God rebuked the Israelites for their sinful ways and vowed to punish them.

Fast forward to 2014.  Somewhere around 75% of Americans say they’re Christians.  If that’s true, how is it that an increasing number of so-called Christians act no differently than the pagans did when Baasha was king?  Clearly, Scripture teaches that Christians are to have a biblical foundation and that their behavior should be Christlike.  Yet many who call themselves believers think nothing of sinning their brains out!

Admittedly, when someone is new to the faith the fruit on the vine doesn’t bloom immediately.  In other words, sanctification is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight.  There comes a time, though, when the vine brings forth fruit.  But when the fruit tree is barren year after year, one can’t help but wonder if the tree was ever pollinated!

One of my favorite pastimes is discussing (debating, dissecting) the Bible with other Christians.  So I find it concerning when I strike up a conversation with a long time believer that knows practically nothing about the Bible.  Most Christians have heard the verse, “Sanctify [set apart for a holy use] them in the truth; your word is truth.   By reading God’s Word believers learn about Christ, with the goal being to be more like Him.  Likewise, we’ll grow in our faith and receive divine guidance on how we’re to live our lives.

To have a close relationship with someone we must get to know the person.  The obvious course of action is to ask probing questions.  So we’ve got to dig below the surface to uncover the intimate details of a person’s life.  When we’re not interested in having a meaningful relationship with someone, we don’t bother to probe!

Because our Father in heaven loves His children, His desire is to be in relationship with each one of us.  His desire is to pull His beloved into a bear hug!  Those who sincerely wish to be in relationship with the Father must dig deep into the scriptures, because that’s the one and only place to learn about God and His ways. “What we believe about God,” said A. W. Tozier, “is the most important thing about us.”

Getting To Know YOU, Getting To Know All About YOU

Nothing should stand in the way of spending a few minutes each day with the King of kings and Lord of lords.  While we sit at His feet we can thank Him for our many blessings; we can pour out our hearts to Him and even make requests, trusting that the answers to our prayers will come.  Sitting at His feet, our hurts will be healed and our joy restored.    says, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

Countless Christians admit to not reading their bibles regularly, they hardly ever pray, rarely attend church, they’re not in a Bible study nor do they study on their own.  Moreover, meeting with other believers isn’t a priority.  If this statement defines you, consider the following:

Would it be honest for someone to claim to be an avid skier that never hit the slopes?

Could a person that pumps iron three or four times a year ever develop into a body-building champion?

In the same vein, is it honest for someone to claim to be a Christian that never spends time pumping spiritual iron?

Getting back to my point—sin.  The Bible says Christians should not tolerate blatant sin.  Furthermore, it says we must stop sinning!  Take for example sexual sin.  In this day and age, many professing Christians ignore the fact that one of the gravest sins we commit is sexual sin.  Having sexual relations outside of marriage (the biblical understanding of marriage is the union of a man and woman) goes against the clear teaching of Scripture.

In dealing with sexual taboos, C. S. Lewis pulls no punches:

Our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural,’ so ‘healthy,’ and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour. Now this association is a lie. Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth …that sex in itself (apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is ‘normal’ and ‘healthy,’ and all the rest of it. The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal.  Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of health, good humour, and frankness. For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing. Every sane and civilized man must have some set of principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others. One man does this on Christian principles, another on hygienic principles, another on sociological principles. The real conflict is not between Christianity and ‘nature,’ but between Christian principles and other principles in the control of ‘nature,’ for ‘nature’ (in the sense of natural desire) will have to be controlled anyway, unless you are going to ruin your whole life. (Excerpt from Book III, Chapter 5, of Mere Christianity)

There’s no getting around it.  Sex without holy matrimony is a sin, so “quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary” if one wishes to be God-honoring and obedient.

Just Follow Jesus

Our Lord spoke plainly when He said, “If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.”    And, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”   Jesus wasn’t just addressing the Apostles; what He stated was meant for all who have faith in Him!

Jesus also gave this warning:

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit ().

For clarification, Jesus Christ is the vine and the fruitful branches are Christians who, through a personal relationship with Him, will bear much fruit.  The unfruitful branches are the people who make a superficial commitment and bear little or no fruit.  The Father will prune the vine and discard the fruitless branches.

Those who professes Christ and behave like heathens may find themselves lopped off the vine – and not because God is mean and intolerant.  On the contrary.   God is long suffering, not willing that any should perish.

Holy Smokes!

Authentic Christians understand that God loves us…that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins…that His crucifixion was the ultimate act of love.  What many believers fail to understand, though, is that the Creator is holy.  Christians, of all people, should understand that we serve a holy God.  So let’s go to  for a glimpse of the prophet’s vision of God:

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said:  “Holy, holy, holy is theLord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”

And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

Here’s how Matthew Henry describes Isaiah’s vision:

The prophet, standing outside the temple, sees the Divine Presence seated on the mercy-seat, raised over the ark of the covenant, between the cherubim and seraphim, and the Divine glory filled the whole temple. See God upon his throne. This vision is explained, John 12:41, that Isaiah now saw Christ’s glory, and spake of Him, which is a full proof that our Saviour is God. In Christ Jesus, God is seated on a throne of grace; and through him the way into the holiest is laid open. See God’s temple, his church on earth, filled with his glory. His train, the skirts of his robes, filled the temple, the whole world, for it is all God’s temple. And yet he dwells in every contrite heart. See the blessed attendants by whom his government is served. Above the throne stood the holy angels, called seraphim, which means burners; they burn in love to God, and zeal for his glory against sin. The seraphim showing their faces veiled, declares that they are ready to yield obedience to all God’s commands, though they do not understand the secret reasons of his counsels, government, or promises. All vain-glory, ambition, ignorance, and pride, would be done away by one view of Christ in his glory. This awful vision of the Divine Majesty overwhelmed the prophet with a sense of his own vileness. We are undone if there is not a Mediator between us and this holy God. A glimpse of heavenly glory is enough to convince us that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. Nor is there a man that would dare to speak to the Lord, if he saw the justice, holiness, and majesty of God, without discerning his glorious mercy and grace in Jesus Christ. The live coal may denote the assurance given to the prophet, of pardon, and acceptance in his work, through the atonement of Christ. ()

As R.C. Sproul so aptly put it in The Holiness of God, every single sin a person commits is a capital offense.  “Sin is cosmic treason.  Sin is treason against a pure Sovereign. It is an act of supreme ingratitude toward the One to whom we owe everything, to the One who has given us life itself.”

I’ll close with this reminder.  Avoiding the sinful temptations we’re exposed to daily requires a close, intimate relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore:

Submit yourselves, then, to God…Come near to God and he will come near to you.  Wash your hands you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.  Grieve, mourn and wail…humble yourself before the Lord and he will lift you up ().

Kundalini (Serpent Power) & Satan’s Servants of Deception In America

“We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us.  Hereby know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.” (1 John 4:6)

In this verse the emphasis is on the believer’s ability to discern between a spirit of truth and a spirit of error, heresy, apostasy, lies and cleverly disguised deceptions such as modern evolutionary thinking and methodological naturalism.

The spirit of truth is relatively easy to discern as such people come willingly to the light of truth (John 3:21).  Having a heart for truth, they really and truly want to know and embrace Truth.  On the other hand, the spirit of error is more difficult to discern because the taproot and energy of this spirit is in Satan, the father of lies, of false gods, cleverness, sophistry, false science and evolution, heresy, apostasy, rebellion, murder, and envy.

Satan is the great deceiver (Rev. 12:9).  He uses his servants of deception to manipulate, confuse, and mislead (Ephesians 4:14).   Today his most powerfully influential servants are the world’s occult ‘elites’ but are also found throughout the secular, Christian, cult and occult New Age arenas. (2 Cor. 11:14-15)

One of Satan’s important servants, the evangelical apostate Alice Bailey (1880-1949), is a major architect of today’s rapidly spreading serpent-powered occult New Age movement, a spiritual juggernaut effecting a counter-conversion of consciousness that closes the soul to Jesus Christ while opening it to powers of darkness.

According to Bailey’s contemporary apostles, the ‘Plan’ telepathically revealed to Bailey for the coming New Age can be traced back to the fall of Lucifer and his angels from heaven. Bailey’s demon-master, the Tibetan, described the revolt of the angels against the Holy God as part of the“divine plan of evolution,” by which angels “descended from their sinless and free state of existence in order to develop full divine awareness on earth.”  (Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 224)

In this total reversal and inversion of the Revealed Word of God, the Fall of man was really an evolutionary ascent to liberating knowledge by which man’s eyes were opened to good (Satan) and evil (the Holy God).  Thus Helena Blavatsky, another important servant of Satan and architect of New Age spirituality concluded that it is but natural,

“…to view Satan, the Serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind.  For it was he who was the ‘Harbinger of Light,’ bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehovah…Indeed, (mankind) was taught wisdom and the hidden knowledge by the ‘Fallen Angel.”   As man’s benefactor, Lucifer continues to assist man’s evolution.   In the words of the apostate evangelical, now New Age theologian David Spangler, a disciple of both Blavatsky and Bailey, Lucifer is ‘the angel of man’s evolution.”  (ibid, pp. 224-225)

From the time of the Apostles of Jesus Christ to our own day, an unbroken chain of Satan’s servants have disguised themselves as super apostles and ministers of righteousness who as always are,

“…the inventors of impure heresies (the) profaners and apostates (who open) their mouths wide against the divine glory”. ...Church Father Cyril of Alexandria

These spirits hate Truth and most generally elevate themselves among God’s family so as to lead believers into compromise and conformity with the pagan world system.

On behalf of what Satan’s contemporary ministers term ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ they sweep away the essentials of the faith necessary both for salvation and the recognition of evil. (2 Peter 2:18) And without the grace and spiritual discernment that is born of true faith, Satan ceases to exist in the eyes of the spiritually blind, whether secular or Christian.

Commenting on the incredible blindness of our scientifically enlightened, theologically compromised and apostate modern society, the cultural theorist Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985), author of “The Devil’s Share, An Essay on the Diabolic in Modern Society” observed:

“What appears to me incredible is not the Devil, not the Angels, but rather the candor and the credulity of the skeptic, and the unpardonable sophism of which they show themselves to be the victims (they say) ‘The Devil is a gent with red horns and a long tail; now I cannot believe in a gent with red horns and a long tail; therefore I don’t believe in the Devil.’  And so the Devil has them precisely where he wants them.” (The Coming Darkness, John Ankerberg and John Weldon, p. 61)

When believers find spiritual Truth trivialized and diminished, marginalized and ridiculed in the church, some will go in search of a faithful church, some will fall away entirely, and others will turn to cults and the occult.

Tragically, since Satan’s ministers ridicule and reject the authority of God’s Word, the second and third groups have no guidelines for evaluating and testing the occult/Eastern spiritual experiences and devices they encounter such as the Enneagram, Jungian psychology, the MBTI, kundalini yoga, and meditation techniques already popular in our culture, apostatizing churches and steadily creeping into compromised churches.  Thus they can easily stumble into the spirit world and if not already fallen away, then onto the broad smooth way of apostasy:

“…..acceptance of the enneagram, if not already a sign of apostasy, must lead to a loss of faith since it distorts the Gospel and contradicts Catholic doctrine, depriving the individual of a genuine Catholic language and setting in its place what has been most aptly termed as psychobabbling. What is most puzzling, however, is the continued silence of the Church’s official teachers who know that this absurdity is being promoted and spread among our Catholic school teachers and priests.”  (NCCB Preparing Cautionary Note on Use of Enneagram, Paul Likoudis, Catholic Culture.org)

For an eye-opening look at the demon-oppressed Carl Jung and a penetrating analysis of his occult, alchemical, Gnostic, and demon-informed psychology and connections to the wildly popular Enneagram and MBTI, read “Carl Jung, Neo-Gnosticism, & the MBTI,” by Rev. Ed Hird, past National Chair of Anglican Renewal Ministries of Canada:  

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” 1 John 4:1

In his best-selling book “Strange Fire,” Pastor John MacArthur masterfully chronicles the unsavory history underpinning the modern Charismatic/Apostolic Movement (NAR) and its false prophets.  The New Apostolic Reformation is both a breeding ground for scandal, bad doctrine, and spiritual chicanery and the fastest growing “Christian” movement in the world.  MacArthur lays out a chilling case for rejecting its false prophets and for exposing their errors to the cleansing light of Truth.

In his own penetrating analysis of the Charismatic/Apostolic movement, Fr. Seraphim Rose notes that the spiritist manifestations (i.e., impartation, holy laughter, drunk in the spirit, roaring, barking, hissing, slain in the spirit) experienced in Charismatic churches are found in the occult New Age movement.   The spirit that invaded the Charismatic movement during the ‘Toronto Blessing’ is not the Holy Spirit, said Rose, but the kundalini spirit (serpent power), the same spirit that ancient Egyptians, Hindus, yoga practitioners, and New Agers are familiar with.

From the time of the ancients serpent power has been important to religious and mythological symbolism all around the world. Within the Egyptian mysteries, serpent power was associated with,

…“the elemental forces that were in play before the creation of the world.” (Carl Teichrib, Gods of Ancient Egypt, p. 182)

In his book, “The Sign of the Serpent,” Mark Balfour relates how pervasive serpent symbols are within India and the Hindu religion:

“Any observant traveler who moves from the snow-tipped Himalayas in the North to the sun-soaked sands of Cape Comorin at India’s southern tip, will encounter – particularly in the rural areas and at sacred centres of pilgrimage wherever Siva, God of both Divine Wisdom and regeneration, is the presiding Deity – the serpent motif sculptured within shrines, impressed on myriads of stone implants in the ground and depicted in art.” (A Short Guide to Occult Symbols: Serpent Power, Carl Teichrib, 2005, Kjos Ministries)

Balfour elaborates on this belief:

“In Hinduism, the Cosmic Serpent – Ananta Sesha – symbolic of timeless eternity, carries the world on his 1000-fold [Cobra] hood…As the creative impulse stirs within the great Serpent in the Sky – when passive idea becomes active thought – the forces of attraction and repulsion come into play as ‘spirit’ begins its involution into “matter.” (ibid, Teichrib)

Moreover, Kundalini yoga, a discipline within Hinduism, teaches that latent serpent power lies at the base of the etheric human spine,

“…like a coiled serpent, ready to spring.” (Harper’s Dictionary of Hinduism, p. 156, ibid, Teichrib)

Through strenuous yoga techniques, serpent power uncoils and rises through seven “chakras” or power centers within the human body. Serpent power is considered,

“(to be a) concentrated field of intelligent cosmic, invisible energy absolutely vital to life beginning in the base of the spine as a man or a woman begins to evolve in their first incarnation.” (The Donning International Encyclopedic Psychic Dictionary, p. 343, ibid, Teichrib)

“Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field…” – Genesis 3:1

Serpent power is imparted by laying on of hands, or Shakti-pat.  The demon-possessed Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajineesh was called the “divine drunkard” by his disciples, and according to Tal Brook, author of “Riders of the Cosmic Circuit,” by his millions of worshippers in India, America, and Europe and throughout the world.  Rajineesh encouraged his devotees to come and drink from him, meaning, receive his touch:

“His spiritual ‘wine’ was often passed on with a single touch to the head (Shakti-pat), at which his followers would collapse in ecstatic laughter. Another famous guru, Swami Muktananda, would hold meetings at which thousands of his followers from around the world came to receive his touch.  They experienced uncontrollable laughing, roaring, barking, hissing, crying, shaking, as well as falling unconscious.”(Rose, p. 217)

These demon-possessed gurus were imparting to their adoring worshippers experiences they had undergone during initiation rituals and which they attributed to spirit-possession.

Veteran researcher Brooks Alexander observes of Rajineesh, Muktananda and other gurus:

“All of these gurus espouse a similar philosophy, and they all turn it into practice in a similar way.  It is a pattern that we find not only in tantra (Indo-Tibetan occultism), but in European Satanism, antinomian Gnosticism, and ancient pagan sorcery as well.” (Book Review: Riders of the Cosmic Circuit,” in SCP Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1987, p. 39)

According to Alexander, Satan’s servants have successfully assimilated occult Eastern teachings and techniques into our church and our culture.  With remarkable speed and ease, Eastern and occult ideas and spiritist techniques for contacting spirits such as trance music, brain-altering drugs, meditation and yoga are being propagated to undiscerning Westerners and Americans, within and without the church, on a mass scale:

“…they are filtered through the pervasive secularism of our culture.  In this way they are demystified without changing their essential content.  The basic components of an Eastern/occult world view are recast in forms of expression that are naturalistic, scientific, and humanistic…Occult philosophy is being secularized and psychologized with increasing refinement….Their underlying themes run through contemporary science, economics, politics, art, psychology, and religion.”  (The Coming Darkness, p. 55)

“Be sober, be vigilant: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” 1  Peter 5:8

Satan’s servants are out in the open today.  They have successfully initiated a devastating assault upon the whole body of the Christian church and by extension, upon Western and American society in ways that to previous generations would have seemed unthinkable.

Therefore,

“Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil.”  Ephesians 6:11

And though all may seem dark, hopeless and lost, fear not, for the faithful believer, the one who seeks and perseveres in Truth, is of God:

“Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.” (1 John 4:4)

Classic Confrontations: Mostly Dead In America

Confrontation is a necessary dam to the progress of evil in society.

American policy is now confined to determining which of two evils will be rewarded.  For decades conservatives have been voting for the lesser of two evils, impaired by party loyalty and seeking a maligned victory, they fail to confront egregious evil.

Evil is inherent in diversity.  The exclusive righteousness characteristic of ancient Israel was predicated on maintaining religious purity.  That purity is being consistently destructed by toleration.

Christian churches should be at the forefront in confronting these dangers.  It is not surprising that the scant confrontation evidenced in the public domain is coming from Christians.  Nor is it surprising that Christian ministers pre-occupied with growing larger and more powerful churches are wont to confront evil either in the society at large or in their own congregations.

In February, 1994, the late Mother Theresa of Calcutta speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast with then President William Jefferson Clinton and his wife Hillary in the audience made the Included in the prayer was the following litany:

We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and inverted our values.

We confess that we have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your Word and called it moral pluralism.

We have worshiped other gods and called it multiculturalism.

We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.

We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.

We have neglected the needy and called it self-preservation.

We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.

We have killed our unborn and called it choice.

We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.

We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self-esteem.

We have abused power and called it political savvy.

We have coveted our neighbors’ possessions and called it ambition.

We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.

We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.

In May, 1999, Darrell Scott, whose daughter Rachel was fatally shot at Littleton, Colorado’s Columbine High School, included the following poem in his poignant remarks before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee:

Your laws ignore our deepest needs
Your words are empty air
You’ve stripped away our heritage
You’ve outlawed simple prayer
Now gunshots fill our classrooms
And precious children die
You seek for answers everywhere
And ask the question “Why”
You regulate restrictive laws
Through legislative creed
And yet you fail to understand that
God is what we need!

Hardness in the reprobate heart repels the confrontation of wisdom.  Mother Theresa’s sweet rebuke of the Clinton stand on abortion was quickly forgotten.  Several walked out on the repentant prayer read by Pastor Joe Wright and Darrell Scott’s confrontation of the House Judiciary subcommittee was like a drop of fresh water in a cesspool.

Error (polite for sin) is a common denominator to human existence and when it is not confronted it metastasizes.  In an effort to preserve their right to debauchery Americans have elevated human comfort above human righteousness.  They have failed to confront lies and distortions of fact in an effort to maintain peace.  This most grievous of errors has become pandemic in our churches rendering them useless in the maintenance of Godly Wisdom and Righteousness.

Fred Reed in one of his recent insightful columns concerning the press writes, “because of law, convention, and political fear papers have to hire “diverse” newsrooms. This exercises a powerful flattening effect on the news. For practical purposes it is not possible to express opinions, or to cover stories, that offend a sizable group on the floor of the newsroom. If your editor is female, or the guy at the next desk black, or gay, you find it very hard to write anything that these groups won’t like. You have to come to work every day. More diversity in the newsroom means less diversity in the news.”

In a Brian Lamb interview on C-Span a caller queried Midge Dector, a Zionist Jewish author and wife of Neo-Con Norman Podhoretz, about why Jewish-Americans predominate in our superstructure.  The caller, who was able to announce that Jews make up a tiny fraction of the American population but have a tremendous amount of power, was loutishly cut off by Brian Lamb and Midge Dector with a straight but distasteful look on her face denied the existence of extensive Jewish power.

This is, of course, a lie.  Jewish intellectualism is cherished. They are a hardworking, intelligent, well educated, collusive, quasi-patriotic group of unassimilated Americans whose quest for behind the scenes power has been generously rewarded.

The road to Hell is paved with the inability to confront lies and America has been in the paving business for several decades.

Unfortunately, the American media hides facts and perpetrates lies.  While the quest for world government with all of its ancillary plots forges fearlessly ahead, detailed discussion of its disastrous consequences for the American people is studiously avoided.

Reporting on confrontations that involve truth are never widely covered in the media.  With all the ballyhoo that is made about freedom of the press, America has not enjoyed a free press for a long time.  As Fred Reed so aptly states, the press is “controlled, controlled, controlled”.

Pictures of aborted babies are avoided; the cruel results of war and the mutilated bodies it produces are never shown to the public; neither the scourge of AIDS nor homosexual activities are reported in all their ugliness; diversity is promoted for America but not for Israel; the efficacy of Christianity is regularly questioned and authentic movies such as “The Passion of Christ” are denigrated.  America’s press, ridden with bias and homogeneity, is a threat to the Nation.

The recent ruckus over “The Passion of Christ” has brought the errant nature the media elite into focus.

To question the right of a Christian American to produce a Biblically authentic movie on the death of Christ because it does not conform to the Jewish agenda and the contrived propaganda of Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League is both an example of the power of Jewish influence in America and a travesty of major proportions for both Jews and Christians.

In an essay entitled “The Passion of the Christ, the Jews, and God” Screenwriter Brian Godawa addresses this problem with the following conclusion: “So to understand the New Testament claims of Jesus as Messiah is to understand a history of Israel that includes hundreds of years of stiff-necked resistance to God’s own prophets, building to a climactic rejection and killing of God’s own Son, the Messiah, followed by the persecution of Messiah’s followers and terminating in God’s wrath and vengeance being taken out on the nation by the destruction of the holy city of Jerusalem and its temple. The barrenness of that temple, still desolate for over 2000 years, is a testament to the new spiritual temple created by God, the body of Christ — a new “nation” consisting of Jews and Gentiles who both have faith in Messiah, a Messiah, as portrayed in the movie The Passion of the Christ, whose rejection and victimization made Him the “unblemished lamb of sacrifice” slain on God’s altar to accomplish the victorious redemption of His people, the forgiveness of their sins.”

In his unique style Fred Reed praises the opportunity we all have on the Internet to express ideas that would never be inked in our newspapers.  This is, indeed, an exceptional opportunity but one that will surely be under attack by those that seek to exert their evil agenda over America.

Haiti & Me: In Search of Jean Bertrand Aristide

When thinking about Haiti, a lot of people think first about that terrible earthquake disaster of 2010 — and also about President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.   And I do too.  So on my first day in Port au Prince, I toured most of the earthquake disaster areas.  And on my third day there, it only seemed logical that I also attempt to meet up with the great man himself.  And I actually came THIS close to doing that too!

After recovering from wandering around the Carrefour district’s Carnival celebration the night before, I then went over to check out Aristide’s house.  “President Aristide is actually here today,” said the guard at the door, “but he’s not seeing visitors right now.  However, you can always wave to him on our closed-circuit TV camera.”  Great idea!  So I smiled and waved and smiled and waved at the CCTV camera like the idiot tourist that I am.

Next I went off to visit Aristide’s Foundation Pour la Democratie and looked around there.  Met some interesting diplomats, students, professors and a chicken.

Then I visited UniFA, a medical school established by Aristide in order to create more doctors in Haiti — where the ratio of Haitians to doctors is 10,000 to 1 in urban areas and 20,000 to 1 in the countryside (no wonder vodou cures are so popular here).  “How many students study here?” I asked a bright-eyed first-year physician wannabe, sitting outside eating her lunch between classes.  (Actually all the students here are clearly bright-eyed and diligent and idealistic — all young, gifted and Black.  Go them.)

“About 700,” the student replied.

“So can you tell me how cure my sore knees?” I asked.

“No, we haven’t gotten that far in our curriculum quite yet.”  Rats.

Lastly, I stopped by a large apartment building that had been constructed during Aristide’s presidency in order to house some of Port au Prince’s homeless population, right before GWB sent in the Marines.  Two things about this apartment building were note-worthy.  First, it was the only building for blocks around that had actually withstood the 2010 earthquake.  And, second, the apartments all had two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen.

In stark contrast, directly across the street one could also see a hundred-odd new U.N. housing units — such as they were.  Each family had been allocated a really really small cube-shaped one-room dwelling with no bathroom, no bedroom, no kitchen and no running water.  And their shared port-a-potties were all way down the street.

So just exactly who is this guy Jean-Bertrand Aristide?  And why do American neo-cons and corporatists all hate him so much?  I don’t know.  Maybe because Aristide doesn’t want to keep Haiti forever “barefoot and pregnant”?  Maybe because Aristide, a former priest, actually tries to practice the teachings of Jesus?  Your guess is as good as mine.

In any case, here’s a bit more about Aristide’s back-story for those of you who have never heard of the guy.  In 2001, Aristide was democratically elected as president of Haiti, just one year after George Bush stole the 2000 American election.  But, unlike GWB, Aristide’s emphasis was on inclusion and education.

In just the few years that he was president, Aristide built more schools in Haiti than had ever existed in all of its long miserable history of being controlled by U.S. interests.  Aristide also devoted 20% of the nation’s budget to healthcare.  Good grief!  No wonder Wall Street and War Street hated him.  And overthrew him too.  Violently.  In favor of deadly U.N. “peacekeepers” and the Marines, who immediately shot everything up and turned UniFA into a military barracks.  That was back in 2004.  
And now, ten years later, Haiti has been stuck with President Michel Martelly, aka the “Neo-Cons’ Choice,” elected in the same way that the U.S. got stuck with Dubya — illegally.  “He is our guy!” cries Wall Street, War Street and the Deep State.

And now WalMart is once again happily running sweatshops in Haiti, where .

What the freak was Aristide thinking!

Surely Aristide should have known that anybody who denies WalMart access to economic slave labor is naturally gonna be in big trouble — and educating a country’s children and providing its citizens with healthcare is also a really bad idea because then countries like Haiti will no longer have a subservient labor force and a really dumb electorate — and that’s just not the corporatist way.  Aristide should have known better.  Most Even Americans are clear on this concept, keeping their eyes down and their mouths shut.  Why couldn’t Aristide do the same?

And if you still want even more information on Aristide and Haiti, here’s a great video to watch:  

Piers Morgan, Alec Baldwin, Jay Leno, Mel Gibson, The National Media, And Political Correctness

It is being widely reported that CNN is ending Piers Morgan’s prime time television program. Here is how the story is covered in The New York Times:

“There have been times when the CNN host Piers Morgan didn’t seem to like America very much–and American audiences have been more than willing to return the favor. Three years after taking over for Larry King, Mr. Morgan has seen the ratings for ‘Piers Morgan Live’ hit some new lows, drawing a fraction of viewers compared with competitors at Fox News and MSNBC.

“It’s been an unhappy collision between a British television personality who refuses to assimilate–the only football he cares about is round and his lectures on guns were rife with contempt–and a CNN audience that is intrinsically provincial. After all, the people who tune into a cable news network are, by their nature, deeply interested in America.

“CNN’s president, Jeffrey Zucker, has other problems, but none bigger than Mr. Morgan and his plum 9 p.m. time slot. Mr. Morgan said last week that he and Mr. Zucker had been talking about the show’s failure to connect and had decided to pull the plug, probably in March.”

See the Times report here:

What I am about to say, I rarely, if ever, say about anyone–even those folks with whom I vehemently disagree. I’ve never allowed myself to let my portion of the public debate get personal. But in the case of Piers Morgan, I am willfully backsliding.

Piers Morgan is an oaf of the highest order. He is a boorish braggart, a wanna-be tyrant, and an overall pompous ass. It was British snobs like Piers Morgan that incited the Colonists to revolt. Just looking at Morgan–as he smugly peered down his nose at us freedom-loving Americans–made me want to go to war with Great Britain all over again.

Now it appears that Piers Morgan will be off the airwaves soon–at least during primetime on CNN. All I can say is GOOD RIDDANCE. I also find it amusing that while Piers Morgan is riding off into the sunset, Alex Jones continues to broadcast all over the place. The Colonists won again. Oohrah!

My comments on Alec Baldwin are going to be much softer (to the surprise of some folks). But if regular readers will think about it, they have not seen me say a whole lot–one way or another–about entertainers–although I did inform my Facebook followers that I am going to miss Jay Leno.

To read my frequent posts, just “Like” my Facebook page at:

In my opinion, Jay Leno was a cut above the rest of the late night television talk show hosts. For one thing, Jay and his wife have been married for over thirty years–and there has been no hint of a sexual dalliance. What a rarity that is among celebrities. Jay doesn’t drink alcohol or smoke. While his jokes were sometimes crude, I never heard one that was irreverent to the things of Christianity or faith in general–unlike his CBS counterpart, David Letterman, whose personal and stage life are both filled with filth.

Leno was also the most fair and balanced comedian on late night television. He dished it out to Barack Obama and liberal Democrats as much as he did to G.W. Bush and conservative Republicans. He even dished it out to his host network, NBC. Plus, he seemed to genuinely respect Congressman Ron Paul; and Ron was a guest on Jay’s “Tonight Show” more than once.

See this Breitbart.com report on Jay Leno:

It seems that NBC executives have had it in their minds to get rid of Leno for quite a while. As you recall, they tried once before, replacing Leno with Conan O’Brien–which was a miserable failure. Now, NBC has truly pulled the trigger and replaced Jay with the likeable and funny (albeit a man who possesses a patented liberal bias, which will reveal itself more and more as he continues hosting “The Tonight Show”) Jimmy Fallon. I can’t help but believe that Leno truly incensed the network brass at NBC with his objectivity and balanced joke-telling. The media and entertainment industry leaders in this country are as about as close to a jihad mentality as you will find in America.

Normally, I don’t spend much time discussing the entertainment industry, because entertainers are–well, entertainers. It has been a long, long time since the American people expected much of anything in terms of honor and character from its movie stars. In fact, most of today’s movie star groupies don’t even know the names of such movie giants as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Clayton Moore. And while there are still several clean and wholesome men and women in the movie and entertainment industries, the media would far rather keep us up-to-date on the morally shipwrecked Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus than point the spotlight on those talents that might actually provide the American people with a role model.

Yes, everyone knows Alec Baldwin is a liberal; everyone knows he had a loud and angry shouting match over the phone with his daughter during which he said some very cruel and hurtful things; and everyone knows he has been a strong supporter, financially and otherwise, of the Democrat Party. But is there anything in the above that wouldn’t apply to the vast majority of Hollywood entertainers? For that matter, I know of a lot of professing Christians who have a host of personal and family issues, not to mention being supporters of a plethora of organizations that are equally sinister and problematic. The only difference is, they are not famous and, therefore, nobody knows or cares about it.

Alec Baldwin (no relation to this writer) recently wrote a column that initially appeared in the February 24, 2014, edition of New York Magazine. In his remarks, he gave a very honest and trenchant analysis of the corrupt and ethically-bankrupt national media.

Remember, Alec Baldwin wrote as an entertainment insider. He is one of the most successful movie stars in the world. He is a liberal. He knows the media and entertainment worlds as well as anyone. No matter. The media and entertainment elite are treating Alec Baldwin like he is public enemy number one. And to many of these folks, he is.

MSNBC dumped him; friends abandoned him; and reporters and photographers have done their best to destroy him. Why? What did Alec Baldwin do to incur the wrath of all of these folks–people who have readily recognized him to be one of the outstanding talents in the industry? Why did they turn on him? Because Alec Baldwin didn’t bow down to the god of political-correctness.

In the politically-correct temple, in which the media and entertainment elite worship, one does not dare say anything–even of a personal nature–that could be construed as being uncomplimentary of certain people who are considered untouchable. In the politically-correct world of the media and entertainment elite, anyone who is an African-American, Jew, or homosexual is absolutely out-of-bounds and may not be touched. Anyone else is fair game. To criticize or condemn a white guy, a Christian, or a heterosexual is not only admissible, but to do so only enhances one’s credibility and popularity with these worshippers of political correctness. It seems that the media elite have forgotten the words of their hero, Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” If the media elite truly believe that people are to be judged as individuals–regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation–how is it that political correctness can even exist? How is it that certain entertainers are singled out to be pilloried and ostracized?

For example, take a look at Mel Gibson. Without a doubt, Mel Gibson is one of the most successful Hollywood actors of all time. His accomplishments on the silver screen are legendary. But the media and entertainment elite now consider Gibson to be damaged goods. For the most part, they won’t touch him. What he has done of late, he has produced himself. Fortunately, for him, he has the resources to do this. Few in Hollywood have his resources.

Gibson’s troubles began when he refused to apologize to a group of homosexuals who were offended at a scene in his blockbuster movie, “Braveheart.” Then there was Mel Gibson’s production of the most politically-incorrect movie of all, “The Passion of The Christ,” which was very much a reverent and respectful (and, yes, graphic) portrayal of Christ’s death on the cross. (I suppose the only other film that could be regarded as more politically-incorrect than “The Passion of The Christ” would be Ron Maxwell’s masterpiece, “Gods and Generals,” starring Stephen Lang as General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. In my opinion, Lang should have received an Oscar for his performance. It was outstanding!) And the nail in the coffin (proverbially speaking) was when Gibson was supposedly drunk and, when in the custody of a police officer, went into an anti-Jewish rant. That was it. Mel Gibson had touched the “third rail.” Of course, had Mel gone into an anti-Christian rant, no one within the media or entertainment elite would have thought one thing about it.

For sure, Alec Baldwin always spoke his mind–and many times Alec was his own worst enemy. No doubt about it. But when Alec tore into a tirade in which what he said could be interpreted (wrongly) as being anti-gay, Alec had also touched the “third rail.” That was it. Alec Baldwin is now being compared to Mel Gibson; and the media elite are doing everything they can to ruin the man.

Baldwin’s column shines the light of day on the sinister, shadowy world of America’s national media. The national media is more than biased; it is more than liberal; it is more than Big Government. The national media is obsessed with political correctness. At the highest levels, they are evangelists of the ministry of propaganda, and they relish their role as Grand Inquisitors.

I caution readers: Alec Baldwin’s column contains no small usage of profanity. But it also reveals an even greater vulgarity: the blatant wickedness of a dishonest and dastardly national media. And, unfortunately, there is not a major network or major media outlet (including the so-called “conservative” FOX News) that is exempt from the dark side of this dragon.

Yes, in typical liberal fashion, Baldwin rants against conservative outlets such as Breitbart.com, but he also torches liberal icons such as Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper along with media opportunists such as Joe Scarborough.

Alec Baldwin has gotten a taste of the harsh realities of political correctness. He has, no doubt, grown up in liberalism and knows little else. However, it would appear that Alec Baldwin has a degree of honesty about him and is willing to call a spade a spade (as he understands it) even when his fellow liberals are in the crosshairs. I think he is reachable with the truth. I am praying for him.

Read Alec Baldwin’s column here:

Piers Morgan deserved to get sacked. No one wants someone from a foreign country looking down their nose at them and telling them how stupid they are. My personal opinion is Jay Leno was not, and will not be, equaled as a late night television comic. I believe he is genuine–a rarity in entertainment. Mel Gibson is one of my all-time favorite actors. His movies, “Braveheart,” “The Patriot,” and “Conspiracy Theory” are especially outstanding. I believe Mel is among a small handful in Hollywood who truly understands the New World Order and is vehemently opposed to it. Alec Baldwin has never been one of my favorite actors, although I do honestly acknowledge his extraordinary talent. Obviously, I do not share hardly any of his political views. However, Alec Baldwin, like Mel Gibson, is the victim of an out-of-control media jihad that intends to cut the head off of anyone who will not bow the knee to their god of political correctness.

How Big Banks Are Cashing In On Food Stamps

Many benefit programs have gone high tech with debit cards and J.P. Morgan Chase and others are making a pretty penny charging users fees. What is there to be done?

“Have An Exit Plan”

Matt Drudge, owner and publisher of the “Drudge Report,” recently tweeted a cryptic warning to his readers, “Have an exit plan.” Here is how Susan Duclos reported the story in BeforeItsNews.com:

“The economic indicators are bad, markets, the weakening dollar, banks preventing large withdrawals, news of China banks halting all cash transfers, in fact, economies across the globe are failing, and much more has led to a simple, four word Tweet from American political commentator and the creator and editor of the Drudge Report, Matt Drudge, that chillingly states ‘Have an exit plan.’”

Duclos also wrote, “Drudge’s words should be a warning to everyone, it is coming, it is almost here and ‘have an exit plan’ ready.”

See the report here:

The Drudge Report is one of the finest news sources on the Web. Matt is well connected. This is the first time I have known of him to write such a warning–as mysterious as it was. No, I do not know what Matt learned to cause him to write this warning; but I do believe we should all pay attention to it.

I know it’s hard for most Americans to believe that something cataclysmic could ever happen to this country, but all of the signs on the horizon indicate that things simply cannot continue as they are for a whole lot longer. The stock markets are being manipulated by the Feds, as are the precious metals markets. Unemployment is vastly greater than what is being officially reported. Hyperinflation is a looming probability. The Feds are printing money like there is no tomorrow. Congress is totally unwilling to control its spending habits no matter which political party is in the majority. Republicans and Democrats alike continue to smash the so-called “debt ceiling.” Federal courts are unwilling to rein-in an out-of-control White House that seems determined to trample and ignore the Bill of Rights. Several countries are desperately trying to find a way to dump the dollar. U.S. foreign policy has made enemies of practically every nation on earth–as has the NSA’s global snooping. Our military is weaker and more demoralized than at any time in recent memory–maybe ever. China and Russia continue to unite militarily. More Americans are expatriating out of the country than at any time in our country’s history. Local and State law enforcement personnel more and more resemble Storm Troopers rather than peace officers. The America that was once the most envied nation in the world is now the most despised. Government corruption at the highest levels mirrors those of banana republics. For the most part, the Church in America is impotent and irrelevant. And, culturally-speaking, honesty and decency are practically non-existent. This is a recipe for disaster.

Unlike the days of America’s first Great Depression, most of us now live in major metropolitan areas. Can one imagine what life would be like in any major city in America today should normalcy be interrupted for more than a few days? Has everyone forgotten what New Orleans looked like following Hurricane Katrina? In any kind of area-wide emergency, there are about four hours (you read it right: HOURS) worth of food and supplies on store shelves–and the same with fuel at the gas pumps. And can you imagine what that big city of yours is going to look like when the welfare checks are not delivered?

I know. I know. Every time I touch on this subject, I hear from hundreds of Christian people saying things like, “Chuck, my exit plan is Jesus is coming” or “God has it all under control,” etc. But most of those same people lock their doors at night and give their teenagers (or even children) cell phones “just in case.” Many have AAA or similar plans for travel emergencies. Most of them have car insurance and homeowner’s insurance. Most have some sort of retirement plan–or wish they did. Most of them tell their wives and daughters to avoid the “bad” parts of town. Every day they routinely put in practice commonsense plans for their family’s safety. So, why is it every time the subject of having a plan for some sort of a national emergency comes up, they get all holier-than-thou and start talking about Jesus coming back?

First of all, most of America’s pastors and churches are doing nothing to help their people make commonsense preparations for any number of looming disasters. In fact, they are fueling the passiveness and indifference most people are drowning in. In the second place, the establishment media is deliberately hiding and obfuscating the truth. In the third place, too many politicians are so consumed with their own lust for wealth and power, that they would do anything to keep the American people in the dark. And, yes, some of them are actually ignorant themselves and are immersed in their own darkness. And, beyond that, the American people continue to turn their backs on honest political candidates–who know what’s going on and would truly make a gallant effort to turn the ship of state around–and elect the same kinds of establishment elitists (regardless of party) who only want to maintain the status quo.

Ladies and gentlemen, this party is almost over. The charade is about to be exposed. Whether it be by divine judgment or the natural result of all of this corruption and graft (probably both), America is going to be forced to pay the bills. And it’s not going to be pretty.

Government agencies are not buying up millions of rounds of hollow-point ammunition for target practice. First it was the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), then it was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), then the Social Security Administration (SSA), then the Department of Education (DE), then the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and now it’s the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). That’s right. The Post Office is making mega-purchases of ammunition.

See this report:

But when Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) recently introduced a bill that would have overturned a federal ban that prohibits citizens who possess concealed weapon permits from carrying inside post offices, members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee voted to kill the bill–including Montana Senator Jon Tester, Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. Obviously, elitists love it when government employees are armed but private citizens are not.

And I can tell you for a fact that there is a host of federal law enforcement personnel–who know what is going on–that are personally leading their own families to prepare for bad times. Many economists are doing the same thing.

The Scripture states, “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished.” (Proverbs 22:3 KJV) Famous Bible commentators Karl Keil and Friedrich Delitzsch quote the verse this way: “The prudent man arises from his perceiving an evil standing before him; he sees the approaching overthrow of a decaying house, or in a sudden storm the fearful flood, and betimes [early] betakes himself to a place of safety; the simple [foolish], on the contrary, go blindly forward into the threatening danger, and must bear the punishment of their carelessness.”

Ladies and gentlemen, America’s house is decaying; there is an evil standing before us; the fearful flood will come; and the sudden storm will strike. How we respond before that happens will reveal our prudence or our foolishness. I’m with Matt Drudge: “Have an exit plan.” This is especially true if you live in or near a big city.

P.S. I highly recommend Joel Skousen’s well-researched book, “Strategic Relocation.” It is chock-full of helpful information regarding dangerous and safe places and what to do about it. Learn about Skousen’s book here:

The Climate Change Infection

It’s all too customary for those analyzing the crises humanity faces to associate climate change, aka global warming, with whatever proximate cause they postulate for our imminent demise. John Tirman, for instance, in his book 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World lists as the first way “Altering the Earth’s Climate”. Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute includes Climate along with Energy and Debt as the three problem areas which threaten our future. Nafez Mossadeq Ahmed, author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, integrates climate change with the other crises he believes civilization faces: the financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages. This linking of concrete, demonstrable societal ills with the less grounded, more debatable theory of global warming is an ill-considered, strategic mistake, I think, as I believe critics of the global warming theory, the so-called “deniers”, are going to win the debate, at least for the near future. It would be a tragedy if valid, much-needed warnings about the dangers haunting our future were to be discredited because of their being tied to discredited fears about climate change.

Here’s why I think this is likely to happen. The warming trend which the earth experienced in the thirty years before the turn of this century has virtually stopped. This “hiatus”, as it is called, has been going on for over a decade and is likely to continue for another two. Check out this graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

What do you see? I see a 60-year cycle in which a 30-year cooling period alternates with a 30-year warming period; to wit, from about 1880 to 1910 the mean global temperature went down, then from 1910 to 1940 the earth warmed up, then from 1940 to 1970, the earth cooled slightly, followed by the 30-year period from 1970 to 2000 when the earth warmed dramatically, and finally the dozen years from the turn of the century till now during which the mean temperature hasn’t risen (the hiatus). Given that the concept of a mean global temperature is an artificial construct subject to error and manipulation, just looking at this graph what would you predict for the near future? Wouldn’t you bet that for the next 20 years or so the earth is not going to get warmer, may even cool a bit?

If this does come to pass, what will be the consequence for the theory of global warming? Won’t it be viewed with increasing skepticism by the pubic at large, at least until the next warming demi-cycle commences 20 years from now? Won’t the discrediting of the global warming theory infect theories which have been linked to it? Are you willing to wait 20 years for your forewarnings of impending doom to be taken seriously?

Unless you have been following the issue as I have, you are probably not aware that the debate over the theory of global warming has been heating up (pardon the pun) of late, largely because of the prolonged . If you believe the science is settled, consider that the “settled” science has generated a multiplicity of  which have done a terrible job of forecasting, invariably predicting warmer temperatures than what has actually occurred. If the science is so settled, why have global warming adherents only recently postulated that heat from the warming of the atmosphere is being absorbed by the oceans, ? The models did not foresee this.What about that august body of climate scientists who comprise the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), you ask. Just recently the IPCC certified once again – with  (whatever that means) – that human activities are causing global warming? We are told that 1800 scientists arrived at this conclusion; but, if you look into it, you will find the majority of the scientists on the panel are not climatologists and some not scientists at all. One scientist who served on the IPCC’s review committee called global warming fears the , predicting “When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.”For one side in a debate to label the opposition “deniers” is a sleazy rhetorical gambit usually employed by the name-callers when they are losing the debate (equally true in the case of another group of iconoclasts routinely labeled “deniers”, but that’s a story for another day). Consider who some of these so-called “deniers” are:

Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT
Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia
Roy Spencer, former NASA Senior Scientist for Climate Studies
Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech
Pat Michaels, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists

Do you really believe such people deny science?

Perhaps you believe such credentialed skeptics are in the pay of Big Oil. It’s true that the global warming theory was once opposed by powerful interests who dominated the debate; but, when a former Vice President of the United States can win both an Academy Award and a Noble Prize for a highly tendentious film full of hyperbole and misinformation, you know there are powerful interests behind the global warming scare, too. If Big Oil has bought off the media, why is it that so many people are aware that sea ice in the Arctic shrank to its smallest extent in modern times in 2012 but not that sea ice in the Antarctic was expanding at the same time or that ice in the Arctic made its largest rebound ever last year, approaching the average for the last thirty years? Why is every extreme weather event – - attributed to global warming when, in fact, extreme events like , ,  and even  are less prevalent today than in the past?

I’m not a climatologist, so I’m neither inclined nor competent to expound on the science of global warming, but I do hope to have convinced you that the science surrounding global warming is far from settled and consequently to hitch your wagon to that fading star is not a good idea. Please, at least listen to what the skeptics have to say – for instance, by consulting the websites I’ve cited – before you link the fate of your own doleful prophecies to that of climate change.

Who Lost America? Institutional Failure

A book review: Who Lost America? by Bromwell Ault…

Part 2: Institutional failure, loss of enforcing the rule of law, injection of incompatible diversity.

History becomes the great mentor for any civilization hoping to outlast the ages.  For all its bloody conflicts, history presents every country lessons from the past on how other nations failed to survive.

But in the 21^st century, America’s leaders and its citizens ignore the lessons of history.  And, ironically, as America becomes less and less of its own people and more and more of dissimilar people from around the world, it won’t be able to return itself to its intellectual, cultural, linguistic and spiritual foundation.

Former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm said, “If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let’s destroy America.  It is not that hard to do.  No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.”

Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall, and that, “An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.”

In his newest book, Who Lost America?—Yale University graduate Bromwell Ault, at 86 years of age, brings enormous historical perspective to the American predicament.

“History is an excellent teacher,” said Ault. “To some degree it is infallible.  It is both the messenger and message, and writes our records. In the end, it determines who survives and who doesn’t, and more importantly, what is and what isn’t.  It leaves little room for argument when it is being written and even less thereafter.”

Every high school student learns how Rome fell.  Every student of history knows how Easter Island’s civilization collapsed into extinction. A quick reading tells all of us why the Mayan civilization vanished.  Historical records show why the Pueblo people of Mesa Verde disappeared from their homes in the rock walls of that ancient civilization.

But do you think the citizens and leaders of America in the 21^st century take note of the causes of those collapsed civilizations?   Do you think we Americans are taking actions to avoid our own definite collapse of our civilization?  The empirical and unavoidable answer: no!  In reality, we follow in the footsteps of those ancient civilizations of history that collapsed.

“The legislative branch of our government, with the power and responsibility to create and pass our laws,” said Ault,  “is riven with so many divisions that its 535 members in the House and Senate are more and more to be found at the far ends of the political spectrum without a refuge of reason at the center.  In our time and place, it is a catastrophe.  How did it his happen and why do we permit it”

When you look at our 10 million unemployed and 7 million underemployed, or 48 million citizens subsisting on food stamps, or our $18 trillion national debt, or our $315 billion annual trade deficit to China, or our useless 10-year wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—you cannot help but lament the devolvement of our country into a horrendous geopolitical hole from which we may not recover.

When you look at our racial strife that dominates the headlines or our porous borders that our Congress facilitated to allow over 12 to 20 million people to cross without invitation or legality—you cannot help but wonder who pretends to be in charge of our laws.  The agony of 68 percent of our African-American children being brought up by a single mother on welfare—speaks to something terribly wrong.

Who lost America?  We citizens gave our country away to power mongers, to the military industrial complex, which foments foreign wars out of fabrications of fear, and to institutional failures.

“To protect ourselves, we must change our concept of power,” said Ault, “and elect as president, not someone who merely wants power, but someone who can wield it in a moral and balanced way…the great fault of government in America today is that it is considered a means, not and end.  It means our elected representatives connive in the distribution of our national political and material resources to favored areas or interests.  We have badly abused our democracy and in the process have done ourselves great disservice.”

In essence, we gave the military-industrial-complex a cart blanche pass to create Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq (twice).  No one questions those dishonest wars even after the evidence shows that our leaders contrived those conflicts.

What causes those manufactured wars?  Answer: money.  Corporations make a lot of money.  A lot of kids die for that money someone else makes.

Ault said, “Money flows in almost unimaginable amounts throughout our political process and is constantly directed and redirected by the same people to the same places.”

Ault describes how conflicted religions faced each other on the battlefields with swords, spears, maces and longbows.  Their cruelty such as the Christians on the Crusades against the Muslims of the 11^th, 12^th and 13^thcenturies engaged extreme barbarism on both sides.  Today, Muslims commit horrific-barbaric acts against the West, but in return, the West bombs and kills hundreds of thousands of Muslims in their own lands.  With countries like Syria, Muslims shoot, bomb, poison and kill each other with prolific enthusiasm.

Ault describes Rome’s fall to its endless immigration that destroyed its cohesive military into the chaos of the Goths, Visa-Goths and Vandals.  Rome lost its cultural foundation along with its language.

“As to immigration, enter the Kudzu Curve,” said Ault.  “Extend it another 50 years and our America will join the Easter Island sculptures looking for help that will not come.”

What Americans don’t realize continues at breakneck speed: America will change from a 90 percent European majority to a Latino majority by 2042—a scant 28 years from now. That means our major language, English, will share center stage with Spanish.  Our national ethos faces radical change.

“Can this come to pass?” said Ault. “And why is it considered a very real possibility by many Americans.  For an answer, it is only necessary to look to Europe.  We have seats, front and center, to observe the deadly results of unchecked immigration in France, Germany, England, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands and Italy where former colonial powers are being swamped by constant third world arrivals, mostly from Africa or the Near East, and mostly Muslims.

“The result has been extreme violence in the streets with random acts of murder, rape, torture and extensive property damage.  To look at the European history, to listen to the arguments on both sides, to observe the results, and then to think it can’t happen here is sheer folly.”

By reading Ault’s book and watching television nightly, you cannot help but “connect the dots” on how we lost America and how fast we continue losing it even further to a peaceful, self-invited invasion via immigration.

Ironically, the latest S744 amnesty bill doubled legal immigration from 1 million to 2 million annually. If it passes, ultimately the rate of speed of immigration leading to an added 100 million immigrants by 2050 shall accelerate at twice the velocity.

Our ultimate destination places a special ring to Toybee’s words: “All great civilizations rise and fall, and that, an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.”

Part 3: Losing our national identity

Who Lost America? By Bromwell Ault

Publisher: Authorhouse

ISBN # 978-1-4634-7446-1

Price: $22.46, 284 pages softcover, Kindle  $3.99

Copies: 

Publisher direct copies: 

Who Lost America?

A book review: Who Lost America by Bromwell Ault…

Part 1: How Americans lost their country like having the rug of their republic pulled right out from under them.

“The Americans cannot even conduct a military operation there,” said General Salami of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. “The conditions and the factors that facilitate the exercise of military power for them have for years been destroyed and today they (the Americans) are in an erosion of political, cultural, financial and military power.”

Military leaders in the Middle East know more about America’s weaknesses than we citizens understand about ourselves.  We know we cannot trust anything the president or military tell us that happens in Iraq or Afghanistan. The same thing happened with Vietnam.

• Politically—after five years, our president staggers knee deep in quicksand while our U.S. Congress bogs down in muck so deep it can’t extricate itself to take meaningful or logical action.
• Culturally—we don’t know if we represent American citizens or illegal alien migrants or the America Way or Iranian-Americans or Coke’s Super Bowl version of our multicultural and multi-lingual morphing into a Muslim nation represented by an Islamic American female covered in a burka to turn her into a non-being.
• Financially—we drown in an $18 trillion national debt with no escape. Our third president, John Adams said, “There two ways to conquer a country: by the sword and by debt.”
• Military Power—We spent trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan with absolutely nothing to show for it but slaughter for our kids and untold PTSD chaos in our young soldiers that will linger for their lifetimes.  We couldn’t defeat a goat-herder nation like Afghanistan for the past 11 years and counting.

Beyond the Iranian general’s understanding of our predicament, Americans in the past 45 years relinquished the American Way to the new Multicultural Way that forces us into hyphenated-Americans, confusing languages and lack of the cohesiveness of what an American stood for in this world.

We’ve become a “schizophrenic or multiple-personality- disorder” country via our immigration system that pumped 100 million immigrants from all over the planet into American from 1965 to 2013 with another 100 million projected to arrive from 150 countries within the next 36 years.

As the Super Bowl Coke advertisement illustrated, we don’t know what we stand for as a culture, language or country.  While the Islamic girl wore a headscarf, you see tens of thousands of Muslim women in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver and Chicago wearing black burkas with only slits for their eyes to see out.  They remain non-beings with no identity within America.  Their Muslim husbands subjugate them with fear and cultural dominance.  Yet, they represent the beachhead for Islamic conquest in America in the 21^st century.   At 7 million Muslims in 2014, we must brace ourselves for their aggressive actions when they reach 20 million within two decades and 50 million soon after.

With one look at the Muslim conquest of Europe, an idiot can see Islam’s march, but we think ourselves immune.  Such denial placed the United Kingdom, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Spain and Sweden reeling from the havoc created by Islamic immigrants.  Lesson: Muslims never integrate into host countries. They create enclaves, which force those countries to tolerate and even adopt Sharia Law, which proves the most barbaric form of subjugation by any religion on the planet.

“Immigrants devoted to their own cultures and religions are not influenced by the secular politically correct façade that dominates academia, news-media, entertainment, education, religious and political thinking today,” said James Walsh, former Associate General Counsel of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. “They claim the right not to assimilate, and the day is coming when the question will be how can the United States regulate the defiantly unassimilated cultures, religions and mores of foreign lands?  Such immigrants say their traditions trump the U.S. legal system.  Balkanization of the United States has begun.”

Whether you stand as a liberal, conservative, libertarian or not-involved in our country’s future by your apathy—this multicultural train speeds into America with a load of cargo 100 million immigrants full, that no one understands—thus we face consequences of an overpopulated, fractured and fragmented culture society.  And ultimately our civilization splinters and degrades.

Brilliant historian Bromwell Ault, at 84, and a graduate of Yale University, brings the brunt of what Americans face in his new book:  Who Lost America?  

He writes, “Can America’s democratic identity and government survive our ethical, political and economic failures?”

Ault begins, “During the State of the Union speech, the President declares that the “State of the Union is strong.”  This has become a tradition and touches upon several emotions and strength; and it creates a sense of unity that binds us to each other and to our past. The problem is that it is a lie centered on its two key words—“union” and “strong”.

Via his extraordinary longevity in America’s story, Ault said, “Technology and progress have a way of overwhelming cultures that are not spiritually, geographically, economically or politically resistant. And it is the ever shifting mix of these elements which determines whether different cultures will succumb or survive.”

With an added 100 million legal immigrants from 150 countries from around the world about to be injected into the United States in the next three decades, can we survive the clash of civilizations they represent?

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations said, “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

Ault stated the most obvious aspect of an “intact” civilization depended on its culture.  With America scattering into hundreds of cultures within the next three decades, the question arises: can it survive its own lack of a single cohesive culture and people?  Huntington’s research as well as Ault’s shows that the United States will not survive as a single united people or culture.

Ault asks, “Who lost America? Or, more specifically, who replaced the America we were, with what we have become? And, why? And, how?”

Part 2: How we lost the rule of law.  Institutional failure. Transforming and devolving America via the culprits doing the dirty work.

Who Lost America? By Bromwell Ault

Publisher: Authorhouse

ISBN # 978-1-4634-7446-1

Price: $22.46, 284 pages softcover, Kindle  $3.99

Copies: 

Publisher direct copies: 

What Is A Blood Moon?

Want to know the dates for the Blood Moons and total lunar eclipses in 2014 and 2015? You’ve come to the right place…

We have been receiving a number of inquiries about some upcoming Blood Moons in the years 2014 and 2015. And we want to say, first of all, that the Blood Moons most people are asking about are not part of astronomy. Instead, their origin is religious, at least according to Christian pastor John Hagee, who wrote a 2013 book about Blood Moons. More about that below. Still, since they’re moons, and since people are asking us, we wanted to reply.

Follow the links below to learn more about Blood Moons.

 

Why is a Hunter’s Moon linked in people’s minds with a red moon? First of all, in autumn, the angle of the ecliptic – or sun and moon’s path – makes a narrow angle with the horizon. Image via classicalastronomy.com.

Secondly, the narrow angle of the ecliptic means the moon rises noticeably farther north on the horizon, from one night to the next. So, every autumn, there is no long period of darkness between sunset and moonrise. Around the time of full moon, many people see the moon low in the sky, around the time of twilight. At that time, the moon often looks reddish. Image via classicalastronomy.com.

Blood Moons in astronomy. In astronomical lore, all the full moons have names. The names typically coincide with months of the year, or seasons.

One of the most famous moon names isthe Hunter’s Moon. It is the the full moonimmediately following the Harvest Moon, which is the full moon occurring most closely to the autumnal equinox.

The Hunter’s Moon, in skylore, is also sometimes called the Blood Moon. Why? Probably because it’s a characteristic of these autumn full moons that they appear nearly full – and rise soon after sunset – for several evenings in a row. Many people see them when they are low in the sky, shortly after they’ve risen, at which time there’s more atmosphere between you and the moon than when the moon is overhead. When you see the moon low in the sky, the extra air between you and the moon makes the moon look reddish. Voila. Blood moon.

Dates for the Northern Hemisphere’s Harvest and Hunter’s Moons in 2014 and 2015:

2014:
Harvest Moon: September 9
Autumn Equinox: September 23
Hunter’s (Blood) Moon: October 8

2015:
Autumn Equinox: September 23
Harvest Moon: September 28
Hunter’s (Blood) Moon: October 27

This book, published in 2013, is apparently what launched all the questions to our astronomy website about Blood Moons. We confess. We haven’t read it.

Blood Moons in Biblical prophecy. We’re not experts on prophecy of any kind. But we’ll tell you what we know about the new definition for Blood Moon that has caused so many questions recently.

From what we’ve been able to gather, two Christian pastors, Mark Blitz and John Hagee, use the termBlood Moon to apply to the full moons of the upcoming tetrad – four successive total lunar eclipses, with no partial lunar eclipses in between, each of which is separated from the other by six lunar months (six full moons) – in 2014 and 2015. John Hagee appears to have popularized the term in his 2013 book .

Mark Blitz and John Hagee speak of a lunar tetrad as representing a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. After all, the moon is supposed to turn blood red before the end times, isn’t it? As described in Joel 2:31 (Common English Bible):

The sun will be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood before the great and dreadful day of the LORD comes.

That description, by the way, describes both a total solar eclipse and total lunar eclipse. Sun turned to darkness = moon directly between the Earth and sun in a total solar eclipse. Moon turned to blood = Earth directly between the sun and moon, Earth’s shadow falling on the moon in a total lunar eclipse.

This is what a total eclipse looks like. This is the total eclipse of October 27, 2004 via Fred Espenak of NASA. Visit Fred’s page here. We astronomy writers often describe a totally eclipsed moon as appearing ‘blood red.’ Here’s why the moon turns red during a total eclipse.

We astronomy writers often describe total lunar eclipses as appearing blood red. Why red? They appear reddish because sunlight from all of Earth’s sunrises and sunsets is scattered by the Earth’s atmosphere and falls on the surface of the eclipsed moon. In years where volcanic activity is pronounced, however, a total lunar eclipse may appear more brownish or gray in color. Read more here: Why does the moon look red during a total lunar eclipse?

Dates of Biblical prophecy Blood Moons in 2014 and 2015. These are the dates for the upcomingtetrad – four successive total lunar eclipses – in these years.

2014:
Total lunar eclipse: April 15
Total lunar eclipse: October 8

2015:
Total lunar eclipse: April 4
Total lunar eclipse: September 28

There are a total of 8 tetrads in the 21st century (2001 to 2100). But proponents of this Biblical prophecy regard the upcoming tetrad as especially significant because it coincides with two important Jewish holidays: Passover and Tabernacles.

The April 2014 and April 2015 total lunar eclipses align with the feast of Passover. The October 2014 and September 2015 total lunar eclipses align with the feast of Tabernacles.

The Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar. In any year, it’s inevitable that a full moon should fall on or near the feasts of Passover (15 Nissan) and Tabernacles (15 Tishri). Nissan and Tishri are the first and seventh months of the Jewish calendar, respectively.

It is somewhat ironic that three of these four lunar eclipses are not visible – even in part – from Israel. The only eclipse that can be seen at all from Israel is the tail end of the September 28, 2015 eclipse, which may be observable for a short while before sunrise.

How common is a tetrad of total lunar eclipses? Depending upon the century in which you live, alunar tetrad (four consecutive total lunar eclipses, spaced at six lunar months apart from one another) may happen fairly frequently – or not at all.

For instance, in our 21st century (2001-2100), there are a total 8 tetrads, but in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, there were none at all. If we include all the centuries from the 1st century (AD 1-100) through the 21st century (2001-2100), inclusive, there are a total of 62 tetrads. The last one occurred in 2003-2004, and the next one after the 2014-2015 tetrad will happen in 2032-2033.

However, if we want to know which tetrads specifically fell on the Jewish feasts of Passover and Tabernacles, there appear to be a total of 8 in these 21 centuries:

1. 162-163 C.E. (Common Era)
2. 795-796 C.E.
3. 842-843 C.E.
4. 860-861 C.E.
5. 1493-1494 C.E.
6. 1949-1950 C.E.
7. 1967-1968 C.E.
8. 2014-2015 C.E.

Why is the term Blood Moon being used to mean a full moon of a lunar tetrad? We can’t really tell you why more and more people are using the term Blood Moon to describe the four full moons of alunar tetrad. We don’t know why, exactly.

Here’s the definition of a lunar tetrad, again: four successive total lunar eclipses, with no partial eclipses in between, each of which is separated from the other by six lunar months (six full moons). There’s no obvious reason why Blood Moon should be associated with this term.

To the best of our knowledge, however, the use of the term Blood Moon to describe a lunar tetrad is of recent origin. It might have originated with John Hagee’s 2013 book.

We’re still not sure whether Blood Moon pertains to the full moon of any tetrad, or specifically to a tetrad that coincides with the feasts of Passover and Tabernacles.

Either way, I suspect the nouveau definition of Blood Moon will gain traction as we approach the tetrad, the four total lunar eclipses of 2014 and 2015.

Bottom line: The term Blood Moon in astronomy in sometimes used as another name for the Hunter’s Moon. The term Blood Moon in Biblical prophecy appears to have been popularized by two Christian pastors, Mark Blitz and John Hagee. They use the term Blood Moon to apply to the full moons of the upcoming tetrad – four successive total lunar eclipses, with no partial lunar eclipses in between, each of which is separated from the other by six lunar months (six full moons) – in 2014 and 2015. Astronomers will not be using the term Blood Moon to describe these four upcoming lunar eclipses.

Source:

Prelude To A Crash

The Fed’s easy money policies have pushed margin debt on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to record levels laying the groundwork for a severe correction or another violent market crash.

In December, margin debt rose by $21 billion to an all-time high of $445 billion.

Buying equities on margin, that is, with loads of borrowed cash, is a sign of excessive risk taking the likes of which invariably takes place whenever the Central Bank creates subsidies for speculation by keeping interest rates pegged below the rate of inflation or by pumping trillions of dollars into the bloated financial system through misguided liquidity programs like QE.

Investors have shrugged off dismal earnings reports, abnormally-high unemployment, flagging demand, droopy incomes, stagnant wages and swollen P/E ratios and loaded up on stocks confident that the Fed’s infusions of liquidity will keep prices going higher. It’s only a matter of time before they see the mistake they’ve made.

The chart below illustrates how zero rates and QE lead to excessive risk taking. The correlation between the stratospheric rise of margin debt and the Fed’s destabilizing monetary policy is hard to avoid. This is what bubblemaking looks like in real time.

Chart: Seeking Alpha.

In the minutes of the FOMC’s December meeting, FOMC officials acknowledge the froth they’ve created in financial assets which is why they’ve begun to scale back their asset purchases. The Fed hopes that by gradually winding down QE they’ll be able to stage a soft landing rather than a full-blown crash. Here’s an excerpt from the FOMC’s minutes:

“In their discussion of potential risks, several participants commented on the rise in forward price-to-earnings ratios for some smallcap stocks, the increased level of equity repurchases, or the rise in margin credit. One pointed to the increase in issuance of leveraged loans this year and the apparent decline in the average quality of such loans.”

There you have it, the Fed sees the results of its work; the distortions in P/E ratios, the exuberant stock buybacks (“equity repurchases”), the deterioration in the quality of leveraged loans, and the steady rise in margin debt. They see it all, all the bubbles they’ve created with their gargantuan $3 trillion surge of liquidity. Now they have started to reverse the policy by reducing their asset purchase from $85 bil to $65 bil per month, the effects of which can already be seen in the Emerging Markets.

The bubble in Emerging Markets has burst sending foreign currencies plunging and triggering a sharp reversal in capital flows. The hot money that flooded the EMs,–(which lowered the cost of borrowing for businesses and consumers)–is entirely attributable to the Fed’s policy. QE pushes down long-term interest rates forcing investors to search for higher yield in other markets. Thus, the cost of money drops in EMs creating a boom that abruptly ends when the policy changes (as it has).

Capital is fleeing EMs at an unprecedented pace precipitating a dramatic slowdown in economic activity, higher consumer prices and widespread public distress. The Fed is 100% responsible for the turmoil in emerging markets, a fact which even mainstream news outlets blandly admit. Here’s an excerpt from an article in Bloomberg just this week:

“Investors are pulling money from exchange-traded funds that track emerging markets at the fastest rate on record…More than $7 billion flowed from ETFs investing in developing-nation assets in January, the most since the securities were created, data compiled by Bloomberg show…

Emerging economies have benefited from cheap money as three rounds of Fed bond buying pushed capital into their borders in search of higher returns…

The Fed’s asset purchases had helped fuel a credit boom in developing nations from Turkey to Brazil. Accumulated capital inflows to developing-country’s debt markets since 2008 reached $1.1 trillion, or $470 billion more than their long-term trend, according to a study by the International Monetary Fund in October.” (“Record Cash Leaves Emerging Market ETFs on Lira Drop“, Bloomberg)

The Fed doesn’t care if other countries are hurt by its policies. What the Fed worries about is how the taper is going to effect Wall Street. If the slightest reduction in asset purchases causes this much turbulence abroad, then what’s it going to do to US stock and bond markets?

The answer, of course, is that stocks are going to fall…hard. It can’t be avoided. And while the amount of margin debt is not a reliable tool for calling a top; it’s safe to say that the recent spike in investor leverage has moved the arrow well into the red zone. Investors are going to cash out long before the Fed ends QE altogether, which means the selloff could persist for some time to come much like after the dot.com bubble popped and stocks drifted lower for a full year. Now check out this clip from Alhambra Investment Partners newsletter titled “The Year of Leverage”:

“For the year, total margin debt usage jumped by an almost incomprehensible $123 billion, while cash balances declined by $19 billion. That $142 billion leveraged bet on stocks far surpasses any twelve month period in history. The only times that were even close to as leveraged were the year leading up to June 2007 (-$89 billion) and the twelve months preceding February and March 2000 (-$77 billion). Both of those marked significant tops in the market.” ( Alhambra Investment Partners newsletter titled “The Year of Leverage“)

Repeat: “The $142 billion leveraged bet on stocks far surpasses any twelve month period in history.”

Investors are “all-in” because they think that the Fed has their back. They think that Bernanke (or Yellen) will not allow stocks to fall too far without intervening. (This is called the “Bernanke Put”) So far, that’s been a winning strategy, but that might be changing. The Fed’s determination to taper suggests that it wants to withdraw its stimulus to avoid being blamed for the bursting bubble. (“Plausible deniability”?) That’s what’s driving the current policy. Here’s more on margin debt from Wolf Richter at Testosterone Pit:

“On the New York Stock Exchange, margin credit has been hitting new records for months. All three mega-crashes in my investing lifetime have been accompanied by record-setting peaks in margin debt. In September 1987, a month before the crash, margin credit peaked at 0.88% of GDP. In March 2000, when the crash began, margin credit peaked at 2.7% of GDP. In July 2007, three months before the downdraft started, margin credit peaked at 2.6% of GDP. Now, margin credit has already reached 2.5% of GDP.” (“Plagued By Indigestion, Fed Issues Asset-Bubble Warning”, Testosterone Pit)

Stock market crashes are always connected to massive leverage, loosey-goosey monetary policy and irrational exuberance (“excessive risk taking”), the toxic combo that presently rules the markets. The Federal Reserve is invariably the source of all bubblemaking and financial instability.

As we noted earlier, equity repurchases or stock buybacks are another sign of froth. Here’s an excellent summary on the topic by Alhambra Investment Partners:

“In the third quarter of 2013, share repurchases totaled $128.2 billion, the highest level since Q4 2007. For the twelve months ended in September 2013, aggregate share repurchases were an astounding $445.3 billion; the only twelve-month period greater than that total was the calendar year of 2007 and its $589 billion.

The common argument advanced in favor of such share repurchases is that companies are using cash to recognize undervalued stocks, but that is total hogwash…

…corporate managers are no different than the reviled stereotypical retail investor. Both leverage themselves further and further as the market goes higher, not in recognizing undervalued stocks or companies but in full froth of chasing obscene values via rationalizations.” ( Alhambra Investment Partners newsletter titled “The Year of Leverage”)

In other words, corporate managers are doing the same thing as your average margin investor. They are loading up on financial assets–not because they think they are a good value or because they expect higher earnings –but because Fed policy supports artificially-high prices. That’s what’s driving the bull market, the Fed’s thumb on the scale. Remove the thumb, and you have a whole new ballgame (as we see in the EMs). There’s also a bubble in high yield “junk” bonds which just had their second biggest year on record (Total issuance $324 billion) Investors are only too happy to dump their money into high-risk debt believing that companies never default or that the Fed will save the day again credit tightens and the dominoes start tumbling through the debt markets. According to Testosterone Pit:

“The cost of a high-yield bond on an absolute coupon basis is as low as it’s ever been,” explained Baratta, king of Blackstone’s $53 billion in private equity assets. Even the riskiest companies are selling the riskiest bonds at low yields… Why would anyone buy this crap?” (“Bubble Trouble: Record Junk Bond Issuance, A Barrage Of IPOs, “Out Of Whack” Valuations, And Grim Earnings Growth”, Testosterone Pit)

Why, indeed? Of course, the author is just being rhetorical, after all, he knows why people are piling into junk. It’s because the Fed has kept a gun to their heads for 5 years, forcing them to grab higher yield wherever they can find it. That’s how Bernanke’s dogwhistle monetary policy works. By slashing rates to zero, the Fed coerces investors to speculate on any type of garbage that’s available. That why junk “just had its second biggest year on record.” You can thank Bernanke.

Housing is also in a bubble due to the Fed’s zero rates, withheld inventory, government modification programs, and an unprecedented uptick in all-cash investors. Clearly, there’s never been a market more manipulated than housing. It’s a joke.

The surge of Wall Street liquidity has spilled over into housing distorting prices and reducing the number of first time homebuyers to an all-time low. The homeownership rate is actually falling even while prices climb higher, which is just one of many anomalies created by the Fed’s policy. (Who’s ever heard of a housing boom, where the number of firsttime homebuyers is dropping?)

Also, the Central Bank has purchased more than $1 trillion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) via QE, which begs the question: How can housing prices NOT be in a bubble?

As we noted earlier, the Fed understands the impact its policies have had. They know the markets are overheated and they’re determined to do something about it. A recent article in Bloomberg explains the Fed’s plan for winding down QE “without doing damage to the economy”. Here’s a short excerpt from the piece:

“Janet Yellen probably will confront a test during her tenure as Federal Reserve chairman that both of her predecessors flunked: defusing asset bubbles without doing damage to the economy…

Yellen is ‘going to be trying to do something that no one has ever done,’ said Stephen Cecchetti, former economic adviser for the Bank for International Settlements, the Basel, Switzerland-based central bank for monetary authorities. She needs ‘to ensure that accommodative monetary policy doesn’t create significant financial stability risks,’ he said in an interview…

The Fed’s ‘first, second and third lines of defense” for dealing with such imbalances is to rely on supervision, regulation and so-called macro-prudential policies, such as mortgage loan-to-value restrictions, Bernanke told the Brookings Institution in Washington on Jan. 16. ….Only as a last resort would it consider raising interest rates.’ (“Yellen Faces Test Bernanke Failed: Ease Bubbles“, Bloomberg)

You got that?

So the Fed is going into the “bubble-deflating” biz.

Check.

And uber-dove Yellen is going to put things right. She’s going to eliminate the price distortions and gradually return the markets to normalcy.

Right, again.

She’s going to wind down QE and start to reduce the Fed’s $4 trillion balance sheet.

Oakie dokie.

And she’s going to do all of this without raising interest rates or sending stocks into freefall?

Right. It’s a pipedream. The first sign of trouble and old Yellen will be scuttling across the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with a punch bowl the size of Yankee Stadium.

You can bet on it.

Everyone Loves A Police State

A few years ago, Reuters News reported that a nationwide poll conducted of the Russian people found that former dictator Josef Stalin was voted the third most popular historical figure. Over one-third of the Russian population participated in the poll.

See the report here:

Can you imagine? Stalin just might be the greatest mass-murderer in human history. Estimates of the body count during Stalin’s reign of terror range anywhere from 20-60 million, and that doesn’t include the millions of people who were starved, imprisoned, and tortured but who didn’t die. Only China’s Mao Tse-tung rivals Stalin’s butchery. Then, again, many Chinese people still love Mao Tse-tung, too.

How is it that people can laud and honor tyrants and butchers? How can people so easily submit to slavery and despotism?

No tyrant rises to power calling himself a tyrant. Tyranny is never sold as tyranny. Every tyrannical regime of history considered itself to be patriotic and compassionate; and the people who supported and submitted to such regimes considered themselves to be patriotic and compassionate, as well. The police state is never called that by those who promote it; they call it “law and order,” “keeping the peace,” “protecting the homeland,” etc.

Ask the average American today about the possibility that our country could become a police state and the common response is, “That could never happen here.” But, ladies and gentlemen, it is already happening here. And, furthermore, it seems that the vast majority of the American people are all in favor it. Republicans love it; Democrats love it; Christians love it; politicians love it; police officers love it; pastors love it; school teachers love it; businessmen love it; everyone loves a police state.

Threaten to remove Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty, and Christians and conservatives come out of the woodwork in righteous indignation. Threaten to put a Nativity scene on some courthouse lawn, and Democrats and liberals come out of the woodwork in righteous indignation. But propose laws that strip the American people of their God-ordained liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, and conservatives and liberals alike, Christians and unbelievers alike, think it’s just about the greatest thing since sliced bread.

You don’t believe that? Try this news story on for size:

According to a World Net Daily report, “The 2014 NDAA was fast-tracked through the U.S. Senate, with no time for discussion or amendments, while most Americans were distracted by the scandal surrounding A&E’s troubles with ‘Duck Dynasty’ star Phil Robertson.

“Eighty-five of 100 senators voted in favor of the new version of the NDAA, which had already been quietly passed by the House of Representatives.”

The report continued saying, “Section 1021 allows the detention of anyone, including American citizens, by the military, if the president considers that person to have helped with terror.”

The report further said, “Congress specifically expressed its desire for the detention provision to apply to American citizens even on American soil by rejecting multiple amendments that would have exempted them.”

So, where are the notable leaders of the Religious Right? Where are the liberal groups? Where is the national media? Where are the talking heads from the right and the left? With precious few exceptions, they are absolutely silent on the subject. Why? Because they like it.

Liberals never met a big-government program or proposal they didn’t like. If it increases the size and scope of government, liberals love it. Conservatives love anything that smacks of “law and order.” (A word of caution: you never want to be the defendant in a courtroom where the jury is stacked with conservatives. If you do, you’re dead meat, friend.) And Christians get goose bumps up their spine about anything they think resembles Romans 13. Give government more power over our lives and listen to the Hallelujahs ringing out from the all of these 501c3 churches. And ditto for most of the talking heads on radio and television and the vast majority of the pundits and spokesmen from the national news media. Like I said, everyone loves a police state.

Well, not everyone, thank God!

The same WND report mentioned above states, “Some of the nation’s most respected legal teams are asking the Supreme Court to take up a challenge to the indefinite-detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, charging the law has created the framework for a police state.

“The controversial provision authorizes the military, under presidential authority, to arrest, kidnap, detain without trial and hold indefinitely American citizens thought to ‘represent an enduring security threat to the United States.’

“Journalist Chris Hedges is among the plaintiffs charging the law could be used to target journalists who report on terror-related issues.

A friend-of-the-court brief submitted in the case states: ‘The central question now before this court is whether the federal judiciary will stand idly by while Congress and the president establish the legal framework for the establishment of a police state and the subjugation of the American citizenry through the threat of indefinite military arrest and detention, without the right to counsel, the right to confront one’s accusers, or the right to trial.’

“The brief was submitted to the Supreme Court by attorneys with the U.S. Justice Foundation of Ramona, Calif., Friedman Harfenist Kraut & Perlstein of Lake Success, N.Y., and William J. Olson, P.C. of Vienna, Va.”

See the report here:

Believe it or not, there was a time in this country when people from both sides of the political aisle believed in freedom. I know it’s hard to imagine, but there was a time in this country when pastors from virtually every denomination believed in freedom. Not only did they believe in it; they fought for it. It seems like a long time ago.

Have you taken a close look at your State and local police agencies lately? More and more, our police officers and sheriff’s deputies resemble soldiers more than they do peace officers. I challenge you to Google “police abuse.” What you will discover will shock you. And, for all intents and purposes, the folks who live in many Northeastern states—along with California and Illinois–are already living in a State that is more controlled than many foreign countries, including some of the countries that we would call oppressive. And even our freer states are feeling the heavy hand of Big Brother more and more each day.

In fact, if you want to really get a taste of a police state, just move into some neighborhoods with their Gestapo-like Home Owner Associations (HOA). I’m telling you, some of these HOA rival anything Adolf Hitler could dream up.

Folks, take a good, hard look at reality: America is already in the beginning throes of a police state. Orwell’s “1984” and Huxley’s “Brave New World” are here. And far, far too many people seem fine with it.

I tell you the truth: I am to the point where I don’t know what to call myself. “Conservative” means nothing today. Nothing! One can be a “conservative” and believe in Big Government, undeclared wars of intervention, debt-driven economics, socialized medicine, increased taxes, and, of course, a police state. Likewise, “Christian” means nothing today. Nothing! One can be a “Christian” and believe in Big Government, undeclared wars of intervention, debt-driven economics, socialized medicine, increased taxes, and, of course, a police state. Oh, many “conservatives” and “Christians” might SAY they don’t believe in these things, but their actions (or lack of them) speak louder than their words.

A big THANK YOU is in order for Bill Olson, Herb Titus, Chris Hedges, et al. And THANK YOU to all of you folks out there who see what’s going on and are actively engaged in “the holy cause of liberty.” (Patrick Henry) I am your brother and compatriot, no matter what you call yourself. At this point, we aren’t conservatives or liberals, Christians or unbelievers; we are freedomists or statists.

Tyrants such as Joe Stalin and Mao Tse-tung might be popular with some people, and a burgeoning police state might be popular with some people, but there is a whole host of us in these United States who aren’t going to the gulags and gas chambers peacefully. And unlike the peasants of Europe and Asia, we aren’t surrendering our means of self-defense, either.

No, not everyone loves a police state.

Digging Ourselves A Grave With Drugs And Chemicals

The pressing question of this commentary: what are we doing to ourselves and why do we keep doing it?

In the past 50 years, scientists and chemists from all over the world created 80,000 different chemicals to work all sorts of havoc on Mother Nature.  You can find pharmaceuticals and pesticides in Polar bears as well as seals and fish in the Southern Oceans of Antarctica.

Guess what?  You can find many of the same chemicals in human beings.  If you look across America’s landscape, 30 years ago, Autism affected 1 in 110,000 births. Today, it affects 1 in 110. (Source: CDC report)

When we poison the plants and animals of the food chain around the planet, we ultimately poison ourselves.  Witness cancer rates skyrocketing around the world.  Witness Parkinson’s disease, fibromyalgia, lupus and other neurological maladies affecting millions of Americans.

Fukushima reactors spill billions of gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.  It circulates to all corners of the planet.  But closer to home, we continue injecting drugs and chemicals into our own Great Lakes.

An International Joint Commission report, conducted by scientists from both the US and Canada, discovered that the Great Lakes region suffers severely contaminated waters replete with chemicals and prescription drugs that slipped past treatment methods at sewage treatment plants.

“The commission found that about half of all prescription drug and other chemical contaminants remain in sewage waste after it is treated,” said a Natural News report. “The situation is so dire that the commission is calling out for new water treatment methods, warning residents of the area of “chemicals of emerging concern” that may affect the health of both aquatic life and humans in negative ways.”

The Great Lakes – becoming a cocktail of pharmaceutical and chemical compounds

Antonette Arvai, physical scientist of the International Joint Commission, said, “It is hard to tell how one contaminate may affect the human body, let alone a whole mix of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The compounds, which can’t be seen, are showing up in mixed proportions at parts per billion or parts per trillion. As compounds combine randomly and in different proportions, water from the Great Lakes is becoming a wicked cocktail travesty of science.”

According to the commission, “A chemical flood of 4.8 billion gallons of waste water is treated and discharged into the Great Lakes basin every day. All the intermingling, parts per billion of untreated waste chemicals add up. The Great Lakes are basically becoming a pharmaceutical stew, a melting pot of side effects waiting to be drunk.”

This list shows chemicals and pharmaceuticals that accumulate in the Great Lakes region.

• A couple of antibiotics  and commercial antibacterial triclosan - Triclosan, the antibacterial compound found in commercial soaps, toothpastes and other body care products is a known toxin to algae and has been shown to be a hormone disruptor to fish. How might triclosan and other antibiotics spawn the creation of dangerous and evolved bacteria strains?
   
  Diana Aga, chemistry professor and chemical researcher of the Great Lakes region said, “Even at low levels you don’t want to have people ingest antibiotics regularly because it will promote resistance.”
• An herbicide - How might this destroy nutritional algae and other beneficial plants, which are needed for a thriving ecosystem?
• Acetaminophen and an anti-inflammatory drug called diclofenac. Dicolfenac accumulates in fish. How might continual dosing through water sources accumulate in the cells of humans and tax the liver over time?
•  An estrogen, estriol - How might hormones in the water affect mating patterns in wildlife and in humans?
• An anti-seizure drug – How might drugs like these, with side effects including suicidal thoughts and behaviors, effect people over time?

Do you filter your water?  Start today!

Commission board member and scientist for the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Regional Center Michael Murray said, “Wastewater plants weren’t designed to handle these types of .”

As wastewater treatment plants fail to keep up with high levels of pharmaceuticals and chemical compounds, obtaining clean water will become the responsibility of the individual family.

Most municipal water sources suffer contaminating with fluoride, chlorine and other chemicals. You must filter your own water. Gravity-fed activated charcoal filtration devices are becoming more popular for their ability to eliminate pharmaceuticals and herbicides from tap water. Other filters that use reverse osmosis help eliminate fluoride and arsenic. Some water filtration systems utilize both methods to free water of practically all contaminates.

Finally, a friend of mine said that my quest to educate all Americans as to the ramifications of adding 138 million people within 36 years fails from the git-go.  Most Americans and certainly our Main Stream Media cannot grasp the enormity of it, or if they do, they flee the subject because it proves extremely unsettling. Better to deny it today and deal with it tomorrow.

Unfortunately, that’s like driving a car toward a cliff at 100 miles per hour and start braking within 100 feet of the edge.  You certainly know what happens to anyone in that car.

That’s why we need to take action today.  We must stop mass immigration into America. We don’t want to become a “refugee nation” and we don’t want our civilization overwhelmed and unsustainable.

Call Speaker of the House John Boehner and demand he not pass S744 amnesty that will flood the country with two million immigrants annually and give amnesty to 20 million plus. The reasonable solution: enforce our current laws against employers.  Call him: .

HSBC Bank on Verge of Collapse: Second Major Banking Crash Imminent

Concerns about an imminent bank crash were further fuelled today at news that HSBC are restricting the amount of cash that customers can withdraw from their own bank accounts. Customers were told that without proof of the intended use of their own money, HSBC would refuse to release it. This, and other worrying signs point to a possible financial crash in the near future.

HSBC is scrambling to manage a seemingly terminal liquidity crisis (a lack of hard cash) that could see the bank become the next Northern Rock – and trigger a bank crash.  The analyst’s advice is for shareholders to sell HSBC investments, and customers to move their accounts elsewhere before the crash.

This from the :

Forensic Asia on Tuesday began its coverage of Britain’s largest banking group with a ‘sell’ recommendation, warning the lender had between $63.6bn (£38.7bn) and $92.3bn of “questionable assets” on its balance sheet, ranging from loan loss reserves and accrued interest to deferred tax assets, defined benefit pension schemes and opaque Level 3 assets.

According a report by the BBC’s MoneyBox Programme, HSBC customers have gone to withdraw cash from their accounts, only to find HSBC would not release the funds.  Customers were told to make a bank transfer instead, unless they provided documentation proving the intended use of the money. Stephen Cotton attempted a withdrawal and told the programme:

“When we presented them with the withdrawal slip, they declined to give us the money because we could not provide them with a satisfactory explanation for what the money was for. They wanted a letter from the person involved.”

Mr Cotton says the staff refused to tell him how much he could have: “So I wrote out a few slips. I said, ‘Can I have £5,000?’ They said no. I said, ‘Can I have £4,000?’ They said no. And then I wrote one out for £3,000 and they said, ‘OK, we’ll give you that.’ “

He asked if he could return later that day to withdraw another £3,000, but he was told he could not do the same thing twice in one day.

As this was not a change to the Terms and Conditions of your bank account we had no need to pre-notify customers of the change”

He wrote to complain to HSBC about the new rules and also that he had not been informed of any change.

The bank said it did not have to tell him. “As this was not a change to the Terms and Conditions of your bank account, we had no need to pre-notify customers of the change,” HSBC wrote.

Mr Cotton is not alone, with other customers seeking to withdraw cash amounts over £3,000 facing the same obstacles.  While HSBC argue there is comes customer security interest here, the story simply doesn’t add up.  Customer identification is required for large withdrawals, not customer intentions – a person’s cash is theirs to withdraw and place wherever they so wish.  Instead, HSBC has been found to have a capitalization black hole (gap between actual cash and obligations) of$80bn.  The message is simple, get your money out now.

The major banks and states appear to be preparing for impending crisis, while pretending to the public that the economic situation is improving.

There is a gold rush underway, with Banks and States frantically buying up as much gold reserve as they can, stoking fears that confidence in currency is at an all-time low.  In recent months and weeks, banks like HSBC and JP Morgan, and states such as the US, Germany and China have joined the gold rush, making vast purchases of stocks.

Investment analysts at Seeking Alpha have been monitoring the strange activity on the COMEX, stating:

“keeping track of COMEX inventories is something that is recommended for all serious investors who own physical gold and the gold ETFs (SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), PHYS, and CEF) because any abnormal inventory declines may signify extraordinary events behind the scenes.”

The crash is in some ways a replay of the last one.  The US dollar is a fiat currency (as is the pound sterling, the euro and most other major currencies).  This means, it is monopoly money.  There is no gold reserve that its values are pegged to.  It is simply made up.  So how does money get made? A private, for profit central bank prints it and lends it to the government (or other banks) at an interest rate.  So the Central Bank prints $100, and gives it to the government on the basis that it returns $101.  You may have already spotted the first flaw in this process.  The additional $1 can only ever come from the Central Bank.  There is never enough money. The second issue is that all money is debt.

This used to be the way pretty much all of the money in circulation came to be.  That is, until Investment and Retail Banks got tired of this monopoly on debt based currency, and kicked off thecommercial money supply.  You might assume that when you take out a loan or other form of credit, a bank gives you that money from its reserves, and you then pay back that loan to the Bank at a given interest rate – the Bank making its profit on the interest rate.  You would be wrong. The Bank simply creates that loan on a computer screen.  Let’s say you are granted a loan for $100,000.  The moment that loan is approved and $100k is entered on the computer – that promise from you to the bank creates $100k for the bank, in that instant.  This ledger entry alone creates the $100k, from nothing. Today, over 97% of all money that exists, is made this way.

This is what drove the dodgy lending practises that created the last crisis.  But since then, the failure to regulate the markets means that while bailouts hit public services and the real economy – banks were free to continue the same behaviour, bringing the next crash.

The world’s second richest man, Warren Buffet warned us in 2003 that the derivatives market was ‘devised by madmen’ and a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ and we have only seen the first blast in this debt apocalypse.

The news that should have us all worried is: the derivatives market contains $700trn of these debts yet to implode.

Global GDP stands at  a year.  This means that (primarily) Wall Street and the City of London have run up phantom paper debts of more than ten times of the annual earnings of the entire planet.

Not only can the Bankers not pay it back, the combined earning power of the earth could not pay it back in less than ten years if every last cent of our productive power went solely to pay off this debt.

This is why answering the issues with our currencies, our banking practices and economic system are not theoretical or academic – they are a matter of our very survival.

Source:  http://iacknowledge.net/hsbc-bank-on-verge-of-collapse-second-major-banking-crash-imminent/

Top Three Media Lies About The Syrian Peace Talks

he media spin machine is again kicking into high gear, perfectly timed to accompany the “Geneva II” Syria peace talks. The lies are necessary to give the Obama administration an upper hand in the peace negotiations, which are not being used to pursue peace, but instead, to accomplish the Obama administration’s longstanding goal of Syrian regime change. Here are the top three Western media lies about the Syrian peace talks.

1) The removal of Syrian Bashar al-Assad was an agreed upon “precondition” for the Geneva II peace talks.

This lie has been repeated over and over by government and media alike. It has zero basis. The Obama administration claims that this precondition was expressed in the “Geneva communiqué,” which was a road map agreement meant to guide the Geneva II peace talks, agreed upon by some of the major parties of the negotiations, including Russia.

The communiqué does indeed call for a negotiated political transition, but nowhere does it state that such a transition cannot include President Assad. Such a condition would have been outright rejected by Russia.

In fact, the Geneva communiqué includes this crucial statement:

“[a transition government] could include members of the present [Syrian] government and the opposition and other groups and shall be formed on the basis of mutual consent.” Nowhere does it specifically mention or imply President Assad would have to leave power first.

The Los Angeles Times recently stepped out of line and exposed this lie:

“[John] Kerry regularly cites the “Geneva communiqué,” a kind of peace road map hammered out in June 2012 during a United Nations-organized summit. But the document does not explicitly call for Assad’s ouster.”

The Obama administration’s constant repeating of this lie only causes divisions in the peace process, undermining the chances that the peace process will succeed.

The Obama administration is especially adamant about this “Assad must go” precondition because it knows that, if free and fair elections were held tomorrow in Syria – as part of a UN-backed “transitional process” – President Assad would likely win. This is the result of the ethnic and religious minorities in Syria that have rallied behind President Assad, since they’ve witnessed the consistent religious sectarian atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed rebels (which the U.S. media loves to ignore or minimize).

Assad would probably win an election since there is also simply no one else on the government side or the opposition side with his name recognition or popularity. The U.S.-backed rebel war in Syria has vastly strengthened Assad’s political hand, but you wouldn’t know it from the Western, anti-Syrian media.

Demanding Assad’s ouster also does not reflect the situation on the ground. The U.S.-backed rebels have never controlled more than one Syrian city, namely Raqaa, which is dominated by al-Qaeda and is governed under a Taliban-style interpretation of Islamic law, which includes a strict ban on music. Thus, the rebels don’t have the ground power that would even enable them to make the demand that “Assad must go”.

2) The U.S.-backed rebel militias are “moderate” Islamic groups.

The fact that this lie can even be uttered publicly without encountering ridicule is a major success of Western media propaganda. The media narrative paints the U.S.-backed “good” rebels fighting both the Syrian government and the “bad” al-Qaeda linked rebels.

But the “good” rebels in the U.S.-backed Islamic Front share the same vision for Syria’s future as the al-Qaeda rebels: a fundamentalist version of Sharia law, where women live in virtual house arrest and where religious minorities are second class citizens (non-Sunni Muslims would simply be butchered, as they are on a regular basis in Syria, which is again minimized or ignored in the Western media.)

The “moderate rebel” lie was further exposed recently when a top leader in the most powerful militia, Ahrar al Sham, within the Islamic Front declared Ahrar al Sham to be the “real” representative of al-Qaeda in Syria, as opposed to the rival al-Qaeda faction that the Islamic Front had recently begun fighting.

Ahrar al Sham has long been known to be an al-Qaeda type Islamist extremist group; the Western media simply chose to ignore it. But when it was recently made official, the US media chose to continue its ignoring stance, since actually reporting on it would destroy their “moderate rebel” lie. The Western media also continues to ignore the fact that the “moderate” U.S.-backed Islamic Front that aligned itself to the extremist views of Ahrar al Sham, the “real” al-Qaeda.

3) New Evidence of Syrian government “industrial scale” torture.

The Western media recently blasted the “breaking news” of brand new evidence showing massive “Nazi-like” torture and murder by the Syrian government, released at the beginning of the Syrian peace talks. This may or may not be true, but the lie here is that the Western media promoted the “evidence” as being unquestionably true, when the story doesn’t reach first base when it comes to evidence-based journalism.

All we really know is that there are hundreds of pictures of dead people that a “trusted source” says were killed by the Syrian government. The trusted source was designated as such by pro-Western intellectuals, who have earned professional “credibility” by helping convict war criminals in the International Criminal Court [ICC]. But as author Diane Johnstone pointed out in her excellent book “,” about the war against Yugoslavia – as well as in other articles – the ICC has long been used by western powers as a tool to create a pretext for war, or a tool to justify a war after the fact.

The evidence of the “NAZI-like” atrocities was written in a study paid for by the government of Qatar, which has long funneled cash, guns, and Jihadis to Syria in aid of the anti-government rebels.

Again, we don’t know if the story is true or not. But such an important investigation should be conducted by the UN or another more objective institution. The same biased dynamic occurred in relation to the infamous chemical weapons attack, where no real evidence was provided, though an unending string of “experts” were quoted in the Western media, testifying to the guilt of the Syrian Government. But when Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the Obama administration lied about the rebels not having the capacity to perform such an attack, the Western media simply ignored the legend of journalism. The wrench in the propaganda machine was simply dislodged.

How do these lies become such permanent fixtures in the Western media? An excellent article in the Guardian newspaper recently discussed in depth the principal sources the Western media has used to understand the Syrian conflict.

The article exposed the incredible bias of some of the most important Western media sources on Syria, which is why they were handpicked in the first place to be “expert” sources: they had political agendas that were aligned with the US government’s foreign policy decisions. The other side of the conflict was completely ignored, except when it was targeted for ridicule. Thus, Americans and Europeans have a completely one-sided, if not fantasy-based perspective of what is happening in Syria. This has been systematic since the beginning of the conflict, as happened with the Yugoslav, Afghan, Iraq, and Libya wars.

The result of this media-led ignorance could result in yet more unnecessary deaths in a country that now has millions of refugees and over a 100,000 dead. Obama seems like he intends to exploit these peace talks with the intention of blaming the Syrian government for their failure. Having failed to defeat Assad on the battlefield in a proxy war, the Obama administration is trying to win the propaganda war. And once peace talks have failed, talk of war will resume, since “all other options have failed.”

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