Evolutionary Cosmologies: Religious Endeavor To Become Like God

Throughout the de-Christianized West and America neo-pagan and mystical pantheist evolutionary reasoning is taken for granted throughout the college curriculum, just as it is in all aspects of modern thought and experience.  It not only undergirds biological and earth sciences, but also Freudian and Jungian psychology, anthropology, law, sociology, politics, economics, the media, arts, medicine, and all other academic—and increasingly seminarian—disciplines as well. The West’s amoral transnational elite Gnostics, the “chosen” ones, are particularly enamored of evolutionary reasoning:

“Western cultural elites have disregarded God for more than two centuries, but for a while the effects were mostly confined to their own circles. At first, they disregarded God. Then they deliberately desecrated Western tradition and lived in ways that would have spelled disaster if they had been followed more closely. But now in the early twenty-first century, their movement from disregard to desecration to decadence is going mainstream, and the United States is only the lead society among those close to the tipping point…. Soon, as the legalization and then normalization of polyamory, polygamy, pedophilia and incest follow the same logic as that of abortion and homosexuality, the socially destructive consequences of these trends will reverberate throughout society until social chaos is beyond recovery. We can only pray there will be a return to God and sanity before the terrible sentence is pronounced: “God has given them over” to the consequences of their own settled choices.”  (Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times, Os Guinness, p. 20)

Evolution: what is it?

“Evolution has always been a fundamentally spiritual concept.  In fact, some of the first thinkers to seriously explore the topic—the German Idealists of the early 19th century—were mystic philosophers who predated Darwin’s Origin of Species by at least a century.”  (A Brief History of Evolutionary Spirituality, Tom Huston)

Rene Guenon (1886-1951) concurs.  Guenon was a French metaphysician, writer, and editor who was largely responsible for laying the metaphysical groundwork for the Traditionalist or Perennialist school of thought in the early twentieth century.   In his brilliant critical analysis of Theosophy and Spiritism entitled, “The Spiritist Fallacy”  Guenon investigates and exposes the satanic esotericism working through various modern Western secret societies to pervert true religion—orthodox Christianity in particular— in order to ultimately turn the world over to Luciferian forces.

Guenon reveals that in early Theosophist and spiritist circles use of the word ‘progress’ or ‘progressivist’ preceded the use of the word ‘evolution.’ The roots of Theosophy, hence of evolution–the universal life force–stretch back to the ancient Upanishads of India in the East and in the West to ancient Babylon, Egypt and Greece.  In its modern version, progress, transformism, and/or evolution describes the progress (transmigration) of soul made possible by the life force as it inhabits in succession the bodies of different kinds of beings over the course of thousands or even millions and billions of years.

Eventually the word evolution became preferred, especially by empirical realists and materialists like Karl Marx because it had a more ‘scientific’ allure:

“This kind of ‘verbalism’…provides the illusion of thought for those incapable of really thinking…”  (ibid, p. 231)

Evolution is an ancient occult doctrine originating in ancient Babylonian Cabbala, Egyptian Hermetic magic and Mystery Religion traditions both East and West from the time of Babylon—the mother of all Mystery Religions—that entered Christendom during the Renaissance.  In “God and the Knowledge of Reality,” the Catholic philosopher and historian, Thomas Molnar (1921–2010), reveals that certain Christian theologians, mystics and scholars such as Emanuel Swedenborg had discovered Hermetic magic and occult Jewish Cabbala texts which they studied and translated resulting in Hermetic Cabbala. Then like Pico della Mirandola, they argued that Hermetic Cabbala— the divine occult science or Magic Way of reaching divine status and powers through initiation, evolution (progress), and ritual procedures is the best proof of the divinity of Christ. In other words said Molnar,

“…..by the time of the Renaissance the esoteric texts of the first centuries A.D. had acquired in scholarly and humanist circles an unparalleled prestige, confronting as equals the texts held sacred by the church. In Pico’s estimation, ‘nulla est scientia que nos magis certificet de divinitate Christ quam magia et Cabala’ (there is no science that would prove for us Christ’s divinity better than magic and the Cabala.)” (pp. 78-79)

That Hermetic magic and Babylonian Cabbala are ancient Mystery Religion traditions undergirded by evolution is affirmed by G. H. Pember in his classic work, “Earth’s Earliest Ages.”    In his impeccably researched book Pember thoroughly examines the role of fallen angels in connection with the occult science they taught to pre-flood generations and compares them to the explosion of spiritism (open intercourse with evil spirits), astrology, the Mysteries and other occult traditions sweeping over Christendom.

Pember writes that the Mysteries are no longer veiled in mystery but boldly presented by the powerful occult progressive brotherhood that emerged out of the Renaissance as the fruit of modern science, especially evolutionary philosophy, which the brotherhood assert was included in the instructions given,

“…to the initiates of the Hermetic, Orphic, Eleusinian, and Cabbalistic mysteries, and were familiar to Chaldean Magi, Egyptian Priests, Hindu Occultists, Essenes, Therapeutae Gnostics, and Theurgic Neo-Platonists.” (Pember, pp.243-244)

Today, evolutionary dynamics and science as the instrument of the will of sovereign man has so thoroughly replaced the personal Creator in the consciousness of vast numbers of secularized Westerners, both within and without the whole body of the Christian Church, that one of the leading evolution-worshippers of our day, Professor S.J. Gould, goes so far as to describe evolutionary biology as the story of mankind.  Evolution:

“….tells us where we came from, how we got here, and perhaps where we are going. Quite simply, it is science’s version of Roots, except it is the story of us all.”   (The Religious Nature of Evolution Theory and its Attack on Christianity, John G. Leslie and Charles K. Pallaghy, Ph.D., )

In fascinated affirmation, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) , a prominent evolutionary biologist and progressive creationist, sees evolution as a light that illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow, for if man,

“…has arrived at his present state as a result of natural processes rather than a supernatural will, he can learn to control these processes…The concept of evolution, which is now basic to the life sciences, has provided new and in some ways revolutionary answers to questions men have been asking for centuries. The two most important of these are, ‘Why am I here, what is the purpose of human existence, and what is the nature of the world of life that surrounds us?”   (Dobzhansky, T., Ayala, F.J., Stebbins, G.L. and Valentine, J.W., Evolution, W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1977)

The most widely held evolutionary cosmology, or model of the universe’s beginning and development is the Big Bang theory.   According to this version of the “story of us all” the universe is thought to have ‘exploded’ from a ‘cosmic egg,’ sometimes called the ylem in a universe bounded by an edge.  The Encyclopedia Britannica notes that the big bang is a theory,

“…of the evolution of the universe.  Its’ essential feature is the emergence of the universe from a state of extremely high temperature and density—the so-called big bang that occurred at least 10,000,000,000 years ago…..”(Big Bang Model, The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, 2:205, 1992)
The big bang is based on two assumptions:

“The first is that Einstein’s general theory of relativity describes the gravitational attraction of all matter.  The second assumption, called the cosmological principle, states that the observer’s point of view of the universe depends neither on the direction in which he looks nor on his location.  This principle applies only to the large scale properties of the universe, but it does imply that the universe has no edge, so that the big bang occurred not at a particular point in space but rather throughout space at the same time.  These two assumptions make it possible to calculate the history of the cosmos after a certain epoch called the Planck time.  Scientists have yet to determine what prevailed before Planck time.”    (ibid)

Distinctions are in order here. While the first assumption qualifies as true science, the second assumption, sometimes misnamed the Copernican Principle, does not since it is completely metaphysical, or philosophical.  This is illustrated by Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who discovered that distant objects appeared to have ‘red shifts’ approximately proportional to distance from earth. Hubble’s speculative interpretation of this discovery presented it as evidence of an expanding universe without a center and without an edge (unbounded) as opposed to Hugh Ross, the popularizer of progressive creationism whose own imaginative assumption pictures everything exploding from a central point in a universe bounded by an edge. (Refuting Compromise: A Biblical and Scientific Refutation of ‘Progressive Creationism’ as Popularized by Astronomer Hugh Ross, Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M., p. 146-147)

Ross’s brand of evolutionary Christianity is wildly popular among certain Christians.  It was as a teenager that Ross decided the non-biblical big bang was a fact, thus it is the foundation stone of his twisted Scriptures—twisted because his big bang assumptions lead him to trip, stumble and fall down evolution’s downward-spiraling vortex blurring distinctions between humans and animals as he goes. (ibid)

The Big Bang is devoid of experimental proof, yet because the universe is definitely running down this fact surely points to some kind of beginning. This is apparently why some Christian leaders–theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists such as Pope Francis, Hugh Ross, Tim Keller and many others who feel we simply have to accept the evolutionists’ billions of years— have decided to accept the Big Bang theory. After all, the Big Bang requires a beginning, and they feel this fits with the Bible.  (Big Bang — The Bucks Stop There, Henry Morris, Ph.D., )

However, not only does the Big Bang—or any other evolutionary cosmology—- not fit into the Bible but it also turns the Creator, Jesus Christ, into a liar, for He said that Adam and Eve were there “from the beginning of the creation” (Mark 10: 6; Gen. 1: 26-27) rather than several billion years after the beginning of the creation as evolutionary speculators hold.

As the Nicene Creed affirms, Gods Word starts with the creation of absolutely everything visible and invisible ex nihilo in the space of six days.  In his “Literal interpretation of Genesis” Augustine of Hippo notes that when God brought material reality into existence, “then time began its flight.” That is, when God created material things (the visible), at the same time He created space and time (the invisible) as their context.  (Creator and Creature, Douglas F. Kelly, Table Talk: Biblical Dichotomies, p. 6)

“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh (matter) is no help at all” John 6:63

The Triune God brought the angels into being sometime during that first creative week and as Thomas Aquinas, one of the most respected theologians of the medieval church affirms,

“Nothing entirely new was afterwards made by God, but all things subsequently made had in a sense been made before in the work of the six days.  Some things…had a previous experience materially, as the rib from the side of Adam out of which God formed Eve; whilst others existed not only in matter but also in their causes, as those individual creatures that are now generated existed in the first of their kind.”   (Summa Theologica, ibid, Sarfati, p. 120)

Evolutionary Cosmologies: Imaginative Assumptions

George Francis Rayner Ellis, a high-profile evolutionary cosmologist lets the cat out of the bag with his candid confession regarding the important role of imaginative assumptions with respect to the broad range of evolutionary models of the universe such as the Big Bang. Ellis admits:
“…I can construct…a spherically symmetrical universe with earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations.”   “You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds.  In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that.   What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models.  A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”  (ibid, Jonathan Sarfati)

In other words, the Authority and Revelation of God, particularly in His six day creation account is rejected a priori not on the grounds of observational science but on the philosophical assumptions of arrogant, defiant speculators whose imaginative evolutionary models are metaphysical projects pretending to be observational science.

Another unspoken Big Bang assumption is neo-pagan and mystical pantheist naturalism, which ought to ring alarm bells for faithful, orthodox Christians.   Naturalism posits that the universe and everything in it, including conscious life, is the result of entirely natural processes.  The Big Bang therefore, is a neo-pagan and occult pantheist evolutionary cosmology, an esoteric program from hell that rejects both the personal Creator and the supernatural dimension.  This position holds true despite the uninformed claims of speculators like Hugh Ross who claim that God created and ignited the Big Bang.

While Pope Francis, Tim Keller and many other liberal revisionists embrace and endorse Big Bang cosmology thirty-three leading evolutionary scientists expose its frauds and fallacies in ‘Open Letter to the Scientific Community’ published on the internet () and in New Scientist (Lerner, E., Bucking the big bang, New Scientist 182 (2448) 20, 22 May 2004).  According to these evolutionary scientists:

“Our ideas about the history of the universe are dominated by big bang theory. But its dominance rests more on funding decisions than on the scientific method, according to Eric Lerner, mathematician Michael Ibison of Earthtech.org, and dozens of other scientists from around the world.” (Secular scientists blast the big bang: What now for naïve apologetics? Carl Wieland, )

The open letter includes statements such as:

1. “The big bang…relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed—inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory.’

2. “But the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation. … Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory’s explanation of the origin of the light elements.”

3. “In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.”

4.”What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory’s supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centred cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.” (ibid, Carl Wieland)

It’s amazing to see how many Christian leaders have not merely succumbed to the ‘big bang’ idea, but embrace it wholeheartedly.  Carl Wieland comments:

“To hear their pronouncements, believers should welcome it as a major plank in our defense of the faith. ‘At last, we can use science to prove there’s a creator of the universe.’ However, the price of succumbing to the lure of secular acceptability, at least in physics and astronomy, has been heavy. We have long warned that adopting the big bang into Christian thought is like bringing the wooden horse within the walls of Troy.” 

The Big Bang model is not the only game in town.  Among other imaginative models there is the quasi-steady-state model of the big bang antagonist, the late Sir Fred Hoyle.  Then there is the ekpyrotic model positing that our universe is a four-dimensional membrane embedded in a five-dimensional ‘bulk’ space.  Its proponents admit:

“Our proposal is based on unproven ideas in string theory and is brand new.” (ibid, Sarfati, p. 182)

Then there are the openly occult multiverse models proposing that our universe is not the only one but that space is filled with an infinite number of parallel universes.  Royal Astronomer Lord Martin Rees, who holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal champions multiverse conceptions in the hope that in at least one or more of them living beings created themselves who are far more advanced than our own life-forms. Rees believes that if this is the case, then super-intelligent aliens might be capable of simulating in their brains or in a super-computer the complex history of our universe, meaning the universe we inhabit is a simulation lacking real substance and existing only as a mental construction in the minds of highly evolved aliens who seeded our world with life and travel through time in order to control man’s evolutionary progress. (Scientific Mythologies, James A. Herrick, p. 216)

The idea that the universe we inhabit exists only as a mental construction is very similar to Hinduism’s Brahman. Brahman is the Great Cosmic Spirit – the Ultimate One Substance (energy field, Void, Essence, prakriti matter) of material phenomena, meaning that the universe exists only as a mental construction in the mind of Brahman: brahma satyam jagan mithya, or “Brahman is real, the world is unreal.” ()

Rees proposal is also similar to the fanciful hypothesis presented by Olaf Stapledon, a scientist who has always kept one foot firmly planted in neo-pagan and occult pantheist science fiction accounts and imagines our universe to be an artifact of the Star Maker. Building off of Stapledons fantasy Carl Sagan suggests that we are“star folk” made of “star stuff.” (Herrick, pp. 216-217)

Replace Star Maker with Brahman and “star stuff” with sarvam khalvidam brahma, or “All is truly Brahman” () and we have ayam atma brahmam: “The Self is Brahman.” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.5

In the caption of his book, “Just Six Numbers,” Rees reveals that the ancient occult basis of his proposition is the serpent biting its tail:

“The ouraboros. There are links between the microworld of particles, nuclei and atoms and the cosmos.” (Rees M., Just Six Numbers, P. 9)

The serpent-powered Ouroboros with its astral planes or multiverses is well-known around the world in its’ many ancient and modern occult traditions.

Evolutionary Cosmologies:  Abominations that Desolate

Like witless moths mesmerized by strange fire, from the Renaissance to our own time liberalized Christian theologians situated within the whole body of the Christian Church have been drawn irresistibly to evolution.   Followed by countless unwitting souls, they’ve been flying into an abomination that desolates and ejects them into a downward-spiraling vortex issuing into eternal hell unless they repent and turn back to the Truth, the Way, and the Life (John 14:6).

Evolutionary Cosmologies: The Significance

Today’s broad range of evolutionary cosmologies symbolize the deep religious desires of certain men, who in their rejection of our Lord Jesus Christ and physical resurrection, seek autonomous self-creation, transcendence and self-redemption, thus are incarnations,

“….of the ancient, deeply religious endeavor ‘to become like God’— infinitely wise, omnipotent, autonomous, and immortal.” (Mircea Eliade, “The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy,” Dr. Erdmann)

They endeavor to become like God but shall instead,

“…drink of the wine of the wrath of God and be tormented with fire and brimstone.” (Rev. 14:10)  And the devil who deceived them shall likewise be “thrown into the lake of burning sulfur…” (Rev. 20:10)

Ultimate Schadenfreude: Democrat Is Twice Bitten, Not Shy

There’s stupid. There’s really stupid. There’s really, really stupid.

Then there’s Democrat stupid.

A prime example is a Friday Wall Street Journal article titled “This Democrat Is Giving Up on ObamaCare.” It’s penned by one Burke Beu, someone I describe as “ethnically Democrat,” as he says “I grew up in a Democratic family. I have been a registered Democrat since age 18.” He also tells us, “[I was] a Democratic candidate for statewide office in Colorado and a party precinct captain in that caucus state. I’ve volunteered for numerous Democratic candidates and contributed to party causes and campaigns. The 2014 election results were extremely disappointing for me….”

And, of course, Mr. Beu has soured on ObamaCare. In fact, he wants it repealed. All good so far. Except that he doesn’t have any explicitly harsh words for Obama, hasn’t given up on his party, wants a single-payer system and seems to believe Hillary Clinton is the solution in 2016. (Note: In fairness, Clinton is different from Obama — she has two X chromosomes.) But here are the money lines:

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, then lost my job in the Great Recession. I was lucky; my brother lost his job and his house. I survived on part-time jobs while paying out-of-pocket for my health insurance.

I voted for President Obama again in 2012, then received a cancellation notice for my health insurance. This was due to ObamaCare, the so-called Affordable Care Act. However, I couldn’t afford anything else.

Does this guy wear a “Kick me” sign?

Nah.

He wears a “Kick me harder” sign.

There’s a saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” What do you say about a guy whose life consists of being fooled?

Beu believes Medicare should be “a model for health-care reform” and says “We Democrats need to get over ourselves, start anew on a national health-care policy, and return to our progressive principles.”

Actually, sir, you need to get over your party.

First, “progressive principles” is an oxymoron; liberals don’t have principles, but provisional positions. This is because they’re governed by emotion, which changes with the wind. As G.K. Chesterton put it, “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” No, I won’t explain that, Mr. Beu. You figure it out.

Beu also mentions the “stupidity of the American voter” remark by ObamaCare designer Jonathan Gruber, taking umbrage and saying “Such comments…are insults to every citizen regardless of party.” So Goober is offended by Gruber.

And Beu is one of those very “useful” people. He doesn’t get that elitist snobbery and superciliousness define the left. Just think of the revelations about socialist French president François Hollande, who is “a cold, cynical cheat and a Socialist who ‘doesn’t like the poor,’” writes National Post about insights provided by the leftist’s ex-girlfriend Valérie Trierweiler. “He presents himself as the man who doesn’t like the rich. In reality, the president doesn’t like the poor” and in private calls them “the toothless ones,” reports Trierweiler. Oh, too anecdotal? “Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned”? Then read the 2008 piece “Don’t listen to the liberals — Right-wingers really are nicer people, latest research shows.” It relates what some of us without “Kick me” signs figured out for ourselves long ago.

Beu also says, when pointing out that Democrats need to exhibit humility and admit error on ObamaCare, “We resent Republicans who act morally superior and pretend to have a monopoly on patriotism, but….”

It’s not pretense, Bucko. As this Pew poll from this summer shows, while 72 percent of “steadfast conservatives” and 81 percent of “business conservatives” “often feel proud to be American,” only 40 percent of “solid liberals” do. That, Mr. Beu, is by liberals’ own admission. (Pew also has a category in the poll called “Faith and Family Left.” I’ve never heard of such a thing — unless it refers to faith in government and the family of the person the liberal is cheating on his spouse with.)

Note also that when liberals and conservatives don’t feel proud to be American, it’s for very different reasons. Liberals don’t like what America was, was meant to be, and what they often imagine it to be (“We’re so Puritan!”); conservatives don’t like the cesspool the liberals are turning it into.

I know schadenfreude isn’t a feeling reflective of a charitable spirit, but the best I can say about the Beus of the world is that they need tough love. Mr. Beu reminds me of a guy who’s being held by the back of the neck, is being repeatedly and violently kicked, and complains about how something needs to be done about the foot. Tend to the foot. Regulate the foot. Repeal the foot.

Mr. Beu, that foot happens to be attached to a man, a being with intellect and free will. And he is not your friend.

Public School Education — There’s Bad News And Good News

The bad news is that John Dewey’s “progressives” are winning big. They mobilized every educational front group and every pedagogical gimmick to achieve the goal of controlling what goes on in the schools, as a way of achieving a fundamental transformation of America, to coin a phrase.

The educational front groups include the National Council of Teachers of Math, the Common Core Consortium, National Education Association, International Reading Association, National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and many more. Their favorite pedagogical gimmicks include Whole Language, Reform Math, Balanced Literacy, Constructivism, Project-Based Learning, Cooperative Learning, 21st-Century Skills, and many more.

So it’s clearly a far-flung, intricately coordinated attack, like Hitler’s military roaring into Russia during the summer of 1941. The progressives want total control so they can turn the schools into social engineering experiments. Traditional approaches will be denigrated; knowledge will be disdained.  gave the marching orders 100 years ago. Our Education Establishment probably feels it is close to total victory, thanks to all the new gimmicks contained in Common Core Standards.

So how can there possibly be any good news? Hitler’s Wehrmacht could tell you. When you advance 100 miles into new territory,  overrunning everything in sight, you can easily gobble up too much too fast.

At some point, even the most successful invaders find they have overextended their lines and exposed their flanks to counterattack. There’s the good news.

In education, this has a peculiar form. Quite simply, the public is starting to see the comic bizarreness of it all. Everywhere people look in education they see frantic activity (and frantic spending) but nobody’s learning very much. Millions of kids can’t read well or do simple math. Surely, someone must be playing a prank, and the whole country is being punked.

The public watches the foolishness and rolls their eyes. What, is the circus in town? Who are all these clowns running around with their funny little cars and pratfalls?

We see the garish makeup, the big red noses, the comedy routines. But we are no longer amused. What does this Clown Corps think it’s doing? How can they squander billions every day, but somehow the children get more ignorant and less literate?

 Summing up, public education in America resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption with the Three Stooges operating all the levers. The good news is that the public can no longer take these people seriously, no more than the majority of the public now takes Obama seriously, and for the same reasons. The public sees the Emperor has no clothes, he’s tipsy, and stumbling around in public.

Here’s one way you know the Education Establishment has gone too far. More people talk casually about . Even a  of education agrees.

Here’s another way you know. Common Core rolled over the country–altogether 45 states embraced it, thanks to lavish bribes (stimulus money repurposed as Race to the Top grants). But now most of those . Indiana has pulled out. Other states will follow. Hallelujah.  The sooner every state cancels Common Core, the safer the country will be.

Another way you know is that the Internet is full of videos where because they can’t do their homework, parents are at meetings to denounce the failed methods used in the schools, and employers  complain ever more loudly they can’t find educated workers.

In fact, Our Education Establishment has been practicing the art of going too far for decades. But now the public is noticing. The election of Obama  may have pushed our education commissars over the edge. Perhaps they were worried they might have only eight years, and they needed to complete their project immediately. Helter-skelter, with a rush of urgency, they had to drive out every traditional approach, terminate every old-fashioned teacher, silence every conservative voice, and banish every administrator who wasn’t a complete toady. Common Core—with its top-down, same answer for every situation—was supposed to finish the job.

Recall the famous World War II movie A Bridge Too Far. Our Education Establishment has committed the strategic sin of A Gimmick Too Many.

Siegfried   “The system adopts instructional programs and practices that have never been tried out on a small scale—like the Common Core standards. The same is true of many instructional programs. They are adopted, then tried out for the first time. That is completely backward.”

The main effort is to drive content out of the school. They’ve got a dozen pretexts for doing this. After you’ve deleted as much content as possible, you garble whatever is left. Each year, the typical student ends up learning  less than the year before. We will hear constantly about “social justice,” which roughly translates “If everyone is mediocre, that’s fairer.”

 All this dumbing down makes even the people in charge dumber. In the process, they make a mockery of their claim to be “educators.” Anti-educators is more accurate.  It’s time for the circus to leave town.

Obama Lame Duck In A NeoCon Congress

You just have to love the wit and precision of a political image. Pat Dollard’s title NY Post Destroys Obama With Brutal Cover, says it all. The arrogant despot was indeed STRIPPED! The belated question is why did it take so long? In order to answer the obvious, most political analysts’ will fall into the partisan trap of party politics. Hope and change finally was seen as dictatorial haughtiness. Most voters do not believe that they are deceived by skilled liars when they cast their ballot. Yet, that is a pattern that is uninterrupted in most elections. Only the style of administrations differs, while the establishment continues to pull the strings and policies to move the consolidation of the New World Order forward.

That Nefarious Warrior Organism is eager to accelerate the next stage of the master plan.  Under an openly NeoCon front, John McCain’s chairmanship of a Senate Armed Services Committee will get to pressure the public into believing that their national security requires vigorous interventionism. Before you think that the Democrats differ from this same post WWII strategy, it would be best to brush up on a necessary history lesson.

Obama never attempted to confront, much less reverse the foreign policy of defending an empire. At the core of American power is the use of force that threatens any regime, which will not capitulate to the dictates of the financial elites that put Obama in office. The same can be said for most of the presidencies from FDR onward. The mere attempt to buck this system got JFK killed and Reagan shot. Yet to even mention such vial thoughts earns the historiographer a place in the conspiracy hall of infamy.

The abandonment of truth is a primary requirement to be part of the system. The reverse also applies. To be a successful player in the corridors of power, the skills of deception and prevarication must be demonstrated. Obama excelled in this task. However, his usefulness is now over.

For the indoctrinated clones that only see politics through a progressive lens, dealing with defeat seems inconceivable. Conversely, the novice supporters of Republican candidates vote with the erroneous belief that the country will now get back on track. Both crowds operate in a mindset that does not work in the real world.

Winning a GOP majority in the Senate removes the crook Harry Reid and his Mafioso tactics but the added seats in the House just gives Boehner flexibility to ignore Tea Party representatives. When you hear of an atmosphere of collaboration between Obama and the new anticipated Senate leader Mitch McConnell, you should shudder.

Democracy Now provides a correct assessment on Obama & McConnell Pledge Cooperation; Will Fast-Tracking Secretive TPP Trade Deal Top Their Agenda?

“We get analysis from Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, who notes that while some analysts say GOP gains will accelerate the passage of fast-track legislation in Congress to enable an agreement on the TPP, “it is kind of hard for the Republicans to voluntarily delegate more authority to the guy they’ve been attacking as the imperial president who grabs power that’s not his.” The controversial so-called free trade deal involves 12 countries and nearly 40 percent of the global economy. Trade ministers from the 12 countries negotiating the trade deal are due to meet in Beijing ahead of the Asia-Pacific economic summit next week to continue negotiations.”

Oh if only such logic would be applied to the deal making sell out process. Here is a central point to most political arrangements. Forget about compromises, the deal boils down to serving the interests of the shady figures behind the officials. Corporatist Republicans want to continue the globalism sellout just as much as the Democrat partisans, who take the same contributions from the financial elites.

No honest observers of the nuclear fallout from the Reid run Senate can conclude that passing legislation through the conference process with the House was ever considered. Will the new GOP Senate leadership return to the 60 vote filibuster tradition? This test will determine if any optimism would return.

In a on Facebook, the always provocative Karen De Coster asks: “Why the F$%K – Does a Congress with a 10% approval rating has a 90% Re-election rate?” Reelection Rates Over the Years provides added evidence of this tragedy.

Maybe the immediate query should be why the newly elected Republican Senators would vote for a known deal maker betrayer of principles like McConnell as their leader? For a more detailed analysis of Expectations after the 2014 Elections, the Radical Reactionary essay is worthy of a read.

THE MEGALOMANICALITY OF BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA cites the Obama the Insane comes out with this… Delusional behavior occurs next out of a mad man.

• EXCERPT:  “The American people sent a message,’ he claimed, ‘one that they’ve sent for several elections now. They expect the people they elect to work as hard as they do. They expect us to focus on their ambitions, and not ours.”
• EXCERPT: “Our economy is outpacing most of the world. But we’ve just gotta keep at it. Much of that will take action from Congress. And I’m eager to work with the next Congress.”
• EXCERPT:  “He said he would only work with Republicans if they seek to ‘make responsible changes’ to the law. I’m going to be very receptive to hearing those ideas. Despite all the contention,” Obama claimed, “we now know that the law works.”
• EXCERPT:  “Executive orders,” he said, “will be replaced and supplanted by a bill from Congress. You send me a bill that I can sign and those executive actions go away. But what I’m not gonna do is just wait.”

For some unsolicited advice for any honorable Democrats left in their party, consider the following. Jeffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review floated this option back in October 2010, Invoke the 25th Amendment To Remove Obama. Undoubtedly the situation has worsened dramatically since then. “LaRouche demanded the invocation of the 25th Amendment, which provides for the orderly removal of a President, and his replacement by the Vice President, due to physical or mental impairment.”

The actual 25^th amendment says:

Section 4.

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Barack Hussein Obama thinks he is an emperor but is actually a dysfunctional psychopath. His dictates need to be ignored and his irrelevancy demands his replacement. Since the Congress does not have the courage to impeach this unhinged traitor, the Democratic careerists need to step up, (for no better reason) than to save their own skins.

Even a two year term under Joe “wacko” Biden would be preferable to an insane sociopath with his finger on the nuclear button.

Discard any pure or noble reasons for adopting such a removal process. Bank on sheer self-interest to blame all the failures on the best fall guy since Richard Nixon. The establishment needs a cover-up to distract the public from the coming economic collapse. When a liar commander in chief no longer is believable, his clothes are STRIPPED from the throne.

Republicans must feel maximum heat NOT to save Obama. Those cowardly chicken hawks will bomb anyone on the globe to maintain the empire, but will not lift a finger to remove a modern day Emperor Justin II. Praetorian Prefect warns of a bi-partisan malady. Now it is time to act and dispatch Obama to a disgraceful internment.

Court Protects IRS Tyranny

The names Catherine Engelbrecht and Reggie B. Walton may not exactly be household names, but both are part of a disturbing court ruling that can only be described as a reprehensible government protection racket in plain sight for all to see. Ms. Engelbrecht was the plaintiff and Reggie B. Walton the judge. A succinct summary is provided by Breitbart in the report, True the Vote’s Lawsuit against IRS Gets Tossed by Federal Judge.

“A federal judge in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered an order dismissing a lawsuit filed by True the Vote, a Houston, Texas-based non-profit organization focused on “voters’ rights and election integrity” against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The order alleged that the IRS had improperly delayed granting their application for 501(c)(3) status and targeted them as a conservative organization. The opinion, by Judge Reggie B. Walton, found that the IRS had taken sufficient “remedial steps to address the alleged behavior.”

From the ruling by Judge Walton, analysis:

“The defendants contend that the Court does not have subject-matter jurisdiction over counts one, two, and five of the plaintiff’s complaint because the IRS ultimately approved the plaintiff’s application for tax-exempt status, and thus counts one, two, and five—all of which seek “to correct [the] alleged targeting [of the IRS] and delay during its application process” for tax-exempt status—are now moot as there is no longer any case or controversy for the Court to resolve.”

How nice that the IRS can slip out of a sticky wicket by simply retroactively approving a 501(c)(3) application that they officiated with a touch of harassment and a sprinkle of intimidation. The reasoning used by Judge Walton to protect the IRS from a “voluntary cessation” exception follows:

“The rationale supporting the defendant’s voluntary cessation as an exception to mootness is that, while the defendant’s unilateral cessation of the challenged conduct may grant the plaintiff relief, the defendant is free to return to its old ways—thereby subjecting the plaintiff to the same harm but, at the same time, avoiding judicial review. Accordingly, a case can be mooted by virtue of the defendant’s cessation of its allegedly illegal conduct only if (1) there is no reasonable expectation that the conduct will recur and (2) interim relief or events have completely and irrevocably eradicated the effects of the alleged violation.”

Oh praise the sacred high priests of the Internal Revenue Service for “seeing the light” and repenting their ways. Such a reasonable trust in the good intentions of the IRS to not only follow the law but to administer their trade under the “good faith” doctrine that only a judge working for the same corrupt government as do the Lois Lerner brigade of bureaucrats, would profess.

An important USA Today article, from hardly an anti government publication, IRS list reveals concerns over Tea Party ‘propaganda’, furnishes the evidence.

“Newly uncovered IRS documents show the agency flagged political groups based on the content of their literature, raising concerns specifically about “anti-Obama rhetoric,” inflammatory language and “emotional” statements made by non-profits seeking tax-exempt status.

The internal 2011 documents, obtained by USA TODAY, list 162 groups by name, with comments by Internal Revenue Service lawyers in Washington raising issues about their political, lobbying and advocacy activities. In 21 cases, those activities were characterized as “propaganda.”

The list provides the most specific public accounting to date of which groups were targeted for extra scrutiny and why. The IRS has not publicly identified the groups, repeatedly citing a provision of the tax code prohibiting it from releasing tax return information.”

The supporting items Document: IRS ‘political advocacy cases’ list, while the pattern of selective favoritism is authenticated in the report, IRS approved liberal groups while Tea Party in limbo.

For a more cutting edge analysis from  Twitchy US politics on the insanity from the Loony Left, just absorb the rhetoric and ask, who the real totalitarians are in society and even worse in government. Outrage: Court acknowledges that IRS targeted True the Vote, dismisses lawsuit anyway explains.

“Voters’ rights group True the Vote , a nonprofit “founded to inspire and equip voters for involvement at every stage of our electoral process,” has had a hard time of it. As the 2012 election approached, Cher of all people referred to True the Vote as “a bunch of Tea Party Nazis” and “animals.” Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, who sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, informed True the Vote founder and president Catherine Engelbrecht that he would be launching an investigation into her organization.

Of course, all of this was happening while the IRS was targeting conservative groups and holding up applications for nonprofit status, often through several election cycles. And even though the U.S. Federal District Court didn’t deny this, True the Vote’s case against the IRS was dismissed today.”

Engelbrecht issued the following brief statement:

“The Court today correctly acknowledged that the IRS targeted True the Vote because of its perceived political beliefs. Such conduct is reprehensible and should never be acceptable in a free society. Despite this critical finding, we are stunned and disappointed in the court’s ruling which nevertheless dismisses our case. We will be evaluating our legal options and will announce our intent in that regard soon.”

Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots reaction to the DC Court Decision on IRS “Unconscionable”. “The Court’s decision not to sanction either the IRS or the individual agents because it and they had taken “remedial measures” is unconscionable.”

Supporting this conclusion are Top 9 Quotes on the IRS Targeting of Tea Party Groups.

1. “Not even a smidgen of corruption.” – President Barack Obama to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly February, 2014
2. “Decline to answer that question.” – Lois Lerner, pleading the Fifth Amendment before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, March 5, 2014
3. “The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention.” – Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration Audit
4. “Instead of referring to the cases as advocacy cases, they actually used case names on this list. They [Determinations Unit in Cincinnati, Ohio] used names like ‘Tea Party’ or ‘Patriots’ and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate.” – Lois Lerner
5. “Even after admitting that it had targeted groups, and a TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration] report detailed the abuses, the IRS did not let up. In August 2013, the IRS requested yet more documents and information. It asked us to provide, for example, all fundraising communications for the 60 days before the November 6, 2012 election, and all materials that we used in various “Get Out the Vote” activities. That request made no sense under the current standards for evaluating non-profit applications. The regulations proposed three months later, however, explain the requests, as they include specific provisions classifying any mention of a candidate’s name within 60 days of an election and get-out-the-vote efforts as taxable political activity.” – Jenny Beth Martin in testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, February 27, 2014
6. “The Internal Revenue Service says acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller was first informed in May 2012 that tea party groups were inappropriately targeted for scrutiny.” – Hot Air, May 13, 2013
7. “The IRS inspector general said this week that while some liberal groups were given extra scrutiny by the tax agency, they were not subjected to the same invasive queries as tea party groups – a finding that seems to confirm political bias was at play.” – The Washington Times, June 27, 2013
8. When the IRS revelations broke, Obama promised a full investigation. Yet Cleta Mitchell, an attorney for a number of tea party and conservative groups targeted by the IRS, testified, “None of my clients have received a single contact from the FBI, the DOJ [Department of Justice] or any other investigator regarding the IRS scandal.” – The Chicago Sun-Times, February 10, 2014
9. More than 400,000 documents have been turned over to Congress, only a fraction of which have been publicly released under the Freedom of Information Act. Republicans say they’re still missing key documents including the e-mails of former IRS Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner. – USA Today, February 26, 2014

But remember, President Obama assures us there’s “not a smidgen of corruption!”

No matter your political leanings, every American should be concerned when the courts condone abusive and arbitrary administration in any agency. Allowing the IRS to retroactively cover their rear, while turning a blind eye to systemic illicit practices, is just part of the game plan that permits the court to make up law, which favors government tyranny.

The True the Vote decision is insulting and only goes to prove that reforms through the election process are truly the moot option.

The Islamist State

You can’t believe a word the United States or its mainstream media say about the current conflict involving The Islamic State (ISIS).

You can’t believe a word France or the United Kingdom say about ISIS.

You can’t believe a word Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, or the United Arab Emirates say about ISIS. Can you say for sure which side of the conflict any of these mideast countries actually finances, arms, or trains, if in fact it’s only one side? Why do they allow their angry young men to join Islamic extremists? Why has NATO-member Turkey allowed so many Islamic extremists to cross into Syria? Is Turkey more concerned with wiping out the Islamic State or the Kurds under siege by ISIS? Are these countries, or the Western powers, more concerned with overthrowing ISIS or overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad?

You can’t believe the so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels. You can’t even believe that they are moderate. They have their hands in everything, and everyone has their hands in them.

Iran, Hezbollah and Syria have been fighting ISIS or its precursors for years, but the United States refuses to join forces with any of these entities in the struggle. Nor does Washington impose sanctions on any country for supporting ISIS as it quickly did against Russia for its alleged role in Ukraine.

The groundwork for this awful mess of political and religious horrors sweeping through the Middle East was laid – laid deeply – by the United States during 35 years (1979-2014) of overthrowing the secular governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. (Adding to the mess in the same period we should not forget the US endlessly bombing Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.) You cannot destroy modern, relatively developed and educated societies, ripping apart the social, political, economic and legal fabric, torturing thousands, killing millions, and expect civilization and human decency to survive.

Particularly crucial in this groundwork was the US decision to essentially throw 400,000 Iraqis with military training, including a full officer corps, out onto the streets of its cities, jobless. It was a formula for creating an insurgency. Humiliated and embittered, some of those men would later join various resistance groups operating against the American military occupation. It’s safe to say that the majority of armored vehicles, weapons, ammunition, and explosives taking lives every minute in the Middle East are stamped “Made in USA”.

And all of Washington’s horses, all of Washington’s men, cannot put this world back together again. The world now knows these places as “failed states”.

Meanwhile, the United States bombs Syria daily, ostensibly because the US is at war with ISIS, but at the same time seriously damaging the oil capacity of the country (a third of the Syrian government’s budget), the government’s military capabilities, its infrastructure, even its granaries, taking countless innocent lives, destroying ancient sites; all making the recovery of an Assad-led Syria, or any Syria, highly unlikely. Washington is undoubtedly looking for ways to devastate Iran as well under the cover of fighting ISIS.

Nothing good can be said about this whole beastly situation. All the options are awful. All the participants, on all sides, are very suspect, if not criminally insane. It may be the end of the world. To which I say … Good riddance. Nice try, humans; in fact, GREAT TRY … but good riddance. ISIS … Ebola … Climate Change … nuclear radiation … The Empire … Which one will do us in first? … Have a nice day.

Is the world actually so much more evil and scary today than it was in the 1950s of my upbringing, for which I grow more nostalgic with each new horror? Or is it that the horrors of today are so much better reported, as we swim in a sea of news and videos?

After seeing several ISIS videos on the Internet, filled with the most disgusting scenes, particularly against women, my thought is this: Give them their own country; everyone who’s in that place now who wants to leave, will be helped to do so; everyone from all over the world who wants to go there will be helped to get there. Once they’re there, they can all do whatever they want, but they can’t leave without going through a rigorous interview at a neighboring border to ascertain whether they’ve recovered their attachment to humanity. However, since very few women, presumably, would go there, the country would not last very long.

The Berlin Wall – Another Cold War Myth

November 9 will mark the 25th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. The extravagant hoopla began months ago in Berlin. In the United States we can expect all the Cold War clichés about The Free World vs. Communist Tyranny to be trotted out and the simple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeated: In 1961, the East Berlin communists built a wall to keep their oppressed citizens from escaping to West Berlin and freedom. Why? Because commies don’t like people to be free, to learn the “truth”. What other reason could there have been?

First of all, before the wall went up in 1961 thousands of East Germans had been commuting to the West for jobs each day and then returning to the East in the evening; many others went back and forth for shopping or other reasons. So they were clearly not being held in the East against their will. Why then was the wall built? There were two major reasons:

1) The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: “West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.”

It should be noted that in 1999, USA Today reported: “When the Berlin Wall crumbled [1989], East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism.” Earlier polls would likely have shown even more than 51% expressing such a sentiment, for in the ten years many of those who remembered life in East Germany with some fondness had passed away; although even 10 years later, in 2009, the Washington Post could report: “Westerners [in Berlin] say they are fed up with the tendency of their eastern counterparts to wax nostalgic about communist times.”

It was in the post-unification period that a new Russian and eastern Europe proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth.”

It should be further noted that the division of Germany into two states in 1949 – setting the stage for 40 years of Cold War hostility – was an American decision, not a Soviet one.

2) During the 1950s, American coldwarriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad.

It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much more.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, of Washington, DC, conservative coldwarriors, in one of their Cold War International History Project Working Papers (#58, p.9) states: “The open border in Berlin exposed the GDR [East Germany] to massive espionage and subversion and, as the two documents in the appendices show, its closure gave the Communist state greater security.”

Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets’ erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. Inevitably, the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West, leading eventually to the infamous wall. However, even after the wall was built there was regular, albeit limited, legal emigration from east to west. In 1984, for example, East Germany allowed 40,000 people to leave. In 1985, East German newspapers claimed that more than 20,000 former citizens who had settled in the West wanted to return home after becoming disillusioned with the capitalist system. The West German government said that 14,300 East Germans had gone back over the previous 10 years.

Let’s also not forget that while East Germany completely denazified, in West Germany for more than a decade after the war, the highest government positions in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches contained numerous former and “former” Nazis.

Finally, it must be remembered, that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union to wipe out Bolshevism forever, and that the Russians in World War I and II, lost about 40 million people because the West had used this highway to invade Russia. It should not be surprising that after World War II the Soviet Union was determined to close down the highway.

For an additional and very interesting view of the Berlin Wall anniversary, see the article “Humpty Dumpty and the Fall of Berlin’s Wall” by Victor Grossman. Grossman (née Steve Wechsler) fled the US Army in Germany under pressure from McCarthy-era threats and became a journalist and author during his years in the (East) German Democratic Republic. He still lives in Berlin and mails out his “Berlin Bulletin” on German developments on an irregular basis. You can subscribe to it at. His autobiography: “Crossing the River: a Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War and Life in East Germany” was published by University of Massachusetts Press. He claims to be the only person in the world with diplomas from both Harvard University and Karl Marx University in Leipzig.

Al Franken, the liberal’s darling

I receive a continuous stream of emails from “progressive” organizations asking me to vote for Senator Franken or contribute to his re-election campaign this November, and I don’t even live in Minnesota. Even if I could vote for him, I wouldn’t. No one who was a supporter of the war in Iraq will get my vote unless they unequivocally renounce that support. And I don’t mean renounce it like Hillary Clinton’s nonsense about not having known enough.

Franken, the former Saturday Night Live comedian, would like you to believe that he’s been against the war in Iraq since it began. But he went to Iraq at least four times to entertain the troops. Does that make sense? Why does the military bring entertainers to soldiers? To lift the soldiers’ spirits of course. And why does the military want to lift the soldiers’ spirits? Because a happier soldier does his job better. And what is the soldier’s job? All the charming war crimes and human-rights violations that I and others have documented in great detail for many years. Doesn’t Franken know what American soldiers do for a living?

A year after the US invasion in 2003, Franken criticized the Bush administration because they “failed to send enough troops to do the job right.” What “job” did the man think the troops were sent to do that had not been performed to his standards because of lack of manpower? Did he want them to be more efficient at killing Iraqis who resisted the occupation? The volunteer American troops in Iraq did not even have the defense of having been drafted against their wishes.

Franken has been lifting soldiers’ spirits for a long time. In 2009 he was honored by the United Service Organization (USO) for his ten years of entertaining troops abroad. That includes Kosovo in 1999, as imperialist an occupation as you’ll want to see. He called his USO experience “one of the best things I’ve ever done.” Franken has also spoken at West Point (2005), encouraging the next generation of imperialist warriors. Is this a man to challenge the militarization of America at home and abroad? No more so than Barack Obama.

Tom Hayden wrote this about Franken in 2005 when Franken had a regular program on the Air America radio network: “Is anyone else disappointed with Al Franken’s daily defense of the continued war in Iraq? Not Bush’s version of the war, because that would undermine Air America’s laudable purpose of rallying an anti-Bush audience. But, well, Kerry’s version of the war, one that can be better managed and won, somehow with better body armor and fewer torture cells.”

While in Iraq to entertain the troops, Franken declared that the Bush administration “blew the diplomacy so we didn’t have a real coalition,” then failed to send enough troops to do the job right. “Out of sheer hubris, they have put the lives of these guys in jeopardy.”

Franken was implying that if the United States had been more successful in bribing and threatening other countries to lend their name to the coalition fighting the war in Iraq the United States would have had a better chance of WINNING the war.

Is this the sentiment of someone opposed to the war? Or in support of it? It is the mind of an American liberal in all its beautiful mushiness.

Notes

1. Derived from William Astore, “Investing in Junk Armies”, TomDispatch, October 14, 2014
2. New York Times, June 27, 1963, p.12
3. USA Today, October 11, 1999, p.1
4. Washington Post, May 12, 2009; see a similar story November 5, 2009
5. Carolyn Eisenberg, “Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949” (1996); or see a concise review of this book by Kai Bird in The Nation, December 16, 1996
6. See William Blum, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II”, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sabotage and subversion.
7. The Guardian (London), March 7, 1985
8. Washington Post, February 16, 2004
9. Star Tribune, Minneapolis, March 26, 2009
10. Huffington Post, June 2005
11. Washington Post, February 16, 2004

America, For Sale Cheap: $2 Billion Oughta Do It

With election time almost upon us, here’s a rather sobering thought:  By spending as little as a mere two billion dollars, anyone with that amount of money can now afford to buy an entire American election — Congress, the White House, governorships and all.

“But Jane,” you might ask, “why would anyone even want to do that?”  Why?  Just look at all the immense amount of loot you can score with just this tiny investment.  Access to national park land, bank deregulation, profits from weapons production, corporate monopoly status, pro-pollution laws, judges’ rulings in your favor…need I go on?

For instance, eleven trillion dollars has been recently spent on escalating and pursuing fake wars.  So if you “invest” in American elections and still only receive, say, just ten percent of those eleven trillion singles for your weapons-manufacturing services or whatever the heck else companies like Halliburton do, you still have just grown your measly two-billion-buck investment at least a thousand times over.  Forever War really pays off!

Or if you are guys like Obama, Bush and Cheney — and can’t resist playing with war toys?  Then you get to buy your very own wars!  Lots and lots of wars.  You get to play with actual life-sized GI Joe dolls and call yourself “Commander in Chief”.  You get to bomb Libya and Ukraine and Iraq and Syria.  What fun!  Two billion dollars can buy you a hecka lot of war toys — eleven trillion dollars worth to be exact.

“Who’s your daddy, ISIS?”

Or let’s say that your net worth is approximately 100 billion dollars, like, say, the Koch brothers’ worth is.  You spend less than three percent of that money on buying elections — and voila!  You too get over a thousand percent return on every dollar you spend.  What kind of crazy-good investment is that!

Or let’s say you are a member of the notorious WalMart family, worth hundreds of billions of dollars.  You spend just a few paltry billion on election buyouts — and suddenly us taxpayers are paying for all of your employees’ healthcare.  And we’re throwing food stamps into the bargain too.  Brilliant idea!

Or what if you own a giant coal company, oil company, car company, power company or some other major polluter?  Common sense tells us voters that we need to cut down on polluting the atmosphere so as to avoid drastic climate change that even now threatens to kill off the whole human race.

We could have been using solar power all this time for instance — and also cleaned up our rivers and even eliminated the need for fossil fuel.  But no.  For a few (billion) dollars more at election time, you can potentially doom the entire human race.  America, are we having fun yet?

Or let’s say for instance that you are AIPAC, that Israeli political action committee.  Spend just two billion dollars to buy every election in America — up to and including the dog catcher?  What a deal!  And since Israel is already receiving three billion dollars every year from America, guaranteed, voted by Congress, you don’t even have to risk using your own moolah.  You can use ours.  Fabulous investment. 

Plus you also get permission to bomb Gaza, take over the West Bank, design America’s stupid “Bomb Syria” policy, have red-carpet access to the entire Middle East (as in red carpets of blood) and get away with committing all kinds of other violations of the Nuremberg precedents and Geneva war crime conventions too.  

According to Middle East expert Paul Larudee, “Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu infamously bragged that ‘America is a thing you can move very easily’.”  Apparently all you need is just two billion bucks.   Hell, Attila the Hun never even had that kind of power.  Or even Josef Stalin.  All he ever got out his American investments was the freaking Cold War.

But don’t worry, Josef!  The Cold War is about to heat up again, thanks to AIPAC.  Hell, now AIPAC is even an unofficial member of NATO (and apparently its most influential member too).  And, as such, Israeli war hawks seem hell-bent on fomenting World War III.  Does the American public really want to go there?  I think not.

Or you could invest your capital in running America’s prison-industrial complex?  Just think of all the cheap labor you’ll get!  For much less than two billion in folding money, you don’t even have to ship your goods over from China any more.  Plus you get to have them stamped “Made in America” too.  Definitely a win-win for you.

Or what if you are Monsanto or Big Pharma or Bank of America or CitiCorp or Goldman Sachs or General Electric?  For far less than two billion dollars, you can get rid of unions, create your own monopolies, write your own “regulations”, appoint your own “regulators” and rake in the profits.  And if you are Big Media, our publicly-owned airwaves now belong to you.  Think Rupert Murdock.  Or net neutrality up in smoke.  Think AT&T.  Boo-yah!

Yep, America is for sale for really cheap these days.  The total assets of the United States of America is currently 188 trillion dollars.  And just think.  For just a mere two billion simoleons, all that can be yours!  Buy a little false advertizing, do a bit of voter-suppression, get your hands on a few electronic voting machines, tell a few lies on Fox News and CNN and, boom shake the room, you can own all of that.  All $188,000,000,000,000.00 worth.  “Worth playing for?”  Yeah.

My country these days has become like some aging cheap whore, selling herself on street corners to the first two-bit John who comes along and offers her a couple of dollars.

America these days isn’t even a high-priced call girl any more.

ISIS, Scotland, And The Politics of Mimicry

Is the fact that half of the Scots want to split from Britain and the news that hundreds of young Muslim Brits are fighting with Jihadi militant groups in Syria connected?

Of course they are. These two social phenomena are intrinsically linked, yet in the intellectual desert in which we live, no one dares to address the subject. The boundaries of our curiosity are limited by our deference to political correctness and Zionist sensitivities.

From a political perspective, Jihadi enthusiasm amongst young Western Muslims is an outcome of the emergence of tribalism in the West; but isn’t the call for Scottish independence driven by a similar tribal urge? From both a philosophical and dialectic perspective, Jihadi identification and the Scottish call for independence are the antithesis of the New Left and its corrosive Identity (ID) politics that have been spread in our midst for too long.

In the last five decades we have witnessed a relentless attack on nationalism and patriotic values. These attacks are commonly associated with the ‘New Left’ and have been led in large part by the Jewish intelligencia. It was the Frankfurt School’s thesis on Authoritarian Personality (Adorno & co) and Wilhelm Reich’s take on ‘Mass Conservatism’ that suggested that there was something wrong, dangerous and even vile to be found among the masses and their ‘reactionist’ political orientation.  Contemporary Left cosmopolitan icon Noam Chomsky has been calling for the abolishment of borders and states (except, of course, the Jewish State* for many years. Chomsky is proudly hostile to patriotism and nationalism. Yet we must examine the alternative offered by Chomsky, The Frankfurt School, The New Left and The Guardian – the media outlet that enthusiastically disseminates these ideas.

For reasons that I have discussed numerous times, the New ‘Left’ and the Jewish intelligencia have vigorously advocated the replacement of the national patriotic discourse with ID politics. In practice, this was intended to break the cohesiveness of the working class and the national bond and replace it with a score of marginal and sectarian discourses. The Left that once claimed to be a universal voice for the working people was hijacked. It became the mouthpiece of ID groups, most of them defined by biology (gender, skin color and race), sexual preferences (LGBT) and even religion (Jews only).

The outcome has been devastating. ID politics that initially purported to promote authentic thinking ended up promoting the opposite. It dismantled authenticity and replaced it with  ‘Identification.’ Instead of being who we really are (John, Sue, Nahida or Abraham) we’ve been trained to identify with group ideology. We adopted a new manner of speech. We convey our thoughts ‘as a’; ‘as a Jew,’ ‘as a woman,’ ‘as a gay,’ ‘as a black,’ instead of expressing our own and very personal authentic feelings and beliefs as we experience them in an unmediated existential mode.

In practice, we have replaced authenticity with detachment, alienation and mimicry.  Instead of celebrating Being in the most existential manner we learned to pre-mediate what being a ‘woman’, ‘Jew’, ‘black’, ‘gay’ should sound like. We learned to envisage what our identification ‘may entail’ and to react as our identification demands.  What I describe above is the practical result of the ‘forgetfulness of Being,’ a term coined by the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger. But it is at this point that tribal awareness; nationalism and patriotism are reinvigorated and seem to be gaining ground.

In order to explain this shift, l would like first to examine the case presented by Zionism, Israel and Jewish progressive politics.

Those who attend progressive meetings become accustomed to the righteous Jewish manner of speech. Many Jews launch their speeches with the ‘as a Jew’ cliché. Needless to mention, neither I nor any other scholar of Jewish ID politics have ever managed to figure out what this cliché means. The reason is that it doesn’t mean a thing.

For years I have asked many Jews to address this question and haven’t received a sound reply. The ‘as a Jew’ seems to convey a meaningful logos, but in practice it is used to block critical discussion of the emptiness of the notion of Jewish progressive ID. In truth, there is no Jewish value system and as the great Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz observed in the 1970s, there is no such a thing as ‘Jewish ethics.’ The Jew is expected to follow Mitzvoth and laws (halakha) instead of acting upon his ethical judgment. The conclusion is devastating – ‘as a Jew’ is an empty expression. It is a deceptive mode used to convey an image of a Jewish ethical heritage that doesn’t exist.

This is where Zionism and Israel intervene. They offer the Jew an opportunity to rid himself of the sham of clichés and offer a glimpse of authentic redemption. Zionism and Israel say to the young Diaspora Jew – instead of speaking ‘as a Jew’ why don’t you just ‘Be a Jew?’ – take the first El Al flight, come to Israel, join the IDF, learn how to drive a tank. By the time your transformation is complete you will be able ‘to pour your wrath on the Goyim’ in the name of the Jewish people and in accordance with Jewish heritage (as the Zionist interpret this heritage).

Whether we like it or not, Israel and Zionism give meaning to Jewishness.

The Zionist call is very appealing to young Diaspora Jews (American, British, French, Australian). The IDF is saturated with lone soldiers who arrived in the ‘promised land’ just to wear the uniform and serve their people.

Israel and Zionism provide an authentic patriotic answer to the anti-patriotic mode that has become the voice of the New Left.

ISIS and other Jihadi groups offer the young Muslim a similar product. Instead of talking ‘as a Muslim,’ a statement that means very little within a consumerist, materialist, multi cultural society, the Islamic State and other Jihadi organizations offer their young Western followers the opportunity to Be a proper Muslim. Instead of participating in the inauthentic ‘as a’ game, ISIS calls on its followers to participate in a holy war, the ultimate form of true spiritual fulfillment.

It would be foolish to tag ISIS Western combatants as “bad Muslims” or ‘evil fundamentalists’ while turning a blind eye to the rising popularity of Jihadi culture within Muslim communities in the region and in the West. I recommend that we examine the popularity of ISIS amongst young Muslims in the light of the popularity of the Zionist cause within Western Jewish communities. I can’t see why a young British Muslim fighting in Iraq is worse than a Jewish British citizen serving in the IDF and ruining the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The rise of nationalism and tribalism is prevalent throughout Europe and much of the world. This week Britain is on the verge of breaking up. Half of the Scots prefer to split from the Kingdom. What is going on in Scotland is a repetition of the same pattern. Instead of subscribing to a watery meaningless British ‘collectivism;’ Scotland, as a unifying symbolic bond has much more to offer its people.

To sum up, it seems that the attempt by the New Left to weaken the Nation state by promoting ID politics has backfired. It has led toward a sharp rise of tribal orientation and local patriotism. This reading may also help us to grasp the historical failures of the New Left and its mentors at the Frankfurt School. As we know, the masses never joined the Left. The promised revolution never occurred either.  And the reason is plain: real working people didn’t have cause to impersonate working people – they were the working people.

The Left’s advocacy of mimicry was not without its benefits. It brought itself some popularity amongst middle class Guardian readers and progressive Jews.  But the current outburst of tribalism suggests that our society is changing direction. Society may never be the same, and this may be a very positive occurrence.

Ukraine And Neo-Nazis

Ever since serious protest broke out in Ukraine in February the Western mainstream media, particularly in the United States, has seriously downplayed the fact that the usual suspects – the US/European Union/NATO triumvirate – have been on the same side as the neo-Nazis. In the US it’s been virtually unmentionable. I’m sure that a poll taken in the United States on this issue would reveal near universal ignorance of the numerous neo-Nazi actions, including publicly calling for death to “Russians, Communists and Jews”. But in the past week the dirty little secret has somehow poked its head out from behind the curtain a bit.

On September 9 NBCnews.com reported that “German TV shows Nazi symbols on helmets of Ukraine soldiers”. The German station showed pictures of a soldier wearing a combat helmet with the “SS runes” of Hitler’s infamous black-uniformed elite corps. (Runes are the letters of an alphabet used by ancient Germanic peoples.) A second soldier was shown with a swastika on his helmet.

On the 13th, the Washington Post showed a photo of the sleeping quarter of a member of the Azov Battalion, one of the Ukrainian paramilitary units fighting the pro-Russian separatists. On the wall above the bed is a large swastika. Not to worry, the Post quoted the platoon leader stating that the soldiers embrace symbols and espouse extremist notions as part of some kind of “romantic” idea.

Yet, it is Russian president Vladimir Putin who is compared to Adolf Hitler by everyone from Prince Charles to Princess Hillary because of the incorporation of Crimea as part of Russia. On this question Putin has stated:

The Crimean authorities have relied on the well-known Kosovo precedent, a precedent our Western partners created themselves, with their own hands, so to speak. In a situation absolutely similar to the Crimean one, they deemed Kosovo’s secession from Serbia to be legitimate, arguing everywhere that no permission from the country’s central authorities was required for the unilateral declaration of independence. The UN’s international court, based on Paragraph 2 of Article 1 of the UN Charter, agreed with that, and in its decision of 22 July 2010 noted the following, and I quote verbatim: No general prohibition may be inferred from the practice of the Security Council with regard to unilateral declarations of independence.

Putin as Hitler is dwarfed by the stories of Putin as invader (Vlad the Impaler?). For months the Western media has been beating the drums about Russia having (actually) invaded Ukraine. I recommend reading: “How Can You Tell Whether Russia has Invaded Ukraine?” by Dmitry Orlov

And keep in mind the NATO encirclement of Russia. Imagine Russia setting up military bases in Canada and Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Remember what a Soviet base in Cuba led to.

Has the United States ever set a bad example?

Ever since that fateful day of September 11, 2001, the primary public relations goal of the United States has been to discredit the idea that somehow America had it coming because of its numerous political and military acts of aggression. Here’s everyone’s favorite hero, George W. Bush, speaking a month after 9-11:

“How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am – like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.”

Thank you, George. Now take your pills.

I and other historians of US foreign policy have documented at length the statements of anti-American terrorists who have made it explicitly clear that their actions were in retaliation for Washington’s decades of international abominations. But American officials and media routinely ignore this evidence and cling to the party line that terrorists are simply cruel and crazed by religion; which many of them indeed are, but that doesn’t change the political and historical facts.

This American mindset appears to be alive and well. At least four hostages held in Syria recently by Islamic State militants, including US journalist James Foley, were waterboarded during their captivity. The Washington Post quoted a US official: “ISIL is a group that routinely crucifies and beheads people. To suggest that there is any correlation between ISIL’s brutality and past U.S. actions is ridiculous and feeds into their twisted propaganda.”

The Post, however, may have actually evolved a bit, adding that the “Islamic State militants … appeared to model the technique on the CIA’s use of waterboarding to interrogate suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

Talk given by William Blum at a Teach-In on US Foreign Policy, American University, Washington, DC, September 6, 2014

Each of you I’m sure has met many people who support American foreign policy, with whom you’ve argued and argued. You point out one horror after another, from Vietnam to Iraq. From god-awful bombings and invasions to violations of international law and torture. And nothing helps. Nothing moves this person.

Now why is that? Are these people just stupid? I think a better answer is that they have certain preconceptions. Consciously or unconsciously, they have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy, and if you don’t deal with these basic beliefs you may as well be talking to a stone wall.

The most basic of these basic beliefs, I think, is a deeply-held conviction that no matter what the United States does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the government of the United States means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are always honorable, even noble. Of that the great majority of Americans are certain.

Frances Fitzgerald, in her famous study of American school textbooks, summarized the message of these books: “The United States has been a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world: throughout history it had done little but dispense benefits to poor, ignorant, and diseased countries. The U.S. always acted in a disinterested fashion, always from the highest of motives; it gave, never took.”

And Americans genuinely wonder why the rest of the world can’t see how benevolent and self-sacrificing America has been. Even many people who take part in the anti-war movement have a hard time shaking off some of this mindset; they march to spur America – the America they love and worship and trust – they march to spur this noble America back onto its path of goodness.

Many of the citizens fall for US government propaganda justifying its military actions as often and as naively as Charlie Brown falling for Lucy’s football.

The American people are very much like the children of a Mafia boss who do not know what their father does for a living, and don’t want to know, but then wonder why someone just threw a firebomb through the living room window.

This basic belief in America’s good intentions is often linked to “American exceptionalism”. Let’s look at how exceptional US foreign policy has been. Since the end of World War 2, the United States has:

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected.
2. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
3. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
4. Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
5. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
6. Led the world in torture; not only the torture performed directly by Americans upon foreigners, but providing torture equipment, torture manuals, lists of people to be tortured, and in-person guidance by American teachers, especially in Latin America.

This is indeed exceptional. No other country in all of history comes anywhere close to such a record.

So the next time you’re up against a stone wall … ask the person what the United States would have to do in its foreign policy to lose his support. What for this person would finally be TOO MUCH. If the person mentions something really bad, chances are the United States has already done it, perhaps repeatedly.

Keep in mind that our precious homeland, above all, seeks to dominate the world. For economic reasons, nationalistic reasons, ideological, Christian, and for other reasons, world hegemony has long been America’s bottom line. And let’s not forget the powerful Executive Branch officials whose salaries, promotions, agency budgets and future well-paying private sector jobs depend upon perpetual war. These leaders are not especially concerned about the consequences for the world of their wars. They’re not necessarily bad people; but they’re amoral, like a sociopath is.

Take the Middle East and South Asia. The people in those areas have suffered horribly because of Islamic fundamentalism. What they desperately need are secular governments, which have respect for different religions. And such governments were actually instituted in the recent past. But what has been the fate of those governments?

Well, in the late 1970s through much of the 1980s, Afghanistan had a secular government that was relatively progressive, with full rights for women, which is hard to believe, isn’t it? But even a Pentagon report of the time testified to the actuality of women’s rights in Afghanistan. And what happened to that government? The United States overthrew it, allowing the Taliban to come to power. So keep that in mind the next time you hear an American official say that we have to remain in Afghanistan for the sake of women’s rights.

After Afghanistan came Iraq, another secular society, under Saddam Hussein. And the United States overthrew that government as well, and now the country is overrun by crazed and bloody jihadists and fundamentalists of all kinds; and women who are not covered up are running a serious risk.

Next came Libya; again, a secular country, under Moammar Gaddafi, who, like Saddam Hussein, had a tyrant side to him but could in important ways be benevolent and do marvelous things for Libya and Africa. To name just one example, Libya had a high ranking on the United Nation’s Human Development Index. So, of course, the United States overthrew that government as well. In 2011, with the help of NATO we bombed the people of Libya almost every day for more than six months. And, once again, this led to messianic jihadists having a field day. How it will all turn out for the people of Libya, only God knows, or perhaps Allah.

And for the past three years, the United States has been doing its best to overthrow the secular government of Syria. And guess what? Syria is now a playground and battleground for all manner of ultra militant fundamentalists, including everyone’s new favorite, IS, the Islamic State. The rise of IS owes a lot to what the US has done in Iraq, Libya, and Syria in recent years.

We can add to this marvelous list the case of the former Yugoslavia, another secular government that was overthrown by the United States, in the form of NATO, in 1999, giving rise to the creation of the largely-Muslim state of Kosovo, run by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The KLA was considered a terrorist organization by the US, the UK and France for years, with numerous reports of the KLA being armed and trained by al-Qaeda, in al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan, and even having members of al-Qaeda in KLA ranks fighting against the Serbs of Yugoslavia. Washington’s main concern was dealing a blow to Serbia, widely known as “the last communist government in Europe”.

The KLA became renowned for their torture, their trafficking in women, heroin, and human body parts; another charming client of the empire.

Someone looking down upon all this from outer space could be forgiven for thinking that the United States is an Islamic power doing its best to spread the word – Allah Akbar!

But what, you might wonder, did each of these overthrown governments have in common that made them a target of Washington’s wrath? The answer is that they could not easily be controlled by the empire; they refused to be client states; they were nationalistic; in a word, they were independent; a serious crime in the eyes of the empire.

So mention all this as well to our hypothetical supporter of US foreign policy and see whether he still believes that the United States means well. If he wonders how long it’s been this way, point out to him that it would be difficult to name a single brutal dictatorship of the second half of the 20th Century that was not supported by the United States; not only supported, but often put into power and kept in power against the wishes of the population. And in recent years as well, Washington has supported very repressive governments, such as Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Indonesia, Egypt, Colombia, Qatar, and Israel.

And what do American leaders think of their own record? Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was probably speaking for the whole private club of our foreign-policy leadership when she wrote in 2000 that in the pursuit of its national security the United States no longer needed to be guided by “notions of international law and norms” or “institutions like the United Nations” because America was “on the right side of history.”

Let me remind you of Daniel Ellsberg’s conclusion about the US in Vietnam: “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.”

Well, far from being on the right side of history, we have in fact fought – I mean actually engaged in warfare – on the same side as al Qaeda and their offspring on several occasions, beginning with Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s in support of the Islamic Moujahedeen, or Holy Warriors.

The US then gave military assistance, including bombing support, to Bosnia and Kosovo, both of which were being supported by al Qaeda in the Yugoslav conflicts of the early 1990s.

In Libya, in 2011, Washington and the Jihadists shared a common enemy, Gaddafi, and as mentioned, the US bombed the people of Libya for more than six months, allowing jihadists to take over parts of the country; and they’re now fighting for the remaining parts. These wartime allies showed their gratitude to Washington by assassinating the US ambassador and three other Americans, apparently CIA, in the city of Benghazi.

Then, for some years in the mid and late 2000s, the United States backed Islamic militants in the Caucasus region of Russia, an area that has seen more than its share of religious terror going back to the Chechnyan actions of the 1990s.

Finally, in Syria, in attempting to overthrow the Assad government, the US has fought on the same side as several varieties of Islamic militants. That makes six occasions of the US being wartime allies of jihadist forces.

I realize that I have fed you an awful lot of negativity about what America has done to the world, and maybe it’s been kind of hard for some of you to swallow. But my purpose has been to try to loosen the grip on your intellect and your emotions that you’ve been raised with – or to help you to help others to loosen that grip – the grip that assures you that your beloved America means well. US foreign policy will not make much sense to you as long as you believe that its intentions are noble; as long as you ignore the consistent pattern of seeking world domination, which is a national compulsion of very long standing, known previously under other names such as Manifest Destiny, the American Century, American exceptionalism, globalization, or, as Madeleine Albright put it, “the indispensable nation” … while others less kind have used the term “imperialist”.

In this context I can’t resist giving the example of Bill Clinton. While president, in 1995, he was moved to say: “Whatever we may think about the political decisions of the Vietnam era, the brave Americans who fought and died there had noble motives. They fought for the freedom and the independence of the Vietnamese people.” Yes, that’s really the way our leaders talk. But who knows what they really believe?

It is my hope that many of you who are not now activists against the empire and its wars will join the anti-war movement as I did in 1965 against the war in Vietnam. It’s what radicalized me and so many others. When I hear from people of a certain age about what began the process of losing their faith that the United States means well, it’s Vietnam that far and away is given as the main cause. I think that if the American powers-that-be had known in advance how their “Oh what a lovely war” was going to turn out they might not have made their mammoth historical blunder. Their invasion of Iraq in 2003 indicates that no Vietnam lesson had been learned at that point, but our continuing protest against war and threatened war in Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere may have – may have! – finally made a dent in the awful war mentality. I invite you all to join our movement. Thank you.

Notes

1. NBC News, “German TV Shows Nazi Symbols on Helmets of Ukraine Soldiers”, September 6 2014
2. BBC, March 18, 2014
3. Information Clearinghouse, “How Can You Tell Whether Russia has Invaded Ukraine?”, September 1 2014
4. Boston Globe, October 12, 2001
5. See, for example, William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower(2005), chapter 1
6. Washington Post, August 28, 2014
7. Foreign Affairs magazine (Council on Foreign Relations), January/February 2000

Suckering The Public On A War On Terror

The gullibility of the American public only exceeded by the ease that the fascist establishment is able to conduct their criminal government without any meaningful protest – just keeps rolling along. The mainstream media is still able to practice their black art of painting their masterpiece, entitled discovering a new cell of terrorists in every news report. Making up a scripted narrative to fix all seasons, take the creative ability of a screenwriter and the guidance of the intelligence community to shepherd the story to fix the immediate political objective. In a world where truth is the rarest of all commodities, you can be assured that the simpletons, who believe the psychological warfare accounts reported as fact, will invariably remain docile fools.

The news machine has become pure government propaganda. If the fantasy spin was merely benign diversion or trivia, one might be able to simply ignore or dismiss the poppycock as the price of driving broadcasts for ratings. However, when national survival as a free society, systematically being dismantled to rationalize some phony made up terrorist threat, the luxury of pampering an imbecilic public attitude that accept lies as reality, can no longer be tolerated.

Mikael Thalen’s article, ISIS Beheadings of Journalists: CIA Admitted to Staging Fake Jihadist Videos in 2010, cites “A 2010 Washington Post article authored by former Army Intelligence Officer Jeff Stein features a detailed account of how the CIA admittedly filmed a fake Bin Laden video during the run up to the 2003 Iraq war.”

Mr. Thalen goes on to say: “Only days after in the James Foley beheading video, top British forensic experts concluded that the video was likely staged using “camera trickery and slick post-production techniques.”

Whether or not Foley lost his head, the accounts provided by a hysterical media, calling for an immediate reversal from rejecting a bombing campaign against Syria, has the smell of a cooked up plan to expand the Middle East regional conflict.

Note that the LiveLeak provides several links to information that supports the claim, Headless James Foley – His Secret Life and the CIA.

“James Foley was a key propagandist in sparking the U.S. air invasion of Libya, in 2011. The proof is here. Believe it or not, it was through his kidnapping then ALSO… part of it spent on a posh resort island! Just about a year after his ‘release’ from that, he’s kidnapped AGAIN! This time, he’s calling us to attack Assad… apparently.

There seems to be plenty of evidence, that we have NOT been told the truth about Foley’s life at all – AND, perhaps not surprisingly, that he works for the CIA… under “press” cover.”

Most people only hear, and sequentially believe, what their prejudicial indoctrination from the government press releases say, and reported as fact, by the controlled media. Those who doubt this occurrence need to reflect on the Intercept account by Ken Silverstein, The CIA’S Mop-Up Man: L.A. Times Reported Cleared Stories With Agency Before Publication.

“A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.

“I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys,” Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be “reassuring to the public” about CIA drone strikes. In another, after a series of back-and-forth emails about a pending story on CIA operations in Yemen, he sent a full draft of an unpublished report along with the subject line, “does this look better?” In another, he directly asks the flack: “You wouldn’t put out disinformation on this, would you?”

Some of the most bold and significant revelations appear under the byline of the Intercept. It comes as no surprise that the founding editor Glenn Greenwald is front and center on the government’s radar as a press source that needs silencing. Simply dismissing him as a tin foil hat conspiracy kook does not fly even in the delusional minds of the NeoCons.

Now that the thirteenth anniversary of the false flag spectacle of September 11, 2001 approaches, it would be useful to review the two BATR articles. 911 has become the ultimate excuse and 911 Ten Years After. With all the chatter and hype, that another attack is imminent coming from the airwaves and presses, creating another diversion to warrant the insidious police state, which has engulfed our land, is probable.
The “presstitutes” are the gatekeepers for the New World Order, AKA the Nefarious Warrior Organism. The War of Terror is and always has been a colossal fraud. Even so, the collective mind of the MSM audience sucks up the disinformation and spin and accepts the account as fact and truth. If this was not so, how can it be objectively explained why it is so easy to turn the psyche dislocation of society on the preverbal dime?

Volumes in the social literature, written on the techniques and practices of mind manipulation, do not adequately excuse, and certainly do not vindicate the pernicious undermining of our lawful and traditional social order. Most analysis makes a feeble attempt to rationalize the scientific perfection of mass adverting and focus group polling to gauge current public sentiment.

In a gonzo and ideological viewpoint published in Truthout, presents her Fourteen Propaganda Techniques Fox “News” Uses to Brainwash Americans.

1. Panic Mongering

2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem

3. Projection/Flipping

4. Rewriting History

5. Scapegoating/Othering

6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness

7. Bullying

8. Confusion

9. Populism

10. Invoking the Christian God

11. Saturation

12. Disparaging Education

13. Guilt by Association

14. Diversion

“Pause for a moment and ask yourself what it means that the world’s largest, most profitable and most popular news channel passes off as fact every whim, impulse and outrageously incompetent analysis of its so-called reporters. How did we get here?

My curiosity about this question compelled me to sit down and document the most oft-used methods by which willful ignorance has been turned into dogma by Fox News and other propagandists disguised as media. The techniques I identify here also help to explain the simultaneously powerful identification the Fox media audience has with the network, as well as their ardent, reflexive defenses of it.”
Academia liberal bias never disappoints. Even a proponent of peaceful nonviolent struggle and civil resistance backs herself in a corner by simply trashing FAUX News as a purveyor of indoctrination. Surely, the collectivist progressives teach the brain path road to authoritarian fascism better than any self respecting genuine “conservative”. The NeoCon persuasion from such stalwart beacons of “Kill’em all, and let God sort’em out” philosophy, does not solely reside at Fox. There is more than enough blood on the hands of the last two Democratic administrations to rival the horrible record of George W. Bush.

Government propaganda continues under a bipartisan umbrella of protection. The War of Terror, entirely embraced by the political class of careerist parasites, has only one litmus test; namely, preservation of the empire.

Deflecting the emphasis away from the root cause in the despotism that is rampant in every institution and agency of government merely practices several of the propaganda techniques that Dr. Boaz condemns.

Rewriting history is the function and purpose of an obedient press. Who can dispute that the corporatist media coverage of the entire Obama administration is a textbook example of submissive adoration? The reign of terror is real, but it stems from internal tyrannical policy, not from an external terrorism, which reinvents itself as the situation demands. ISIS is just the latest morphing of a manufactured enemy whose existence is a direct result of clandestine funding, training and mission selection, from our own intelligence community.

Why has this latest maturation of Islamic assassins not set their sights on Zionist Israel? Just look to the controllers of U.S. foreign policy for the obvious answer. Yet a trusting domestic public so easily accepts the latest photoshop images and video cropping of a bogyman executioner. Jihad John, single handily shifted public sentiment to bomb Syria now that you can envision what the lying eyes in the media sees. It is assured that future ISIS locations for drone annihilations must protect all those stolen weapons from Muammar Gaddafi Libya’s arsenals.

The War of Terror is the surest bet in town. Tricking American suckers is just as easy as tuning into your latest government propaganda public service announcement.

Who Owns The Nukes If Wall Street Owns The Government?

Maybe it’s Time to Take Back the Government…

Paul Craig Roberts is not a fool. Nor is he a card-carrying Communist. His conservative credentials at least once were impeccable – a senior researcher at the Hoover Institute, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, one of the economists responsible for President Reagan’s supply-side economics, and Reagan’s Assistant Treasury Secretary for economic policy, working for development of the tax policies that were central to everything that followed in the US.

That is why he cannot be dismissed lightly when he says the United States and Russia are already at war over the Ukraine, and the US is planning nuclear war, based upon a transparent pretense. He is not alone. Now there are almost daily expressions of concern that the US is positioning itself to take the first strike in a nuclear war with Russia; see, e.g. Stern,”Threats Against Russia Increase Danger Of Nuclear War ,”http://www.countercurrents.org/stern300814.htm

Nuclear war between the United States and Russia has been hanging over our heads now for over half a century. The great majority of the world’s humans have had that possibility lurking in the background of everything they do for all their lives – the knowledge that if they live in any major urban area they are subject to annihilation by nuclear weapons on perhaps half an hour’s notice., and that those who are far enough away from urban centers to survive that half hour are facing unknown terrors such as the abrupt disappearance of modern civilization and/or “nuclear winter.” This is totally insane, and is pretty much proof positive that President Kennedy was wrong in his immortal American University speech (perhaps not coincidentally shortly before he was assassinated,) .

Kennedy described the insanity as all of us have lived with it for most of our lives:

“Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the Allied air forces in the second world war. [The US and Russia are now in possession of comparable numbers, with a total of ninety thousand Allied World War IIs, by Kennedy’s count, .] It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”

And he gave his prognosis for ending the insanity:

“Our problems are man-made. Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.” www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau150614.htm

In the last half century, little has changed about the insanity of nuclear war, but our ability and determination to solve the problem has waned and it no longer appears within our capacity. We are no longer certain man-made problems can be solved by man, and in particular, the worst of all, that we may be unable to undo catastrophic global warming, which threatens to turn our lush, green, beautiful world into a hot, dry uninhabitable wasteland.. But let’s leave that aside for the moment and focus on nuclear war.

We have all lived with the threat of nuclear war for all or most of our lives, but it has only been a threat. What Kennedy described has always been a threat to winner and loser alike. Realistic visions of the outcome include destruction of all the major cities of both Russia and the United States, followed by possible “nuclear winter” everywhere – instant destruction of the urban half of each nation involved, and slow destruction by starvation and undoubted socioeconomic chaos of much of the other half in months and years to follow. Not most folks’ idea of a win, even for the sociopaths presumably involved in the planning of our wars.

“Our” wars? Perhaps not. We have “outsourced” to China millions of jobs that will never come back because we cannot compete with Chinese wages. We have given to China, with the resettlement of the likes of Pfizer, rights to uncounted numbers of patents developed as a result of centuries of carefully nurtured American ingenuity. . We left in Afghanistan and Iraq, after “our” wars, hand chosen pawns who sold Afghanistan’s immense copper resources at pennies on the dollar, the great preponderance of Iraq’s petroleum, and who knows what else, to China. We have left troops in both countries to provide security for Chinese industrial establishments. “China won the war,” as the Kabul press said, made possible by a trillion dollars in bonds sold to China. See Arguimbau, “That much petroleum is that much bullshit,” www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau150614.htm, and “The War – Did We Sacrifice A Million Lives And A $Trillion Cash Just To Hand Our Jobs To China?” (URL for Part 3 with links to Parts 1, 2, and 4),

So if “we” gave away our jobs, gave away our major corporations, gave away our trade secrets, gave away access to the natural resources assumed to be the spoils of war, donated our military men to protect Chinese industry in Afghanistan and Iraq, and charged our taxpayers over a trillion dollars for accomplishment of these tasks, then who will determine the use of our nukes? A fair question, isn’t it? A nuclear war between the United States and Russia would likely leave China and our emigrated industry, the corrupters of Congress,  untouched, at least physically, and would make it overnight the unquestioned dominant economic power in the world. So perhaps we cannot assume that our government is giving full consideration to the dangers to the US itself of nuclear war with Russia.

American politics of both parties at this time portray a nation bent on self-destruction. For instance, the Republican Party, which as a practical matter is the controlling party today, “is divided between the ‘hope America fails’ Republicans, who appear to actively want joblessness to rise to seek political gain, and the radical Republicans who adore Ayn Rand, like Paul and Ryan, who favor extremist economic policies that would make America fail .” Budowsky, ” July 4 Infamy: Republicans Try to Destroy America’s Economy,” And the Democrats, with as much or more support from Wall Street than the Republicans, elected a candidate for two terms whose political strategies (e.g. assertion of the existence of a Senate “super majority”) have assured Republican control, whose name alone uniquely qualifies him to be controversial and misunderstood, and whose very first day in office was spent openly and deliberately rejecting central campaign promises that he could as easily have kept, “What Fools We Are,”  . Has it not come to anyone’s mind that Wall Street may have intentionally engineered a politics of failure for the United States, and that the Republicans’ willingness to destroy the American economy is Wall Street’s as well ?

And how better quickly to engineer a lasting failure of America, than to steer it into a nuclear first strike after resettling the great corporations thousands of miles away, leaving them free to pick up the spoils in two or three newly-vacated subcontinents? Doesn’t that make this nuclear confrontation uniquely dangerous?

These are insane questions, and one who poses them must question his own sanity, but they are no more nor less insane than the question, to which we now casually assume the answer: “Aren’t Wall Street and the world’s political and corporate leaders steering us into ultimately catastrophic climate change?”

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I know the people had better regain control of the nuclear weapons, and fast.

Happy Workers of The Future

Life In 500 Square Feet…

One Hundred and Twenty Thousand results to a Google search on “city is more competitive”.  The oligarchs who currently control our world intend to herd people in cities where inter-city  contests will keep everyone producing at a high level.

Read how this is already being implemented in China.

More and more of the land is falling under government control and hundreds of thousands of homes have been repossessed.  American citizens own fewer homes and less land.  If this scenario is successful the earth will be enjoyed by elite overseers while the proletariat toils and lives in tiny cubicles in crowded cities.

I wrote recently about our connection to land

In his daily devotional books R. J. Rushdoony (These books are tightly connected to daily behavior and provide usable righteousness for the Christian seeker.  Buy them here .)describes Rogation Sunday and its practice by early Americans.  In the evening following Sunday prayer for the harvest “each farmer and his family walked the boundaries of their property and gave thanks for the good earth.  As they walked, the boy of the family was ‘bumped’ against the landmarks, the boundary stone, or against a boundary tree.  If a pond or stream marked the boundary he was ducked into it.  Then the boy who was bumped or ducked was given a small gift.  The purpose of the ‘bumping’ and of the gift was to make the boy remember the boundaries of the land he would someday fall heir to.”

Land plays a primary role in the Biblical narrative.  The occupation of the Promised Land, the events the preceded, and the battles that followed make up a significant part of the Old Testament.  The earth is the Lord’s and it is to be carefully maintained.  He provided land for His people and it was apportioned to the Twelve Tribes.  He provided the Year of Jubilee to provide stability and prevent a permanent centralization of wealth and power.

Borders of land are related to God’s Law – both are meant to restrain.

In some of America’s Western States 80 percent of the land is owned by the Federal Government.  Alaska’s land is mostly government property.  Oil drilling rights are controlled in Washington.  If these rights were released United States would be energy independent.  Reliable sources claim the government owns about 30 percent of the entire United States land mass.

There is evidence that powerful elite bankers may be conspiring to take over large tracts of land as collateral for debt.   As our government obligates our posterity for trillions of dollars of debt some of it could be paid by sacrificing government owned land.  This could be the genesis of the recent squabble over cattle grazing.  .

In His provisions for the lands in ancient Israel God allowed the permanent sales of urban properties but had rural lands returned to their original owners in the year of Jubilee.  Stability was vested in the families than owned and cultivated land.  Though often overlooked it is still the same today; the cultivation of land provides sustenance for the populace of the earth.

Water and food are products of the earth.  They sustain life.  Without food and water death comes quickly.  Control over access to water and food is power over life and death.  The earth belongs to The Lord we are short term custodians.  God tells us that those who do not work should not eat.  It is the ability to produce food that is everyone’s God given right.

Robots are being touted as a means of reducing the need for human labor.  The analyzer failed to address the fate of displaced workers.  As technology replaces human labor a problem develops over the use of displaced workers.  When Wal-Mart replaces cashiers with do-it-yourself checkout stations they realize an additional profit but the displaced cashiers are faced with the emergency of being deprived of their livelihood.

Societies benefit from technical progress and work that benefits the general population is deserving of reward.  However, when technical improvements displace energetic workers the workers must be provided with the means of working to earn food and lodging for themselves and their families.

What is to be done with the leisure time our technical progress is giving us?  For many it will be used for self-indulgence.  Most of us work to provide the necessities of life but constantly pine for leisure time. But if leisure time is not filled with activity we soon hope for something to do.  We were created for activity and when we are full of sleep we crave it.

Wealth provides a person with activity choices.  Some wealthy individuals find productive activities; others waste their time in sinful indulgences.  A few amass wealth consistently over several generations and use this tacit control of human life to manipulate world powers with an objective of world domination.

We are created beings vested with the mandate to live under the Law our Creator has provided.  The Law is not an impediment to our happiness; obedience is the vehicle to righteous, peace, joy, and prosperity.  God brings blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience.

It is not only difficult to experience but hard to believe that the United States of America is being gutted and destroyed on the altar of world government.  Though the mainstream media is complicit and refuses to publish the atrocities the signs are everywhere.  How can airplanes clearly visible to the entire population fly over our nation and spray long trails of an unknown cloud-like substance while the people, the weather channels, and the major news sources never acknowledge their presence?  How can an entire government, 435 congressional representatives, 100 senators, and one president ignore hundreds of engineers and piles of evidence that the 9/11 attack was false flag operation and allow the policies of our government to be based on its authenticity?  And most shocking of all, how can voters continue with confidence to cast ballots for candidates that invariably betray their trust?

U. S. Voters are like battered spouses that continue to return to the battering partner.  It makes no sense to observers but to the voters its must seem like the only alternative.  An intervention is sometimes the only solution – but how?

The United States of America has been filled with alien immigrants whose only interest is to rape its wealth.  It is engaged in constant wars that sap its strength and destroys its youth.   It has been saturated with pornography and bludgeoned into sodomy. For many years its citizens have been exposed to the most aggressive use of incarceration in the entire world.  It has piled up debt that probably cannot be repaid but will enslave its children for generations.  It is home to so many diverse and ineffective religions that the anarchy of secular humanism is helping push it into tyranny.  Liberty has been lost to the lust for power and we now live under a police force that regularly kills citizens that do not obey.

More and more Americans are becoming concerned with our progressive downfall.  They see the clouds of tyranny approaching and they feel the winds of turmoil.  They are beginning to understand that their government has betrayed them and are apprehensive that unseen forces are overshadowing us. But in spite of this approaching avalanche they are unable to discern the hand of God.

During the 1930s in the small towns of Central United States a deep depression afflicted everyone.  We were grateful to be able to eat from a 25 pound bag of oatmeal three times a day.  Men without work hitched rides on railroad trains that took them to other areas where they hoped to find work.  Those who had food to eat shared with the transients who would often do add jobs in payment.

In the little town where I lived an Evangelical pastor was called to our protestant church.  In an effort to bring the congregation closer to the God of the Bible he began having altar calls.  The altar call was too confrontational for the church leaders whose brush with Christianity consisted of a Sunday School Bible studies where God’s Word could be judged by the participants and they could decide whether they believed it or not.  This minister was soon replaced with one who did not upset the status quo.

Before the Evangelical minister left there was a miracle at my mother’s home.  She has been a Methodist all of her life and following my conversion we sometimes discussed religion.  On this particular day she was sitting in her antique platform rocker in the living room when she asked me about conversion.  I said, “The Bible says you must be born again”.  At that very moment there was a knock on the front door.  It was the recently dismissed minister.  He came in and sat down.  In familiar fashion mother said, “Now, Albert, tell the minster what you were telling me.  I did, the minster affirmed it, and Mother said, “I don’t believe I have ever done that”.   We bowed our heads and mother accepted Christ as her Savior.  The minister left without ever mentioning why he had knocked on our door.

Neither my mother nor I made much progress in the Faith since correct Christian theology was not readily available and when it was preached it usually fell on deaf and recalcitrant ears.  We are a nation of nominal Christians whose faith is selfish and sinful.  We say we believe in God and have accepted Christ as our Savior but instead of becoming obedient servants we expect Him to serve us

During the 1930s there was a Christian patina that covered heavy layers of humanism.   My mother was a good, dependable woman.  She had earned a college degree from University of Illinois but with my father out of work and not having today’s labor saving devices she was forced to work hard to keep up our home and keep food on the table.

For a time my father worked in the WPA but for the most part society during the depression was free from government interference.  Nevertheless, a pride-filled humanism had taken over the country and the seeds for our current tyrannical government were beginning to grow.

Evangelical Christianity brings the good news to individuals but when they are converted the lack of a solid theological base leaves them in a moral limbo that fails to bring change to society.  Once our sins are forgiven and we are made new by the Blood of the Savior God seeks obedience as He always has.  The Jews failed to obey God’s commandments and their disobedience broke the Covenant.  All of God’s blessings are the result of obedience to His Law.

God will not long allow an oligarchy of wealthy humanistic elitists to control His creation.  All things work together for good for those who love the Lord and He will bring blessing from this unprecedented quest for world domination.  Unfortunately Christians who have failed to work against encroaching evil will be severely judged and will not see the blessing in store for His faithful servants.

The Low-Information Evangelical – Part 2

Appearing in part 1 is the phrase “low-information voter” (LIV) which is oft used by a popular radio talk show host.  The host suggests that those who make up this population set are individuals who vote for a candidate or important issue having little or in most cases zero knowledge about either.  LIVs are highly opinionated even when they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Also included in part 1 was the following quote from D. Edmund Wright.  I appreciate the way he expands on the LIV concept:

But forget low-information voters for just a minute; the malignancy that is really destroying this country is low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence.  You know, people who would lobby for, comment on, advocate for, or vote on laws like ObamaCare without any understanding of its real-world impact.  Such felonies are then carried out by low-information bureaucratic microbes with the power to destroy lives and businesses with impunity, and a political and talking-head class with the access and sway to codify these common malfeasances. Destruction of private property and liberty – and these two concepts are not divisible – takes place in government cubicles every minute of every day across the country.  And why not?  ( – emphasis in original)

His thoughts fit nicely with what I’ve come to believe about many leaders in the evangelical community.  Specifically, a large number of them are uninformed people with high-profile power and/or influence.  The LIVs Wright’s pointing a finger at are liberals.  Likewise many of the evangelicals that came to mind for me are liberals but because liberal has a negative connotation they prefer “progressive Christian” or “.” Take your pick.  But whichever one you go with has its roots in communism.

So to Christianize the LIV phrase I simply changed “voter” to “evangelical,” thus it became “low-information evangelical” (LIE).   I defined the LIE in this way:

Reminiscent of the LIV, the high-profile LIE does not understand the impact that his unorthodox view has on the visible church.  When it comes to the Bible, the LIE has opinions on a variety of challenging topics.  Even when his opinion is decidedly unbiblical, he presents it as the gospel truth.  The LIE’s arguments are often based, not on what God’s Word clearly teaches but instead on esoteric experiences he’s had or what he’s picked up from LIE celebrities.  

More on esoteric experiences in a moment.

There’s also a group of evangelicals that fall into the category of undistinguished LIE (ordinary folk).  The term I bestowed on them is u-LIE.  This group is also uninformed on many things (both Christian and otherwise).  They are often biblically illiterate.  In part 1 I made this observation:

Sadly, some undistinguished low information evangelicals (u-LIEs) assume that popular pastors, teachers and best-selling authors would never steer them wrong.  But nothing could be further from the truth!

Last but not least, I coined the phrase LIE-celebs.  These individuals are prominent Christian leaders who are uninformed people with high-profile power and/or influence.  Many of them are false teachers who do not speak for God.

LIE-celebs And Their Vain Hopes

God tells us how we are to handle false teachers:

Thus says the LORD of hosts: “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD.” ().

We are to pay these folks no mind.

One example of a LIE-celeb is popular women’s Bible teacher .  In part 1 I reported on Moore’s claim that she receives personal direct revelation from Almighty God.  In other words, God tells her things.  According to her, He calls her “baby” and “honey.”  I’ll have more to share on this modern day prophetess in a moment.

LIE-celeb  also claims that she receives extra biblical revelation or “revelation knowledge” from the Almighty.  Both Moore and Meyer’s respective claims clearlydeny the sufficiency of Scripture.   Equally troubling is that Joyce holds to heretical  (WoF) theology.  So naturally her students are swallowing the poisonous prosperity health and wealth gospel that does not save anyone.  Following is an erroneous assertion made by her:

The Bible can’t even find any way to explain this. Not really.  That is why you have got to get it by revelation. There are no words to explain what I am telling you. I have got to just trust God that he is putting it into your spirit like he put it into mine. ()

Why do I say this is erroneous?  Because it’s not taught in the Bible.  She made it up.  How do I know this?  I searched the scriptures.  ()   Nowhere does Scripture teach that God’s people are given special “revelation knowledge.”

“The fact that contemporary evangelicals seek ‘fresh’ revelations from God,” says Larry DeBruyn, “indicates that they no longer consider Holy Scripture to be sufficient and authoritative in matters of faith (). This seeking is Gnostic and mystic.  Harvie Conn …a former missionary in Korea, noted that the ‘central feature of mystical religion is its ‘belief in special revelation outside the Bible.’ Yet if the Bible is no longer considered sufficient, the coming of “new revelations” raises the following conundrum. I repeat it.

“If added revelations repeat what’s in the Bible, they are unnecessary. If new revelations contradict the Word of God, they are heresy. And if they supplement God’s Word, then the new revelations imply Scripture’s insufficiency, and about this Proverbs warns: ‘Add thou not unto his [God’s] words, lest he [God] reprove thee, and thou be found a liar’ ().” ( – emphasis added.)

 is esoteric mysticism – a desire to “know the unknowable.”  One of the obstacles the early church faced was Gnosticism.  The Gnostics believed that the masses are not in possession of spiritual knowledge, and only the truly “enlightened” can experience God.  The Apostles condemned Gnosticism as a heresy.

But Gnosticism is not the issue; the issue at hand is this: how can one know for certain if Meyer’s so-called revelation came from God?  “Is she on par with the apostles who received revelation knowledge from God himself?” asks apologist Matt Slick.  He continues:

Or how about the Old Testament prophets?  Does she, like them, also receive revelation knowledge from God?  If so, how would we know if it were true or not? The answer is simple:  we test what she says against Scripture, and it is obvious that she is getting a lot of things from somewhere else that contradict the word of God. ()

More On Moore

In part I brought the reader up to speed on Beth Moore’s slide into mysticism and also gave a heads up on her unbiblical teaching and had planned to leave it at that.  But then the news came that she made an appearance on Joyce Meyer’s TV show.  This is the sort of news Beth fans should be made aware of, so I decided to include a bit about it here.  Just before her appearance Beth tweeted:

I have the great privilege of sitting down w/@ Joyce Meyer in her studio today to talk about unity. Pray for Jesus to be so present & pleased.

The unity Meyer and Moore espouse is man centered, not Christ centered.

Scoffers And Bullies And Meanies, Oh My!

So – Beth Moore sitting down for a chat with a WoF heretic is a problem in and of itself.  But the reason she gave for appearing on the show was to talk about unity.  The obvious question is why would a “solid Bible teacher,” as she is called, choose to unite with a woman who preaches a false gospel?   Although their tête-à-tête is troubling it’s not the only concern people have with her.  As I pointed out in part 1, she’s been under fire for, among other things, engaging in , likewise for her acceptance of “” which is odd for someone who’s an .  Another problem arose when she appeared on Life Today with “” and big time promoter of   and proceeded to advise the audience to tune out the “scoffers”:

We’re going to have people that are honestly going to want to debate and argue with us about awakening and downpours … But there will be scoffers and they will be the far bigger threat, the one within our own brothers and sisters, our own family of God — far, far more demoralizing. And yes, it will come from bullies, and yes, it will come from the mean-spirited. ()

Beth’s attempt to shut people up who question her teaching should be concerning to Christian women who read her books and participate in Bible studies she has written.

Be Watchful! 

For those of you who are Joyce Meyer fans, it’s imperative that you wake up to the fact that some of this woman’s teaching is outright heresy.  Anyone who continues learning from her is choosing to remain under the teaching of what Jesus referred to in  as a ravenous wolf.  Listen to John’s warning:

Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting, for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works. ()

Sadly, a growing number of LIE-celebs, likewise u-LIEs, are taking part in the wicked works John spoke of.

We are living in perilous times, brethren.  It’s now common place for professing Christians to dabble in mysticism.  The result?  Many believers boast of having subjective magical mystical experiences such as visions; dreams; impressions; hearing inner voices; experiencing private illumination; and .  Warning! Christians who engage in esoteric mysticism deny  – the sufficiency of Scripture.

God’s people must come to grips with the fact that historic orthodox Christianity holds to the belief that everything we need to know about our Triune God is contained within the pages of the Bible.  ()

Stranded In Spiritual Infancy

Following is an observation by apologist and author Bill Muehlenberg from a post entitled :

We have millions of believers who may have been saved decades ago, but are still acting like spiritual infants. They have not grown much, they have not progressed much in their walk with Christ, and their spiritual condition is rather anaemic [sic] and shallow.

They have not become genuine disciples in other words, and they are still stranded in a spiritual infancy. They can’t even handle the deep truths of God as revealed in Scripture. Indeed, many of them hardly even read their Bibles, barely pray, or engage in in-depth fellowship.

No wonder they are still floundering around as babies. They have not moved beyond the nursery. They are all stuck in day care. They are permanent residents of Christian kindergarten. Sadly this is so very widespread today in our churches.

This brings me back to the low information evangelical.  As Muehlenberg pointed out, many Christians prefer milk to solid food.  ()  Consequently they’re biblically illiterate…which is the reason for the colossal lack of discernment among Christians.  So it should come as no surprise that the worst sort of unbiblical teaching has reared its ugly head in the visible church, thanks largely to diaper-wearing milk-fed u-LIEs who rarely, if ever, go to the Bible to scrutinize someone’s teaching.  ( These same u-LIEs are the ones who put on a pedestal/promote/pay tribute to and finance the lavish lifestyles of LIE-celebs, some of whom are prosperity preaching/health and wealth televangelists. What will it take to get professing Christians to understand that they’re propping up heretics?

Before I close I must also mention that the liberal media seems to think that all Protestants are evangelicals – and that includes WoF heretics such as Joyce Meyer, , and Oprah’s pal /New Thought/ guru .  Nowadays evangelical is such a broad term that it has lost its meaning.  Even Tony Campolo and , who have abandoned the biblical gospel for the “social gospel,” call themselves evangelicals.

Campolo, Wallis, Osteen, Bell, et al can say they are monarchs and wear a crown if they so desire.  But as I’ve said many times, a mouse in the cookie jar is not a cookie.

Resources:

—Apprising Ministries

—Apprising Ministries

–On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

God, Heaven, Hell & Demons: Do They Exist?

Rev. Robert Barron was chagrined, but not entirely surprised when he read Woody Allen’s recent ruminations on ultimate things. To state it bluntly, said Rev. Barron, Woody could not be any bleaker in regard to the issue of meaning in the universe. We live, he said,

“… in a godless and purposeless world. The earth came into existence through mere chance and one day it, along with every work of art and cultural accomplishment, will be incinerated. The universe as a whole will expand and cool until there is nothing left but the void. Every hundred years or so, he continued, a coterie of human beings will be “flushed away” and another will replace it until it is similarly eliminated. So why does he bother making films — roughly one every year? Well, he explained, in order to distract us from the awful truth about the meaninglessness of everything, we need diversions, and this is the service that artists provide.”  (Woody Allen’s Bleak Vision, , Aug. 12, 2014)

Like millions of other evolutionary humanists in rebellion against our Heavenly Father, Woody Allen is a nihilist—a non-person.  The source of his nihilism is the belief that our Heavenly Father is dead and there is no Absolute Truth, that all truth is relative.  According to Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, nihilism is the basic philosophy of the 20th century:

“It has become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any ‘front’ on which it may be fought.” The heart of this philosophy, he said, was “expressed most clearly by Nietzsche and by a character of Dostoyevsky in the phrase: ‘God is dead, therefore man becomes God and everything is possible.”  (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, )

Rev. Richard Wurmbrand (1909 –2001), a Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent possesses penetrating insight into nihilism because it was his own philosophy for many years.  But after fourteen years of physical and mental torment in a man-made hell on earth operated by soulless psychopaths, this courageous pastor emerged with an unquenchable love for Jesus Christ and his fellow man.   According to Wurmbrand, nihilism freezes and hardens the souls of its’ dehumanized believers:

“You freeze when you think of yourself as only a complicated product of chemical reactions….You cannot see stars (or your soul) through the microscope or microbes through the telescope.  Men who cannot think rightly come to the conclusion that God does not exist because they cannot find Him through the senses, which are functions of life in the realm of matter.  Senses are not the right means to see God.” (The Answer to the Atheist’s Handbook, Wurmbrand, p. 105)

The common denominators of Allen’s particular form of nihilism as well as those of militant secularism and its’ theological and New Age Eastern oriented counterparts are the denial of the supernatural Triune God and creation ex nihilo, the fall (original sin), man as person because created in the spiritual image of the One God in three Persons, Moral Law, immutable Truth, Jesus Christ God enfleshed, His death and Resurrection, heaven and hell.

Within the secular framework there is also denial of angels and demons, especially of Lucifer as the fallen angel Satan.  Other common denominators are the embrace of the idea of either pre-existing or spontaneously generated evolving matter and energy and mankind collectively dehumanized and reduced to aspects of the evolving universe.   All of these myths are validated by scientism—the instrument of fallen man’s will.

Whether matter and energy are held to be eternally existing or spontaneously generated (Cosmic Egg/Big Bang) matters not since the common point of departure for all worldviews grounded in matter and energy is metaphysical nihilism,

“… This position has been held by philosophers such as Parmenides, Buddha, Advaita Vedantins, and perhaps Kant (according to some interpretations of his transcendental idealism). Blob theory can also be considered very closely aligned with mereological nihilism (there are no parts and wholes). Obviously if metaphysical nihilism is correct, empirical reality is an illusion.” (What is Metaphysical Nihilism? OpenTopia.com)

Concerned creationists have long pointed out that evolutionary scientism is at the heart of the spiritual and moral crisis facing modern man.  A booklet titled The Surrender to Secularism (Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, 1967) written by Most Rev. Cuthbert O’Gara, former bishop of Yuanling, China, provides a powerful testimony to this truth.  Rev. O’Gara relates the following:

“When the Communist troops over-ran my diocese they were followed in short order by the propaganda corps—the civilian branch of the Red Forces—an organization…more fanatical, then the People’s Army of Liberation itself.  The entire population, city and countryside, was immediately organized into distinctive categories (and) forced to attend the seminar specified for his or her proper category and there (forced to submit) to the official Communist line.   Now what…was the first lesson given to the indoctrinees?  The first, the fundamental, lesson…was man’s descent from the ape—Darwinism!   Darwinism negates God, the human soul, the after-life.  Into this vacuum Communism enters as the be-all and end-all of the intellectual slavery it has created.  In the Red prison in which I was held, the slogan, ‘Bring your mind over to us and all your troubles will end,’ was hammered into the minds of the prisoners with brutal and numbing monotony.  Nothing but a groveling holocaust of the human person can satiate the lust for dominance of Peking’s Red Regime.”  (Article 12: The Quintessential Evolutionist, )

All forms of the evolutionary scientism dominating our modern societies, from the Neo-Darwinism force-fed to our children to militant forms of secularism, occult New Age evolutionary pantheism and their evolutionary theological counterparts, all are variations of metaphysical nihilism demanding a holocaust of the human person:

“It matters little whether we are dealing with Communism, Socialism, Nazism, abortion, the whole secular culture of perversity and death, the exclusion of God from public education, the crisis within the Church, or a whole host of other individual and social agendas – all are intimately related, and have as a powerful causative factor, belief in Darwinian Evolution.” (ibid)

Within the Western civilized world, including America, the idea that everything in the universe reduces to matter and energy is found for example, in the thinking of global NWO socialists, America’s progressive ruling class, the evolutionary ‘Christianity’ of Michael Dowd, the Hindu-pantheism of Teilhard de Chardin, the integral evolutionism of Ken Wilber, the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, and the 20th century’s murderous dictators, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot.

In his article, “Leftism a Radical Faith,” Bruce Riggs notes that much of the political history of the extended twentieth century is that of massive extinctions of citizenries by their dictatorial governments:

“Take the engineered mass starvations, torture chambers, firing squads, and gulags of Lenin and Stalin; Nazi gas chambers; Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killing fields; the genocides of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”; and the tyrannical North Korean Sung dynasty, and one will find that over one hundred million people
have been slaughtered.” (American Thinker, Jan. 1, 2014)

In one way or another, these dictatorial governments systematically dehumanized and murdered millions to create an imagined earthly Eden, said Riggs, and this is clearly irrational.  In this sense, leftist ideology is an atheist religion with the look of a religious inquisition. Klaus Fischer puts it this way:

“[T]otalitarianism represents the twentieth-century version of traditional religiosity; it is in many ways the secular equivalent of the religious life. Unless this crucial point is captured, the quintessential nature of totalitarianism will elude us.” (ibid)

This “totalitarian religiosity” is grounded in metaphysical nihilism and the dehumanization and reduction of mankind to aspects of the evolving universe on a par with slugs, weeds, and apes.  This evil religion continues today as a “scientific,” secular, politico-centric faith,

“….disdainful of theistic beliefs and contemptuous of those who subscribe to them.  It is a faith that, in its historical manifestations, has birthed the murderous tyrannies of the extended twentieth century — tyrannies that have marched under left-wing banners of Marxism, Communism, and National Socialism, or, more generally and descriptively, Coercive Collectivism.” (ibid, Riggs)

As it was for murderous 20th century dictators, so it is for todays’ individual evolutionists that metaphysical nihilism and dehumanization of ‘others’ is liberating, at least during younger years when death is not yet a blip on the radar.  This is  because for the uncreated, liberated autonomous ‘self’ who is the measure of all things and whose life no longer has any ultimate meaning or purpose there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his debauched, even murderous friends should not do what they want to do.  But the nihilism, egotism, lying, perverse license, and sadistic pleasure attained through psychological domination and manipulation of dehumanized ‘dupes’ and their children, all of which nihilists rejoice in during their younger years becomes an unbearable source of  despair, horror, night terrors, dread, and thoughts of murder and suicide with the advent of old age and the approach of death.

God, Heaven, Hell, Souls and Demons:  Do They Exist?

At issue for evolutionary humanists is the existence of the supernatural God of Revelation, the Heavenly Creator who spoke everything into existence ex nihilo.   Does He exist and did He reveal Himself to men or not?    Rebellious evolutionists say no, all that exists is the natural dimension of matter and energy in continuous motion measured by time that may or may not involve the working of a god invented and controlled by man.

However, existence within the natural dimension of space and time is not the only form of existence.  Timeless is the supernatural realm (third heaven) of the eternally existing, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Holy God of Revelation.

There are three heavens.  The first is the immediate sky, or earth’s atmosphere. (Genesis 2:19; 7:3, 23; Psalms 8:8; Deuteronomy 11:17)  The second is the starry heavens or outer space. (Deuteronomy 17:3; Jeremiah 8:2; Matthew 24:29).  The third heaven is outside of time and space, meaning the first and second heavens, thus outside the reach of man’s science.  The timeless heaven is where God and the holy angels and spirits of righteous men in possession of eternal life dwell and to which Paul was taken. (Deuteronomy 10:14; 1 Kings 8:27; Psalms 115:16; 148:4; 2 Cor.12:2)

Furthermore, all people who have had out-of-body experiences by way of near-death or drugs, astral plane travels, or through shamanism for example, can testify to the existence of their own souls as well as of the timeless abode of demons and fallen angels, the “spirits of wickedness under the heavens” (Eph. 6:12) and their chief, “the prince of the powers of the air.” (Eph. 2:2) According to the Apostle Paul, fallen angels thrown down from the third heaven are dispersed in a multitude throughout the first heaven.  It is with this timeless abode of fallen angels and demons that shamans interact and to which astral plane travelers from the time of Nimrod to our own have been visiting. According to Francis Huxley and Jeremy Narby:

“Western observers began participating in shamanistic sessions involving hallucinogenic plants, (and) found, to their astonishment, that they could have experiences similar to those described by shamans.”   ‘Life’ magazine popularized shamanism in a 1957 story, “In Mexico, American banker Gordon Wasson ate psilocybin mushrooms in a session conducted by (a) shaman.”   Wasson described to ‘Life’s’ readers his experience of “flying out of his body.”  Narby and Huxley report that “hundreds of thousands of people read Wasson’s account, and many followed his example.”  (Modern Shamanism: Spirit Contact & Spiritual Progress, James Herrick, p. 17, from “On Global Wizardry, edited by Peter Jones)

When the soul comes out of its’ body, as happened to the Satanist William Schnoebelen, it is immediately within the timeless realm of evil spirits.  According to early Church Fathers, if the soul is that of a faithful believer it will be met by one of Gods’ Holy Angels and escorted to the third heaven.   If not, as was the case with Schnoebelen, it will meet with deceiving, malignant spirits.

William Schnoebelen was a great hardboiled sinner whose damnable transgressions included Satanism and receiving the mark of Satan during an out of body experience.  His autobiography, Lucifer Dethroned, is a gripping and horrifying account of his descent into the darkest, most frightening side of the occult, magick, spell-casting, vampirism, astral travel and Satanism and his subsequent restoration through grace and the love of Jesus Christ.

Bill was a demonically-empowered Druidic high priest, high-order Mason, ordained spiritist minister and Satanist who frequently “went out of his body” into the timeless realm for various reasons.  As he tells it, one night he was “yanked” out of his body and drawn up through the paths of the Tree of Life toward the zone of Binah or Saturn.  His terrifying journey took him to a vast, obsidian trapezoidal shaped temple called the Cathedral of Pain situated in the midst of swirling stars. The inside walls were clear glass,

“…holding back a transparent green fluid.  Floating within the fluid…were hundreds of naked (horribly mutilated) human bodies.  They were all dead, most with expressions of exquisite terror etched in a rictus on their frozen faces.”  Then a pillar of light struck an “obsidian throne,” a sacrificial altar, and out of the light “appeared a huge being…robed in white…”  Mighty wings swept his shoulders.  At one moment the winged being was an incredibly handsome man, the next a “bull” and the next a “woman.” Chanting began in Latin: “Ave Satanas, Rege Satanas (Hail Satan, Satan Rules)”  Then the terrifying being reached out his left hand “and placed it on my forehead….I felt a claw tear into my brow (and) insert itself into my brain like a white-hot poker..”  Then a voice spoke: “Now you are mine forever.”    (p. 157-159)

Schnoebelen was forced to return to the Cathedral of Pain a few more times before turning to Jesus Christ for salvation.  One night he finally got down on his knees and confessed,

“…to the Lord that I was indeed a sinner—perhaps the chiefest of sinners (but) I repented (Luke 15:5) and confessed that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins and rose from the dead so that I might have eternal life (Romans 10: 9-10).  I asked Jesus to save me from my sins (Romans 10: 13), and to be the absolute Lord of my life (Romans 12: 1-2)”    Jesus Christ forgave me and set me “free from unbelievable darkness and evil...”   Jesus Christ liberated his demonically oppressed soul.”(p. 315)

All people, including ‘scientifically enlightened’ evolutionary nihilists live in a mysterious world of which we see in part, and that only darkly, because we are imprisoned in the jail of our senses.  But as Schnoebelen, shamanists and practicing occultists such as Carl Jung know, there are all about us and even here on earth powerful, intelligent beings that move so fast we cannot not see them, who emit rays outside the spectrum of our vision and communicate among themselves on a wavelength beyond what man can hear and apprehend, thus they can observe us, inflate our most disordered passions and influence our dreams and thoughts for good or bad.  They can also, by way of telepathy or automatic writing, transmit through someone like Nietzsche or Carl Jung teachings from the demonic realm.

According to the highly celebrated Jung, Philemon, a winged, horned demon, supervised and inspired the writing of the “Seven Sermons to the Dead.”  Jung described the occasion like this:

“The whole house was….crammed full of spirits.   They were packed deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick I could hardly breathe…Then it began to flow out of me, and in the course of three evenings the thing (Septem Sermones ad Mortuos) was written.” (Jung relates how his soul departed into the timeless realm)…the mystical land of the dead (and) soon after the…..’dead’ appeared to me and the result was the Septem Sermones.”   (To Hell and Back, Maurice S. Rawlings, M.D., p.143)

Spirits can, and do, influence the minds of proud evolutionary humanists who then trumpet the nihilistic ideas dropped into their minds as their own brilliant ideas and do the work of devils by leading astray millions of people with their damnable soul-destroying teachings.

Evolutionary seculars and their theological and occult New Age counterparts commit grievous sins and live as if they will never die. But the God of Revelation, heaven, hell, angels and demons exist, and even now, without their knowledge, rebellious nihilists are being prepared to receive the mark of Satan on their foreheads unless they repent.   Before it’s too late, let them learn from the despairing words of other adversaries of Jesus Christ:

“I am suffering the pangs of the damned.”  Talleyrand (ibid, Wurmbrand, p. 158

“Give me laudanum that I may not think of eternity.”  Mirabeau

“I am abandoned by God and man.  I shall go to hell.  Oh Christ, oh Jesus Christ!” Voltaire

“What blood, what murders, what evil counsels have I followed.  I am lost, I see it well.” Charles IX, King of France

“I would give worlds, if I had them, if the Age of Reason (an anti-Christian book) had never been published.  Oh, Lord, help me. Christ, help me.  Stay with me.  It is hell to be left alone.” Thomas Paine

“…I had a feeling that life was ebbing from me.  I felt powerful sensations of dread (then suddenly everything) turned a glowing red.   I saw twisted faces grimacing as they stared down at me (I tried to defend myself but) could no longer shut out the frightful truth: beyond the faces dominating this fiery world were faces of the damned.  I had a feeling of despair….the sensation of horror was so great it choked me.  Obviously I was in Hell itself (and then suddenly) the black silhouette of a human figure began to draw near…a woman…with lipless mouth and in her eyes an expression that sent icy shudders down my back.  She stretched out her arms…and pulled me by an irresistible force (into) a world filled with….sounds of lamentation….I asked the figure…who she was.  A voice answered: “I am death.”  (German actor Curt Jürgen’s, To Hell and Back, pp. 76-77)

Nihilists are lost and spiritually blind— to the reality of the timeless realms, but especially to the third heaven of our Heavenly Father.  So too are they are blind to the reality of their own frozen souls and to the existence of devils all around them for their foolish hearts are darkened (Rom. 1:21) and their thoughts evil (Gn. 6:5).  They are ignorant, guilty, and corrupt.  They have exchanged God’s Revelation for scientism and His Truth and Way for a lie (Rom. 1:25), and their darkened minds are wholly blind to the saving Light of Christ that shines into the hearts of the faithful. (John 8:12)

From his own experience, Eugene Rose believed that a nihilist cannot come to Christ fully until he is first aware of how far he and his society have fallen away from Him, that is, until he has first faced the Nihilism in himself:

“The Nihilism of our age exists in all,” he wrote, “and those who do not, with the aid of God, choose to combat it in the name of the fullness of Being of the living God, are swallowed up in it already. We have been brought to the edge of the abyss of nothingness and, whether we recognize its nature or not, we will, through affinity for the ever-present nothingness within us, be engulfed in it beyond all hope of redemption-unless we cling in full and certain faith (which doubting, does not doubt) to Christ, without Whom we are truly nothing.”  (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, )

“This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.”  “For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.… (John 3:19-20)

For all who repent of their sins, combat their nihilism with the aid of God and unite with the faithful who persevere in the Way of Christ, death is merely a doorway to eternal physical life, first in the third heaven for a while, then in a physical Paradise—the earth and heavens renewed and remade in unimaginably wondrous ways.   But for the stubborn, dehumanized nihilist who prefers darkness to Light the approach of old age and death are accompanied by increasing afflictions of the mind—despair, depression, nightmares, inexplicable feelings of dread and horror—because beyond the grave lies only eternal remorse in utter darkness.

The Low-Information Evangelical – Part 1

We are told throughout the New Testament to judge, to test, to discern, to assess, to rebuke, to hold one another to account, to make moral distinctions, and to pronounce judgment when and where it is due. ~ Bill Muehlenberg

The phrase low-information voter (LIV) was made popular in the mid-1990s.  Although the LIV is uninformed on the issues, he casts his vote.  The LIV is often highly opinionated even when he has no idea what he’s talking about.  A popular conservative talk show host has labeled a segment of those who vote for liberals LIVs.

D. Edmund Wright expresses his disdain for the LIV in a rather harsh way:

But forget low-information voters for just a minute; the malignancy that is really destroying this country is low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence.  You know, people who would lobby for, comment on, advocate for, or vote on laws like ObamaCare without any understanding of its real-world impact.  Such felonies are then carried out by low-information bureaucratic microbes with the power to destroy lives and businesses with impunity, and a political and talking-head class with the access and sway to codify these common malfeasances. Destruction of private property and liberty – and these two concepts are not divisible – takes place in government cubicles every minute of every day across the country.  And why not?  ( – emphasis in original)

While reading Wright’s rant against the organized left (and rightly so) it occurred to me that evangelicalism is dealing with the same sort of crisis – low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence.  So for the purpose of this piece I’ll refer to them as low-information evangelicals (LIE).

Reminiscent of the LIV, the high-profile LIE does not understand the impact that his unorthodox view has on the visible church.  When it comes to the Bible, the LIE has opinions on a variety of challenging topics.  Even when his opinion is decidedly unbiblical, he presents it as the gospel truth.  The LIE’s arguments are often based, not on what God’s Word clearly teaches but instead on esoteric experiences he’s had or what he’s picked up from LIE celebrities.  As a side note, whenever I write a column for the express purpose of exposing a LIE-celeb’s unbiblical teaching and even though I included an abundance of evidence to support the biblical view, the LIE rarely uses logical argumentation to contest the facts and win me over to their way of thinking.   Instead he resorts to personal attacks.  For example I’m often scolded for being unloving…ungracious…mean spirited…hateful…homophobic……and far worse.

Facts are stubborn things.  And the fact of the matter is that it’s biblical to report on a high-profile Christian leader whose teaching is unbiblical.  Much of the problem lies in the fact that oodles of LIE-celebs are unapologetically  in their worldview and their teaching reflects that.  (For the record, “progressive Christian” is an oxymoron.)

Several influential Bible teachers started out as good Bible expositors but got off track when they became enamored with Eastern mysticism.  Today the beliefs some Christians hold contain a good deal of New Age/New Thought ideas borrowed from Eastern mysticism.  Bible teacher, conference speaker and founder of Living Word Ministries  is one of those teachers.

Over the years Moore has gained substantial popularity with women, so much so that her resources line the shelves of churches and Christian book sellers everywhere.  Because she’s affiliated with the  her overt acceptance of “” surprised a lot of people.  For instance, at one of her conferences she shared a vision she supposedly received of “the church as Jesus sees it.”  Listen to this bombshell:

You know what He [God] told me not too long ago? I told you when I first began this whole concept, He first started teaching it to me about five years ago, and He said these words to me: “Baby, you have not even begun to believe Me. You haven’t even begun!”

You know what He said just a few days ago? “Honey, I just want you to know we’re just beginning.” Oh, glory! That meant I had begun. Hallelujah!

But He was telling me, “When this ends, we ain’t done with this. Honey, this is what we do for the rest of your life.” And He says those words to me over and over again: “Believe Me. Believe Me. And I hope it’s starting to ring in your ears, over and over again, Believe Me.” ()

Does that not make your hair stand on end?   “He said these words to me…” is the same as saying “Thus saith the Lord!”   Any discerning Christian will no doubt find Moore’s alleged chats with God troubling.

Contrary to what Beth Moore believes, when the Lord allegedly speaks to her it couldn’t be His voice she’s hearing.  How do I know that?  Because the way in which she claims the Almighty communicates with her is unbiblical.  How does God speak to us today?  We are told in  that He speaks to us by His Son through His Spirit in His Word.

In  Paul commands us to “test everything; hold fast what is good.”  With this in mind, I challenge Beth’s fans to test her teaching by the Word of God.  Those who are open to the truth will discover that this Bible teacher is feeding her followers rotten fruit!

Erin Benziger has been warning of Beth Moore’s shift into mysticism for quite some time.  Erin points out that:

Beth Moore has demonstrated time and again that she cannot properly handle the biblical text. And yet, she is a mentor and teacher to many women who look to her leadership and knowledge as a foundation for their own spiritual walk.

In recent months, Moore participated as a speaker at the Unwrap the Bible conference, which was held at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church. The event was hosted by ministries, and also featured such dangerous teachers as Priscilla Shirer, Christine Caine, Lisa Harper, Sheila Walsh and of course, Victoria Osteen. Nearly 11,000 women were in attendance at this event. 11,000. That is a tremendous number of women who were exposed to deceptive and erroneous Bible teaching. These are women in your Bible study and in your church. These are women who will now take the principles they learned and will begin to influence other women and girls within their church. This ought to be of no small concern to those who love and revere the Word of God. ()

Before I move on, I should mention that I don’t enjoy tearing down the powerful magnetic personalities professing Christians revere.   My purpose for taking aim at Beth Moore is to get undistinguished LIEs (ordinary folk) up to speed on her unbiblical teaching.  Sadly, some undistinguished low information evangelicals (u-LIEs) assume that popular pastors, teachers and best-selling authors would never steer them wrong.  But nothing could be further from the truth!

The Undistinguished LIE

The u-LIE learns Scripture in a variety of ways:  (1) Best-selling “Christian” books; (2) Blog posts; (3) Religious TV programs; (4) “Christian” radio/podcasts; (5) Trendy market-driven/seeker sensitive churches; (6) Family and friends (some of whom are nominal Christians at best and Bible illiterates at worst.)

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that the u-LIE who utilizes the above resources won’t learn anything worthwhile. He will!  In fact it’s a good idea to gain knowledge from mainstream Bible scholars/theologians/apologists/bloggers and ministers of the gospel; likewise from TV, radio/podcasts of solid Bible expositors.  But we must see to it that those from whom we learn, including LIE-celebs, continually guard against error.  As I said above, when someone’s theology lands outside of the pale of orthodoxy it’s appropriate to challenge what’s being taught and to (gasp!) “name names.”  How else will we know who to be wary of?

Christians must never lose sight of the fact that false teachers are deceptive and evil.  And by the way, anyone who’s exposed as a wolf or wolverine must swallow their pride and repent of their sin against God.  The objective is restoration.

What has resulted from all the abysmal teaching in the Church?  U-LIEs have accepted liberal/progressive theology.  Likewise, they’re up to their eyeballs in aberrant/heretical movements such as liberal/progressive/social justice; emergent/emerging; /health & wealth/name-it-claim-it; New Apostolic Reformation/Dominionism/Latter Rain. Moreover they’ve become easy prey for the .  How does one avoid becoming ensnared by the wiles of the devil?  By becoming a Berean!  ()

Christian Mysticism

Thanks largely to Christian mystics such as recently deceased ordained Baptist Minister Dallas Willard and Quaker Richard Foster, many u-LIEs have been introduced to spiritual formation.  Sounds biblical, but I assure you it’s not.  In a nut shell, spiritual formation,

encourage[s] believers to incorporate a wide variety of extrabiblical spiritual practices, such as contemplative prayer, silence, meditation, creative expression, and yoga.  In fact, some of the most popular methods of spiritual formation have been lifted from Catholicism, new age mysticism, or other religions and rebranded with biblical-sounding terminology. ()

Ken Silva cautions that involving oneself in mysticism can lead to a “denial of the Reformation and the acceptance of apostate  as a viable form of Christianity.”

Both Willard and Foster, as well as Rick Warren, John Ortberg, Ruth Haley Barton and Tony Campolo have encouraged believers to read the writings of Roman Catholic Trappist Monks such as Thomas Merton, Basil Pennington, William Menninger and Thomas Keating to name a few.  From individuals like these, Eastern pagan practices have been introduced into mainline Protestant churches, likewise independent, nondenominational, charismatic and Pentecostal churches.

Because of books penned by Catholic monks, an increasing number of u-LIEs embrace the idea that  in much the same way that He spoke to the patriarchs and apostles.  And this is the primary reason Christians boast that they hear directly from God.

LIE-celebs and u-Lies who are exposed to mysticism will say things such as: “I had a word from the Lord” or “God said (this or that)…”  Or “God told me to do (this or that)…” And “I have received revelation knowledge.”  Anyone who makes these claims is saying that God speaks directly to them!  The danger in thinking this way is that when God doesn’t “speak” to a professed Christian, she worries that He’s silent because she doesn’t have enough faith, or she has a “hidden sin” in her life because if she didn’t, God would speak to her; or perhaps the Lord’s silent because He’s angry over an act of disobedience…and the list goes on.

The Silence Is Not Golden

The aforementioned monks, or , allege that by engaging in a prayer method called The Silence they’ve been able to achieve a profound experience with God.  “We enter the silence to consciously experience our oneness within the one Mind, God.”  The idea of experiencing oneness within the mind of God comes, not from the Bible, but from Eastern mysticism.  It makes no sense for God’s people to borrow from a corrupt religious system that God despises.  Listen to :

For you [God] have rejected your people, the house of Jacob, because they are full of things from the east and of fortune-tellers like the Philistines, and they strike hands with foreigners.

The Desert Fathers have so little discernment that they not only participate in recycled paganism, they encourage others to go that route!  Willard and Foster and other LIE-celebs know full well that they’re “striking hands with foreigners” and they do it anyway!

Being that the Lord condemns paganism, His people are to have nothing to do with it.  No dabbling!  Steer clear of anything to do with .  Methods such as…centering prayer…breath prayer…are forbidden!   Even though this will ruffle some feathers, my advice is to steer clear of “.  “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” ()

Part 2, coming up!

Recommended:

 (Posting this with a warning)

The following is a concise presentation of the contemplative practice known as “Entering the Silence” taught by the  [a cult] founded by

—By Mike Ratliff

Research links:

–On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

Cold War Two

During Cold War One those of us in the American radical left were often placed in the position where we had to defend the Soviet Union because the US government was using that country as a battering ram against us. Now we sometimes have to defend Russia because it may be the last best hope of stopping TETATW (The Empire That Ate The World). Yes, during Cold War One we knew enough about Stalin, the show trials, and the gulags. But we also knew about US foreign policy.

E-mail sent to the Washington Post July 23, 2014 about the destruction of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17:

Dear Editor,

Your July 22 editorial was headed: “Russia’s barbarism. The West needs a strategy to contain the world’s newest rogue state.”

Pretty strong language. Vicious, even. Not one word of hard evidence in the editorial to back it up. Then, the next day, the Associated Press reported:

Senior U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday that Russia was responsible for ‘creating the conditions’ that led to the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, but they offered no evidence of direct Russian government involvement. … the U.S. had no direct evidence that the missile used to shoot down the passenger jet came from Russia.

Where were these words in the Post? You people are behaving like a rogue newspaper.

– William Blum

I don’t have to tell you whether the Post printed my letter. I’ve been reading the paper for 25 years – six years during Vietnam (1964-1970) and the last 19 years (1995-2014) – usually spending about three hours each day reading it very carefully. And I can say that when it comes to US foreign policy the newspaper is worse now than I can remember it ever was during those 25 years. It’s reached the point where, as one example, I don’t take at face value a word the Post has to say about Ukraine. Same with the State Department, which makes one accusation after another about Russian military actions in Eastern Ukraine without presenting any kind of satellite imagery or other visual or documentary evidence; or they present something that’s wholly inconclusive and/or unsourced or citing “social media”; what we’re left with is often no more than just an accusation.  Do they have something to hide?

The State Department’s Public Affairs spokespersons making these presentations exhibit little regard or respect for the reporters asking challenging questions. It takes my thoughts back to the Vietnam era and Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, the man most responsible for “giving, controlling and managing the war news from Vietnam”. One day in July 1965, Sylvester told American journalists that they had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good. When one of the reporters exclaimed: “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be handmaidens of government,” Sylvester replied: “That’s exactly what I expect,” adding: “Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? – stupid.”

Such frankness might be welcomed today as a breath of fresh air compared to the painful-to-observe double-talk of a State Department spokesperson.

My personal breath of fresh air in recent years has been the television station RT (formerly Russia Today). On a daily basis many progressives from around the world (myself included occasionally) are interviewed and out of their mouths come facts and analyses that are rarely heard on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, Fox News, BBC, etc. The words of these progressives heard on RT are typically labeled by the mainstream media as “Russian propaganda”, whereas I, after a long lifetime of American propaganda, can only think: “Of course. What else are they going to call it?”

As for Russia being responsible for “creating the conditions” that led to the shooting down of Flight 17, we should keep in mind that the current series of events in Ukraine was sparked in February when a US-supported coup overthrew the democratically-elected government and replaced it with one that was more receptive to the market-fundamentalism dictates of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the European Union. Were it not for the coup there would have been no eastern rebellion to put down and no dangerous war zone for Flight 17 to be flying over in the first place.

The new regime has had another charming feature: a number of outspoken neo-Nazis in high and low positions, a circumstance embarrassing enough for the US government and mainstream media to turn it into a virtual non-event. US Senator John McCain met and posed for photos with the leader of the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party, Oleh Tyahnybok (). Ukraine – whose ties to Naziism go back to World War Two when their homegrown fascists supported Germany and opposed the Soviet Union – is on track to becoming the newest part of the US-NATO military encirclement of Russia and possibly the home of the region’s newest missile base, target Moscow.

It is indeed possible that Flight 17 was shot down by the pro-Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine in the mistaken belief that it was the Ukrainian air force returning to carry out another attack. But other explanations are suggested in a series of questions posed by Russia to the the Secretary-General of the UN General Assembly, accompanied by radar information, satellite images, and other technical displays:

“Why was a military aircraft flying in a civil aviation airway at almost the same time and the same altitude as a civilian passenger aircraft? We would like to have this question answered.”

“Earlier, Ukrainian officials stated that on the day of the accident no Ukrainian military aircraft were flying in that area. As you can see, that is not true.”

“We also have a question for our American colleagues. According to a statement by American officials, the United States has satellite images which show that the missile aimed at the Malaysian aircraft was launched by the militants. But no one has seen these images.”

There is also this intriguing speculation, which ties in to the first Russian question above. A published analysis by a retired Lufthansa pilot points out that Flight 17 looked similar in its tricolor design to that of Russian President Putin’s plane, whose plane with him on board was at the same time “near” Flight 17. In aviation circles “near” would be considered to be anywhere between 150 to 200 miles.  Could Putin’s plane have been the real target?

There is as well other serious and plausible questioning of the official story of Russia and/or Ukrainian anti-Kiev militias being responsible for the shootdown. Is Flight 17 going to become the next JFK Assassination, PanAm 103, or 9-11 conspiracy theory that lingers forever? Will the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the Syrian chemical weapons be joined by the Russian anti-aircraft missile? Stay tuned.

Will they EVER leave Cuba alone? No.

The latest exposed plot to overthrow the Cuban government … Oh, pardon me, I mean the latest exposed plot to bring democracy to Cuba …

Our dear friends at the Agency For International Development (USAID), having done so well with their covert sub-contractor Alan Gross, now in his fifth year in Cuban custody … and their “Cuban Twitter” project, known as ZunZuneo, exposed in 2012, aimed at increasing the flow of information amongst the supposedly information-starved Cubans, which drew in subscribers unaware that the service was paid for by the US government … and now, the latest exposure, a project which sent about a dozen Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian young people to Cuba in hopes of stirring up a rebellion; the travelers worked clandestinely, using the cover of health and civic programs, or posing as tourists, going around the island, on a mission to “identify potential social-change actors” to turn into political activists. Can you believe that? Can you believe the magnitude of naiveté? Was it a conviction that American exceptionalism would somehow work its magic? Do they think the Cuban people are a bunch of children just waiting for a wise adult to come along and show them what to think and how to behave?

One of these latest USAID contracts was signed only days after Gross was detained, thus indicating little concern for the safety of their employees/agents. As part of the preparation of these individuals, USAID informed them: “Although there is never total certainty, trust that the authorities will not try to harm you physically, only frighten you. Remember that the Cuban government prefers to avoid negative media reports abroad, so a beaten foreigner is not convenient for them.”

It’s most ironic. The US government could not say as much about most of their allies, who frequently make use of physical abuse. Indeed, the statement could not be made in regard to almost any American police force. But it’s this Cuba that doesn’t beat or torture detainees that is the enemy to be reformed and punished without mercy … 55 years and counting.

The United States and torture

Two of the things that governments tend to cover-up or lie about the most are assassinations and torture, both of which are widely looked upon as exceedingly immoral and unlawful, even uncivilized. Since the end of the Second World War the United States has attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders and has led the world in torture; not only the torture performed directly by Americans upon foreigners, but providing torture equipment, torture manuals, lists of people to be tortured, and in-person guidance and encouragement by American instructors, particularly in Latin America.

Thus it is somewhat to the credit of President Obama that at his August 1 press conference he declared “We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.”

And he actually used the word “torture” at that moment, not “enhanced interrogation”, which has been the euphemism of preference the past decade, although two minutes later the president used “extraordinary interrogation techniques”. And “tortured some folks” makes me wince. The man is clearly uncomfortable with the subject.

But all this is minor. Much more important is the fact that for several years Mr. Obama’s supporters have credited him with having put an end to the practice of torture. And they simply have no right to make that claim.

Shortly after Obama’s first inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that “rendition” was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time: “Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.”

The English translation of “cooperate” is “torture”. Rendition is simply outsourcing torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo, or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to name some of the known torture centers frequented by the United States. Kosovo and Diego Garcia – both of which house large and very secretive American military bases – if not some of the other locations, may well still be open for torture business. The same for the Guantánamo Base in Cuba.

Moreover, the Executive Order referred to, number 13491, issued January 22, 2009, “Ensuring Lawful Interrogations”, leaves a major loophole. It states repeatedly that humane treatment, including the absence of torture, is applicable only to prisoners detained in an “armed conflict”. Thus, torture by Americans outside an environment of “armed conflict” is not explicitly prohibited. But what about torture within an environment of “counter-terrorism”?

The Executive Order required the CIA to use only the interrogation methods outlined in a revised Army Field Manual. However, using the Army Field Manual as a guide to prisoner treatment and interrogation still allows solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep deprivation, the induction of fear and hopelessness, mind-altering drugs, environmental manipulation such as temperature and noise, and stress positions.

After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had “left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules … Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of ‘rendition’ – picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country. But he said the agency would refuse to deliver a suspect into the hands of a country known for torture or other actions ‘that violate our human values’.”

The last sentence is of course childishly absurd. The countries chosen to receive rendition prisoners were chosen precisely because they were willing and able to torture them.

No official in the Bush and Obama administrations has been punished in any way for torture or other war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and the other countries they waged illegal war against. And, it could be added, no American bankster has been punished for their indispensable role in the world-wide financial torture they inflicted upon us all beginning in 2008. What a marvelously forgiving land is America. This, however, does not apply to Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning.

In the last days of the Bush White House, Michael Ratner, professor at Columbia Law School and former president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed out:

The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.

I’d like at this point to once again remind my dear readers of the words of the “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”, which was drafted by the United Nations in 1984, came into force in 1987, and ratified by the United States in 1994. Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Such marvelously clear, unequivocal, and principled language, to set a single standard for a world that makes it increasingly difficult for one to feel proud of humanity.

The Convention Against Torture has been and remains the supreme law of the land. It is a cornerstone of international law and a principle on a par with the prohibition against slavery and genocide.

“Mr. Snowden will not be tortured. Torture is unlawful in the United States.” – United States Attorney General Eric Holder, July 26, 2013

John Brennan, appointed by President Obama in January 2013 to be Director of the CIA, has defended “rendition” as an “absolutely vital tool”; and stated that torture had produced “life saving” intelligence.

Obama had nominated Brennan for the CIA position in 2008, but there was such an outcry in the human-rights community over Brennan’s apparent acceptance of torture, that Brennan withdrew his nomination. Barack Obama evidently learned nothing from this and appointed the man again in 2013.

During Cold War One, a common theme in the rhetoric was that the Soviets tortured people and detained them without cause, extracted phony confessions, and did the unspeakable to detainees who were helpless against the full, heartless weight of the Communist state. As much as any other evil, torture differentiated the bad guys, the Commies, from the good guys, the American people and their government. However imperfect the US system might be – we were all taught – it had civilized standards that the enemy rejected.

Just because you have a right to do something does not make it right.

The city of Detroit in recent months has been shutting off the supply of water to city residents who have not paid their water bills. This action affects more than 40% of the customers of the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, bringing great inconvenience and threats to the health and sanitation of between 200 and 300 thousand residents. Protests have of course sprung up in the city, with “Water is a human right!” as a leading theme.

Who can argue with that? Well, neo-conservatives and other true believers in the capitalist system who maintain that if you receive the benefit of a product or service, you pay for it. What could be simpler? What are you, some kind of socialist?

For those of you who have difficulty believing that an American city could be so insensitive, allow me to remind you of some history.

On December 14, 1981 a resolution was proposed in the United Nations General Assembly which declared that “education, work, health care, proper nourishment, national development are human rights”. Notice the “proper nourishment”. The resolution was approved by a vote of 135-1. The United States cast the only “No” vote.

A year later, December 18, 1982, an identical resolution was proposed in the General Assembly. It was approved by a vote of 131-1. The United States cast the only “No” vote.

The following year, December 16, 1983, the resolution was again put forth, a common practice at the United Nations. This time it was approved by a vote of 132-1. There’s no need to tell you who cast the sole “No” vote.

These votes took place under the Reagan administration.

Under the Clinton administration, in 1996, a United Nations-sponsored World Food Summit affirmed the “right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food”. The United States took issue with this, insisting that it does not recognize a “right to food”. Washington instead championed free trade as the key to ending the poverty at the root of hunger, and expressed fears that recognition of a “right to food” could lead to lawsuits from poor nations seeking aid and special trade provisions.

The situation of course did not improve under the administration of George W. Bush. In 2002, in Rome, world leaders at another UN-sponsored World Food Summit again approved a declaration that everyone had the right to “safe and nutritious food”. The United States continued to oppose the clause, again fearing it would leave them open to future legal claims by famine-stricken countries.

I’m waiting for a UN resolution affirming the right to oxygen.

Notes

1. See various examples at RT.com, such as “Jen Psaki’s most embarrassing fails, most entertaining grillings”, or simply search the site for “Ukraine Jen Psaki”
2. Congressional Record (House of Representatives), May 12, 1966, pp. 9977-78, reprint of an article by Morley Safer of CBS News
3. “Letter dated 22 July 2014 from the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General”, released by the UN 24 July, Document No. A/68/954-S/2014/524
4. “Pre-WWIII German Pilot Shocker, MH17 ‘Not Hit By Missile’”, Before It’s News, July 31 2014
5. Associated Press, August 4, 2014
6. Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2009
7. New York Times, February 6, 2009
8. Associated Press, November 17, 2008
9. Associated Press, November 26, 2008
10. Washington Post, November 18, 1996
11. Reuters news agency, June 10, 2002

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