Did Jesus teach that we cannot serve both God and unrighteous mammon? Does that mean that money is second only to God in the list of things that influence us the most?
If these things are true, doesn’t it stand to reason that the misuse of or control of or exploitation of money might be the single most sought after target by any enemy of our wellbeing? And doesn’t that mean we ought to make it one of our priorities to see that these things never happen?
Isa 1:4-9
Alas, sinful nation,
People weighed down with iniquity,
Offspring of evildoers,
Sons who act corruptly!
They have abandoned the Lord,
They have despised the Holy One of Israel,
They have turned away from Him.
Where will you be stricken again,
As you continue in your rebellion?
The whole head is sick
And the whole heart is faint.
From the sole of the foot even to the head
There is nothing sound in it,
Only bruises, welts and raw wounds,
Not pressed out or bandaged,
Nor softened with oil.
Your land is desolate,
Your cities are burned with fire,
Your fields — strangers are devouring them in your presence;
It is desolation, as overthrown by strangers.
The daughter of Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard,
Like a watchman’s hut in a cucumber field, like a besieged city.
SEPTEMBER 25, 2018
America is undoubtedly the most Christian nation on this earth. Australia has about six Christian radio stations. Britain I think has a handful. New Zealand has one. The United States of America has 1,485 Christian radio stations, 300 Christian television programs. I’m amazed to turn on secular television so often and see on secular television news people testifying to God’s deliverance from earthquakes, and tornadoes, and floods. I mean, it’s just accepted that they thank the Lord for delivering them, standing with them in their time of testing.
What other nation could have a talk show host ask, “Name some life-changing experience,” and hear an answer, “Accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior”? What other nation has gospel music festivals sponsored by McDonald’s? The United States of America, where it isn’t extraordinary to have Time Magazine run a comprehensive interview with evangelist Billy Graham, where the president reads his Bible every day, where supermarkets and other secular stores sell Christian cards, plaques, and Bibles, where there are more fish on cars than there are in the supermarkets. In fact, the Barna Research Group found that 62% of Americans, quote, “Say they have made a commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today.” That means according to that statistic that there are 148 million professing born-again Christians in the Unites States.
The foundation of America is soaked in a godly heritage. The pilgrim fathers’ reason for establishing the United States was, quote, “For the glory of God and the founding of the Christian faith.” The Declaration of Independence declares all men are endowed by God with certain inalienable rights. 50 of the 55 men who established or instituted the Constitution were professing Christians. What other nation has “In God We Trust” on its currency? What other nation sings unashamedly that God’s grace was shed upon it? If ever a nation should shine with the blessing of God, it should be this nation, the United States.
The Bible says righteousness exalts a nation. A nation’s house will bring forth, the Bible says, because of righteousness. God will honor any country that honors Him with long life, blessings, health, and prosperity. If America is as godly as it seems, it will be reflected both in the health of its people and its land, but instead, we’re seeing the very opposite. In 1989, 52,000 Americans died of a flu virus. In the same year, more died of AIDS than were killed in the entire Vietnam War. Every year, 160,000 die of cancer. Two and a half million have Alzheimer’s disease. Heart disease is killing millions. 10 million have asthma. 400,000 have Parkinson’s disease. The National Alliance on Mental Health diagnosed 10 million Americans with having, quote, “Serious long term mental illness”; 10 million. There are 500,000 attempted teenager suicides each year, over one million teenager runaways each year, 10,000 of them living on the streets of Los Angeles.
There are escalating marriage breakdowns, widespread alcoholism, epidemic drug problems, boiling racism, and massive financial pressures from home to commerce. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and droughts rock the nation, making the whole thing somewhat difficult to equate with God’s blessing. Despite America’s belief in God, in 1989 she spent 240 billion dollars on gambling. In the same year, 120,000 women reported being raped. Two and half million abused, missing, and abducted children were reported. 5,000 women in one year were killed by domestic violence. 23,000 Americans are murdered every year. Drunk drivers kill 25,000 each year, and the number one killer in the United States of children is parents. The US has 100 times more burglaries per capita as so-called “godless” Japan.
Since the law was instigated in the U.S., 30,000 law officers have died in the line of duty, and it’s almost added to daily. Satanic murders, mass killings, are common place. Drive-by shootings and other gang-related murders or drug-related murders are beyond police control in many states. Florida, state representative Michael Freedman said these words. This was in Time Magazine, 1987: “The message we’re sending out is we can’t protect you anymore, so get yourself a gun and do the best you can.” Violence and drug use have just so infiltrated the public school system that over 500,000 children in the U.S. are now homeschooled. That’s not Christian schooling. That is homeschooling. They’re taking them out of the school system all together.
“Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Sin is not hurtful because it’s forbidden. Sin is forbidden because it is hurtful.’ The pleasures of sin aren’t worth the pains of sin. If we as Christians can’t hate sin for what it is, we just hate it for what it does.”
Video has taken pornography and sexual violence to a new realm. Television programs spew out murderous acts of violence every hour, 32 acts of violence every hour. Pornography is now a 32 billion dollar industry. USA Today reported recently that the new NC-17 censorship for movies means that, quote, “Movies can now start where most sex scenes end.” The irony, on the same page I read that in USA Today, there was a report of a 500% increase in a certain type of cancer saying researchers do not know why. The answer is just across the page. If a nation sews sin, it will reap suffering and death. Benjamin Franklin said, “Sin is not hurtful because it’s forbidden. Sin is forbidden because it is hurtful.” The pleasures of sin aren’t worth the pains of sin. If we as Christians can’t hate sin for what it is, we just hate it for what it does.
Each year in California alone, 50,000 drug-addicted children are born. San Francisco has 60,000 intravenous drug users. Corruption and drug use has so infiltrated the police system in the U.S. that California police decided they would instigate a lie detector to test the 34,000 people who wanted to join the police force and found to their horror that 64% were former drug users. Jails in L.A. are often so full, judges don’t know what to do with criminals because they don’t know where to put them, so they just send them out back into the streets. The blood of unborn through abortion spilled at a million, over a million each year. 146,000 of these are in the last semester. That is the seven to nine month period. That’s 4,300 abortions per day, 97% just for the sake of convenience. There’s an estimated 17 million professing homosexuals in the U.S. 800,000 babies are born to unwed teenagers each year.
This one nation under God has 10,000 full-time astrologers and 175,000 part-time astrologers working busily to chart the heavens for future-minded citizens. Halloween, you wouldn’t believe how big Halloween is. It is a multi-billion dollar industry. You can see Bibles on one side of the store and Halloween junk on the other side of the store. It’s as common as apple pie is in the United States. One out of seven teenagers in the U.S. has a sexually transmitted disease. A 1990 survey showed that in schools, 40% of kids had had at least three sexual partners. Adults lead the example. USA Today reported that between 50 and 60% of married men had committed adultery. The women weren’t too far behind.
Now, the sad thing is this isn’t confined to the unchurched. You ask my son Daniel, he’s with me here, how many kids in his class in the secular school he used to go to went to church. 85, 90% of kids actually go to church, and the language they use is absolutely disgusting. A university campus found that nearly 50% of those who call themselves evangelicals think premarital sex is okay. Christianity Today did a confidential survey among 300 pastors and found that one in four had been involved in some sort of sexual sin.
Sammy Davis seemed to sum it up. Sammy Davis Jr. testified as to how Jesus had stood with him, this was a public testimony, during a bout with throat cancer. Someone came up to him and said, “Hey, you’re a born-again Christian.” He said, “No, no. It’s more of a cultural thing than a religious thing.” I find when I’m preaching to the homeless, drug addicts, and thieves, as I quote John 3:16, they all join in the chorus and quote it with me. I mean, America is baptized in a baptism of the grace of God, and they use God’s grace for liberty and occasion of the flesh. Contemporary America has adopted a cosmetic Christianity, which was epitomized when I was standing in line recently. I turned around, there was a guy with a chain around his neck and on the chain he had a cross and a Playboy bunny hand in hand.
“America is baptized in a baptism of the grace of God, and they use God’s grace for liberty and occasion of the flesh. Contemporary America has adopted a cosmetic Christianity.”
Satan understood the principle of inoculation far longer or far before man discovered it. His great victory has been to convince the church of the United States and this country throughout the western world to open up its doors and say, “Hey, world, come in. All you have to do is ask Jesus into your heart. It’s easy to become a Christian.” Jesus said the exact opposite. He said, “Strive to enter the straight gate. For many, I say, shall seek to enter and shall not be able.” He said, “Straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it. Broad is the path that leads to destruction and many go in that way.” When Jesus said, “Strive to enter the straight gate,” he used a Greek work which means “to agonize.” Agonize to get into the straight gate. It is not easy to become a Christian.
James said, “Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double minded.” He said, “Weep and mourn. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness.” If someone doesn’t repent in humble contrition, they can’t become a Christian. They can’t be born into God’s kingdom unless they repent. Jesus said that. “Unless you repent, you shall perish.” You see, the tragedy in the United States is that a minister can get up, an evangelist can get up and preach for 40 minutes on faith and give a good faith teaching and make no mention of sin, Law, righteousness, holiness, judgment, repentance, or even mention the cross, and then say, “Let’s just bow in prayer. You need to give your life to Jesus Christ. You’ve got a God shaped vacuum in your heart,” and multitudes come forward and they accept Jesus as Savior and Lord, and they have a false conversion. Because how could a man repent if he doesn’t know what sin is?
March 21, 2018
This March marked the 15th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
In 2003, President George W. Bush and his advisers based their case for war on the idea that Saddam Hussein, then dictator of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction — weapons that have never been found. Nevertheless, all these years later, Bush’s “Global War on Terror” continues — in Iraq and in many other countries.
It’s a good time to reflect on what this war — the longest in U.S. history — has cost Americans and others around the world.
First, the economic costs: According to estimates by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the war on terror has cost Americans a staggering $5.6 trillion since 2001, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.
$5.6 trillion. This figure includes not just the Pentagon’s war fund, but also future obligations such as social services for an ever-growing number of post-9/11 veterans.
It’s hard for most of us to even begin to grasp such an enormous number.
It means Americans spend $32 million per hour, according to a counter by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Put another way: Since 2001, every American taxpayer has spent almost $24,000 on the wars — equal to the average down payment on a house, a new Honda Accord, or a year at a public university.
Khalil Bendib / OtherWords.org
As stupefying as those numbers are, the budgetary costs pale in comparison with the human toll.
As of 2015, when the Costs of War project made its latest tallies, up to 165,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a direct consequence of U.S. war, plus around 8,000 U.S. soldiers and military contractors in Iraq.
Those numbers have only continued to rise. Up to 6,000 civilians were killed by U.S.-led strikes in Iraq and Syria in 2017 –– more civilians than in any previous year, according to the watchdog group AirWars.
In addition to those direct deaths, at least four times as many people in Iraq have died from the side effects of war, such as malnutrition, environmental degradation, and deteriorated infrastructure.
Since the 2003 invasion, for instance, Iraqi health care has plummeted — with hospitals and clinics bombed, supplies of medicine and electricity jeopardized, and thousands of physicians and healthcare workers fleeing the country.
Meanwhile, the war continues to spread, no longer limited to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria, as many Americans think. Indeed, the U.S. military is escalating a shadowy network of anti-terror operations all across the world — in at least 76 nations, or 40 percent of countries on the planet.
Last October, news about four Green Berets killed by an Islamic State affiliate in the West African nation of Niger gave Americans a glimpse of just how broad this network is. And along with it comes all the devastating consequences of militarism for the people of these countries.
We must ask: Are these astounding costs worth it? Is the U.S. accomplishing anything close to its goal of diminishing the global terrorist threat?
The answer is, resoundingly, no.
U.S. activity in Iraq and the Middle East has only spurred greater political upheaval and unrest. The U.S.-led coalition is seen not as a liberating force, but as an aggressor. This has fomented insurgent recruitment, and there are now more terrorist groups in the Middle East than ever before.
Until a broad swath of the American public gets engaged to call for an end to the war on terror, these mushrooming costs — economic, human, social, and political — will just continue to grow.
Source: https://otherwords.org/15-years-after-the-iraq-invasion-what-are-the-costs/
The free speech social network Gab has been taken offline after being banned by web domain registrar GoDaddy, shopping cart service Shopify, PayPal, payment processor Stripe, web host service Joylent and even blog site Medium since being blamed by the media for the mass shooting in Pittsburgh.
Though heinous crimes are regularly livestreamed by criminal users of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without the owners of those sites being held personally responsible, Gab is being held to a completely different standard and its founder Andrew Torba is being targeted for personal destruction.
Gab’s website now shows only this statement:
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1056708683130781696
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1056720079574814720
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1056735204717420544
Former DNC chair Howard Dean said Gab should be tried as an “accomplice” to murder:
Attorney General John Shapiro told CBS Philly on Monday: “Were also going to be conducting independently a review of the social media platform Gab, used by this individual in Pittsburgh. We’re going to do everything we can to support law enforcement and do our work as well to keep people safe.”
The media is going after Torba’s friends and family:
Torba spoke out about the censorship push on The Alex Jones Show:
Dana Loesch criticized the hypocrisy of the situation on Twitter:
The left’s favorite line is to say “if you don’t like their platforms build your own.”
That’s exactly what Torba did and yet he’s being blacklisted and banned from every service on the internet over the criminal actions of a user which he had no control over and is doing everything in his power to bring to justice.
Mass censorship of conservatives and libertarians is exploding. You’ve already seen this with the demonetization and ultimate purge of Infowars and other alternative media outlets by mega-corporations working in tangent to stifle competition. But you are important in this fight. Your voice is important. Your free thought is important. Make no mistake, you are just as important as anyone in the Anti-American establishment.
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| Was this what some were thinking 2000 years ago? Here is the reference: Revelation 13. What a slippery slope to hell. Now I understand what Jesus must have envisioned when He said, .”..when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” Luke 18 |
(Bloomberg Businessweek) — Patrick Kramer sticks a needle into a customer’s hand and injects a microchip the size of a grain of rice under the skin. “You’re now a cyborg,” he says after plastering a Band-Aid on the small wound between Guilherme Geronimo’s thumb and index finger. The 34-year-old Brazilian plans to use the chip, similar to those implanted in millions of cats, dogs, and livestock, to unlock doors and store a digital business card.
Kramer is chief executive officer of Digiwell, a Hamburg startup in what aficionados call body hacking—digital technology inserted into people. Kramer says he’s implanted about 2,000 such chips in the past 18 months, and he has three in his own hands: to open his office door, store medical data, and share his contact information. Digiwell is one of a handful of companies offering similar services, and biohacking advocates estimate there are about 100,000 cyborgs worldwide. “The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’ ” Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”
Research house Gartner Inc. identified do-it-yourself biohacking as one of five technology trends—others include artificial intelligence and blockchain—with the potential to disrupt businesses. The human augmentation market, which includes implants as well as bionic limbs and fledgling computer-brain connections, will grow more than tenfold, to $2.3 billion, by 2025, as industries as diverse as health care, defense, sports, and manufacturing adopt such technologies, researcher OG Analysis predicts. “We’re only at the beginning of this trend,” says Oliver Bendel, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences & Arts Northwestern Switzerland who specializes in machine ethics.
A Spanish dancer named Moon Ribas has a chip in her arm connected to seismic sensors, which is triggered when there are tremors anywhere on the planet. She uses it in a performance art piece called Waiting for Earthquakes. Neil Harbisson, a colorblind artist from Northern Ireland, has an antennalike sensor in his head that lets him “hear” colors. And Rich Lee, from St. George, Utah, has spent about $15,000 developing a cyborg sex toy he calls the Lovetron 9000, a vibrating device to be implanted in the pelvis. Lee hasn’t sold (or used) the Lovetron yet, but he’s got magnetic implants in his fingertips to pick up metal objects, two microchips in his hands that can send messages to phones, and a biothermal sensor in his forearm to measure temperature. “We’re the first movers,” Lee says. “But as the technology becomes more mainstream, there will be potential uses for pretty much everybody.”
Lee gave an address at BdyHax, a conference in Austin where people in the business can meet fellow cyborgs, discuss trends, and check out gadgets. At this year’s conclave, speakers included the developer of an artificial pancreas, a representative of a group advocating tech connections to the brain, and a researcher from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the developer of the internet—who’s exploring biohacks to fight memory loss and improve the lives of people without limbs.
Biohacking raises a host of ethical issues, particularly about data protection and cybersecurity as virtually every tech gadget risks being hacked or manipulated. And implants can even become cyberweapons, with the potential to send malicious links to others. “You can switch off and put away an infected smartphone, but you can’t do that with an implant,” says Friedemann Ebelt, an activist with Digitalcourage, a German data privacy and internet rights group.
Those concerns haven’t stopped some businesses from embracing biohacks. Tesla Inc. founder Elon Musk, who says people must become cyborgs to stay relevant, has raised at least $27 million for Neuralink Corp., a startup developing brain-computer interfaces. Neuralink is planning an announcement that’s “better than probably anyone thinks is possible,” the ever-self-promotional Musk said in a Sept. 7 video podcast where he was seen smoking marijuana. And last year, Three Square Market, a company in Wisconsin that makes self-service kiosks for office break rooms, asked its 200 employees if they’d be interested in getting chipped. More than 90 said yes, and they now use the implants to enter the building, unlock computers, and buy snacks from the company’s vending machines.
Digiwell’s microchip implants run from $40 to $250, and Kramer charges $30 to inject them, either in his Hamburg office or while traveling (he did Geronimo’s implant in the lobby of a Berlin hotel). His clients include a lawyer who wants access to confidential files without remembering a password, a teen with no arms who uses a chip in her foot to open doors, and an elderly man with Parkinson’s disease who once collapsed in front of his house after trying for two hours to get his key into the lock. He now uses a chip in his hand to open the door.
Kramer is also a co-founder of a company called VivoKey Technologies, which is developing a more advanced implant expected to be introduced next year. The device will be able to generate passwords for online transactions, and buyers can download software to upgrade it with more functions. “Humanity can’t wait millions of years for evolution to improve their brains and bodies,” Kramer says. “That’s why we’re doing it ourselves.”
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.
Until Americans realize a government of the people, by the people, for the people no longer exists, things will just continue to get worse for them. This is a pretty good depiction of the way things are currently.
The Story of Citizens United v. FEC
Quotes:
- The revelation that hotel security had been alerted comes a day after Las Vegas police changed their time line of how the Route 91 Harvest country music festival massacre started on Oct. 1 — not with an attack on a crowd along the Strip at 10:05 p.m., but with the shooting of Mandalay Bay security guard Jesus Campos inside the hotel about six minutes before.
- “He called it in before” the attack began
- There are no surveillance cameras in the hotel hallway, only on the floor’s elevator banks, and the timestamps on the hotel’s communications systems have in some cases been inaccurate, hampering investigators’ ability to build an accurate time line while they try to find a motive for the gunman, Roberts said.
- Officials said Paddock had mounted cameras outside his hotel room and first started shooting at Campos through the door of the room when the guard came to check an alert for an open door on another guest’s room. Campos was hit in the leg. Officials estimated Paddock shot 200 rounds into the hallway.
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