Today we read about Jesus speaking in the synagogue at
Capernaum. Mark does not tell us a single word that He spoke. Instead,
he deals with the reaction of the listeners, and it seems they were
divided. Most of the people were favorably impressed. Mark says they
were spellbound by Jesus' teaching because He taught with authority.
All except one man, who screams at Jesus, "What have
You to do with us? Have You come to destroy us?" Mark tells us that he
was possessed by a demon, an unclean spirit. In those days that was a
common explanation for almost anything. Today we would probably say that
the man was emotionally disturbed.
This man did
take Jesus seriously, he understood that Jesus was a threat to his
present way of living. Sometimes we tend to forget what a disturbing
presence Jesus could be. Take a casual stroll through the pages of the
New Testament, and you will meet all sorts of people whose lives were
disrupted by His influence. Even before His birth, He drastically
altered the plans of Mary and Joseph.
Remember Zaccheus ‑ He was probably the wealthiest man
in Jerico, a tax collector. That was, until he opened the doors of his
home and heart to Jesus. That brief visit cost him most of his fortune:
he ended up giving half of his money to the poor, and repaying all of
his fraudulent gains with interest.
Then we have Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathie. Both had
reached the pinnacle of their careers, both were wealthy. And both were
changed by a meeting with Jesus, their conscience pulling them in one
direction, toward Jesus, and their career pulling them in another. In
fact, we read that Joseph of Arimathie secretly became a disciple of
Jesus.
The pattern of disrupting people's lives did not end with the crucifixion, Jesus still changed people.
Saul of Tarsus was killing the followers of Christ. He
encountered the Lord on the road to Damascus, and Saul became Paul, the
Apostle to the Gentiles, spreading the Gospel all over the known world.
It is because of him that we are sitting here today.
It is incredible, the kind of things that Christ has
done to people, and is still doing, from Mother Teresa to Martin Luther
King. And the countless thousands of people who, day in and day out,
struggle to be His followers, good people, here tonight.... Everywhere!
That man in the synagogue was right. We can call him
demon‑possessed, or emotionally unbalanced. Call him what you like, but
he was aware that involvement with this Jesus would change him. I am not
sure that the rest of the crowd that day knew it. O yes, they were
spellbound by His teaching, but did they take that teaching to heart?
Apply it to their own lives?
Perhaps, from time to time, we all need Jesus to expel
demons from our lives. Demons of an unforgiving spirit, or a selfish
attitude, a prejudiced mind.... Whatever it is that keeps you from a
closer relationship with Christ. Those things in our lives that we know
are wrong, those things that make us uncomfortable in His presence.
We know beyond doubt that we can put our faith and trust
in this Jesus, He taught us not just to exist, but to live, live for
Him! Because He is the only one that can speak with divine authority.
It is never too late to change, no matter what our age or
background. Never too late to let go of those things that keep you from
a closer relationship with Jesus. It comes down to the question, who do
you allow to have authority in your life? Who controls and rules you?
Someone? Something? Or worse of all, Nothing?!
There was a man on retreat at Graymoor, and on his
sweatshirt were the words, "Jesus Christ is Lord." Another retreatant
made fun of this man, saying that was too much and over the top. This
man had the words "Calvin Klein" on his shirt.
This leads me to a question: do we follow where our
culture wants to lead us? Or do we follow the one who speaks with
authority? The one who said... I am the way, the truth, and life.
"Foreign
students have one of the highest rates of overstaying visas of any
category -- much higher even than tourist visas. It's one of the
favorite visas for terrorists to try to obtain, because it offers a
longer duration of stay." — Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy
studies for the Center for Immigration Studies.
According
to the Department of Homeland Security, there were approximately
739,000 immigrants who overstayed their visas last year alone. Roughly
80,000 of those were foreign students.
Worse,
jihadists do not even need to obtain a university admission to set foot
in the US. They can get a student visa by obtaining an admission from a
school to learn English. Many of these Islamists can alter their area
of study once they set foot in the US. An agent of the Iranian regime,
for instance, may get a visa to study English in the US, but once he
arrives, he can switch that major to study nuclear physics, to help his
regime obtain nuclear weapons.
(Image source: US State Department)
Recently,
in the middle of a speech at a conference in Europe about the threats
of radical jihadist groups, a young imam stood up and vehemently voiced
his objection to my remarks. At the end of the conference, the imam and
several of his followers came forward. The imam insisted that Americans
should be educated about Sharia law.
One
of the imam's followers spoke up, his voice filled with excitement as
he described how they had just entered Europe and their next destination
was the US. When asked what their experience was like traveling to
Europe, the man responded with a tone of gloating in his voice.
"It was very easy," he said. "We came here on a student visa, and we will be in the US on another student visa!"
What
the man claimed was tragically true. Many Islamists have become adept
at manipulating the flaws in the immigration system and have found ways
of taking advantage of any legal loopholes.
The
European Union has programs in place that seek heavily to influence
mainstream news outlets and journalists with its own agendas -- such as
that of continued mass-migration into Europe from Africa and the Middle
East. For this purpose, the European Commission recently funded the
publication of a handbook with guidelines for journalists on how to
write about migrants and migration.
It is seemingly in the interest of these media representatives to label competition from alternative or new media, "fake news".
A
proposed French law would allow authorities to block websites during
election seasons, a draconian measure to combat political opponents,
which would place France in the same category as countries such as China
and Iran that block websites that do not suit the agendas of the
regime.
Both
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (left) and French
President Emmanuel Macron (right) are proposing restrictions that would
violate the right to freedom of expression and information that is
guaranteed in the European Convention on Human Rights. (Image source:
European Commission)
The
European Union is intensifying its efforts to censor and marginalize
voices that disagree with its policies under the convenient euphemism of
combating "fake news".
"The
Commission needs to look into the challenges the online platforms create
for our democracies as regards the spreading of fake information and
initiate a reflection on what would be needed at EU level to protect our
citizens," wrote Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European
Commission, in May 2017. How considerate that Juncker, in totalitarian
fashion, wishes to protect EU citizens from news that does not fit the
Commission's narratives and agendas.
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The coming crash as men and women go their own way: Summary: Men and women are going their own way. The result might be a crisis of unimaginable size and more difficult to fix than putting Humpty Dumpty together again. Think of it as social entropy, an arrow that runs in only one direction. Emma Watson going her own way. Women going their own way. Vogue and…
How We Got Donald Trump (And How We Might Have Avoided Him) By Andrew J. Bacevich
The present arrives out of a past that we are too quick to forget,
misremember, or enshroud in myth. Yet like it or not, the present is
the product of past choices. Different decisions back then might have
yielded very different outcomes in the here-and-now. Donald Trump
ascended to the presidency as a consequence of myriad choices that
Americans made (or had made for them) over the course of decades.
Although few of those were made with Trump in mind, he is the result.
Where exactly did Trump come from? How are we to account for his
noxious presence as commander-in-chief and putative Leader of the Free
World? The explanations currently on offer are legion. Some blame the
nefarious Steve Bannon, others Hillary Clinton and her lackluster
campaign. Or perhaps the fault lies with the Bernie Sanders insurgency,
which robbed Clinton of the momentum she needed to win, or with Little
Marco, Lyin’ Ted, and Low Energy Jeb, and the other pathetic Republicans
whom Trump trampled underfoot en route to claiming the nomination. Or
perhaps the real villains are all those “deplorables” -- the angry and
ignorant white males whose disdain for immigrants, feminists, gays, and
people of color Trump stoked and manipulated to great effect.
All such explanations, however, suggest that the relevant story began
somewhere around June 2015 when Donald Trump astonished the political
world by announcing his intention to seek the presidency. My aim here
is to suggest that the origins of the real story are to be found much
earlier. The conditions that enabled Trump to capture the presidency
stemmed from acts of commission and omission that occurred well before
he rode down that escalator at Trump Tower to offer his services to the
nation.
Click here to read more of this dispatch. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176379/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich%2C_american_paths%2C_chosen_and_not_%281989-2018%29/#more
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Peril on the sea: Why are so many megaships sinking?
About
100 giant ships carrying metal ores sank in the last decade, often in
calm seas – a frightening stat that goes to the heart of an industry
hitting the rocks
Friends,
in our Gospel Jesus came to Capernaum and entered the synagogue on a
Sabbath, where he began to
teach. Then it says that the "people were astonished at his teaching,
for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes." The
ordinary teachers would have appealed to their own teachers and
authorities, and finally to Moses and the Torah, which were
unassailable. Now
what would prevent the people from saying that he was just crazy? Well,
watch what happens next. Into the synagogue there rushed a man with "an
unclean spirit." And he knows who Jesus is: "I know who you are—the
Holy One of God." But
then Jesus demonstrates his authority: "‘Quiet, come out of him!’ And
the unclean spirit convulsed him with a loud cry and came out of him."
The claim to God’s own authority is now ratified by showing power over
the spiritual realm. And now they—and we—have to make a decision. Are we with him or are we against
him? If he is who he says he is and who he demonstrates himself to be, then we have to give our lives to him.
Ray
McGovern informs us that Bob Parry died last night. Proximate cause: a
third stroke. Actual cause: shock at how corrupt his beloved
profession of journalism has become.
After
his first stroke on Christmas eve, greatly hindered with terribly
blurred vision, he wrote an apology to his readers. It is worth reading
again.
May he rest in peace. And may we recover from our current confusion.
From Editor Robert Parry:
For readers who have come to see Consortiumnews as a daily news source,
I would like to extend my personal apology for our spotty production in
recent days. On Christmas Eve, I suffered a stroke that has affected my
eyesight (especially my reading and thus my writing) although
apparently not much else. The doctors have also been working to figure
out exactly what happened since I have never had high blood pressure, I
never smoked, and my recent physical found nothing out of the ordinary.
Perhaps my personal slogan that “every day’s a work day” had something
to do with this.
Journalist Robert Parry
Perhaps, too, the unrelenting ugliness that has become Official
Washington and national journalism was a factor. It seems that since I
arrived in Washington in 1977 as a correspondent for The Associated
Press, the nastiness of American democracy and journalism has gone from
bad to worse. In some ways, the Republicans escalated the vicious
propaganda warfare following Watergate, refusing to accept that Richard
Nixon was guilty of some extraordinary malfeasance (including the 1968 sabotage of President Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks
to gain an edge in the election and then the later political dirty
tricks and cover-ups that came to include Watergate). Rather than accept
the reality of Nixon’s guilt, many Republicans simply built up their
capability to wage information warfare, including the creation of
ideological news organizations to protect the party and its leaders from
“another Watergate.”
So, when Democrat Bill Clinton defeated President George H.W. Bush in
the 1992 election, the Republicans used their news media and their
control of the special prosecutor apparatus (through Supreme Court Chief
Justice William Rehnquist and Appeals Court Judge David Sentelle) to
unleash a wave of investigations to challenge Clinton’s legitimacy,
eventually uncovering his affair with White House intern Monica
Lewinsky.
The idea had developed that the way to defeat your political opponent
was not just to make a better argument or rouse popular support but to
dredge up some “crime” that could be pinned on him or her. The GOP
success in damaging Bill Clinton made possible George W. Bush’s disputed “victory” in 2000
in which Bush took the presidency despite losing the popular vote and
almost certainly losing the key state of Florida if all ballots legal
under state law were counted. Increasingly, America – even at the apex
of its uni-power status – was taking on the look of a banana republic
except with much higher stakes for the world.
Though I don’t like the word “weaponized,” it began to apply to how
“information” was used in America. The point of Consortiumnews, which I
founded in 1995, was to use the new medium of the modern Internet to
allow the old principles of journalism to have a new home, i.e., a place
to pursue important facts and giving everyone a fair shake. But we were
just a tiny pebble in the ocean. The trend of using journalism as just
another front in no-holds-barred political warfare continued – with
Democrats and liberals adapting to the successful techniques pioneered
mostly by Republicans and by well-heeled conservatives.
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was another turning point as
Republicans again challenged his legitimacy with bogus claims about his
“Kenyan birth,” a racist slur popularized by “reality” TV star Donald
Trump. Facts and logic no longer mattered. It was a case of using
whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent.
We saw similar patterns with the U.S. government’s propaganda
agencies developing themes to demonize foreign adversaries and then to
smear Americans who questioned the facts or challenged the exaggerations
as “apologists.” This approach was embraced not only by Republicans
(think of President George W. Bush distorting the reality in Iraq in
2003 to justify the invasion of that country under false pretenses) but
also by Democrats who pushed dubious or downright false depictions of
the conflict in Syria (including blaming the Syrian government for
chemical weapons attacks despite strong evidence that the events were
staged by Al Qaeda and other militants who had become the tip of the
spear in the neocon/liberal interventionist goal of removing the Assad
dynasty and installing a new regime more acceptable to the West and to
Israel.
More and more I would encounter policymakers, activists and, yes,
journalists who cared less about a careful evaluation of the facts and
logic and more about achieving a pre-ordained geopolitical result – and
this loss of objective standards reached deeply into the most
prestigious halls of American media. This perversion of principles –
twisting information to fit a desired conclusion – became the modus
vivendi of American politics and journalism. And those of us who
insisted on defending the journalistic principles of skepticism and
evenhandedness were increasingly shunned by our colleagues, a hostility
that first emerged on the Right and among neoconservatives but
eventually sucked in the progressive world as well. Everything became
“information warfare.” The New Outcasts
That is why many of us who exposed major government wrongdoing in the
past have ended up late in our careers as outcasts and pariahs.
Legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who helped expose major
crimes of state from the My Lai massacre to the CIA’s abuses against
American citizens, including illegal spying and LSD testing on
unsuspecting subjects, has literally had to take his investigative journalism abroad
because he uncovered inconvenient evidence that implicated
Western-backed jihadists in staging chemical weapons attacks in Syria so
the atrocities would be blamed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The
anti-Assad group think is so intense in the West that even strong evidence of staged events,
such as the first patients arriving at hospitals before government
planes could have delivered the sarin, was brushed aside or ignored. The
Western media and the bulk of international agencies and NGOs were
committed to gin up another case for “regime change” and any skeptics
were decried as “Assad apologists” or “conspiracy theorists,” the actual
facts be damned.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh
So Hersh and weapons experts such as MIT’s Theodore Postol were
shoved into the gutter in favor of hip new NATO-friendly groups like
Bellingcat, whose conclusions always fit neatly with the propaganda
needs of the Western powers.
The demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is
just the most dangerous feature of this propaganda process – and this is
where the neocons and the liberal interventionists most significantly
come together. The U.S. media’s approach to Russia is now virtually 100
percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read the New York
Times’ or the Washington Post’s coverage of Russia and think that he or
she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts? For
instance, the full story of the infamous Magnitsky case cannot be told in the West, nor can the objective reality of the Ukrane coup in 2014.
The American people and the West in general are carefully shielded from
hearing the “other side of the story.” Indeed to even suggest that
there is another side to the story makes you a “Putin apologist” or
“Kremlin stooge.”
Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to
hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin
and Russia. Ironically, many “liberals” who cut their teeth on
skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the
Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S.
intelligence community feeds us, even if we’re told to accept the
assertions on faith. The Trump Crisis
Which brings us to the crisis that is Donald Trump. Trump’s victory
over Democrat Hillary Clinton has solidified the new paradigm of
“liberals” embracing every negative claim about Russia just because
elements of the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency produced a report last Jan 6 that blamed Russia for “hacking” Democratic emails
and releasing them via WikiLeaks. It didn’t seem to matter that these
“hand-picked” analysts (as Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper called them) evinced no evidence and even admitted that they
weren’t asserting any of this as fact.
Donald
Trump and Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate in 2016,
during which Clinton called Trump Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.”
The hatred of Trump and Putin was so intense that old-fashioned rules
of journalism and fairness were brushed aside. On a personal note, I
faced harsh criticism even from friends of many years for refusing to
enlist in the anti-Trump “Resistance.” The argument was that Trump was
such a unique threat to America and the world that I should join in
finding any justification for his ouster. Some people saw my insistence
on the same journalistic standards that I had always employed somehow a
betrayal.
Other people, including senior editors across the mainstream media,
began to treat the unproven Russia-gate allegations as flat fact. No
skepticism was tolerated and mentioning the obvious bias among the never-Trumpers
inside the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence community was
decried as an attack on the integrity of the U.S. government’s
institutions. Anti-Trump “progressives” were posturing as the true
patriots because of their now unquestioning acceptance of the
evidence-free proclamations of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement
agencies.
Hatred of Trump had become like some invasion of the body snatchers –
or perhaps many of my journalistic colleagues had never believed in the
principles of journalism that I had embraced throughout my adult life.
To me, journalism wasn’t just a cover for political activism; it was a
commitment to the American people and the world to tell important news
stories as fully and fairly as I could; not to slant the “facts” to
“get” some “bad” political leader or “guide” the public in some desired
direction.
I actually believed that the point of journalism in a democracy was
to give the voters unbiased information and the necessary context so the
voters could make up their own minds and use their ballot – as
imperfect as that is – to direct the politicians to take actions on
behalf of the nation. The unpleasant reality that the past year has
brought home to me is that a shockingly small number of people in
Official Washington and the mainstream news media actually believe in
real democracy or the goal of an informed electorate.
Whether they would admit it or not, they believe in a “guided
democracy” in which “approved” opinions are elevated – regardless of
their absence of factual basis – and “unapproved” evidence is brushed
aside or disparaged regardless of its quality. Everything becomes
“information warfare” – whether on Fox News, the Wall Street Journal
editorial page, MSNBC, the New York Times or the Washington Post.
Instead of information provided evenhandedly to the public, it is
rationed out in morsels designed to elicit the desired emotional
reactions and achieve a political outcome.
As I said earlier, much of this approach was pioneered by Republicans
in their misguided desire to protect Richard Nixon, but it has now
become all pervasive and has deeply corrupted Democrats, progressives
and mainstream journalism. Ironically, the ugly personal characteristics
of Donald Trump – his own contempt for facts and his crass personal
behavior – have stripped the mask off the broader face of Official
America.
What is perhaps most alarming about the past year of Donald Trump is
that the mask is now gone and, in many ways, all sides of Official
Washington are revealed collectively as reflections of Donald Trump,
disinterested in reality, exploiting “information” for tactical
purposes, eager to manipulate or con the public. While I’m sure many
anti-Trumpers will be deeply offended by my comparison of esteemed
Establishment figures with the grotesque Trump, there is a deeply
troubling commonality between Trump’s convenient use of “facts” and what
has pervaded the Russia-gate investigation.
My Christmas Eve stroke now makes it a struggle for me to read and to
write. Everything takes much longer than it once did – and I don’t
think that I can continue with the hectic pace that I have pursued for
many years. But – as the New Year dawns – if I could change one thing
about America and Western journalism, it would be that we all repudiate
“information warfare” in favor of an old-fashioned respect for facts and
fairness — and do whatever we can to achieve a truly informed
electorate. Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the
Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
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