Index for posts concerning War

Dear Bryan (A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song) by invot
1 comment

Don’t vote, Do something! by Darth B'strad
0 comments

Dear Girl sitting in front of me eating dates and knitting pt 2 by Bear
5 comments

White Knuckled Flag (stop the ground) by invot
4 comments

A journey into the political ideas of Distinguished Bean… (Compare/Contrast with the Congressman from Texas) by Distinguished Bean
0 comments

A letter to the Pacifist Muse. by Darth B'strad
2 comments

Intifada in the Gaza Ghetto by Pacifist Muse
13 comments

Things are blowing up in Israel, Again! by Darth B'strad
6 comments

The Sinking ship called the United States of America by Darth B'strad
7 comments

Congratulations to Barack Obama! by Darth B'strad
0 comments

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Dear Bryan (A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song)

Posted on July 11th, 2010 by invot.
Categories: War, Comedy.

Have you ever felt like there’s something infinite and foul inside of you? an infinite Sadness, maybe? A Sadness that, once you reach for it and grasp it, it becomes so real that you can feel your blood run cold and your teeth chatter as it stands before you? Something deep within assures you that it holds the power to eat you alive, and once you touch it - even in the slightest - it demands to be fed;

and it feeds on pieces of you,

pieces you need,

pieces you miss…

Truth be told, I know you’ve felt it, and I know you’re likely thinking that I have only just explained the half of it. There’s so much to be said about its hunger, its power, and its presence. Oh, its presence is so relentless and unkind, isn’t it?

I’ve felt it there –that same Sadness– more and more each day while knowing you. (Now, I didn’t know that it had already been there for years, possibly my whole life –planted by the hands of someone or something far more powerful than I.) It was then that my emotional being began to speak. It came back to life after it had been swallowed down for years, clogging up my esophagus, numbing my throat as if I swallowed a whole tube of Orajel, so I get that special ‘lil tingle reminding me that pain should be here, but all I’m feeling now is a sharp tingle, because my nerve endings need a rest. Where there was once only numbness, there grew pain, pain that was unleashed through the streams that branched wildly out from two bluish pools, never exhausting, never calloused and unfeeling, that rested so beautifully in the center of an unmistakable and strangely proportionate face.

You would deliver this infinite Sadness to me –better, stronger, more diabolical than ever before– with the slightest of glances.

Does the Sadness see me as nothing but a late-night snack? It was always your eyes that would bring me to it, willing to loosen another piece of myself and watch it be chewed up by its infinite teeth. Does the Sadness speak of nothing but my defeat?

The truth is, the Sadness was not born of devils and darkness, but of all those pieces of you and I within us both. The Sadness was telling me something. It’s speaking to you too.

The Sadness is not there to devour me, it’s a result of me consuming myself. There’s pieces of us both we’re denying, and the Sadness has come as a result of us both carving away at our souls.

For me, it was my love for you. Though I was ashamed to admit it for so long, I always knew that was the culprit. There were nights where I would watch you sleep and [so very silently] I would cry. I felt so defeated warming just one side of my mattress, with another empty slot beside me, wondering when it will ever be used. Especially when the one man my heart spoke volumes of laid quietly (I know, I was the snoring one) at the other end of the room.

I felt like, by hiding this, I was cheating on myself. But I did it anyway, because I was scared of losing you.

However, it should go without saying that ultimately those fears were realized.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. I’m writing this because I wasn’t the only one who fed the Sadness. It had us both.

And, what still puzzles me to this day is why it had you too. My mind, for a time, was consumed by this question. Every minute of ever hour I thought about you and the Sadness, sacrificing everything to understand it.

A few nights ago, I stumbled across a video of the two of us. I know that if I posted it you would instantly take this whole thing down (as you did my Bible verses), as it could be seen as incriminating, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I say it wasn’t easy to watch.

We told each-other things I haven’t heard in a very long time.

It made me miss you, though it was a you that I lost quite some time ago. Long before I left the house.

Though you smiled time and again, the Sadness was standing beside you. You could hear it in my voice that I was trying to cast it away, but it was more at home there than I. It was more welcome than any guest has ever been. In fact, I always sensed it in you –the sadness– since the first day I met you. I never knew what to do about it. I could never figure it out or make it better.

The man I loved was being consumed by a monster, and I hadn’t the slightest clue how to stop it.

My theory, as of late, has been that I was the source of the Sadness. This is why I had to leave. Then you would be happier and this venomous shadow would be driven away from you.

I hope this is the case. But I have no way of knowing.

To be honest, I was not interested in speaking with you until I saw that video. It reminded me why I fought so hard for you. I was close to showing up at your church this morning, but changed my mind after feeling that you (as well as everyone else) would not be interested in seeing me.

I just want to know that you are okay. I want to know what to pray for when I pray for you. I hate that I still think of you, but I feel that until my heart lets you go, you have a right to be there, so I shouldn’t despise it.

I hope that you are okay… and that the Sadness doesn’t take you over –as it was when I was with you.

Truthfully, I have nothing but love for you, regardless of everything. And not just the kind of love that shamed me in the past. I really do wish you the best, even if that requires me to disappear from your life completely. I also hope that you find what it is that you need. You can overcome whatever it is that is fighting against you, as the name of our Lord is Victory. And yes, we do have the same God, I believe this wholly, and thus we are brethren. We are adopted into the family of Christ, and amongst this family, there ought to be no devision.

1 comment.

Don’t vote, Do something!

Posted on February 18th, 2010 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, War, Law, Orig. Literature, Philosophy, Media, Economics, Local, Cultural.

So how about I say a little about myself before everyone around here gets the wrong impression of me. I was one of your average run of the mill conservatives supporting the usual conservative view of the world and I still do hold true to most if not all of the typical conservative way of thinking. And that’s an easy thing for everyone around here to confirm, all you have to do is take a good look at my posts here about two years back and you’ll easily see that I had all of the talking points set and was committed all the way to the conservative cause. I’ve even been accused by Bieren of being the poster boy of conservatism and I was honored to receive that supposed cut down by Bieren (I still don’t consider that to be a cut down). I used to listen to talk radio at least 8 hours a day to the greats like Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager. And just like all of them, I still do think that Obama is just about the worst president we have elected in quite some time even though I do like the guy, I just never thought he was right for the job and with how the events have unfolded recently, looks like I was very much right about that. Along with all of the rest of the good conservatives, I fought hard to get McCain elected even though none of us wanted the guy but that we thought he would just be slightly better than Obama, and he did make us all happy with nominating Sarah Palin and calming our fears that we would just get pushed to the side once the election was done. But we didn’t win that one, and now I do find as least for myself that it was a good thing that McCain didn’t win. Not because I enjoy seeing this country going to shambles whenever I briefly have a look at the news but that I did get the chance to completely rethink the whole idea of the conservative movement and for that matter I started to find a problem with our entire political system as it is. The truth is: this system is completely unsustainable and impractical right from the time that we (as a country) started capitalizing on the industrial revolution. The unfortunate truth is that when we (as a country) started making capitalism the reason for why we exist then that’s when it started to no longer be one nation under God but rather one nation under the mighty dollar. As we keep on making the dollar and this entire system work for us, we keep finding ourselves enslaved to this system and even start finding ourselves enslaving other countries to it as well. Sooner or later something has to give, and the more and more our economical crisis continues, the more and more likely people around the world are going to be demanding more world government and more world economical integration. It’s not really a question of if this will be, it’s much more a question of when. The idea will keep looking and sounding reasonable on paper but if we start calculating the realities of human nature you’ll find that it’s just going to persist this problem. So may I suggest an alternative? How about an opt out plan?

The bureaucratic issue
We have a big issue going on in this country today! It’s just the fact that this country’s government is swollen with way too much bureaucracy that’s just sucking out all of the real freedom around here. In reality we are not much of a free country at all. We can elect a completely different group of people who say the exactly opposite thing but yet the same things just keep on happening. For example all of the people that really wanted us to stop all the wars and get out completely, they just do things the proper way and gather up support for Obama and push all the way to win the election! And Obama didn’t quite do as he promised by moving Iraq and instead did the same exact thing in Afghanistan that Bush did in Iraq! So may I ask what really is the difference here? They both say opposite things only to do the same actions. They both spend way too much money on things that don’t work and all these governmental programs just keep failing. So why exactly are we spending all of this money on things that don’t work? Why are we spending all of this money on a system that doesn’t do what it’s suppose to do?

Now it’s an easy argument for a conservative to say “well that’s because the liberals have abandoned the constitution and start making up their own law!” Now to an extent that is true because it was a liberal president named Franklin Delano Roosevelt who started a trend to nominate supreme court justices that would do as the president pleases rather than rule on what the constitution says. That sort of judicial ruling has showed up all over the country in situations like when California had used it’s supreme court to put same sex marriage in place despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of citizens in that state voted against same sex marriage. So ruling like that one have effectively made voter initiatives practically obsolete in this country. However, liberals would argue that it’s the big business in this country that’s tearing this country to shreds and that’s also true. With how financially irresponsible that most all of the larger corporations have been, it’s lead to the financial collapse that we see today. The large banks around this country liked making all of that money they were getting off of the bad loans they were handing out so much that they didn’t check to see what would happen if the housing bubble would pop. Thus, there were a lot of people left out in the cold when they couldn’t pay the loans they had. So there is plenty of blame to go around and most certainly lots of people around the country have been making sure they push that blame out there. All you need to do is turn on the news and you’ll see somebody (no matter who it is that’s on) blaming someone else for all of the problems of the country. This problem gets so absurd that certain people have made t-shirts saying “pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8.” Now that doesn’t sound so bad until you look up the verse and see “May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership.” Well that’s not very good sportsman like conduct there and I find anyone who would use the bible in such a manner utterly detestable. So Why do we have to put up with this failed system? But still we’re not a the root cause of what’s wrong here.

The Irony of it all
You can actually trace all of these problems back to the American Civil War and even further back to the founding of our nation. The question here is why exactly did that war start in the first place? Considering that every southern state left the union because of slavery, that does mean that we started off as a nation living in violation of one of our most core values: that all humans are created equal. In order to change this Violation, we required a Civil War so that we can remove the inequality from our nation, but have we really started to live as our principals say that we should? So that we could win the civil war Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus allowing him to detain confederate soldiers without trial so that things could operate more smoothly and allow for a victory. Lincoln had also spent money that was not approved by congress yet and kept pushing all to win the war and never held back. While I’m not wiring this to demonize Lincoln, what he did had corrected a great injustice in our society that should not have been allowed to exist in the first place but yet to correct that problem we ended up having to throw away most of our principals to win. This did create a sense of pragmatism that’s created a false mindset in this nation: that we will go to any length to achieve our objectives no matter the rules that we have. This is an American problem that both political parties adhere to and this is shown in every element of our society from the way that it spends it’s money to the way that we talk. Everything is geared to making America the bright shining city on the Hill without thinking of what’s truly the right thing to do. The political talk is always about what is best for America rather than what is the right thing to do. Just as Lincoln had done in the past, so too, every president had continued following his example up to the present day in some from by placing America before all other concerns. As a result, we have ended up wiping out most of the native Americans, we have imprisoned Japanese without cause, we detain people of middle eastern decent and we keep people from coming into our country when it is not to our benefit. We demonize groups of people when they don’t line up with our core values when we have a political difference or a cultural difference. We place that we are first, right in what we believe and anyone that sees it differently is then someone who needs to change their perspectives to our view for things to come out right. We decide that we must implant our culture into other societies, regardless of the cost to them, because we are the ones who live right. We place blame on others when things don’t go right when they are not the problem. The true problem is how we think. We are a country that holds to the ideas on individualism and we think that each of us individually can make it on our own without any help from the people around us, other countries or even God Himself. We say “yes we can” prove that we are the great thing in the world when this is not true. We are arrogant.

A deceleration of dependence
In our founding document, The declaration of independence, the defining words are “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” At the time that was written, it was intended to convey to England that they do not have the right to take life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness away from us and that is a true statement. However, as we have aged as a nation, that statement has evolved even further to mean that our government must provide these things for us when our government can not provide. In order to provide life for our citizens then that means that we must go abroad and take life from others to ensure that we have it. In order to ensure liberty for our citizens then we have to take it from our own people so as to not trample on others rights. Finally, to create the possibility of the pursuit of happiness then we create a system that leaves many loop holes and allows for people to get caught up in and they never find what they were looking for. Most of the wars that we have fought were because other people were living in a way that we did not like rather than because we had to fight that war so that we would survive as a nation. The only two wars we have fought where we would not have continued existing as a nation if we had not won was the revolutionary war and world war two. With all of the wars that we keep on fighting, it only continues to keep fueling the hatred for our nation because we fight every war with the assumption that we are right that may or may not be the case. Thus, we continue taking life so that we can provide it for others. We enforce copy write laws to ensure that people to do not take someone’s work and use it for a profit when they themselves have taken that idea from someone else. There is nothing on this earth that is truly new and in reality, everything is just a recycled idea applied in a different way like having an internal combustion engine replace a horse or replacing a mud hut with wooden and steel houses. We stop certain people from releasing a song because they have certain words that are the same to another that may be right or may not be right. Or we take the house of another person so that we can build a highway to move people faster around the country. Thus, we take the liberty from others to ensure it for others. We have created the market economy so that the people that work the hardest are the ones that reap the most reward out of this nation but yet what it all comes down to is blind luck. Everyone in the housing market was making millions of dollars and was working really hard to get there only to find that we built too many houses and no longer needed so many thus causing them to loose out on what they worked so hard on. While at the same time a kid who has never worked a day in his or her life can just get all of the money their parents earned and just waste it away. At the end of it all, I keep finding that the most ambitious people in the world are also the most unhappy. So to ensure the pursuit of happiness usually ends up creating our own unhappiness. We don’t follow what we preach in this country!

Let us take a step back for a moment and realize certain truths of this world that we can not change. Life is not ensured because at any moment you can die in millions of different ways. So in reality, the very fact that you take another breath is actually a gift because you may not take another. Liberty is never ensured because anything that you want can become something that controls your actions and thus you end up enslaving yourself to your desires. To truly be independent of everything means that all of your actions must be devoid of all passion. Happiness is something that things can not provide for you but it is something that you have to choose to be on a daily basis despite what this life brings you. So the more and more that we keep on focusing in on how to fix problems that are part of a world that we can never change, the more that we will keep spending and fighting and working we keep on pushing ourselves into slavery. Every single person on this planet is a slave to something and your only choice is what you choose to be a slave to. So given all of this, what can we possibly do about our problem here? The only answer here is to take everything that we have in this world with gratitude and live the best that we can and allow forces that are greater than us to correct what is wrong in this world. We need to push aside our arrogance and admit that we don’t know everything and that we can’t correct everything in this world. We need to live a little simpler with our minds set on where we are truly headed all together as a whole. We need to realize that everything in this world is a gift and that we are only still living by grace that this world have not taken our lives yet. We need to stop thinking of what we are entitled to but rather what we can do to celibate the fact that we are still living. We need to declare that we are dependent on each other and need to keep focused on the people around us rather than focusing on things that we can not change. I propose that we change the way that we think.

Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do despite your country
We are a country were most of the population clams to be Christan but yet the funny thing is we rarely act like Christians in this country. So it’s really quite funny to see every president tout their Christaness about when they never do things that are “Christan.” For one, Jesus was never concerned about popularity and in fact usually said things to purposefully drive people away when He would start to get popular. Also, He never cared much for government workings and in fact usually attracted hatred from government officials. However, for the purpose of this post I am not talking of evangelizing people, that is a subject that I have talked about and will spend a lifetime talking about but for now I’m focusing in on how we act and think. For example, our founding fathers had the Boston Tea Party where we destroyed the property of the British to make our point that we didn’t like the taxes England was placing on us. But on the other hand, England was paying for a costly war that we had benefited from and they had bills to pay. Now was it right for England to be placing all of the high cost on us and enforcing the control on us? No but we were also not right in destroying what was not ours. And we constantly keep doing this by butting our heads into conflicts that are not ours to deal with. So why didn’t we go about this another way? Why didn’t we work off the dept that we had accumulated for that war and then continued on living our lives as if the king of England didn’t matter to us? But we can’t change what happened in the past so we can’t possibly know what would have happened if we had followed that course. So let’s just fast forward 234 years to the present and ask the same question, why don’t we live as if the federal government doesn’t matter? Well then that means that we won’t be worried at all about who’s in office and might not even bother to vote at all. That doesn’t mean that we keep ourselves out of the loop and not know what’s happening but instead of worrying about the things that we can’t control, we keep focused on what we can control. We can’t control what Washington is going to do but we can control what we say and what we do. So if we live life with the principals that government is by about and for the people (even though it’s not) then that means we don’t have to stress ourselves over everything the government is doing. We can better focus on the people around us and our local communities if we’re not worried about government. We don’t have to waste our money on a system that’s completely broken and almost useless. We don’t have to keep fixed into the 9 to 5 work week and then go home and quickly lock the door to make sure the neighbors are thous scary terrorist that we keep hearing about. No, we can get to know our neighbors and actually find out for sure if they actually have bad intentions. We can turn off the TV and and just not care about all the useless hype that we have going around the country. We can instead look to helping out the people in our own back yard instead of relying on a system that doesn’t the people that it hands out checks to. May I suggest that we stop relying on the government.

Now don’t misunderstand me here– I am not suggesting that we start another revolution or march on Washington and demand changes. No, I really mean pretend that it doesn’t matter. Not that we decide to not pay our taxes or anything illegal like that but just that we live without the government in our heads every day. So in order for us to start moving us forward in a manner that allows for us to correct our local problems despite what the government is doing I have a few points to think over.

1. First things first– smash your TV! or at lest stop watching the political news and hyped up television that will have you constantly griped by by the culture. All of the constant reports are just things that will keep you worried over one thing that you can’t change to the next thing that you can’t change and so it’s just something that’s just going to keep draining you out. It’s wise to know what’s going on in the world but news papers and other such media formats are less intrusive and allows for deeper thought than TV news.

2. Find a community– Churches or your local temple of your religious believes are by far the best places to go for this or if you happen to be atheist or agnostic then I suggest you try one, it might just be a good experience for you. And pay close attention to the people there, find out what they are like and what they need and help out if you can. Don’t look at it like it’s a place for getting good and services like your local market but more like a second home with people that you can help and can help you. Let it enrich your life with cares that have nothing to do with the government.

3. Form a new identity– We all have been living in a culture of being Americans first that overrides everything else in this life and we need to break from that habit. We need to care more about the people around us and the world at large rather than our country or creed. America is not the most important thing in this world and someday it will fall just like all of the empires and countries in the past have also risen and fallen but the world keeps on going on despite that. So don’t let that trouble you! Instead, try loving the people around you just as you love yourself and place more value on being part of your community rather than a citizen of America and this also goes the same for all of you living in other countries as well.

4. Work with others– Start living a little simpler with what you have! Instead of rushing out to buy that nice car you always wanted, find one that meets your needs. Don’t rush out to buy the big nice house but find one that meets your needs. With the excess of money that you save here then you can pour it into your local community to help out with others helping build an establishment that you all can benefit from. It’s easy to tear down but it takes generations to build up places of shelter and comfort. As you work and commit to a place to build up, you start to leave good traditions in your children and the people around you.

5. Take joy in your life– None of us was given the choice to be born into this world and none of us has the choice on when it will end. So take hold of that! Live your life as if it were all as song of praise for all that you have been given. Yes, you will have pain in your life and yes you will be hurt and will hurt others, this is inevitable but your only other option is to end it prematurely. But that would be a horrible same for you to do such a thing! If you have people around you that love and care for you, then take hold of that for that’s more precocious then all of the finest gold in the world. Fame will fade in time and countries will eventually die out but the people that you encourage and love will turn around and bless others. That’s what changes societies!

None of what I suggest is going to be easy but if we are to move forward in this country then we are going to have to start learning how to straighten out our priorities. We have lost our way completely! We no longer do what is right in this country but rather what is more expedient and easy to do and that’s caught us in a terrible snare. Life will go on despite what this country does, so why should we let us control us? There’s so much more out there than this country has to offer.

0 comments.

Dear Girl sitting in front of me eating dates and knitting pt 2

Posted on April 22nd, 2009 by Bear.
Categories: Death Penalty, Ethics, Abortion, Constitutional Law, Terrorism, Philosophy, Republicans, Parental Advisory.

Wale is not a delicious meat. You shouldn’t eat it, because most people would consider that cannibalism due to the fact that you’re fucking huge. It’d be like me saying “Yeah, they don’t have laws in Japan about peopling, but I understand because people are delicious.”
Wales are awesome. You’re not.
Fuck you,
Sam

5 comments.

White Knuckled Flag (stop the ground)

Posted on February 12th, 2009 by invot.
Categories: War, Creative Writing.

A flash.

The night sky suddenly glows a crimson red. Moving slowly like the clouds, amidst a sky of seething gunfire, her army drifts closer through the dismembered trenches.

They remained visible for only a moment. The light fades all too soon and once again the dark of night regains her charm. The only thing to be sensed by those within the city walls now is the hissing, like a wounded snake, of rockets being launched into the heavens. That, and the overbearing suspicion that the heavens just wont receive a single prayer this night.

The thinnest sliver of moon casts a slight blueish haze over the countryside. In parts, the valley seems to sparkle like a gentile sea, but the citizens of Jakra are far more than acquainted with the sight of polished helmets in the moonlight. No sooner are the walls of their city washed clean of blood does another army advance upon them, thirsty for more nectar of life.

Then: Another flash…

and in the bright crimson air rises the strangest silence. A moment of light is accompanied by an unexpected ceasefire. The queen’s army continues towards the city, slightly bewildered, until the city walls can feel their breath against its mortar skin. From the ground, the soldiers can see that Jakra’s cannons lack cannoneers. Guns have been laid down prudently with bullets beside them on the windowsills of the keeps. Upon further inspection, it appears that the city gates lack their keepers. With a careful nudge, they swing open freely, to reveal a city void of its inhabitants.

Plagued with perplexity, the queen’s army slowly accroach the city streets. They search high and low but find no one, living or dead. After quite some time, the queen herself makes her way through the town, sporting an equally perplexed expression as the rest of her men. She enters through the gates of the palace, then through its foyer, then up its long stairs, until she reaches the king’s chambers.

The view from the king’s chamber proves irresistible. The queen glides her eyes across the pointed rooftops of the city and sees the movement of her men below them as they search for a sign of life.

“Impossible!” The queen exclaims. “How does an entire population simply vanish?” She feels a sudden jolt of discomfort as those words escape her lips. At that moment her attention drifts to a letter left dangling off the corner of a dresser, on it written “Her Majesty” in calligraphic letters.

She unfolds the letter and reads:

As you are well aware, our marvelous city is the object of many’s desire. We have spent decades fighting, waging our blood and our spirits each time beyond what we are willing, to preserve this place and keep our homes. The beauty that so powerfully surrounds you now as you stand in my chambers serves as a weighty possession.

O how I wish peace was what others would bring to this city that I love! How I wish you carried peace beside you, instead of war!

My body has so weakened by sacrifice after sacrifice that I have chosen to depart from it! Yes, my soul has shed its shell and now walks freely!

I am without doubt that you now stand here, in the midst of my palace, in wonder by the words that I write. Assuredly, I am still among you, as so are my people! Though our bodies are lost, not so for our souls! And now, by the power invested in my very soul, I will reap victory! I will cast your soul into the depths by the thrusting of my hands! Though they now only exisit in spirit, my hands will forever be the protectors of the greatest city on this earth! Fear, and fear rightly, for I will now withdraw from you your life!

Suddenly, a gentile wind sweeps across the room, and after it passes, the body of the queen finds rest on the floor.

4 comments.

A journey into the political ideas of Distinguished Bean… (Compare/Contrast with the Congressman from Texas)

Posted on January 17th, 2009 by Distinguished Bean.
Categories: Political, Abortion, War, Law, Constitutional Law, Terrorism, education, Economics.

When i began to develop politically, morally, and economically, i took on specific views on most of the issues spanning the political spectrum of today. I began to take stances and apply my own intellect onto the issues, however, something was weird. I was raised old fashioned Republican and thought it was faultless, however, when i began my journey i began to contradict myself and confuse my past. My views didn’t fit one political party, let alone a single frame of thought. I suddenly realized that there was a party out there that, for the most part, was saying what i was thinking. However, even then, i felt very confused. Suddenly i read and studied the history and ideas of the 10 term congressman Ron Paul from Texas. I was absolutely amazed on how much i lined up with his political thoughts. I truly and honestly believe that if people could step past party boundaries, politicians like him, who actually thought ‘outside the box’ , would have a chance at positively influencing the country. I have recently read his book Revolution: A Manifesto. I felt like he did an incredible job of covering the issues pressing our nation today, so i have decided to post brief summaries that i found on the site http://www.ontheissues.org/Revolution_Manifesto.htm, that sum up his views and political thought.

Abortion is murder
A popular academic argument for abortion demands that we think of the child in the womb as a parasite.but the same argument justifies infanticide, since it applies just as well to an infant outside the womb.newborns require even more attention & care.

People ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing. They do not ask how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite. But that is what her baby becomes as soon as the child is declared to be unwanted.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 59-60 Apr 1, 2008

Roe v. Wade decision was harmful to the Constitution
The federal government should not play any role in the abortion issue, according to the Constitution. Apart from waiting forever for Supreme Court justices who rule in accordance with the Constitution, Americans do have some legislative recourse. Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over a broad categories of cases.

Wasteful government spending backed by both parties
Truth is treason in the empire of lies. There is an alternative to national bankruptcy, a bigger police state, trillion dollar wars, and a government that draws ever more parasitically on the productive energies of the American people. It’s called freedom.

School prayer is not a federal issue
[Limits on Constitutional authority] holds true for issues like prayer in schools. Such issues were never meant to be decided by federal judges. The whole point of the American Revolution was to vindicate the principle of local self government.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 61 Apr 1, 2008

Private funds for arts work better than government funds
Some Americans appear to believe that there would be no arts in America were it not for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). While the government requested $121 million for the NEA in 2006, private donations to the arts totaled $2.5 billion that year, dwarfing the NEA budget. NEA funds go not necessarily to the best artists, but to people who happen to be good at filling out government grant applications. I have my doubts that the same people populate both categories.

Free trade agreements threaten national sovereignty
I opposed both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, both of which were heavily favored by the political establishment. Many supporters of the free trade market supported these agreements. Nearly six decades ago when the International Trade Organization was up for debate, conservatives and libertarians agreed that supranational trade bureaucracies with the power to infringe upon American sovereignty were undesirable.

The “living Constitution” is the death of democracy
A living Constitution is just the thing any government would be delighted to have, for whenever people complain that their constitution has been violated, the government can trot out its judges to inform the people that they’ve simply misunderstood: the Constitution, you see, has merely evolved with the times.

Those who would give us a ‘living’ constitution are actually giving us a dead constitution, since such a thing is completely unable to protect us against encroachments of government power.

Replace Medicaid with volunteer pro-bono medical care
In the days before Medicare and Medicaid, the poor and elderly were admitted to hospitals at the same rate they are now, and received good care. Before those programs came into existence, every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate and free medical care was the norm. Hardly anyone is aware of this today, since it doesn’t fit into the typical, by the script story of government rescuing us from a predatory private sector.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 84 Apr 1, 2008

Private medical savings accounts, not government meddling
The most obvious way to break this cycle is to get the government out of the business of meddling in health care, which was far more affordable and accessible before government got involved. Short of that, and more politically feasible in the immediate run, is to allow consumers and their doctors to pull themselves out of the system through medical savings accounts.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 89 Apr 1, 2008

Conscription is unconstitutional–including National Service
Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government given the power to conscript citizens. The power to raise armies is not a power to force people into the armies.

Lesser forms of the draft, such as compulsory “national service” are based on the sam unacceptable premise. Young people are not raw material to be employed by the political class on behalf of whatever fashionable political, military, or social cause catches its fancy. In a free society, their lives are not the plaything of government.

Contract with America was a toothless cop out
The Republican leadership urged these freshmen congressmen to focus on a toothless, soporific agenda called the Contract with America that was boldly touted as a major overhaul of the federal government. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Brookings Institution in effect said that if this is what conservatives consider revolutionary, they have conceded defeat.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 3 Apr 1, 2008

11/5/07: Set fundraising record of $4 million in single day
I was a reluctant candidate, not at all convinced that a sizable enough national constituency existed for a campaign based on liberty and the Constitution rather than on special interest pandering and the distribution of loot. Was I ever wrong.

On November 5, 2007, we set a record when we raised over $4 million online in a single day. Not only is the freedom message popular, it is more intensely popular than any other political message.

Terrorism is just like any other murder: you look for motive
People were bound to start wondering eventually, why we were attacked? Not because they sought to excuse the attackers, but out of natural curiosity regarding what made these men tick. Looking for motive is not the same thing as making excuses; detectives always look for motive behind crime, but no one thinks they are looking to excuse murder.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 15 Apr 1, 2008

War in Iraq was senseless invasion of sovereign state
The war in Iraq was one of the most ill considered, poorly planned and just plain unnecessary military conflicts in American history.and I opposed it from the beginning.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 21 Apr 1, 2008

Mandate declaration of war before military aggression
In 2002, as war with Iraq loomed, I proposed that Congress officially declare war against Iraq, making it clear that I intended to oppose my own measure. The point was to underscore our constitutional responsibility to declare war before commencing major military operations, rather than leaving the decision to the President or passing resolutions that delegate to the president the decision making power over war.

And finally, due to the recent heat of the conflict in Israel/Palestine, i have found an excerpt from a speech he made concerning the conflict.

“collective punishment” against Palestinians is immoral.

“Many innocent children are among the dead. While the shooting of rockets into Israel is inexcusable, the violent actions of some people in Gaza does not justify killing Palestinians on this scale,” said the outspoken Republican.

Israel launched Operation Cast Lead on December 27 against Gaza to put an end to rocket attacks launched from the coastal enclave.

At least 888 Palestinians have been killed during the Israeli operation, while some 3,700 others are reported wounded. At least 10 Israeli soldiers have died in the now 16-day onslaught.

Hamas, the democratically-elected ruler of the impoverished strip, demands a cessation of an 18-month Israeli blockade on Gaza before it stops rocket attacks on Israel.

The US Congress endorsed a resolution Friday to support Israel in its offensive in Gaza, “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza.”

Congressman Paul, however, says the resolution “clearly takes one side in a conflict that has nothing to do with the United States or US interests.”

“At the very least, the U.S. Congress should not be loudly proclaiming its support for the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza,” Paul added.

The Israeli operation has entered its third week now, despite international calls and a UN Security Council resolution which urge an immediate end to the attacks against the densely-populated strip.

0 comments.

A letter to the Pacifist Muse.

Posted on January 15th, 2009 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, War, Terrorism, Philosophy, Islam, Judaism, Israel, Religon, Christianity, Palestine, Cultural.

As the title would suggest, this is mainly written to P. muse so as to bring comfort and understanding but also to clarify to the best of my ability what really is going on with Israel today. As soon as I read an e-mail sent out by P. muse that was nearly the same as his latest post I urged him to lay it all out here so that we as a community can see and understand what it is he’s been going through. As Paul tells in his first letter to the Corinthians “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it, and if one part is honored, all the parts are glad.” (12:26) I see that your suffering here P. muse so I urged you to place it up here so that we could all bring comfort and prayers in his time of need. So please do bring prayers on behalf of P muse and also for peace in Israel. This is certainly proving to be trying times in that region and it has had me rethinking a lot of my believes towards Israel but I know that the Palestinians hold a special place in your heart as they should. But we all need to remember that we all need each other here and when a bother is suffering we need to lift him up. You all have done the some for me and now it’s my turn to lift up a brother in Christ. So I’m sure you’ll all be interested and I’m sure that Bear will get a kick out of it but here’s my letter to P. Muse:

My brother: your exactly right! Looking at the situation as it exists today, this is completely unacceptable! What did we immediately say when Russia started blowing the crap out of little Georgia (the country Georgia not the state south of Carolina)? We started condemning them immediately! Well I did, Invot still has his arguments but they don’t matter for the purpose of this letter :P. But just as you spelled out in your latest post, it looks like the oppressed have become the oppressors! Just looking at what they have been doing over the past few years, like building walls to hold in the Palestinians and such things, just are the sort of things that we’ll find unacceptable in these days from a devolved nation. Going through and shooting down aid ships trying to help the starving and hurting people in Gaza is something that we never do! Why would we allow Israel to do it? It’s starting to be a really strange set of circumstances where we are starting to support a state that just throws all caution to the wind and start to blow things away just because their angry. Now you’ll get the argument “well if we had rockets shot off over our border wouldn’t we get angry?” Well, of course we would! We’d go kick some butt! But unlike what Israel is doing, we also have the tendency to rebuild that country we destroy and leave it in a place of peace and prosperity so that we won’t have to deal with any more attacks from that country. We’ve rebuilt Germany and Japan, and depending on Obama, we’ll also be leaving Iraq and Afghanistan in places of peace and prosperity or at least that’s what we were trying to do. But on the other hand you have Israel, who’s walling up the people they don’t like rather than actually making peace for them, and they’re treating them like dogs! Can we really that it’s all right for the Israelis to go ahead and keep fighting this war of attrition and completely starve out the Palestinians from the land that they have lived in for generations? What would that be saying of us? Just because your granpa went though the Holocaust does not mean that you have a right to go shooting someone who had nothing to do with it. Didn’t Jeremiah say of his own people:

Jeremiah 3:19-20
“I thought to myself,
‘I would love to treat you as my own children!’
I wanted nothing more than to give you this beautiful land—
the finest possession in the world.
I looked forward to your calling me ‘Father,’
and I wanted you never to turn from me.
But you have been unfaithful to me, you people of Israel!
You have been like a faithless wife who leaves her husband.
I, the Lord, have spoken.”

So what really has changed with the Jews? They’re still acting this way! They’re still doing the same evil acts that they were back in the day of Jeremiah! Didn’t Isaiah tell us:

Isaiah 5:8
What sorrow for you who buy up house after house and field after field,
until everyone is evicted and you live alone in the land.

Humm, What are the Israelis doing today? Evicting the Palestinians so that no one else lives there! Yea, their still doing the same things that they always have been doing for thousands of years. And all their doing is just invoking more and more wraith upon themselves! What they are doing is for one, wrong and two, not working! So are we really to be supporting this? NO!

I remember going to Israel awareness day back in 2005 or so, down at that maga-church, and going to listen to Denis Pager speak about Israel, and it was a good speech. There where alternating Israeli and American flags hung up on the ceiling, and he just started out by taking about how these two flags belonged together. It was just an amazing sight to see, one of the men I looked up to as a mentor in my growing up and learning how to think rationally in this world, it just felt like the place for me to be! And I still do look up to and admire Pager a lot! He has certainly helped bring me out of a dark and dismal period of my life by his theories that he came up with on happiness. Something that I have tested and proven to be true in my own life, but now I have to part company with this line of thinking. Not out of anger at him or others that hold his positions, and I still very much look up to thous that still do hold these positions. But to sanction the mass killings without some sort of cause and vision to at least build up a society that is open and truly free, is just something that I can no longer do. I can’t say that it’s alright for the Israelis to go ahead and just imprison a large group of people without some sort of means to rebuild and make a new life for themselves. They’re not trying to make these people part of a greater society that holds equality as a value, but they are enslaving a group of people in certain towns. I can’t agree with that!

Now having said all that, your call “that the rouge state of Israel be brought to justice and swiftly dissolved for being the racist” is just not possible at this time nor do I support that idea ether. We also have to remember that there is an evil side to the Palestinian cause as well and to dissolve the state of Israel would just be switching roles. At this time there is no possible way for us to dissolve the state of Israel without massive blood shed of Israelis and displacement from their homes because there is a group of people in the Palestinian camp who also wish to kill off all of the Jew as well. And you can’t deny this fact as well. They are locked in mutual hatred of each other and they will continue to fight this war, unfortunately I think, until God decides to intercede here. We have two sides of different faiths fighting out a holy war here and our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ are getting cut up in the middle. And just like you, I am very heart broken over these turn of events, as we should. We should not accept this situation as it is and there is plenty of blame to go around. But while there is a burning of hatred going on around this whole region, I beg you to please, don’t let your heart to get too hard. You were a big part of helping me to find my way and calling, please let me be that brother to you as well. I still think that this rouge state will have a part to play in the grand story that is being written. Paul tell us in Romans:

Romans 11:19-21
“Well,” you may say, “those branches were broken off to make room for me.” Yes, but remember—those branches were broken off because they didn’t believe in Christ, and you are there because you do believe. So don’t think highly of yourself, but fear what could happen. For if God did not spare the original branches, he won’t spare you either.

So while the Jews are broken and lost branches, we were also broken and lost branches. And God very much wants them to be grafted back into His tree of life as well as the rest of us. So don’t let your experiences start to also make you hard as well. That’s something that we all have to deal with and by the grace of God, He gave me such an amazing friend as you to help me along through my darkest periods in my life. Keep on loving the Lord your God with all your mind, your heart and your strength and He will bless you for it. He will bring you though your most difficult times so keep Him close and never let go. It might just be that the Palestinian Christians are just the first who are going to go through a suffering that we will all have to endure. So really the only bit of advice that I can give to them is:

Romans 13:1-3
Everyone must submit to governing authorities. For all authority comes from God, and those in positions of authority have been placed there by God. So anyone who rebels against authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and they will be punished. For the authorities do not strike fear in people who are doing right, but in those who are doing wrong. Would you like to live without fear of the authorities? Do what is right, and they will honor you.

I know that’s easy for me to say when I’m not the one getting my home taken away and getting shot at, but if we support each other, I believe that we will also keep true to our principals when it’s our time of persecution. I’ll tell you to remember the words that God told me Himself when I started moving into my recent dark period: “Don’t worry my son, I AM still in control.” I know that it just doesn’t look possible right now but what Isaiah said will come to pass:

Isaiah 2:4
The Lord will mediate between nations
and will settle international disputes.
They will hammer their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will no longer fight against nation,
nor train for war anymore.

That day is still coming and we are still looking and working towards that day, and when it comes there will be much rejoicing for we will be vindicated by our faith in Jesus.

I love you
Your Brother and Fellow bondsmen in Christ
Bryan Federowicz

2 comments.

Intifada in the Gaza Ghetto

Posted on January 14th, 2009 by Pacifist Muse.
Categories: Ethics, War, Terrorism, Israel, Palestine.

Gentlemen, here’s my latest overly serious post on Palestine. One day I will start writing about something else. Someday.

On January 18th 1943 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, surrounded by walls, and living under crippling restrictions imposed by Nazi forces engaged themselves in an uprising that would last until May 16th in the same year. The poorly armed and ill-supplied Jewish forces staged heavy resistance against the modern war machines of the SS. While the Nazi SS claims to have suffered only 16 casualties; history has surmised that in reality SS casualties were much higher.

In the end the courageous Jewish resistance was deflated as the Nazi troops resorted to indiscriminate burning of houses. Of the nearly 13,000 Jews that were killed in just three months of fighting at least 6,000 died in the house fires or from smoke inhalation. Thus, over 40% percent of those killed in the Ghetto uprising were not killed because they were engaged in resistance but rather by nature of the fact that they happened to be in or around the houses that the Nazis were indiscriminately fire bombing in order to root out the “sub-human” Jewish resistance forces. Considering that the Nazis’ claim that they suffered just 16 casualties is suspected to be a heavily doctored number, it seems likely that, as it was published by the Polish Underground State, in fact their were at least 200 German casualties. Thus, the brutal Nazi Forces killed roughly 65 times more Jews then they suffered casualties. About half the Jews that were killed were engaged in active resistance, while the others were simply living in the Ghetto and found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Nazi justification for the ghettos in the first place and then the ensuing brutality against the already impoverished ghetto inhabitants was the idea of Jews as a dangerous and polluting people who were locked up in ghettos for the good of Germans and indeed the good of the world. Jewish resistance was twisted and contorted and reconstructed by the Nazis as sub-human terrorism while the Nazi brutality was constructed in the macabre logic of Nazism as defensive in spite of the heavy disproportionately in those killed and the reality that the Jews who rose up in rebellion were doing so in a ghetto!

When people are rounded up in ghettos and denied basic life-sustaining goods they will in time resist. And resist they should.

Aside from enormous power imbalance introduced by the Nazi’s heavily superior military weaponry the Warsaw Ghetto suppression was so successful related to the number of Jewish collaborators the Nazi’s had coerced into feeding them information about the Jewish resistance movement. As the massacres took place the Allied forces did little to nothing to stop the Nazis. Szmul Zygielbojm, who was the leader of the Jewish socialist party called the Bund wrote in suicide letter that:

“The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out.

The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions, tortured children, women and men they have become partners to the responsibility …”
(Quote By Joseph Massad, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10110.shtml)

In the last 11 days of fighting in the Gaza Ghetto Uprising nearly 700 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 3,000 have been wounded (many of which are expected to succumb to their wounds because of an acute lack of medical supplies and space in Gazan hospitals). Medical sources in Gaza are saying that the casualties are at least 50% civilians. As high as 30% of the casualties may be children under 10 years old. Today, a UN school was shelled twice by Israeli tanks causing over 40 deaths and dozens more wounded. In last few days whole families have been killed in their houses. In once case Israel bombed a mosque it said was a “stronghold” for Hamas. As it turned out five young girls, sisters, were in the mosque after having fled their home. The only video evidence Israel has released which they did as “proof” of their targeting Palestinian resistance fighters turned out to be a 14 year old boy and other men loading oxygen tanks onto a pickup.

Palestinian resistance has been twisted and contorted and reconstructed by the Israelis as sub-human terrorism while the Israeli brutality has been constructed in the macabre logic of Zionism as defensive in spite of the heavy disproportionality of those killed and the reality that the Palestinians who have risen up in resistance are doing so in a ghetto!

Since the beginning of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza ghetto, 4 Israeli civilians have been killed by rocket fire and at least 6 soldiers have been killed. Israel has been using phosphorous bombs in crowded civilian areas (bombs that explode in the air and shower thousands of bits of burning phosphorous that burns through flesh and bone in seconds and is considered a war crime if used in civilian areas). Israel has also been using radioactive Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME) bombs. “DIME bombs produce an unusually powerful blast within a relatively small area, spraying a superheated “micro-shrapnel” of powdered Heavy Metal Tungsten Alloy (HMTA). Scientific studies have found that HMTA is chemically toxic, damages the immune system, rapidly causes cancer, and attacks DNA
(genotoxic).<4-11>” (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103×414058)
The weapon was developed by the US and sold to Israel. What is taking place in the Gaza ghetto is a massacre that equals and even so far exceeds the Nazis massacre of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

If Israel were to keep up her pace for as long as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising lasted–three months–roughly 6,300 Palestinians will be killed and over 27,000 wounded (many if not most of which will succumb to their wounds as a result of the fact that conditions in Gazan hospitals, if they are not bombed, look only to get more dire). This reality puts potential Palestinian casualties at well over the 13,000 that were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, if even a third of the potential Palestinian wounded succumb to their wounds, which seems tragically likely. If Israeli casualties remain at the same rate they have been at there will be about 90 dead at the end of the three months. Thus if things continue we are looking at over 15,000 Palestinian deaths and a Israeli disproportionality rate of 170-1, a rate that makes the Nazis 65-1 in the Warsaw ghetto look mild. Even now the Israeli massacre in Gaza is running at nearly 70-1, already proportionally worse than the Nazis’ suppression of the Jewish uprising in 1943.

It may seem sick to engage in such theoretical projections (and God knows I pray each day that things will not carry on this long or with the ferocity that we have seen so far) but I believe it is important to put this mass killing in historical perspective.

The sick thing about what is happening now is Gaza, is that like in the case of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Israelis have enlisted their own judenrat collaborationist government–the PCA (Palestinian Collaborationist Authority)–in their program to root out Hamas. The PCA in the West Bank has actually been on the verge of violently breaking up Palestinian demonstrations in solidarity with the Gazans. I fully expect their to be a Fatah invasion of Gaza following the Israeli massacre. Indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if Mahmoud Abbas had foreknowledge of the invasion of Gaza and may already have plans for taking Gaza over after the mass killing.

Yet as Joseph Massad wrote recently in an Electronic Intifada article:

“The crushing of the Gaza Ghetto Uprising and the slaughter of its defenseless population will be relatively an easy task for the giant Israeli military machine and Israel’s sadistic political leadership. It is dealing with the aftermath of a strengthened Palestinian determination to continue to resist Israel that will prove much more difficult for Israel and its Arab allies to deal with. While the thousands of dead and injured Palestinians are the main victims of this latest Israeli terrorist war, the major political loser in all this will be Abbas and his clique of collaborators. The test for Palestinian resistance now is to continue to refuse to grant Israel the right to conquer populations, to steal their land, to destroy their livelihoods, to imprison them in ghettos, and to starve them without being resisted.

The only constant in Palestinian lives for the last century of Zionist atrocities has been resistance to the Zionist project of erasing them from the face of the earth. While Zionism sought and recruited Arab and Palestinian collaborators since its inception in the hope of crushing Palestinian resistance, neither Israel nor any of its collaborators has been able to stop it. The lesson that Zionism has refused to learn, and still refuses to learn, is that the Palestinian yearning for freedom from the Zionist yoke cannot be extinguished no matter how barbaric Israel’s crimes become. The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.”

(Joseph Massad, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10110.shtml)

Please do what you can, in demonstration, in boycotts, in resistance in Palestine, and in prayer on behalf of the people of Gaza.

To see Massad’s article go here:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10110.shtml

Here are some links:
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/
http://www.bdsmovement.net/
http://www.vtjp.org/
http://electronicintifada.net/

Along with the vast majority of the world’s people and nearly none of the world’s governments: I look forward to and pray that the state of Israel is swiftly dissolved out of existence. I hope and pray that not one drop of Jewish-Israeli blood is spilled in the process and equally that not one Israeli-Jew be displaced from their homes but it is time that the rouge state of Israel be brought to justice and swiftly dissolved for being the racist, apartheid state that it is.

In mourning,

13 comments.

Things are blowing up in Israel, Again!

Posted on December 30th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Ethics, War, Terrorism, Islam, Judaism, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Religon, Palestine.

It’s actually quite strange that the American media had to take several days to analyze the situation but they eventually did. P. muse has been on top of the bombings Israel just committed and sent this article around form electronicintifada.net:

“I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing.” Those were the words, spoken on Al Jazeera today by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area adjacent to Gaza, as images of Israel’s latest massacres were broadcast around the world.

Hey Israel! When Al Jazeera is praising you, that’s not a good thing!

A short time earlier, US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters dropped over 100 bombs on dozens of locations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip killing at least 195 persons and injuring hundreds more. Many of these locations were police stations located, like police stations the world over, in the middle of civilian areas. The US government was one of the first to offer its support for Israel’s attacks, and others will follow.

Reports said that many of the dead were Palestinian police officers. Among those Israel labels “terrorists” were more than a dozen traffic police officers undergoing training. An as yet unknown number of civilians were killed and injured; Al Jazeera showed images of several dead children, and the Israeli attacks came at the time thousands of Palestinian children were in the streets on their way home from school.

Shmerling’s joy has been echoed by Israelis and their supporters around the world; their violence is righteous violence. It is “self-defense” against “terrorists” and therefore justified. Israeli bombing — like American and NATO bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan — is bombing for freedom, peace and democracy.

The rationalization for Israel’s massacres, already being faithfully transmitted by the English-language media, is that Israel is acting in “retaliation” for Palestinian rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since the six-month truce expired on 19 December (until today, no Israeli had been killed or injured by these recent rocket attacks).

But today’s horrific attacks mark only a change in Israel’s method of killing Palestinians recently. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food and necessary medicine by the two year-old Israeli blockade calculated and intended to cause suffering and deprivation to 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority refugees and children, caged into the Gaza Strip. In Gaza, Palestinians died silently, for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.

What the media never question is Israel’s idea of a truce. It is very simple. Under an Israeli-style truce, Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonize their land. Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren.

That article continues on painting an even grimmer picture of Israel’s bombing, and assuming that it’s true, then Israel is guilty of some serous war crimes here. Being a former conservative, I would have most certainly rationalized Israel’s attack as a necessary loss to get as the enemies that they face. And there is still some truth to that statement but with how much that Israel keeps everyone in the dark about what they’re trying to do, you really can’t know all of the truth of the situation. But it does seem that Israel tried to explain themselves here but were cut off. This from commentarymagazine.com:

Yesterday, the IDF did something innovative: it opened a channel on YouTube and posted videos to it that help explain why Israel is fighting Hamas. The site hosted about a dozen videos showing things like Israeli humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza and airstrikes that prevented terrorists from firing rockets at Israeli civilians.

This was apparently too much for YouTube, which moments ago removed several videos from the IDF’s channel, including the most-watched video, which showed a group of Hamas goons being blown up in an air strike as they loaded Katyusha missiles onto a truck. The point of such footage, as if it needed to be said, is not to revel in violence — it is to show the legitimacy of Israeli self-defense.

The rank double-standard that YouTube has applied to Israel is disturbing. YouTube hosts all manner of similar footage — much of it far more gory than the grainy infrared images posted by the IDF — of U.S. air strikes. Why is YouTube capitulating to those who do not wish for Israel to be able to tell its side of the story?

So this does get even more complicated just due to the fact that there are interests in hiding the truth in our media. There are many interest groups in portraying Israel in the worst light possible or in the best light possible. So it’s hard to really know what is accurate here but ironically enough here the New Republic actually does have the best analysis:

It was Israel at its best. In response to random attacks aimed at its civilians, Israel launched precise attacks aimed at terrorists. In place of political schism, Israel suspended election campaigning, and initiated coooperation between government and opposition. Instead of illusions about an imminent peace agreement with Bashar Assad or about half a negotiated peace agreement with half of the Palestinian leadership, we exhibited sobriety and a willingness to defend ourselves. And instead of military confusion and ineptitude, as we displayed in Lebanon two years ago, we showed the most impressive display of our intelligence, air power, and psychological warfare in decades.

But what’s next? Here are some of the possible consequences to watch for in the coming days and weeks.

So for a paper that been praising Obama like crazy, they just move in on supporting Israel. I thought Obama was suppose to keep them under control?

Israel’s Options: There are three possible scenarios for how this operation will evolve. The first is that the government will opt for a limited attack whose goal isn’t the overthrow of the Hamas regime but merely the attainment of better terms in the next round of ceasefire–such as supervision over tunnels linking Gaza with Egypt and through which Hamas has smuggled in missiles. The argument for a limited operation is that Mahmud Abbas’s men aren’t ready to secure the Strip from Hamas–and even if they were, they would bear the mark of collaborators if they took control of Gaza courtesy of Israel.

The second scenario is the overthrow of Hamas and turning the Strip over to a foreign power–ideally Egypt, as the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, has suggested. It’s doubtful, though, that Egypt will agree to relieve Israel of its Gaza burden. And NATO is on record as refusing to commit peacekeeping troops in the Palestinian territories.

The third option is to begin with the first option of a limited operation but, as fighting intensifies, find ourselves reluctantly implementing the second option of all-out war against Hamas. That may well be the least desirable option of all, leaving Israel vulnerable to events beyond its control. But given previous Israeli experience, that could be the most likely scenario.

The Iranian Bomb: The countdown to a nuclear Iran is now being measured in months rather than years. Few here in Israel believe that President Obama’s diplomatic efforts will succeed; and if those efforts fail, there won’t be enough time to galvanize the international community to adopt effective sanctions. The danger of the current conflict in Gaza, then, is that Israel will be too preoccupied with fighting Hamas and perhaps Hezbollah to effectively respond to the Iranian threat.

The Gaza conflict, though, could also have the opposite effect, especially if the IDF loses focus and finds itself immersed yet again in a no-win battle. Israeli policymakers may begin asking themselves what the point is of fighting Iran’s proxies every few years rather than confronting Iran itself, especially given the urgency of stopping a nuclear Iran.

The Fate of a Two-State Solution: The future of the West Bank may well be resolved in Gaza. If the international community forces the IDF to end the operation before the missile threat against southern Israel is resolved, Israelis will inevitably conclude that, even when we withdraw to the 1967 borders, as we did on the Gaza front in 2005, the international community will not allow us to protect ourselves. And the likelihood then of convincing a majority of Israelis to withdraw from the West Bank–within easy rocket distance from our major population centers–will be close to non-existent. Ultimately, then, the creation of an independent Palestine depends on neutralizing Hamas.

The Moderate Arab Response: About six months ago, during a meeting with a senior Palestinian official, I was stunned when he asked me matter of factly, “So when are you Israelis going to invade Gaza already?” “You mean you want us to?” I asked. “If you want a peace agreement,” he replied, “you will have no choice.” I never expected that position to be made public. But some Arab leaders–including Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and even the feckless Abbas–have both come as close as any Arab leader can dare go in expressing support for the Israeli attack by condemning Hamas for inviting it.

In the 1990s, there was hope that a “new Middle East” would emerge through peace talks. For Israel, that turned out to be a near-fatal illusion. Now, though, a new Middle East may actually be emerging–not through peace but conflict. And in this new Middle East, moderate Arabs are siding with Israel against Iran and its proxies. That is the reason why several Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, condemned Hezbollah rather than Israel in the initial phase of the Second Lebanon War. And it’s the reason why most of the Arab world failed to condemn Israel’s air strike last year against the Syrian nuclear reactor–intended, according to one intelligence report, as an eventual nuclear bomb factory for Iran.

In the interest of not making this post way too long I’ll cut to the end of the article:

As I am writing this article, a ground operation appears imminent. That may be necessary to prevent Hamas from firing rockets at southern Israel, but it will also result in growing casualties in Gaza. And that will increase international pressure against Israel and undermine the Israeli domestic consensus on which the success of the operation depends. The Israeli Zionist left, which so far supports the government, has resricted its backing to a limited operation. We still don’t know what the government wants to achieve, and what the army believes is achievable. What constitutes victory? Will we know how to translate military success into political gain? Will the government be strong enough to resist world pressure, even in the event of a disastrous accident that results in Palestinian civilian casualties? Most of all, what’s required is patience, and the realization among Israelis and our friends abroad that this battle is part of the larger war against jihadism that shifts from one part of the world to the other, and whose outcome will define our generation.

But I find it really funny that this one comes out supporting Israel. While I do see Iran a major threat to us and the rest of the world, especially as they complete a nuclear bomb and can be a helpful as an ally in that region. However on the other hand, Israel is becoming exactly like the people that they hate! They’re starting to shoot down any aid that comes to Gaza and are starving them out. Is this indiscriminate killing really helping their cause? P. muse is calling for us to contact our congressmen to protest these chain of events. I’ll give you the link here, but I don’t have any faith that it will change anything. The real solution is to have Israel to cease all operations and allow us to take over the situation along with some sort of solution to Iran to get at the heart of the problem. But theirs no will left in the American people. So with Israels excessive force and the Palestinians desire to destroy Israel, were looking at a middle east that is just going to continue to get more and more bloody. I pray that Obama will have the wisdom to do what is right here.

6 comments.

The Sinking ship called the United States of America

Posted on November 16th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Environment, Ethics, Party System, War, Law, Philosophy, Creative Writing, Israel, Christianity, Economics.

I’m actually taking great pleasure in writing this! I can’t deny this any longer. Our country is dieing! Now if you have voted for Obama because you believe that he will have an epic presidency and he will bring us out of the dark ages that Bush has put us through, then I think that you should stop reading this post now. It’s your time now and you should live it up to the fullest! Celebrate this and remember this to your dieing day! Really! Don’t let this bigoted fool spoil all of your fun! God bless all of you and just keep on going because nothing I have to say here that is going to be helpful for you. It’s just going to make you upset and I don’t want that. However if you voted for Obama because you thought he was the best man for the job or if you voted for anyone else or didn’t vote then this post is for you. Believe it or not I am not saying this because Obama was elected. In fact, I really think that politics should just start becoming a sporting event for everyone! I’ll root for my team, the republicans! My great friend can root for the democrats (who will not be named in this post, but sorry, girl, what just happened between us is just too essential to the point of this post for me to pass up!) D. Bean can root libertarian, P Muse can root Nater while Bieren can root for the no vote. We can just have some fun at it all! But I say that when the voting is done we get back to the business of the real kingdom because this country started dieing a long time ago and we’re still in that process. Obama’s election really just acted as a conformation of the fact that this country is sinking. Or we could say that his election was a diagnosis of a disease that our country has and it’s a terminal one. Now if you have voted for Obama then you did exactly what God wanted you to but we have a caner growing in our country and eventually it will kill our country. We could try a surgery on it; a revolution per se. But that’s not going to work one bit! this caner is too big and will kill the patient if attempted. That would be a lot of bloodshed in a hopeless cause so don’t attempt it! No! There is no reasonable why to remove this caner at all! This country is doomed to death. And it’s really quite simple why it will die! Our country will die because of just two sins: greed and coveting. Now I must first warn you before you keep reading this: This post is intended to challenge you! It’s not meant to gain agreement with me in any way at all but rather it’s meant to confuse. It’s really meant to screw your thinking up! So if you keep on reading this then you’ll be entering the world of a ravening lunatic! However this lunatic is a bondsmen to Jesus and that Guy has more power than you can imagine to just mess with your mind! So read on if you dare and if you do then I pray that He will start screwing with your mind and conforming it to what He wants. If you stop here then I pray that He will bless you and give you great Joy. If you have any challenges of me if you really do dare to read this, then please bring it on. I could really use much more challenges! If you have any hate filled comments then please send them. I have a funny way of always starting to pray for people who hate me so you’re really asking to trouble yourself with God. And lastly if you have any praise for me, well I’ll accept them but they’re just going to end up in Gods hands so you might as well just throw them up to Him now. That’ll just be quicker. But then again all of it will end up with Him anyway!

A far fetched grasp to what God sees
That title to this section is just my way of saying that this is what I think God was thinking when he allowed our nation to be born. Not that I am saying that I know what God is thinking by any sense of the word. If I knew what God is thinking then I would be God. But no, I’m not. I’m just another fool trying to make sense of this world. But as we have had a look through the bible we see a nation, Israel, that is one that always had God directly involved in all of the inner working of it’s government. God brought them out of Egypt, showed them their path to follow, destroyed their enemies for them, showed them how they should march in battle, how they should conduct their daily lives and when they started to complain that they didn’t have a king like the rest of the nations, he also selected a king for them. If you trust the bible on all that, then you can’t deny that He was running the whole show there. He even told them ahead of time how they could fail and get Him to kick them out of the land He promised for them.

Deuteronomy 30:15-18
“Now listen! Today I am giving you a choice between life and death, between prosperity and disaster. For I command you this day to love the Lord your God and to keep his commands, decrees, and regulations by walking in his ways. If you do this, you will live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you and the land you are about to enter and occupy.

“But if your heart turns away and you refuse to listen, and if you are drawn away to serve and worship other gods, then I warn you now that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live a long, good life in the land you are crossing the Jordan to occupy.

So in Israel of that time, anyone could look up in their book here and see why God is punishing them and why their doing badly. You’re not doing what God wants so you’re going to get disaster! You see it all throughout the old testament where Israel goes up and down. As soon as they start to forget God then they start doing badly and when they turn back then God blesses them and then they go back to forgetting Him again. That cycle kept on going on and on until they really upset God and he had Babylon come in and take them all away for 70 years. Just read through Jeremiah and you’ll get a sense of how upset God can really get! But as God had promised, He brought them all back again and it was back to the same as usual. However now this time God decided to really shake things up. He sent Jesus to turn everything up on it’s head. Jesus paid the price for the law so that now we’re not following the letter of the law but rather the spirit of the law. Now we’re to do what the law was always meant to do but because of sin everyone was unable to do it. The price of the law was paid in full and while it still applies, it serves as only as a mirror to show us our sins so that we may run to Christ and receive His free gift to pay the price for the law. That’s a concept coming directly from Paul where he says:

Romans 7:4
So, my dear brothers and sisters, this is the point: You died to the power of the law when you died with Christ. And now you are united with the one who was raised from the dead. As a result, we can produce a harvest of good deeds for God.

And here in verse 7:

Well then, am I suggesting that the law of God is sinful? Of course not! In fact, it was the law that showed me my sin. I would never have known that coveting is wrong if the law had not said, “You must not covet.”

So now something takes the place of the law:

John 14:15-17
“If you love me, obey my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you. He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth. The world cannot receive him, because it isn’t looking for him and doesn’t recognize him. But you know him, because he lives with you now and later will be in you.

The Holy spirit takes the place of the law and acts as our guide. So that means that we no longer need direct laws and miracles from God in order for us to follow His will. That’s not to say that He doesn’t do miracles anymore, there have been many that people have experienced and I have seen these miracles for myself as well. However God always seems to make them much more settle lately and their not obvious for the whole world to see like He did for the Jews in early Israel. So God has never directly controlled our country. He in fact had allowed us to set up our government without any direct guidance from Him but rather our forefathers set this country up based upon the principles that we find in the bible. I think that God set up a second Israel like nation as the United States only this time He held back and instead of direct involvement in every inner working of our government, He instead granted the wisdom to us on how we should run this country according to His will and gave us the right people to run establish this nation. However just like the first test He had with Israel, we still had sin in our country from the very beginning that will, just as early Israel did, eventually lead to our death as a nation. The first one we have had entrench before we even became a nation: Greed.

The original sin of the United States
Greed is our original sin as a country! It’s the most obvious sin we have going around. We saw that all to clearly with our finical collapse we are going through. It’s all due to the fact that people we getting greedy and taking loans that was beyond their means. It’s a hard thing to control just due to the fact that we do have a finical system that is set up to encourage greed. Now a little bit if greed is actually not bad at all! It’s what keeps us driving to bigger and better things in this country. We need a little bit to keep our economy going because people want to make their money so that they can live out their life and reach for their dreams. The problem is when we get too excessive with that dream. A little greed is good but we have to realize that we use it only so that we can survive, enjoy life and to give to others! Where it gets us into trouble is where it starts to rule our lives so that the obtaining of wealth becomes most important aspect to our lives. That’s why we allowed our first horrid injustice form: slavery. We allowed the south to buy people as though they could be bought like a plow and use them to make money for our selfs. That’s a dark sin on our country that we have paid a horrible price for it through war. Our civil war left a massive scar on our nation. However, going overboard on greed is just something that cuts at out nation and if thous cuts don’t kill us on impact then we find a way to move forward in this country and repair the damage that was done. We have seen this all the time in out nation! We get a little bit overboard in our markets and then we get punished with recessions and then we go back up again. It’s quite a cyclical thing in our country and it’s happened many times before. So just like how people get an occasional bum and cut all the time and they heal back up, so too our country goes through these bums and cuts and also heals back up again. However just like how people can get an infection or a disease through a wound that is exposed, so too we have let a caner into our country through our exposed wound of greed. That’s a caner that is less obvious to see and feeds off of our nation; growing to eventually take the life of our nation. That caner is coveting.

The killer germ
Doesn’t that seem like the odd commandment out! Looking through all of the other commandments, their all ones that you should do something or not do something. You know, Don’t murder, or worship idols, or you should honor your parents and the sabbath. But then he throws in “You must not covet your neighbor’s house. You must not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female servant, ox or donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.” (Exodus 20:17) Isn’t that one a little strange? This is the only one that tells us not to want something, or one that tells us not to think something. So of all of the commandments this the one weird zinger at the end! Why would God do that? Well this is the interesting don’t think something commandment. What does it really mean? You’re not to want something that someone else has. It doesn’t say that you can’t want things. There are plunty of times where it’s good to want things. It’s alright to want a nice house but it’s bad to want your neighbor’s house. It’s alright for a man to want a wife but it’s bad for a man to want his neighbor’s wife. So why should you want anything that your neighbor has? Could it be because you think you’re more deserving of that than your neighbor? That’s the real problem! thinking that because your neighbor did something wrong means that you should get what your neighbor has! Does that sound familiar? That’s all that Obama talks about! Just because the poor have been crushed by the rich means that the poor should be given what the rich has. Now again I was just getting into how bad greed is. Letting that greed go wild can create this situation but it doesn’t make it right. Why can’t we just trust God to set things right? Why do we have to start getting envious of what these rich people have. They have far more problems to deal with than the rest of us who don’t have that much money.

Isaiah 3:14-15
The Lord comes forward to pronounce judgment
on the elders and rulers of his people:
“You have ruined Israel, my vineyard.
Your houses are filled with things stolen from the poor.
How dare you crush my people,
grinding the faces of the poor into the dust?”
demands the Lord, the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.

Why couldn’t we just trust in God like our coins say? But instead we have chosen to make coveting a governmental issue! Did you ever wonder why we have never prevailed in the war on poverty. We’ve been doing it for around 40 years and it’s never gotten better. In fact I would say that it’s gotten much more worse! When you eliminate the principal that if a man doesn’t work that he doesn’t eat then what happens? He just doesn’t work! So when everyone wants to just let others do the working for them then how’s going to do the work? The only people who work are like me who know there is a God in heaven that I am really serving. I don’t work hard at my job just so that I can live, I could just take it easy just like the rest of the people at my work and just do enough to get by the day. But I work harder than them because I want to give that up as an offering to my God! And I really asking for forgiveness right now because lately I’ve been loosing sight of that with all the things going on in my life. However when the weight of people that just want to be lazy gets greater than the weight of thous that are pulling them, then how is the cart of our economy going to get pulled? You can’t do it! So just by the sheer laws of economics that God has put in place, our country is just going to die. So when everyone thinks they’re owed a free ride then the economy will collapse, hence the commandment do not covet just so that they can just keep on going about their business and not worry about who has more or who has less. instead Jesus told us to be concerned with the least of these. I’ll tell you what, voting for someone else to be concerned with the least of these is not being concerned with the poor! Sitting down and taking to such people is and helping them get out of their situation is helping the poor! You’re just pushing it one someone else rather than dealing with the problem that you see. But we have all been raised in a now oriented culture and we just want to see the problem to go away right now! But these things don’t go away immediately, It takes a lot of time and effort. Just giving a hand out just makes the problem worse! Not only do you need to stop the problem but you need to fix what created it in the first place. So I can give you a problem of mine to illustrate this better. I have this Truck that I absolutely love! That thing can haul things really well. At the time that I have bought I, it seemed really reasonable to me! It was only 9 Grand and It had a V8! I love big engines! So it seemed that it was really well with in my means. However The gas prices went up and then I’ve had both axles brake on me and now just the rear axle just locked up on me. So now it’s become a whole lot more expensive for me! So is the solution to just keep on borrowing money from people so that I can say afloat? (and I am very grateful that I have amazing people in my life that have helped me out here). No! The real solution is for me to get rid of that truck so that I can live a little bit better in my means. So if I just keep on asking for money from the people around me pretty soon I am going to run them dry and also make them angry with me. However our whole country is not doing that! we just continue to borrow from others for something that we really don’t need. That’s all this welfare and social security. All of these thing made to make us feel better for not really caring for the poor our selfs like we should have. All of this to conceal the greed that we all have (and this is me much more than most).

The land of the slaves and the home of the timid
We are slaves to this country! Now in relative terms we’re quite free in this nation. Now, in comparison to North Kora we’re really free! But we’re still not actually free. To Illustrate my point further I just have to go to Joesph. Just a little refresher, he was the one that sold into slavery to Egypt and interpreted Pharaoh’s dream to him. Pharaoh then put him in charge of everything in Egypt and so when the famine came everyone came to Egypt because Joesph had plunty of food stored up. First he took all their cattle for the grain he gave them but the famine was still relentless. So all of the people sold their land and themselves as slaves to Pharaoh. So what was the consequence of that action?

Then when you harvest it, one-fifth of your crop will belong to Pharaoh. You may keep the remaining four-fifths as seed for your fields and as food for you, your households, and your little ones.”

Or that’s 20% of everything that they make goes to Pharaoh. So we get about 17% in income tax but you also have to add in state and sales taxes and not to mention that any tax on companies gets installed into the price of what they sell. We’re well beyond that 20%! Not to mention that now the government is going to be buying up the bad houses and while I did support that idea at the time, that’s just going to make us even more enslaved to this government. I still thought that McCain would win when I had supported the idea so I thought that it would eventually get sold back to the market, but with Obama I just think that it’s going to get a whole lot bigger! But we do have a freedom in the sense that we still can control our own lives to a certain extent. We can still decide for our selfs what line of work we want or who we want to marry and such things like that. But when all of our money goes to this system, does that really make us free? We can’t really do everything that we really want with all of our money because we have a demand on us from this government to give a good bit of it to what government wants to do! Why should we be saves to this government! It’s all because we have decided to make our selfs slaves to this government. By voting in policies that forcefully take from the rich and give to the poor, we have decided to enslave ourself to this government. And that’s just going to become more and more true as more and more welfare policies go up. Now I have been one of the biggest patriots this country has ever known! I very much grew up that why and I guess one of my biggest sins early in life has been one were I would put my trust in this nation rather than in God. I didn’t trust myself at all and at the time I though God hated me, so the only thing I had was this country! So I got very interested in politics, listened intently to talk radio all so that I could understand it all extremely well. But right now God is dealing a really harsh reality to me that I have been afraid of all my life. The reality is that any system ever conserved by man is doomed to failure just by the very fact that it has been made by sinful men. It doesn’t matter what system it is, it’s doomed to failure just by the fact that we are sinful, we’re human! Now in the past we have seen a perfectly controlled society that could not fail in early Israel. That system was one in which God Himself pronounced the judgments and rules to His people through His judges and He went ahead and won the battles for them. But what happed to that system? The people wanted a king to be like all of the rest of the nations.

1 Samuel 8:7
“Do everything they say to you,” the Lord replied, “for it is me they are rejecting, not you. They don’t want me to be their king any longer.

Doesn’t this sound a bit familiar? What is it that Obama is all about? Being liked by other nations! We just all need to get along. Well just getting along is not why we are here but to do God’s will is why we are here! So we are rejecting the same God that has blessed us so much just the same as early Israel. We didn’t trust God we he wanted us to help each other out and be a blessing to the rest of the nations just the same as early Israel did. God used two different methods to prove His point, that without Him we are meaningless. In early Israel he used the method of direct involvement in every aspect of the country and in our country he used the method of just giveing the principals, wisdom and His Holy Spirit to guide us. The results was and will be failure just because we are sinful humans and we always fail. So there’s really no hope here! The ship is sinking here and anything we do with this government will just be putting a little sock in the massive hole. There’s no hope to stopping this patent from dieing! If you try to remove the caner by revolution then you’ll just end up killing the patent. That’s a horrible bloody thing to be thinking about and just a lot of people would die for no reason. So you can count me out on any sort of idea like that. I just won’t have any part of that. So without some sort of miracle, then this patent is going to die sometime soon. I can’t say when, I’m not a prophet by any sense of the word and God has never talked to me directly but rather by implanting ideas in my head and I just struggle my hardest to make sense of it all. So what can we really do when someone is dieing from a caner? Pray for a miracle and be there as much as we can. But what can we do when a country is dieing from a caner? Become the miracle!

Finding a miracle in a broken country
That great friend of mine reminded me of a line from Shane Claiborne a few weeks back that said- “We need to find some way to teach people to live more simply…so that others may simply live.” I have to admit that it really did seem like a really simplistic line to me at first! Almost like the liberal version of the conservitive line “eat your food because there are kids starving in China.” Oh! So does that mean that if I just eat my food then some kid in China will have his stomach filled? I had a similar reaction to this line thinking, “Oh does that mean that money will just get shipped of to Africa if I don’t make that much.” No that doesn’t translate at all! If I just don’t make the money then someone will just do it. You just can’t force wealth to be spread you have to get others to make it for it to be spread. But as I had mentioned earlier the rear axle in my truck had just locked up on me a few weeks back. After I had gotten it back to the shop and heard how much it was going to cost me I just couldn’t help but think, “man I just need to live a little simply so that I can just live!” Then it just hit me, that’s exactly what the whole country needs right now! To get rid of the excess and just live simply for others! Which is exactly what my friend was getting at in the first place! Now I just have to admit that Shane was right, God just has a funny way of just slapping what you dismiss right back in your face (and that’s why I still say that He has a really sick sense of humor or maybe He just does that to me because I like it). But we just can’t go up to congress and demand that they just stop doing things, they don’t care! They’re just going to keep voting for what gets them elected and getting their bribes. And both parties do that! We can’t get a governmental fix here because of all this greed and coveting! So what’s the miracle?

John 17:13-19
“Now I am coming to you. I told them many things while I was with them in this world so they would be filled with my joy. I have given them your word. And the world hates them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, but to keep them safe from the evil one. They do not belong to this world any more than I do. Make them holy by your truth; teach them your word, which is truth. Just as you sent me into the world, I am sending them into the world. And I give myself as a holy sacrifice for them so they can be made holy by your truth.

Retuning to what Jesus told us! We were not called to be engulfed by this world but to be in the middle of it and not represent any part of it. The sneaky betrayal of this country is that it started off representing that but as the devil has gotten a hold of over this country then he twisted it to something completely different. From being in this world but not of it to taking thous who trust in it to slavery to the devil. This is something that I am just now realizing because I was so caught up in it! But now I must call that we turn this country off even though it has done so many great things in the world. However this county is not the same as the heavenly kingdom that we are apart of! This one will burn! But yet by the fires that will burn this country, there will be a purification of thous that are not part of this world. Like a crucible the burns off the trash and reveals the pure gold so to will this world be burned by fire. The hope is not that we leave this world but that God will come and burn off all of the evil that has infected this world and bring us to His special home. So it becomes, especial now, massively important that we become part of the gold that will remain when the fires start! For if the death of a smaller nation like early Israel lead to God giving us the gift of Jesus and His Holy Spirit then what would the death of this nation mean? It would mean the beginning of the fires that burns off the trash and the return of Jesus. And that’s all that our hope is warped up in! But how do we make our selfs pure when we have a nation that makes us slaves to the devil by giving us what we desire most. We start a revolution! One not of bloodshed or even one that has any violence at all to it. One that’s just really Irresistible!

The Irresistible Revelation
Now that’s not an original line! That’s a title to a book that I have reviewed here on this blog. That was written by Shane Claiborne and he has a funny little disclaimer at the beginning of it. Something similar to the disclaimer that I made a the beginning of this post. That’s a disclaimer that you should pay attention to because it does mess with your mind! You just can’t get it out of your head until God just makes you pay attention! Because it is just so irresistible to just absolutely not care for the things of this world and just care about the smaller things of life. And that’s what we need to do! Start giveing into God and start releasing our selfs from the slavery of this country and enslaving our selfs to Jesus and we can do that right now in a piratical way! All we have to do is just stop depending on government as much as possible and start depending on each other as much as possible! Not that we don’t pay our taxes or anything like that but just that we should just make it harder for them to tax us. May I be so bold as to say that we should just give unto Obama what’s Obama’s and give unto God what’s God’s. And when you count for the fact that God wants every part of us then you just have to say that Obama really doesn’t get all that much (that’s just to give a little twist on what Shane had said). However as Paul had told us:

Romans 13:1-3
Everyone must submit to governing authorities. For all authority comes from God, and those in positions of authority have been placed there by God. So anyone who rebels against authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and they will be punished. For the authorities do not strike fear in people who are doing right, but in those who are doing wrong. Would you like to live without fear of the authorities? Do what is right, and they will honor you.

This is not a rebellion in any sense of the word but yet it’s one rebellion that will absolutely drive everyone mad (just like how I am just going crazy!) The one thing that going to get everyone ticked of the most is just the fact that we just will not conform to their thinking like they want us to. The battle is in being surrounded by this world but not being in it so then we must not live anything like everyone else. We should go into every place with a smile so big that no one can figure out why the heck we can even smile. I can tell you what: I have that key! It’s really very simple yet really hard to do! But it only has two steps to it. The first step is pretty hard, you have to realize that all of your suffering is your own fault! (I really messed up on that line, I explain here.) After that the next one is really easy. All you have to do is just love everyone around you intensely just as if they we’re your own child. Once you do that then you’ll find out that you haven’t suffered at all! I’m telling you that it’s really a great feeling that you just can’t help but smile! I’m telling you that once you start doing that then you’ll find that you just never fit! Could we say that it’s just like repenting and serving? Now why does that sound familiar? Could that just be exactly what Jesus called us to do? Isn’t that “three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13) We are called to do everything that we do in this life for God with great love for others! That’s what just makes this so Irresistible! It’s because God himself just keeps throwing zingers at us all the time! However the zingers are just too small for our humanly eyes to see! We just have to trust him to let us see them and you’ll just be amazed at how much the smallest things can make the biggest impacts of all. So to borrow another line from Shane that we are “committed to doing small things with great love.” And when we do that for each other and everyone else then the world view then start to crumble around us. But yet we have to keep on making that commitment over and over again because the eyes God gives us are small and need constant maintenance to keep us focused on the little things that God has. When you let an engine run without oil for a long time the thing just breaks down! Then you have to rebuild it that engine to get it working again. So to when we let our selfs loose the sight of the little things that God does for us then God needs to take apart our brains and just rebuild it so that it can function properly again. Hence: my prayer that this is screwing up your thinking. Well Shane just did it to me, can’t I just start throwing it on you now!

I have come here a sinner but I will leave you a saint
I am really ashamed to admit it, but just this week the thought of some sort of suicide for me was quite temping the other day. That was the first time I even had ever though that I could do such a thing. Just in the past few months everything I have though and believed in was coming crashing down before my very eye’s and there was nothing I could do about it. That’s the hardest thing for me to deal with because understanding is one of my most valued assets. But yet being a bondsmen to Christ means that he owns everything even my flawed way of thinking. So when God had planted the idea in my head that there’s this girl who’s going to love you sitting right there (and now I am really putting you on the spot here girl! Sorry if you still reading this). God told me that he had something for me to do first before I could get it. So being a raving fool that I am, I just start looking for every little thing about her to find out what it is I have to do! That’s been causing a wreaking ball in my head trying to figure it out! God’s just used this whole situation to completely blow up my mind! Till finally I just had the wild idea that I should just tell her the whole thing! A very frighting prospect to me because I just felt so ragingly mad over everything. And in the end I didn’t get that girl of my dreams here but yet she still really did love me. Not in the way that I wanted her to but, yet, in the why that I needed her to. That’s doing a simple thing with great love! For though it all I was able to find myself once more. For God’s grace is sufficient. He always does what he promises to do but its our own flawed thinking that makes us wrong with Him and we need Him to rebuild our minds every now and then. Through it all I just had to keep my hope in God and while He didn’t do anything that I wanted, He did what I needed. That’s the most valuable thing we can take from this right now! Through every shattered thought and dream the words God had told me have never left: “Don’t worry my son, I AM still in control.” God wants us to have great joy in our lives but He will do what we need first. So even if all of the doom and gloom happens then God is still in control! If all of the doom and gloom doesn’t happen then God is in control! If everything that I strive to try to achieve doesn’t fall through THEN GOD IS IN CONTROL! I would have been dead so long ago if it wasn’t for God being in control and well for that matter there’s nothing. For what does one gain when he sells his soul to get what he wants? I’ll tell you! A world full of greed and coveting! Let’s let God have our greed and coveting (and we all do it!) and give all of our work up to Him in everything that we do. That’s being a bondsman to Christ.

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Congratulations to Barack Obama!

Posted on November 4th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, War, Democrats, Christianity.

Man you really have to admit that the stars really have aligned for Obama. But then again John McCain did run a terrible campaign from the get go and that really didn’t help all that much. Although I do have to admit that I am really starting to feel really apathetic about the whole country. Right now, I’m really getting sick of politics and I really looking froward to getting away from that subject and moving to other things. I was already on that path a month ago but now I really don’t care about politics anymore. We’re going to see some massive changes in everything that the country is right now and I’m still not convinced that any of it will be good at all. Well, the sun will shine another day and while I am very pessimistic right now I can still say that I think we can still find a way through everything. Even if my country fails me (and I think it’s really going to start to now) I can still say that I put my trust in something higher. So for all of you Christan republicans like I am, I just have this to share with you. In Lamentations, Jeremiah (or so we think) went over an account of what happened to Israel when it fell to the Babylon and in the middle of it all he still had this to say:

Lamentations 3:20-40
I will never forget this awful time,
as I grieve over my loss.
Yet I still dare to hope
when I remember this:

The faithful love of the Lord never ends!
His mercies never cease.
Great is his faithfulness;
his mercies begin afresh each morning.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance;
therefore, I will hope in him!”

The Lord is good to those who depend on him,
to those who search for him.
So it is good to wait quietly
for salvation from the Lord.
And it is good for people to submit at an early age
to the yoke of his discipline:

Let them sit alone in silence
beneath the Lord’s demands.
Let them lie face down in the dust,
for there may be hope at last.
Let them turn the other cheek to those who strike them
and accept the insults of their enemies.

For no one is abandoned
by the Lord forever.
Though he brings grief, he also shows compassion
because of the greatness of his unfailing love.
For he does not enjoy hurting people
or causing them sorrow.

If people crush underfoot
all the prisoners of the land,
if they deprive others of their rights
in defiance of the Most High,
if they twist justice in the courts—
doesn’t the Lord see all these things?

Who can command things to happen
without the Lord’s permission?
Does not the Most High
send both calamity and good?
Then why should we, mere humans, complain
when we are punished for our sins?

Instead, let us test and examine our ways.
Let us turn back to the Lord.

So even if all of my worst worries do come true I can still say that I serve a faithful God and that in the end He will set things right. So really what is the use of worrying? I need to learn this lesson just as much as any of you out there! I let myself get burdened all to easily. But as always I need to come back to letting it all go to God. He has His plans set and I want to be apart of it! While people are celebrating thinking that all these wars are going to end, I am filled with sorrow thinking that many more wars and even worse ones than we have seen before are underway. I think that Obama’s presidency will encourage much more bloodshed and horrific acts. But even so, it is well with my soul! I still serve a great God who will set things right. I will be overjoyed to be wrong here and I will pray that Obama’s presidency will be a great one.

My God grant wisdom and courage to Obama so that he can face the challenges that are to come. May God grant wisdom to all in our government so that they will make the right decisions. May God use us to bless people around the world. But most of all may God show us His will and help us to follow it, no matter what the cost.

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