Posted on February 1, 2019 June 10, 2020 by Ray Joseph Cormier
Today is the 44th Anniversary since I was given a new lease on Life. February 1st, 1975, I unexpectedly came alive to the Spirit of God and/or God came alive to me in me. Of this I have no doubt, and I have only grown in Trust and Faith in Eternal Life, recognizing life in this Flesh, on this Earth, is transitory.
The rest believe they will just die and cease to exist forever, begetting a 'get it while you can' attitude oblivious to any notion of Respect for Posterity and the collective well being of Future Generations. That Day changed my direction and outlook, and how I interpret the unfolding events in this Material World
All of us are born into this World toothless, dependent and vulnerable, having to wear diapers. Most of us leave this World the way we arrived, toothless, dependent and vulnerable, having to wear diapers. Our Words and Deeds between arrival and departure determine our Future, quality of Life and effectiveness in this Material World. That's the human condition and it will not change. What we think and reason can change with new Facts and Information.
The following information was written by Jonathan Cook, an Independent British Journalist living and working in the original Nazareth where Jesus grew up in Occupied Palestine. There is an exclusive Jews only settlement called Upper Nazareth.
Jonathan reports on the Jewish-Palestinian conflict and other significant World events. Israeli and Western Media don't publish him.
I'm sharing this, his latest writing, because this article uses Secular, non-religious terms, generally covering what I have been attempting to convey using Biblical terms that can turn people off.
Jonathan does it so well in this article. My personal comments, apart from Jonathan's, will be in brackets. The Bible verses I think he mirrors in this article are in italics. I added the pictures and the video I think enhance his script.
A liberal elite still luring us towards the abyss
A group of 30 respected intellectuals, writers and historians has published a manifesto bewailing the imminent collapse of Europe and its supposed Enlightenment values of liberalism and rationalism. The idea of Europe, they warn, "is falling apart before our eyes", as Britain prepares for Brexit and "populist and nationalist" parties look poised to make sweeping gains in elections across the continent.
The short manifesto has been published in the liberal elite's European house journals, newspapers such as the Guardian. "We must now will Europe or perish beneath the waves of populism," their document reads. Failure means "resentment, hatred and their cortege of sad passions will surround and submerge us."
Unless the tide can be turned, elections across the European Union will be "the most calamitous that we have ever known: victory for the wreckers; disgrace for those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, and Comenius; disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster".
The manifesto was penned by Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher and devotee of Alexis de Tocqueville, a theorist of classical liberalism. Its signatories include novelists Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie, the historian Simon Shama, and Nobel prize laureates Svetlana Alexievitch, Herta Müller, Orhan Pamuk and Elfriede Jelinek.
Though unnamed, their European political heroes appear to be Emmanuel Macron of France, currently trying to crush the popular, anti-austerity protests of the Yellow Vests, and German chancellor Angela Merkel, manning the barricades for the liberal elite against a resurgence of the nationalist right in Germany.
Let us set aside, on this occasion, the strange irony that several of the manifesto's signatories – not least Henri-Levy himself – have a well-known passion for Israel, a state that has always rejected the universal principles ostensibly embodied in liberal ideology and that instead openly espouses the kind of ethnic nationalism that nearly tore Europe apart in two world wars last century.
Instead let us focus on their claim that "populism and nationalism" are on the verge of slaying Europe's liberal democratic tradition and the values held dearest by this distinguished group. Their hope presumably is that their manifesto will serve as a wake-up call before things take an irreversible turn for the worse.
Liberalism's collapse
In one sense, their diagnosis is correct: Europe and the liberal tradition are coming apart at the seams. But not because, as they strongly imply, European politicians are pandering to the basest instincts of a mindless rabble – the ordinary people they have so little faith in. Rather, it is because a long experiment in liberalism has finally run its course. Liberalism has patently failed – and failed catastrophically.
These intellectuals are standing, like the rest of us, on a precipice from which we are about to jump or topple. But the abyss has not opened up, as they suppose, because liberalism is being rejected. Rather, the abyss is the inevitable outcome of this shrinking elite's continuing promotion – against all rational evidence – of liberalism as a solution to our current predicament. It is the continuing transformation of a deeply flawed ideology into a religion. It is idol worship of a value system hellbent on destroying us.
Liberalism, like most ideologies, has an upside. Its respect for the individual and his freedoms, its interest in nurturing human creativity, and its promotion of universal values and human rights over tribal attachment have had some positive consequences.
But liberal ideology has been very effective at hiding its dark side – or more accurately, at persuading us that this dark side is the consequence of liberalism's abandonment rather than inherent to the liberal's political project.
The loss of traditional social bonds – tribal, sectarian, geographic – has left people today more lonely, more isolated than was true of any previous human society. We may pay lip service to universal values, but in our atomised communities, we feel adrift, abandoned and angry.
Humanitarian resource grabs
The liberal's professed concern for others' welfare and their rights has, in reality, provided cynical cover for a series of ever-more transparent resource grabs. The parading of liberalism's humanitarian credentials has entitled our elites to leave a trail of carnage and wreckage in their wake in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and soon, it seems, in Venezuela. We have killed with our kindness and then stolen our victims' inheritance.
They drank wine and praised gods of gold, silver, copper, iron, wood, and stone. Daniel 5:4
(In other words, it's the economy, Stupid! From the Bible record of 'The Writing on the Wall')
Unfettered individual creativity may have fostered some great – if fetishised – art, as well as rapid mechanical and technological developments. But it has also encouraged unbridled competition in every sphere of life, whether beneficial to humankind or not, and however wasteful of resources.
At its worst, it has unleashed quite literally an arms race, one that – because of a mix of our unconstrained creativity, our godlessness and the economic logic of the military-industrial complex – culminated in the development of nuclear weapons. We have now devised the most complete and horrific ways imaginable to kill each other. We can commit genocide on a global scale.
Meanwhile, the absolute prioritising of the individual has sanctioned a pathological self-absorption, a selfishness that has provided fertile ground not only for capitalism, materialism and consumerism but for the fusing of all of them into a turbo-charged neoliberalism. That has entitled a tiny elite to amass and squirrel away most of the planet's wealth out of reach of the rest of humankind.
Worst of all, our rampant creativity, our self-regard and our competitiveness have blinded us to all things bigger and smaller than ourselves. We lack an emotional and spiritual connection to our planet, to other animals, to future generations, to the chaotic harmony of our universe. What we cannot understand or control, we ignore or mock.
And so the liberal impulse has driven us to the brink of extinguishing our species and possibly all life on our planet. Our drive to asset-strip, to hoard resources for personal gain, to plunder nature's riches without respect to the consequences is so overwhelming, so compulsive that the planet will have to find a way to re-balance itself. And if we carry on, that new balance – what we limply term "climate change" – will necessitate that we are stripped from the planet.
REVELATION: GLOBAL WARMING – FACT OR FICTION? TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES?
Nadir of a dangerous arrogance
One can plausibly argue that humans have been on this suicidal path for some time. Competition, creativity, selfishness predate liberalism, after all. But liberalism removed the last restraints, it crushed any opposing sentiment as irrational, as uncivilised, as primitive.
Liberalism isn't the cause of our predicament. It is the nadir of a dangerous arrogance we as a species have been indulging for too long, where the individual's good trumps any collective good, defined in the widest possible sense.
The liberal reveres his small, partial field of knowledge and expertise, eclipsing ancient and future wisdom, those rooted in natural cycles, the seasons and a wonder at the ineffable and unknowable. The liberal's relentless and exclusive focus is on "progress", growth, accumulation.
What is needed to save us is radical change. Not tinkering, not reform, but an entirely new vision that removes the individual and his personal gratification from the centre of our social organization.
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
This is impossible to contemplate for the elites who think more liberalism, not less, is the solution. Anyone departing from their prescriptions, anyone who aspires to be more than a technocrat correcting minor defects in the status quo, is presented as a menace. Despite the modesty of their proposals, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US have been reviled by a media, political and intellectual elite heavily invested in blindly pursuing the path to self-destruction.
Status-quo cheerleaders
As a result, we now have three clear political trends.
The first is the status-quo cheerleaders like the European writers of liberalism's latest – last? – manifesto. With every utterance they prove how irrelevant they have become, how incapable they are of supplying answers to the question of where we must head next. They adamantly refuse both to look inwards to see where liberalism went wrong and to look outwards to consider how we might extricate ourselves.
Irresponsibly, these guardians of the status quo lump together the second and third trends in the futile hope of preserving their grip on power. Both trends are derided indiscriminately as "populism", as the politics of envy, the politics of the mob. These two fundamentally opposed, alternative trends are treated as indistinguishable.
This will not save liberalism, but it will assist in promoting the much worse of the two alternatives.
Those among the elites who understand that liberalism has had its day are exploiting the old ideology of grab-it-for-yourself capitalism while deflecting attention from their greed and the maintenance of their privilege by sowing discord and insinuating dark threats.
These things say the Amen, the Faithful and True witness, the Beginning of the Creation of God;
I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot: I would you were cold or hot.
So then because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.
Because you say, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and know not that you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked:
I counsel you to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that you may be rich; and white raiment, that you may be clothed, and that the shame of your nakedness do not appear; and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see.
The criticisms of the liberal elite made by the ethnic nationalists sound persuasive because they are rooted in truths about liberalism's failure. But as critics, they are disingenuous. They have no solutions apart from their own personal advancement in the existing, failed, self-sabotaging system.
The new authoritarians are reverting to old, trusted models of xenophobic nationalism, scapegoating others to shore up their own power. They are ditching the ostentatious, conscience-salving sensitivities of the liberal so that they can continue plundering with heady abandon. If the ship is going down, then they will be gorging on the buffet till the waters reach the dining-hall ceiling.
Where hope can reside
The third trend is the only place where hope can reside. This trend – what I have previously ascribed to a group I call the "dissenters " – understands that radical new thinking is required. But given that this group is being actively crushed by the old liberal elite and the new authoritarians, it has little public and political space to explore its ideas, to experiment, to collaborate, as it urgently needs to.
Social media provides a potentially vital platform to begin critiquing the old, failed system, to raise awareness of what has gone wrong, to contemplate and share radical new ideas, and to mobilize. But the liberals and authoritarians understand this as threat to their own privilege and, under a confected hysteria about "fake news", are rapidly working to snuff out even this small space.
We have so little time, but still the old guard wants to block any possible path to salvation – even as seas filled with plastic start to rise, as insect populations disappear across the globe, and as the planet prepares to cough us out like a lump of infected mucus.
We must not be hoodwinked by these posturing, manifesto-spouting liberals: the philosophers, historians and writers – the public relations wing – of our suicidal status quo. They did not warn us of the beast lying cradled in our midst. They failed to see the danger looming, and their narcissism blinds them still.
We should have no use for the guardians of the old, those who held our hands, who shone a light along a path that has led to the brink of our own extinction. We need to discard them, to close our ears their siren song.
There are small voices struggling to be heard above the roar of the dying liberal elites and the trumpeting of the new authoritarians. They need to be listened to, to be helped to share and collaborate, to offer us their visions of a different world. One where the individual is no longer king. Where we learn some modesty and humility – and how to love in our infinitely small corner of the universe.
(What you are reading and seeing in the Secular, non-religious, Main Stream Media Today, the pictures and possibilities they propagate, are the Revelation of this Biblical Vision of a Future Time that has Finally Arrived.)
And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. (false beliefs about God in Judaism, Christianity & Islam. Written some 500 years before Islam, the 3rd arm from the Jewish religious record appeared)
For they are the spirits of DEVILS, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth (1%, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Senators, CEOs, and other Idols of the People) and of the whole world, (the rest of Humanity) to gather them to the Battle of that Great Day of God Almighty. (the war is already underway Today between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, leading to the climax of that Great Day)
Behold, I come as a thief. (when you least expect it)
Blessed is he that watches, and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.
And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.
(Armageddon was derived from Har Megiddo, located in Judea and Samaria of occupied Palestine 2000 years ago.
Israel as a kingdom disappeared some 800 years before Jesus walked in that area during the occupation.
Har Megiddo/Armageddon still exists as a physical place in this material world, but is now under the control of temporal Israel re-created from the Bible after an absence of some 2800 years.
After all those years, the occupation of Judea and Samaria in Palestine is still an unresolved, violent, open wound in the Middle East and this material world.
American Zionist Christians want to see Armageddon come. They praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
It's the DEVIL's work, not God's Will according to ALL Christian Bibles!
The World did not take notice of the spiritual significance, as a Sign of OUR Times when, in 2014, ISIS destroyed the Islamic Mosque in Nineveh, Iraq, containing the tomb of Jewish-Christian Jonah in the Whale Biblical fame, sent to warn the "World City" Nineveh of impending destruction 2900 years ago if they did not change their ways.)
And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do to them; and he didn't do it.
Jonah 3: 10
But he answered and said to them, An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas:
For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
2Peter.3:8
(By that measure, we've arrived at the 3rd Day.)
Tagged Armageddon, born again, end times, money, politics, religion1 Comment
LOVE OF MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL
Posted on October 27, 2012 December 2, 2021 by Ray Joseph Cormier
Neil Barofsky, the former regulator tasked with policing banker bailouts in the Bush administration's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) told talk show host Bill Moyers another major banking crash is now "inevitable" because neither of the political parties have the stomach to end "too big to fail."
I trust what this man is saying, and I admire his honesty and integrity. He tells us how it is on the inside with the big money players and government. He was frustrated in trying to do the job he was hired to do when so many government officials were telling him not to rock the boat in taking his job too seriously.
Reprinted from The Raw Story. Images selected and added by Ray
"This was the government policy created by the architects, Ben Bernanke who is chair of Federal Reserve, Tim Geithner, who was then the president of the New York Fed before becoming Treasury Secretary, and Hank Paulson," he explained, describing the Bush administration's actions during the 2008 economic crisis. "Their solution originally was to further concentrate the industry, to make the too big to fail banks bigger."
That's a policy the Obama administration has mostly continued, placing only modest limits on the debt load financial institutions are allowed carry, but neglecting broader reforms like restoring the long-standing firewall between checking and savings accounts and the big banks' more risky ventures on Wall Street.
It's not as if there isn't some support for restoring that firewall either, which effectively lets banks risk their investors' money while keeping deposits safe from major swings in the markets. It used to be the law, but that law was repealed during the Clinton administration, in legislation created with the help of former Citigroup CEO Sanford I. Weill. In the wake of the crisis, however, Weill admitted in July that the time has come to restore the division between investment and consumer banking, which would essentially ban the "financial supermarket" model he created that's led to institutions becoming "too big to fail."
Barofsky added that the consolidation of over-leveraged banks like Merrill Lynch into somewhat more healthy institutions like Bank of America ultimately put the markets on a more dangerous path than the nation's top financial regulators realize. That's because "you have institutions now that are just monstrous in size, over $2 trillion in assets by certain measures, close to $4 trillion by other measures," he said, calling the reality in today's markets "terrifying."
"The idea that any of these institutions could ever be allowed to fail is pure fantasy, at this point," Barofsky lamented.
That's when Moyers cut right to the chase: "Are you suggesting that we could have another crash?"
"I think it's inevitable," he replied.
On a scale of significance and importance to the Future well being of America and the World, this report and Testimony of Mr. Barofsky should be the #1 issue in this election campaign and shouted from the rooftops!
Watching from CanaDa, this American election is an exercise in Fraud, deception and manipulation. It doesn't really matter who wins the Presidency. For those who think Romney can turn things around in less time than Obama had, think again! Hard Times are ahead.
Mr. Barofsky confirms what most people already suspected. "The rich bankers will sell their souls for a few points of profit." Jesus chased them out of the Jewish Temple, saying the House of My Father is a House of Prayer for ALL NATIONS and you have made it a Den of thieves. Is there anything new under the Sun?
This honest realism of Mr. Barofshy with his inside experience is so refreshing to see in this election campaign of lies and misleading half-truths. The mainline news media don't have any Integrity left in investigating and reporting the Truth in my opinion.
And Judgment is turned away backward, and Justice stands afar off:
for TRUTH is fallen in the street, and EQUITY cannot enter.
Yea, Truth fails; and he that departs from evil makes himself a
prey: and the LORD saw it, and it displeased him that there was no Judgment.
No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
This video is kinda corny, but it's the thoughts that count!
Tagged Banks, money, super rich, Wall Street9 Comments