2008-02-08

Righteousness Right Now

"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." Jesus (Matt. 5:6)


"Righteousness" is one of those words we don't use much today. It suggests leading a life that is pleasing to God, doing right, putting right, and being right. Not only does it contain a component for us to reflect on our actions of the moment, but it also urges fixing past mistakes.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney:

- Repeatedly violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court approval for presidential wiretaps. FISA was enacted precisely to avoid abuses by presidents. Former President Richard Nixon's illegal wiretapping was one of the offenses that led to his impeachment.

- Were involved in detainee abuse. They defied the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the anti-torture Act, both being federal criminal statutes, as well as the Geneva Conventions.

- Used deception to drive us into the Iraq war. "President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials ... made at least 935 false statements ... about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. ... [T]he statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses." http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/

"Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill." Jesus (Matt. 5:17)

The Constitution requires the president to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Impeachment is warranted when a president puts himself above the law and gravely abuses power. The Constitution of the United States specifies the grounds for impeachment as treason, bribery, or "high crimes and misdemeanors," a term that means "great and dangerous offenses that subvert the Constitution."

Impeachment proceedings are the righteous thing to do. They'll curb the serious abuses of this administration and send a strong message to future administrations that no president or vice president is above the law.

Feed my sheep.

Test of the Gods

A story from the Old Testament (I Kings 18) records Elijah the prophet coming unto the people and discovering them divided in their religious views. His assessment on the situation was very pragmatic: "If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him."

To help the people determine which god to follow, Elijah proposed a test involving an alter for burnt sacrifices. Elijah would call on his God, and the four hundred and fifty prophets would call on Baal. The god that answered with fire would be God.

The four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal called their god all day long without success and in frustration tore down the alter. Elijah patiently rebuilt the alter with stones, put a trench around it, and arranged his wood. But then he told them to fill four barrels with water and to pour it all over his wood and burnt sacrifice: not once, not twice, but three times to the point it filled the trench.

Elijah the prophet then said, "Hear me, O Lord, that this people may know that thou art the Lord God." The Lord's fire came and consumed the burnt sacrifice, the wood, the stones, as well as the dust and licked up the water that was in the trench.

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The United States is fighting a war on terror that President Bush says was instigated by Muslim extremists and Islamic fascists. His speechwriters cleverly embed Christian theology into Bush's messages. They have been, however, very careful not to insinuate in their "with us or against us" rhetoric that this is a war between Christianity and Islam.

A very good thing, too. Because if we ponder the galvanizing event of 9/11 and what the Bush Administration told us, we'd be led to believe and conclude that Allah is more powerful than the Lord God and Baal. Some COINCIDENCES AND MIRACLES (scroll down below) that were revealed through 9/11 make the surface of Allah's alter feel pretty hot.


Hermann Goering, the Nazi Reichsmarshall, said:

Why, of course, the "people" don't want war.
Why would some poor slob on a farm want to
risk his life in a war when the best that he
can get out of it is to come back to his farm
in one piece. Naturally, the common people
don't want war; neither in Russia nor in
England nor in America, nor for that matter
in Germany. That is understood. But, after
all, it is the leaders of the country who
determine the policy and it is always a simple
matter to drag the people along, whether it is
a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a
Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. The
people can always be brought to the bidding of
the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do
is tell them they are being attacked and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works
the same way in any country.



Recall the words of Jesus, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32)

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450 Profit$ of Baal
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Roberto Rodriguez wrote in The Silence of the 999 Monkeys:

In order to tell a big lie to the American
people, it is not necessary to fool 300
million Americans. ... All that is required
to run a dishonest government is to fool but
999 people, otherwise known as the nation's
decision-and-opinion-makers. ... The only
opinions that matter are those of 435 members
of Congress and 100 Senators.


Four hundred and thirty-five members of congress. Four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal. Coincidence?

Elijah's test of the gods may not be relevant today. After all, our Constitution protects and defends a person's right to their own religious belief, be it a Christian God, an Islamic Allah, or Baal of old.

Would appealing to Congress's sense of righteousness help? Are they willing to put right that which is wrong, particularly if a big lie fooled them into doing it?

"Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice; a fool can't get
fooled again."
George W. Bush



Roberto Rodriguez goes on to write:

Yet, as this [Bush] administration has shown,
if it keeps everything classified and keeps
the country in a permanent state of war and
in a permanent state of fear, all it needs
to do [to get its way] is manipulate less
than two handfuls of members of Congress –
"the gang of eight" [the Democratic and
Republican leaders of both the Senate and
the House, plus the Democratic and Republican
leaders of the Congressional Intelligence
committees]. In this manner, the well-tested
system of checks and balances comes to a
grinding halt. … all of this, not
surprisingly, under the guise of
"protecting the homeland."

As we have seen in the destruction of the
CIA torture tapes, all the administration
needs to do [to pull off such a job] is
inform, not the gang of eight, but the
"gang of four" [the heads of Congress's
Intelligence committees]. Not lost on
anyone is that one of the four at the time
was none other than Nancy Pelosi.

So to govern by deceit and outlaw government
and to ensure that no one ever has to be held
accountable, one needs to simply get the
acquiescence of the gang of four… and if
one of those members ascends to the position
of Speaker of the House… little wonder that
Impeachment comes "off the table."


Jesus said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill." (Matt. 5:17)

If we want our deity to fire up the alter, maybe it is as simple as recognizing the law (the Constitution) and having our "450 prophets" fulfill their Constitutional duties.

Feed my sheep.

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Coincidences and Miracles of Allah on 9/11
========

It doesn't appear to be the US government's intention to be advocating Allah and Islam. But if Allah isn't the explanation for these great and mystical and unprecedented events of 9/11, then what is?

* Three steel skyscrapers (WTC-1, 2, and 7) fell into their own footprints through their paths of most resistance at near free-fall speed, implying that the floors underneath the impact site conveniently stepped aside before the falling mass from above hit them. WTC-7 was not hit by a plane.
* Although the speed of their collapses consumed all of the potential energy of the falling mass from the buildings' heights, significantly more energy was available not just to break concrete but also to crush it into fine powder and to leave extremely hot sub-basement fires that burned for weeks under the rubble. "The Case for Demolitions," the websites wtc7.net and 911research.wtc7.net, and the influential article by physicist Steven Jones.
* The towering infernos were said to burn with the heat of nuclear power plants, despite sooty black smoke and few visible flames.
* The building collapses were presented as inevitable, even though such behavior was unheard of in steel structures.
* An aluminum jet was able to fly completely into the Pentagon and leave no wings, no luggage, no bodies, and no debris outside the building as would be evident in any other plane crash.
* The fiberglass nose-cone of that aluminum jet was able to pierce six steel re-enforced concrete with the last hole being over 6' in diameter.
* Nineteen (19) Muslim hijackers went undetected through airport security of three major airports and onto four commercial flights where none of their names appear on the flight roster and few of their faces on security video.
* These Muslims commandeered four flights without the pilots being able to speak or toggle with their fingers on the talk button any type of distress call.
* The same hijackers who pulled off aerobatic maneuvers with large jets were flight school flunkies who had never flown jets.
* The worst Muslim pilot made high speed, technical turns and flew at low altitude to plow a jumbo jet into the most heavily guarded spot on the planet.
* The supposedly fanatically devout Muslim hijackers were fond of strip bars.
* Flight 77 crashed into Wedge 1 of the Pentagon -- the one portion of the building that was sparsely occupied due to undergoing renovations, which included blast-hardening of the exterior walls.
* An extensive paper trail of the hijackers was found within hours of the attack, even though the same people had supposedly eluded authorities for years. The FBI claimed that the passport from one of Flight 11's hijackers was found blocks from the towers (when the only other parts of the jetliner that penetrated the tower were a few pieces of landing gear).
* Several hijackers turned up alive after the attack.
* The hijacked flights all flew long routes taking them far from their targets exposing them to certain interception given standard operating procedures.
* The US air defense system failed to follow standard procedures for responding to diverted passenger flights and other indications for when a flight is unresponsive to control tower commands, for when a flight turns off its transponder, and for when a flight deviates (radically) from its flight plan.
* The Pentagon was hit 1 hour and 20 minutes after the attacks began.
* Interceptor flights were delayed and sent the wrong direction at quarter speed.
* The most sophisticated military radar tracking system of the planet was confused, not once, but four times.
* US military and other authorities planned or actually rehearsed defensive response to all elements of the 9/11 scenario during the year prior to the attack - including multiple hijackings, suicide crash-bombings, and a strike on the Pentagon.
* The US military on 9/11 was participating in more than four military exercises under the command of Vice President Cheney that simulated hijacked flights flown into high-profile targets. The war games included scenarios of a domestic air crisis, a plane crashing into a government building, and a large-scale emergency in New York. The war games created confusion as to whether the unfolding events were "real world or exercise."
* The officials at the top of the chain of command for response to a domestic attack - George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Myers, Montague Winfield - all found reason to do something else during the actual attacks, other than assuming their duties as decision-makers.
* Multiple allied foreign agencies informed the US government of a coming attack in detail. Various individuals came into possession of specific advance knowledge, and some of them tried to warn the US prior to September 11th.
* Certain prominent persons received warnings not to fly on the week or on the day of September 11th.

* Osama Bin Laden appears on the FBI's most-wanted list for the bombing of the USS Cole but not for 9/11, where the FBI says they have insufficient evidence.
* The video of Osama bin Laden that has him taking credit for the attack doesn't even look like him.

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All the Signs of a Systematic 9/11 Cover-up
========

* The rapid and illegal scrapping of the WTC ruins at Ground Zero disposed of almost all of the structural steel indispensable to any investigation of the collapse mechanics. The official Twin Towers collapse investigation was left with almost no forensic evidence, and thus could only provide dubious computer models of ultimately improvable hypotheses. It failed to even test for the possibility of explosives.
* Airplane black boxes were found at Ground Zero, according to two first responders and an unnamed NTSB official, but they were "disappeared" and their existence is denied in The 9/11 Commission Report.
* US officials consistently suppressed and destroyed evidence (like the tapes recorded by air traffic controllers who handled the New York flights).
* Whistleblowers (like Sibel Edmonds and Anthony Shaffer) were intimidated, gagged and sanctioned, sending a clear signal to others who might be thinking about speaking out.
* The various responsible agencies - NORAD, FAA, Pentagon, USAF, as well as the 9/11 Commission - gave radically different explanations for the failure (in some cases upheld for years), such that several officials must have lied; but none were held accountable.
* The official investigations avoided the issue of the multiple war games held that day.
* Officials who "failed" (like Myers and Eberhard, as well as Frasca, Maltbie and Bowman of the FBI) were given promotions.

* Omissions or fleeting footnotes in The 9/11 Commission Report:
- The collapse of WTC-7. The NIST report on the collapses did not mention it either, except to say they did not know how it fell.
- A group of FBI officials in New York systematically suppressed field investigations of potential terrorists prior to 9/11 that might have uncovered the alleged hijackers.
- High-level corruption and protection of criminal networks are revealed in the stories of Sibel Edmonds, Robert Wright, Coleen Rowley and Harry Samit, the "Phoenix Memo," David Schippers, the 199i orders restricting investigations, the Bush administration's order to back off the Bin Ladin family, the reaction to the "Bojinka" plot, and John O'Neil.

* Philip Zelikow was assigned as the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission. In 1998, he co-authored a Foreign Affairs article, "Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger," which warned of a possible catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center and accurately predicted the governmental aftermath of 9/11. Before he was selected as Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, he authored the Bush administration's National Security Strategy of the United States of America for 2002. This document for the first time asserted a national policy of pre-emptive war (the "Bush Doctrine"), and paved the way for the war on Iraq.

abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4218157


"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." (Matt. 5:6)


Feed my sheep.