Hold Me Together - Royal Tailor
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
A fortress against fear
HAYDEN, Idaho–Don and Jonna Bradway recently cashed out of the stock market and invested in gold and silver. They have stockpiled food and ammunition in the event of a total economic collapse or some other calamity commonly known around here as “The End of the World As We Know It” or “SHTF”–the day something hits the fan.
The Bradways fled California, a state they said is run by “leftists and non-Constitutionalists and anti-freedom people,” and settled on several wooded acres of north Idaho five years ago. They live among like-minded conservative neighbors, host Monday night Bible study around their fire pit, hike in the mountains and fish from their boat. They melt lead to make their own bullets for sport shooting and hunting–or to defend themselves against marauders in a world-ending cataclysm.
“I’m not paranoid, I’m really not,” said Bradway, 68, a cheerful Army veteran with a bushy handlebar mustache who favors Hawaiian shirts. “But we’re prepared. Anybody who knows us knows that Don and Jonna are prepared if and when it hits the fan.”
The Bradways are among the vanguard moving to an area of the Pacific Northwest known as the American Redoubt, a term coined in 2011 by survivalist author and blogger James Wesley, Rawles (the comma is deliberate) to describe a settlement of the God-fearing in a lightly populated territory that includes Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon.
Those migrating to the Redoubt are some of the most motivated members of what is known as the prepper movement, which advocates readiness and self-reliance in man-made or natural disasters that could create instability for years. It’s scenario-planning that is gaining adherents and becoming mainstream in what Redoubt preppers described as an era of fear and uncertainty.
They are anxious about recent terrorist attacks from Paris to San Bernardino, Calif., to Orlando; pandemics such as Ebola in West Africa; potential nuclear attacks from increasingly provocative countries such as North Korea or Iran; and the growing political, economic and racial polarization in the United States that has deepened during the 2016 presidential election.
Nationally, dozens of online prepper suppliers report an increase in sales of items from water purifiers to hand-cranked radios to solar-powered washing machines. Harvest Right, a Utah company that invented a $3,000 portable freeze dryer to preserve food, has seen sales grow from about 80 a month two years ago to more than 900 a month now, said spokesman Stephanie Barlow.
Clyde Scott, owner of Rising S Bunkers, said pre-made, blast-proof underground steel bunkers are in big demand, including his most popular model, which sleeps six to eight people and sells for up to $150,000.
“Anybody with a peanut-sized brain,” he said, can see that the U.S. economy is in perilous shape because of the national debt, the decline of American manufacturing and the size of the welfare rolls.
Some people worry about hurricanes, earthquakes or forest fires. Others fear a nuclear attack or solar flare that creates an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out the nation’s electric grid and all computers, sending the country into darkness and chaos.
“The list is long; the concerns are many,” said Glenn Martin, who lives in north Idaho and runs Prepper Broadcasting Network, an online radio station. “Imagine a societal collapse and trying to buy a loaf of bread in Los Angeles or New York and stores are closed down.”
Martin’s programming emphasizes gardening, farming and how-to shows about sustainable living more than “doom and gloom,” he said, and his audience has grown from 50,000 listeners a month two years ago to about 250,000 a month now.
Online interest in prepper and American Redoubt websites is increasing. Tools that measure online readership show that monthly search traffic to Rawles’s survivalblog.com has doubled since 2011; an estimate from SimilarWeb, a Web analytics firm, shows that the site had about 862,000 total visits last month.
Rawles’s guidebook, “How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It,” and his post-apocalyptic survival novel, “Patriots,” have sold about 350,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan. They are among hundreds of available survivalist books.
In response to all the uncertainty, more and more preppers are not simply stocking up at home. They are moving their homes–to the Redoubt, a seldom-used term for stronghold or fortress.
It is impossible to know exactly how many people have come over the past few years, but newcomers, real estate agents, local officials and others said it was in the hundreds, or perhaps even a few thousand, across all five states.
Here, they live in a pristine place of abundant water and fertile soil, far from urban crime, free from most natural disasters and populated predominantly by conservative, mostly Christian people with a live-and-let-live ethos and local governments with a light regulatory touch and friendly gun laws.
The hearty and adventurous, or those seeking an escape from modernity’s leading edge, have long made a new life for themselves in Idaho; Ernest Hemingway came here to live and to die.
The locals regard the newest transplants as benign if odd, several said in interviews.
“The mainstream folks kind of roll their eyes,” said state Sen. Shawn Keough, a 20-year veteran Republican legislator who represents north Idaho.
Many drawn to the Redoubt are former police, firefighters and military. Most said they would vote for Donald Trump as the “lesser of two evils,” and they said Hillary Clinton would make an already bloated and ineffective government even bigger.
“I don’t want to be one of the guys waiting for help,” said Patrick Devine, 54, a former paramedic in Los Angeles who moved two years ago at a friend’s urging.
Devine said he had firsthand knowledge of chaos and government failure, earned from working numerous shootings and earthquakes, particularly in Haiti in 2010.
“I can’t stop it. But I can prepare myself to the best of my ability for anything that does come and be helpful to other people,” said Devine, who works at a local gun range and wears a 9mm pistol on his hip.
“I love this place,” said Chris Walsh, as he buzzed low over sparkling Lake Coeur d’Alene in his mustard-colored Beechcraft Bonanza airplane.
A Detroit native, Walsh, 53, runs Revolutionary Realty, which specializes in selling real estate to those moving to the American Redoubt. He said he has sold hundreds of properties in the last five years.
He lives off the grid in a house high on a hill overlooking a lake, producing his own electricity from 100 solar panels. But he is also a few miles from restaurants and shopping in Coeur d’Alene, a popular tourist destination.
Walsh said most of the prepper properties he sells generally have key features: at least two sources of water, solar panels or another alternative energy source, ample secure storage space for a few years’ worth of supplies, and a defensible location away from main roads and city centers.
Such amenities don’t come cheap; the average property sells for between $250,000 and $550,000, he said, but some go for more than $2 million. Walsh said a basic solar array can cost around $15,000, while more elaborate systems can cost 10 times that.
Walsh said most of his clients regard moving to safer territory as a prudent step against a reasonable fear. But just as important, he said, they get to live a simpler life in a safe, beautiful place.
“What they are doing when they come here is relearning things that their great-great-great-grandfathers and mothers already knew,” Walsh said. “What’s going on here is a pioneering spirit.”
Much of the Redoubt migration is motivated by fears that President Obama–and his potential successor, Hillary Clinton–want to scrap the Second Amendment, as part of what transplants see as a dangerous and anti-constitutionalist movement toward government that is too intrusive and hostile to personal liberties.
“This is a bastion of freedom,” said Todd Savage, 45, a retired Marine who moved to north Idaho from “the urban crime-scape” of San Francisco and opened American Redoubt Realty after meeting Rawles a few years ago.
“The bottom line is that our clients are tired of living around folks that have no moral values,” Savage said. “They choose to flee tyranny and leave behind all the attributes of the big city that have turned them away.”
Savage spoke as he drove his Chevrolet Suburban with an AR-15 rifle tucked next to the driver’s seat, a handgun between the front seats, and body armor and more than 200 rounds of extra ammunition in the back–along with a chain saw to move fallen trees and two medical kits, just in case.
“You have GEICO; I have an AR-15,” Savage said.
Trevor Treller, 44, who carries a small Smith & Wesson pistol on his hip, moved to north Idaho last year from Long Beach, Calif., and recently paid a little less than $400,000 for a defensible three-bedroom house on five wooded acres.
Treller, a sommelier at a local resort, said Obama was a key factor in his decision. He said the president has inflamed racial tensions in America, presided over a dangerous expansion of the national debt, been “hostile” to Second Amendment rights and failed to curtail the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran.
Treller said any one of those factors could lead to crippling chaos, so he and his wife have laid in food, weapons and ammunition and are installing an iron gate across their long gravel driveway.
“I think there’s a very good chance that these things won’t happen in my lifetime, but I also think there’s a chance that they will,” Treller said. “It’s extreme collective hubris to think that we’re exempt from everything that happened to every single society before us throughout history.”
Treller said he settled on Coeur d’Alene after scouring city-data.com, a website where he looked for his ideal mix: conservative election results, low crime rates, solid incomes, low population density, affordable house prices–and few illegal immigrants, because he said they erode “American culture.”
Utah is about 83 percent white, and its three northernmost counties are more than 90 percent white, according to Census Bureau data. Those interviewed in the American Redoubt insisted they are not trying to segregate themselves by race. And while the Aryan Nations white supremacist group was headquartered near Hayden Lake in the 1980s and 1990s, Rawles has described the Redoubt movement as “anti-racist” and said like-minded folks of all races are welcome.
Walsh, the real estate agent, said he saw far more racism in Detroit, where he was raised, than in north Idaho.
“Here, a black person, they’re a novelty,” Walsh said. “You’ll see people walk up to black people here sometimes and just talk to them because they’ve never spoken to a black person before. In terms of them walking around [saying racist things], you never see it.”
Treller’s wife, Christina Treller, 38, a critical care nurse at a local hospital, said she initially resisted her husband’s proposal to move to Idaho. Now she loves their new Victorian-style house in the woods, with its fresh well water and clean air, and fruit and nut trees that they recently planted.
Having lived through the 1992 riots after Los Angeles police were acquitted in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, she said she views society as more fragile than most people realize.
“I’m being wise,” she said.
In north Idaho, the narrow panhandle that stretches to the Canadian border, many people on the streets of pretty towns such as Coeur d’Alene, Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry have never heard of the American Redoubt.
That’s mainly because of the prepper ethos of privacy–most don’t even tell their neighbors they have years’ worth of food in a safe room.
Several locals did express unease about their new ammo-stockpiling neighbors.
“I don’t have a problem with preppers, but it’s the extremists people don’t want around–the fringe, the radicals. That’s the concern I hear from people,” said Mike Peterson, a real estate agent in Bonners Ferry and retired Los Angeles firefighter and EMT.
Keough, the state senator, recently fought off a tough GOP primary challenge in which she was labeled a “progressive traitor” by Alex Barron, a blogger who calls himself the Bard of the American Redoubt.
“We’re certainly not oblivious to the turmoil in the world and not oblivious to the huge challenges we have at the national level,” Keough said. “But those who subscribe to the ‘world is coming to an end’ theory, people tend to shake their heads at those folks. They come across as paranoid.”
State Rep. Heather Scott, a Republican who represents north Idaho, said the newcomers have adapted smoothly.
“I have met many people, especially recently, who have moved here after being inspired by the idea of the American Redoubt,” she said. “I haven’t heard any of them speak about the ‘end of the world’ but rather the appreciation for a simpler and safer life.”
Scott said preparing for a natural or man-made disaster was “simply prudent,” because, “Economic experts are consistently saying that global markets are at risk, and they are telling people to take precautions to weather through an economic crisis.”
Don Bradway dug into a plate of homemade enchiladas in the kitchen of the cozy house he and Jonna bought for $259,000 in 2010.
What they have looks like an idyllic retirement experience: his and hers recliners in front of a big-screen TV, a “side-by-side” all-terrain vehicle in the barn, an art studio for retired nurse Jonna, a carpentry and machine shop for retired firefighter and EMT Don, and a sweet-natured dog named Moose.
Their 30-year-old son, who moved to Idaho with them, lives nearby.
Don, who’s a member of the GOP Central Committee of Kootenai County, won’t say exactly how much food and supplies they have on hand.
“There are some things you don’t talk about,” he said. “But the Bradway motto is that it’s better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.”
As Don sees it, you need look no further than the economic chaos in Venezuela, with its hungry people storming grocery stores, to see that a society-ending economic collapse could easily happen anywhere.
“We pray to God that it never happens,” he said, finishing his refried beans.
But if it does, he said his “fellow thinkers” in the American Redoubt are prepared.
“They know they can depend on the Bradways to help them,” he said.
A ramshackle village at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
SUSIYA, West Bank–For a quick reality check on the current stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there’s no better place to visit than this little village of miserable huts and sheep pens in the middle of nowhere.
The hamlet in the hills south of Hebron has become an improbable proxy in a cold war waged among Jewish settlers, the Israeli government, Western diplomats, peace activists and the 340 or so Arab herders who once inhabited caves on the site and now live in squalid tents.
Israel’s military authority in the West Bank wants to demolish the Palestinian community, contending that the ramshackle structures made of old tires and weathered tarpaulins were built without permits and must come down.
The Palestinian residents insist they are not squatters but heirs to the land they have farmed and grazed since the Ottoman era.
They say Israel wants to depopulate the area of Arabs and replace them with Jews.
“It’s ethnic cleansing,” said Nasser Nawaja, a resident of the village, who also is employed by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which opposes the demolition.
That is nonsense, said Josh Hasten, international director for the pro-settler group Regavim, which has been pushing the Israeli government “to stop kicking the proverbial can down the road” and shove these “illegal squatters” off the land.
Hasten described Susiya as a phony village and part of a plot funded by the European Union and supported by the Palestinian Authority to assert rights that do not exist and create a “de facto Palestinian state” on land that should belong to Israel.
The Nawaja clan are stubborn, tough, poor shepherds who have spent the past three decades subsisting with brackish cistern water and a trickle of power from a generator. They’re not likely to leave unless forced at gunpoint.
“If we can stop the Israelis here, we can stop them from demolishing other villages,” said Jihad Nawaja, one of the village elders.
A final order to bulldoze the hamlet was delayed in mid-August when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office asked the courts to stay a ruling on the dispute for two months–until after the U.S. presidential election–according to lawyers involved in the case on both sides.
The Obama administration this month warned Israel that it finds the proposed eviction “very troubling.”
In July, State Department spokesman John Kirby said that demolishing Susiya “would set a damaging standard for displacement and land confiscation, particularly given settlement-related activity in the area.”
Far beyond the United States, Susiya stands at the center of fraying relations between Israel and Europe, which is providing life support to the village.
The solar panels in Susiya were donated by Germany, the school by Spain, the water pumps by Ireland. Belgium, Italy, Norway and others have contributed a playground, a shipping container to use as an office, and a new bullhorn.
Even so, it is a pitiful place, without running water or electricity from the grid, though it lies just a few hundred yards from Israeli power and water lines that serve a nearby Jewish settlement with the same name.
Right-wing ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition government have become much more vocal in their calls to Europe to stay out of Israel’s domestic affairs.
Apparently, that is not going to happen.
This month, two top British diplomats visited Susiya to hear from the locals.
Tony Kay, the deputy chief of mission at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv, made Susiya a first stop just weeks after arriving in the country.
“The Israelis criticize the Palestinians for building without permits, but the number of permits the Palestinians are issued for Area C is practically nil,” he said.
Area C is the 60 percent of the West Bank completely controlled by the Israeli military, which oversees both security and civilian affairs here.
B’Tselem, citing government figures, reports that in 2014, out of 242 permit applications submitted by Palestinians for building in Area C, only one was granted. Between 2009 and 2012, a total of 1,640 applications were submitted. Only 37–about 2.3 percent–were approved, according to the human rights group, which said that most Palestinians do not submit the paperwork unless they face “stop-work” orders.
The Palestinians want to create a state in the Gaza Strip and here on the West Bank, which Israel occupied after winning the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The Israeli government right now wants to formally annex Area C in the West Bank, where 200 Jewish settlements are located, saying that a two-state solution is unworkable. Most of the world considers the Jewish settlements on the West Bank to be illegal, a conclusion that the Israeli government rejects.
James Downer, the British deputy consul general in Jerusalem, sipped coffee with the Nawaja clan.
“I am very fond of Susiya,” he said.
Downer joked that he had visited enough times to be made an honorary citizen.
He promised the locals, “We will do what we can to oppose demolitions here and elsewhere.”
Whatever it was in the past, these days Susiya has more the feeling of a protest camp than a functioning Palestinian village.
There are no streets, shops or mosques, and no permanent homes. There do not seem to be many people, either–giving some support to Regavim’s claim that most of the residents live in the nearby Palestinian town of Yatta.
Residents say that since the construction of a Jewish settlement nearby in 1983, their village has been leveled twice and partly demolished seven other times by Israeli bulldozers. Each time, the Palestinians returned to the hilltop and rebuilt their huts.
Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked visited the area this month and said it was hypocritical for Europe to fight against new building in Jewish settlements in the West Bank while underwriting illegal construction in Palestinian villages.
The Europeans also see Israeli hypocrisy.
As the Jewish settlements in the West Bank continue to grow, the Israeli military has ramped up demolitions of Palestinian homes, barns and sheds.
According to the United Nations, Israel has demolished 614 unauthorized Palestinian structures in the West Bank this year.
Israeli settlers in the West Bank see an insidious Palestinian encroachment onto lands the Jewish homesteaders believe were given to them by God.
Regavim, the group pushing to have the Palestinians evicted, says the herders of Susiya are squatting on land adjacent to an important archaeological site with ruins of a Jewish community and a synagogue dating to the 8th century.
The same site also has remains of an ancient mosque, built on top of the synagogue.
Monday, August 29, 2016
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Saturday, August 27, 2016
How Many Guns Did the U.S. Lose Track of in Iraq and Afghanistan? Hundreds of Thousands.
Early this year, a Facebook user in Baghdad using the name Hussein Mahyawi posted a photograph of a slightly worn M4 assault rifle he was offering for sale. Veterans of the latest war in Iraq immediately recognized it. It was a standard American carbine equipped with a holographic sight, a foregrip that was military-issue during the occupation and a sticker bearing a digital QR code used by American forces for inventory control. Except for one detail–an aftermarket pistol grip, the sort of accessory with which combatants of the current generation often pimp their guns–it was a dead ringer for any of the tens of thousands of M4s the Pentagon handed out to Iraqi security forces and various armed militias after toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003. And here it was on the open market, ready for bids.
Was this a surprise? No. A little more than four years after the United States withdrew all its military forces from Iraq, and not quite two years after a smaller number of American troops began returning to the country to help fight the Islamic State, the open sale of such an M4 was part of Iraq’s day-to-day arms-trafficking routine. Mahyawi’s carbine was another data point attesting to an extraordinary and dangerous failure of American arms-trafficking and public accountability and to a departure from a modern military’s most basic practice: keeping track of the guns.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the United States has handed out a vast but persistently uncountable quantity of military firearms to its many battlefield partners in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today the Pentagon has only a partial idea of how many weapons it issued, much less where these weapons are. Meanwhile, the effectively bottomless abundance of black-market weapons from American sources is one reason Iraq will not recover from its post-invasion woes anytime soon.
An inkling of just how expansive these arms transfers were, and how stubbornly resistant they are to precise measurement, is apparent in a new attempt at weapons-tallying compiled in a project led by Iain Overton. Overton is a former BBC journalist who is now the executive director of Action on Armed Violence, a charity based in London that researches and lobbies against weapons proliferation and violence against civilians; he is also the author of “The Way of the Gun,” a dark examination of some of the roles firearms play in modern society. With a string of Freedom of Information Act requests that began last year, he and his small team of researchers pooled 14 years’ worth of Pentagon contract information related to rifles, pistols, machine guns and their associated attachments and ammunition, both for American troops and for their partners and proxies. They then crosschecked the data against other public records. Overton is releasing the data and his analysis today. It covers 412 contracts and merits pause for reflection as the parties to the international Arms Trade Treaty gather this week in Geneva. The treaty, which took effect in 2014 and of which the United States is a signatory, is intended to promote transparency and responsible action in the transfer of conventional arms and to reduce their diversion to unintended hands–exactly what the United States often failed to do in recent wars.
In all, Overton found, the Pentagon provided more than 1.45 million firearms to various security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, including more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols and almost 112,000 machine guns. These transfers formed a collage of firearms of mixed vintage and type: Kalashnikov assault rifles left over from the Cold War; recently manufactured NATO-standard M16s and M4s from American factories; machine guns of Russian and Western lineage; and sniper rifles, shotguns and pistols of varied provenance and caliber, including a large order of Glock semiautomatic pistols, a type of weapon also regularly offered for sale online in Iraq.
Many of the recipients of these weapons became brave and important battlefield allies. But many more did not. Taken together, the weapons were part of a vast and sometimes minimally supervised flow of arms from a superpower to armies and militias often compromised by poor training, desertion, corruption and patterns of human rights abuses. Knowing what we know about many of these forces, it would have been remarkable for them to retain custody of many of their weapons. It is not surprising that they did not.
As an illustration of how haphazard the supervision of this arms distribution often was, last week, five months after being asked by The New York Times for its own tally of small arms issued to partner forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon said it has records for fewer than half the number of firearms in the researchers’ count–about 700,000 in all. This is an amount, Overton noted, that “only accounts for 48 percent of the total small arms supplied by the U.S. government that can be found in open-source government reports.”
This gap between the tallies, the Pentagon said, is partly because at first the United States military was trying to stand up to two governments that were busily fighting wars. “Speed was essential in getting those nations’ security forces armed, equipped and trained to meet these extreme challenges,” Mark Wright, a Pentagon spokesman, wrote in an email. “As a result, lapses in accountability of some of the weapons transferred occurred.”
Why counting weapons, and making a record of serial numbers and recipients, was seen as so time-consuming that it would have slowed down war is not clear. Anyone who has served in a military unit knows that documenting who received what weapon is both a fundamental task and a habit that fits easily into a routine. It takes no more time than issuing a uniform to a soldier or feeding him a meal. But often the Pentagon did not require these steps–although Wright noted that once a weapon is provided to another force, “It is their responsibility to account for that weapon.”
As Overton worked earlier this year on his own exercise in accounting, I asked Nic Marsh, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, to take a crack at the same tally, but using other sources he tracks, most notably export data from the European Union and American military inspector-general reports. Marsh’s back-of-the-envelope total for the two wars also exceeded the Pentagon’s by a large margin. By examining declared arms transfers from Europe, he found official reported totals of more than 465,000 firearms provided by the Pentagon to Afghanistan since 2001. Marsh said the exports included weapons from Albania, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Montenegro, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United States. He also found at least another 628,000 firearms exported to Iraq from 2003 to 2014, from a similar list of nations, plus Bosnia, Estonia, France, Latvia and Turkey. His Iraq count does not include almost 300,000 more firearms that he suspects were moved there for the Pentagon but for which the records are not quite clear. “The number is much larger” than 628,000, he said, “but we are not certain the exact number exported from Bosnia.”
The weapons sent from Europe to Iraq, and the crates of ammunition necessary to keep them fed, filled cargo planes–though Marsh said the available data also does not say how many were directly paid for by the United States, as opposed to those bought by Iraqi ministries with American-donated funds or those donated by countries unloading old stock. This is an important observation, because the latter two categories–state-to-state gifts via American handlers or otherwise and firearms purchased directly by Afghanistan or Iraq–might not be in Overton’s final count. This is one of many reasons to suspect that the 1.45 million tally might understate the real quantity of weapons disbursements during a long run of years when the Pentagon played the role in Afghanistan and Iraq of small-arms provider. “It could be twice as much, as far as we know,” Overton said last Friday, not entirely in jest.
Overton’s analysis also does not account for many weapons issued by the American military to local forces by other means, including the reissue of captured weapons, which was a common and largely undocumented practice.
Adding to the suspicion that the number is even larger, Overton is certain that his tally missed shipments, because the data that the Defense Department made available was incomplete or laden with contradictions that were not readily reconciled. For example, the contracts it released were for more than $6.5 million or $7 million, depending on the year. Overton suspects that this hides many smaller purchases. And the contract data often labeled purchases vaguely, sometimes making it difficult to determine exactly what was bought, much less for whom. The Pentagon’s data, in short, did not declare much of what the Pentagon actually bought.
One point is inarguable: Many of these weapons did not remain long in government possession after arriving in their respective countries. In one of many examples, a 2007 Government Accountability Office report found that 110,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 80,000 pistols bought by the United States for Iraq’s security forces could not be accounted for–more than one firearm for every member of the entire American military force in Iraq at any time during the war. Those documented lapses of accountability were before entire Iraqi divisions simply vanished from the battlefield, as four of them did after the Islamic State seized Mosul and Tikrit in 2014, according to a 2015 Army budget request to buy more firearms for the Iraqi forces to replace what was lost.
These spectacular losses were on top of the more gradual drain that many veterans of the wars watched firsthand–including such scams as Afghan National Army recruits showing up for training and disappearing after rifles were issued. They were leaving, soldiers suspected, to sell their weapons. On the outposts where American troops and Afghan and Iraqi units worked together, the local units were often a fraction of their reported strength and dwindled as ever more national police officers or soldiers disappeared or deserted, vanishing with their firearms. The American arming of Syrian rebels, by both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department, has also been troubled by questions of accountability and outright theft in a war where the battlefield is thick with jihadists aligned with Al Qaeda or fighting under the banner of the Islamic State.
By this year, various internet arms traders, including many on Facebook, were hawking a seemingly unending assortment of weapons of obvious American origin, including the M4 offered by Hussein Mahyawi, whose Facebook profile spoke of his background in interior design. In April, after being approached by The New York Times and reviewing data from Armament Research Services, a private arms-investigation consultancy, Facebook closed many pages in the Middle East that were serving as busy arms bazaars, including pages in Syria and Iraq on which firearms with Pentagon origins accounted for a large fraction of the visible trade. Hussein Mahyawi’s profiled vanished. But many new arms-trading Facebook pages have since cropped up, including, according to their own descriptions, virtual markets operating from Baghdad and Karbala. The trade goes on.
The new data also suggest ways in which ground combat for American troops raged and changed over the past decade and a half. According to its tally, the American military issued contracts potentially worth more than $40 billion for firearms, accessories and ammunition since Sept. 11, including improvements to the ammunition plants required to keep the cartridge production going. Most of these planned expenditures were for American forces, and the particulars tell the story of two wars that did not go as pitched. More than $4 billion worth of contracts was issued for small arms, including pistols, machines guns, assault rifles and sniper rifles, and more than $11 billion worth was issued for associated equipment, from spare machine-gun barrels to sniper-rifle scopes, according to Overton’s count. A much larger amount–nearly $25 billion–was issued for ammunition or upgrades to ammunition plants to keep those firearms supplied. That last figure aligns with what most any veteran of ground combat in Iraq and Afghanistan could tell you–American troops have been involved in a dizzying number of gunfights since 2001, burning through mountains of ammunition along the way.
The data show large purchases of heavy-machine guns and barrels. This is a wink at the shift in many American units from being foot-mobile to vehicular, as grunts buttoned up within armored trucks and needed turret-mounted firepower to defend themselves–a matériel adaptation forced by ambushes and improvised bombs, the cheaply made weapons that wearied the most expensive military in the world.
Now look away from the data for a moment to consider what it does not show. The Pentagon provided Overton with contract information on small arms up to a caliber of 30 millimeters. This meant that certain classes of infantry weapons were not included, among them mortars, shoulder-fired rockets and powerful Mark 19 automatic grenade launchers that were mounted on many American vehicles and also used in outpost defense. That omission means the data offer no insight into a startlingly risky aspect of the Pentagon’s arming of local forces with infantry arms: the wide distribution of anti-armor weapons, including RPG-7s, commonly called rocket-propelled grenades, and recoilless weapons, including the SPG-9. Each of these systems fires high-explosive (and often armor-piercing) projectiles, and each was commonly used by insurgents in attacks. After the opening weeks of each war, the only armor on either battlefield was American or associated with allied and local government units, which made the Pentagon’s practice of providing anti-armor weapons to Afghan and Iraqi security forces puzzling. Why would they need anti-armor weapons when they had no armor to fight? All the while rockets were somehow mysteriously being fired at American convoys and patrols in each war.
All together, the sheer size of the expenditures, the sustained confusion about totals and the multiple pressures eroding the stock combine to create a portrait of the Pentagon’s bungling the already-awkward role it chose for itself–that of state-building arms dealer, a role that routinely led to missions in clear opposition to each other. While fighting two rapidly evolving wars, the American military tried to create and bolster new democracies, governments and political classes; recruit, train and equip security and intelligence forces on short schedule and at outsize scale; repair and secure transportation infrastructure; encourage the spread or restoration of the legal industry and public services; and leave behind something more palatable and sturdy than rule by thugs.
Any one of these efforts would be difficult on its own. But the United States was trying all these things at once while buying and flying into both countries a prodigious quantity of light military weapons and handing them out to local people and outfits it barely knew. The recipients were often manifestly corrupt and sometimes had close ties to the same militias and insurgents who were trying to drive out the United States and make sure its entire nation-building project did not stand. It should not have been a surprise that American units in disaffected provinces and neighborhoods, and their partners, could encounter gunfire at every turn.
The procession of arms purchases and handouts has continued to this day, with others involved, including Iran to its allies in Iraq and various donors to Kurdish fighters. In March, Russia announced that it had given 10,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles to Afghanistan, already one of the most Kalashnikov-saturated places on earth. If an analysis from the United States’ Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or Sigar, is to be believed, Afghanistan did not even need them. In 2014 the inspector general reported that after the United States decided to replace the Afghan Army’s Kalashnikovs with NATO-standard weapons (a boon for the rifles’ manufacturer with a much less obvious value for an already amply armed Afghan force), the Afghan Army ended up with a surplus of more than 83,000 Kalashnikovs. The United States never tried to recover the excess it had created, giving the inspector general’s office grounds for long-term worry. “Without confidence in the Afghan government’s ability to account for or properly dispose of these weapons,” it noted, “Sigar is concerned that they could be obtained by insurgents and pose additional risks to civilians.”
Ultimately, Overton’s tallying of the weapons rollout serves as another reminder of a fundamental institutional disconnect between what the Pentagon expects of its troops and it expects of itself. From their earliest days in uniform, Army and Marine recruits are drilled in the near sanctity of their rifles. They quickly learn that no other item of standard equipment will be more rigidly tracked in the routines of accountability and that inspections will continue throughout their careers. Rifles are to be kept properly lubricated and spotlessly clean. Rifles are to be always at hand. Rifles are to be pointed only where meant to be pointed. Rifles are never to be lost. Everything in the armory and each patrol is to be counted, again and again (and again), so that everyone from private to commander knows that nothing has been misplaced and that the weapons are ready for whatever lies ahead. So thorough does this mentality take hold that more than a few veterans, years after returning to civilian life, can recite the serial numbers of service rifles they carried. Some find themselves involuntarily reaching for rifles throughout the day.
When the military distributed weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq, a different dynamic was in play. Keeping track of the weapons in any reliable fashion–documenting who got what and what went where–was often not a priority. It is impossible today. And so no one knows where many of the weapons are, until they turn up on social media or announce themselves in combat or crime with the crack of incoming fire, a reminder of tens of billions of dollars gone into nations where violence and terrorism continue apace. What to do? If past is precedent, given enough time one of the United States’ solutions will be, once again, to ship in more guns.
Inside the trend that’s casting its spell over the culture
Welcome to the season of the witch. Recently, the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted a Witches Brew film festival, which included the acclaimed new film “The Witch.” Lately it isn’t uncommon to see glossy magazines like Nylon with headlines that start “The Witches’ Guide to…”, while new publications like Sabat, an aesthetically driven magazine that explores contemporary witchcraft, are attracting attention from readers and design snobs alike.
Stores specializing in metaphysical sundries (think ritual candles, blended oils, sacred herbs) are suddenly crowded. In Brooklyn, Witches of Bushwick has evolved from a venue on the underground party circuit to a social collective that celebrates witchcraft as a feminist art and collaborates with fashion companies like Chromat. Of course, for those who prefer whipping up potions at home, several new witch- and occult-themed subscription boxes deliver the magical arts to the doorstep.
Not just witches are enjoying a cultural renaissance, though. All manner of magic is in the air, as the New Age movement’s lighter granola-and-Zen fare has given way to the practice of a more modern mysticism, where conversations about conjuring, personal shamans and powerful potions can be intense as they are ubiquitous. While social media and feminism have brought witchcraft to the fore, the new kaleidoscopic array of spell casting, ritual observing (from pagan holidays to full moons) and crystal charging draws from traditional mysticism, magic and paganism. Served buffet style to an eager audience of open-minded converts, it’s shining a white light on everything from fashion and health to politics.
Last fall the folks at trend-forecasting firm K-Hole–which coined the term “normcore”–looked into the cultural crystal ball to release a paper dubbed “A Report on Doubt.” K-Hole’s new prediction was that logic and “sameness” were becoming relics and people were about to head into the mystic.
Dubbing this new philosophy “Chaos Magic,” a term that’s been bantered about in the postmodern Magick community for decades), K-Hole prophesied, “The fundamental element of magic is the ability to manifest or sublimate things.”
Plus, K-Hole observed, “Chaos Magic lives in the same realm as the cult of positive thinking. But it goes beyond making mood boards of high end apartments you’d like to will into your possession… . You opt into whatever belief system you think will help you reach your intended goals.”
Check social media: A search for #witch on Instagram yields about 2,375,000 posts–whereas one for #kardashian scores only 1,630,000. K-Hole was right, “mysticore” is the new norm.
But why? Consider the simple maxim: In uncertain times, people turn to religion to make sense of the world around them.
Today, however, as traditional Western religion loses some of its appeal, mysticism, witchcraft and magic are stepping in to fill the spiritual void.
The current surge of mystical thought is also directly tied to the sense of personal empowerment that modern feminism works toward. “The witch as an icon is resonating right now because we’ve entered a fourth wave of feminism,” said Pam Grossman, author of What Is a Witch and co-founder of the Occult Humanities Conference at New York University. “We are redefining what power, leadership, beauty and value look like on our own terms. And the witch is the ultimate symbol of female power. Doing witchcraft is a way to connect to that energy, which is so needed right now, as we’re beginning to collectively course correct thousands of years of sexism and oppression.”
A visit to the temple of Instagram (and Tumblr and Snapchat) makes it easy to see how mysticore appeals to the generation of internet autodidacts that grew up on Harry Potter. In social media, the idea of tapping into something ancient is suddenly accessible, personal and highly individualized.
Grossman, for one, doesn’t see mysticore going away anytime soon.
Thursday, August 25, 2016
This 100-Year-Old To-Do List Hack Still Works Like A Charm
By 1918, Charles M. Schwab was one of the richest men in the world.
Schwab (no relation to Charles R. Schwab, founder of the Charles Schwab Corporation) was the president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the largest shipbuilder and the second-largest steel producer in the U.S. at the time. The famous inventor Thomas Edison once referred to Schwab as the “master hustler.” He was constantly seeking an edge over the competition.
Accounts differ as to the date, but according to historian Scott M. Cutlip, it was one day in 1918 that Schwab–in his quest to increase the efficiency of his team and discover better ways to get things done–arranged a meeting with a highly respected productivity consultant named Ivy Lee.
Lee was a successful businessman in his own right and is widely remembered as a pioneer in the field of public relations. As the story goes, Schwab brought Lee into his office and said, “Show me a way to get more things done.”
“Give me 15 minutes with each of your executives,” Lee replied.
“How much will it cost me?” Schwab asked.
“Nothing,” Lee said. “Unless it works. After three months, you can send me a check for whatever you feel it’s worth to you.”
During his 15 minutes with each executive, Lee explained his simple method for achieving peak productivity:
At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks.
Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.
When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.
Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.
Repeat this process every working day.
The strategy sounded simple, but Schwab and his executive team at Bethlehem Steel gave it a try. After three months, Schwab was so delighted with the progress his company had made that he called Lee into his office and wrote him a check for $25,000.
A $25,000 check written in 1918 is the equivalent of a $400,000 check in 2015.
The Ivy Lee Method of prioritizing your to-do list seems stupidly simple. How could something this simple be worth so much?
What makes it so effective?
Ivy Lee’s productivity method utilizes many of the concepts I have written about previously.
Here’s what makes it so effective:
It’s simple enough to actually work. The primary critique of methods like this one is that they are too basic. They don’t account for all of the complexities and nuances of life. What happens if an emergency pops up? What about using the latest technology to our fullest advantage? In my experience, complexity is often a weakness because it makes it harder to get back on track. Yes, emergencies and unexpected distractions will arise. Ignore them as much as possible, deal with them when you must, and get back to your prioritized to-do list as soon as possible. Use simple rules to guide complex behavior.
It forces you to make tough decisions. I don’t believe there is anything magical about Lee’s number of six important tasks per day. It could just as easily be five tasks per day. However, I do think there is something magical about imposing limits upon yourself. I find that the single best thing to do when you have too many ideas (or when you’re overwhelmed by everything you need to get done) is to prune your ideas and trim away everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Constraints can make you better. Lee’s method is similar to Warren Buffet’s 25-5 Rule, which requires you to focus on just five critical tasks and ignore everything else. Basically, if you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything.
It removes the friction of starting. The biggest hurdle to finishing most tasks is starting them. (Getting off the couch can be tough, but once you actually start running, it is much easier to finish your workout.) Lee’s method forces you to decide on your first task the night before you go to work. This strategy has been incredibly useful for me: As a writer, I can waste three or four hours debating what I should write about on a given day. If I decide the night before, however, I can wake up and start writing immediately. It’s simple, but it works. In the beginning, getting started is just as important as succeeding at all.
It requires you to single-task. Modern society loves multitasking. The myth of multitasking is that being busy is synonymous with being better. The exact opposite is true. Having fewer priorities leads to better work. Study world-class experts in nearly any field–athletes, artists, scientists, teachers, CEOs–and you’ll discover one characteristic that runs through all of them: focus. The reason is simple. You can’t be great at one task if you’re constantly dividing your time 10 different ways. Mastery requires focus and consistency.
The bottom line? Do the most important thing first each day. It’s the only productivity trick you need.
Uma Luz no Final do Vale
[Light at the End of the Valley]
Você alguma vez enfrentou uma situação aparentemente sem solução, um beco sem saída das dificuldades, em que tudo parecia perdido? Talvez até esteja enfrentando isso agora, com uma situação aparentemente impossível e prolongada, sem esperança à primeira vista.
Talvez sinta-se completamente só, que ninguém mais enfrenta circunstâncias tão intensas e dolorosas. Acha que está sitiado e sem saída. Não consegue ouvir a voz de Deus ou qualquer manifestação da presença divina.
Algo que poderia ajudar é se lembrar que algumas pessoas bem conhecidas já passaram por isso, ou seja, por grandes adversidades. Não posso lhe dizer que passaram por tudo ilesas, com grande alegria e vitória, porque definitivamente não foi o que aconteceu.
Seguem-se alguns exemplos de personagens na Bíblia que passaram por grandes sofrimentos. Suas histórias nos oferecem vislumbres de tudo que enfrentaram, mas algumas palavras em uma página jamais poderiam transmitir a dimensão das lutas e batalhas travadas.
Todos nós conhecemos a história de Jó, mas não faria mal algum reler os vívidos relatos de suas experiências. Tamanha foi sua angústia e desespero que, amargurado, culpou a Deus por permitir que ele viesse ao mundo. Jó chegou a um ponto em que implorou a Deus para tirar sua vida.
Abraão é outro personagem que passou por uma situação dolorosíssima quando Deus lhe pediu para mandar embora Ismael, o seu primogênito. Além disso, dói sequer pensar na agonia pela qual ele passou diante da possibilidade de sacrificar Isaque, o filho da esperança e da promessa, que daria continuidade à sua linhagem, que cuidaria dele na velhice, o filho que ele tanto amava!
Eu imagino a decepção de Moisés (para não usar uma palavra mais forte), quando o povo pelo qual estava dando a vida se opôs a ele, se tornou vingativo e crítico, apontando erros, o bombardeando com queixas e abusando verbalmente do seu líder. Fizeram acusações graves contra Moisés. Acusaram-no repetidamente de levá-los ao deserto para ali morrerem, até ele chegar a clamar desesperado: “Senhor, o que faço? Essas pessoas estão a ponto de me apedrejar!”
Davi perdeu alguns filhos, o reino, a saúde, e diversas batalhas contra os inimigos. Imagine o tormento, o trauma que sofreu, e por períodos prolongados. Provavelmente conhece alguns dos seus sentimentos de tristeza e angústia traduzidos nos Salmos. Preste atenção a este: “Rejeitará o Senhor para sempre e não tornará a ser favorável? Esqueceu-se Deus de ter misericórdia? Ou encerrou ele as suas misericórdias na sua ira?”[1]Aparentemente Davi se sentia completamente perdido e encurralado.
Jeremias também deve ter ficado extremamente desencorajado. Afinal, a situação dele era terrível, pessoas influentes mancomunavam para matá-lo; foi rejeitado e desprezado, debocharam dele, o puseram na cadeia, jogaram em um poço cheio de lama... Graças a Deus que não tinha água, senão ele teria morrido ali mesmo! De modo que sempre podemos louvar a Deus por alguma coisa. Mas imagino que ele tenha ficado bastante deprimido com toda a situação, uma depressão mais profunda do que o buraco onde foi jogado e a lama na qual chafurdou.
E José! Coitado! Deve ter passado por um desencorajamento colossal e grande depressão. Afinal, foi vendido como escravo pelos próprios irmãos! Isso não é algo que se possa ignorar. E logo que a coisas começaram a clarear, bem, a maioria das pessoas conhece a história. — Ele foi preso injustamente, sem esperança de libertação. Desesperançado. Desamparado. Só impossibilidades.
Pedro sem dúvida estava pronto para abandonar a sua vocação depois que negou Jesus. Pense nisso, imagine os sentimentos que essa atitude provocou. Como Pedro teria coragem de aparecer em público de novo, muito menos inspirar confiança como líder da primeira igreja, depois de negar o Salvador?
Até mesmo Paulo, que nas suas epístolas de encorajamento às igrejas tentou falar principalmente de suas vitórias, às vezes sentiu-se perdido e infeliz. Em 2 Coríntios 4:8 Paulo expressou isso através do conhecido versículo: “Em tudo somos atribulados, mas não angustiados; perplexos, mas não desanimados”, também existe a contrapartida da situação, quando ele diz: “Porque não queremos, irmãos, que ignoreis a tribulação que nos sobreveio na Ásia, pois que fomos sobremaneira agravados mais do que podíamos suportar, de modo tal que até da vida desesperamos.”[2] Isso mostra que podemos continuar tendo fé em Jesus mesmo quando as coisas estão tão ruins que acharíamos melhor nem estar vivos.
Esses são célebres seguidores e servos de Deus. Se eles passaram por tal angústia de espírito no serviço a Ele, por que haveríamos nós de achar estranho os filhos de Deus atualmente terem seus períodos de desolação e até mesmo angústia e desespero, achando que suas vidas não vão dar em nada? Não conseguem ver as recompensas ou promessas, e tudo parece um fracasso.
Todos passam pelo vale do pranto e da lamentação em algum momento. Davi definiu essa situação como o “vale de Baca”, literalmente prantos e lamentações, um vale de lágrimas.[3]
O segredo é passar por isso, e nesse processo, como a Bíblia mostra, “cavar um poço”. Tudo isso pode se tornar um manancial de água fresca.
Nos dois versículos anteriores, Davi afirma que os que louvam a Deus, nEle encontram forças, pois são pessoas que sabem transformar esse vale de lágrimas em um manancial.[4] Existe a tendência de achar que louvar a Deus é algo que fazemos quando nos sentimos aconchegados, felizes e satisfeitos. Mas algo em comum entre todos esses “homens de fé” é que continuaram louvando a Deus apesar de estarem passando pelo vale de Baca, por um grande sofrimento e uma situação dificílima. Essas pessoas estavam em agonia.
Às vezes o sofrimento ou angústia eram tão intensos que só conseguiam clamar ao Senhor por misericórdia. Mas até mesmo isso era um louvor, porque estavam reconhecendo a soberania de Deus e admitindo a sua fé na Sua misericórdia e poder para livrar.
O versículo 6 no original relata um lindo segredo. De acordo com a Strong's Concordance, a frase que os tradutores da versão King James traduziram como “a chuva também enche os tanques”, no original em hebraico pode ser traduzida também como “O Professor (referindo-se a Deus, o Grande Mestre), cobre de bênçãos”. Que interpretação mais linda e acertada!
Portanto, conforme conseguirmos passar pelo vale das lágrimas, do sofrimento e das dificuldades louvando a Deus, poderemos transformar esse vale desolado de angústia em um manancial, e o nosso Professor nos cobrirá de bênçãos.
A água que se torna uma fonte, um manancial refrescante, poderá transformar em alegria a nossa jornada da vida, que, caso contrário, seria triste e sombria. Pode transformar o choro em dança, nos consolar e produzir beleza.[5] E mais adiante, depois de passarmos pelo vale, poderemos olhar para trás com gratidão, percebendo que essas coisas enriqueceram e realçaram nossas vidas. O nosso Grande Professor vai nos envolver com bênçãos valiosas de crescimento espiritual e um entendimento mais profundo do Seu Espírito, bem como um coração que se tornará cada vez mais como o dEle.
Publicado originalmente em setembro de 2012. Adaptado e republicado em agosto de 2016.
[1] Salmo 77:7–9.
[2] 2 Coríntios 1:8 RC.
[3] Salmo 84:6.
[4] Salmo 84:4–5.
[5] Salmo 30:11.
His Anointing
Audio length: 10:33
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“You have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.”—1 John 2:201
I have a mantle just for you that I drape over your shoulders. It is My anointing. It is the presence of My Spirit in you. It is the strength and encouragement that you need. This mantle is available to all who love Me and serve Me, but each one is different, for it must fit the wearer. Each one is different in color, in size, and in tailoring—and yours is tailored just for you!
I clothe all My servants with the mantle of My anointing—not to cover up, but to enhance. You have the mantle of My Spirit, with its power, love, wisdom, and truth. Never forget that you wear it; it is a symbol of My presence and a great honor.
I have chosen you and anointed you, because you have chosen Me. I have ordained you to go and bring forth much fruit, fruit that will remain. You are worthy, because I gave My life for you. I paid the price. You have been ransomed, and your ransom has been paid.
I love you, and I know that you serve Me because you love Me. What can separate you from this love? Nothing. Even when you are tempted or when you stumble and fall, you will always find My way of escape, and the mantle of My Spirit will always guide and protect you.
Strength in quietness
“For thus the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, has said, ‘In repentance and rest you will be saved, In quietness and trust is your strength.’”—Isaiah 30:152
You cannot receive the full power, love, and wisdom that you need unless you take time in quietness, seeking Me and praising Me. There are always so many things to be done, and it is a constant temptation to hurry, to push ahead, to accomplish. But I say to you, in quietness and confidence will be your strength. For it is in quietness that you will hear the still, small voice of God speaking to you, saying, “This is the way, walk ye in it.”
Great power, wisdom, and love can be found in quietness, in My peace that surpasses all understanding. If you could see the spiritual gifts that I have for you and the strength that I can empower you with! If you could see tangibly, with your eyes, the answers that I have for you and the anointing of My Spirit upon you, you would have greater understanding and you would not fail to take the time to stop and be guided by My still, small voice.
So often your earthly vision is clouded and all that you can see is that there is so much to do, and you feel compelled to labor and labor some more. But I have asked you to labor to enter into My rest. As you do so, I will strengthen, anoint, empower, and guide you.
It is at those times that I instruct and guide you, and it is in those quiet moments when you access the wisdom available to you through My Word. So don’t neglect to come to Me in quietness, and in so doing, receive all that I have for you. As you do so, you will find that your life, your relationships, your job and your ministry will flow so much more smoothly! I can anoint you with the wisdom that you seek and the strength that you need by My Spirit.
The anointing of great faith
“Through Christ you have come to trust in God. And you have placed your faith and hope in God because he raised Christ from the dead and gave him great glory.”—1 Peter 1:213
I honor you with the high calling of discipleship. I honor you with the blessing of great faith in Me. I anoint you with the gift of great faith that trusts when it’s difficult to trust. Faith that keeps on believing when all seems to go wrong. Faith that trusts in the midst of adversity, when opposition surrounds you. Faith that trusts even though you seem to stand alone. Faith that trusts when your heart is sinking and it aches within you. Faith that trusts when you do not understand, and when you cannot feel. Faith that believes and looks on in the face of discouragement. Faith that is sturdy and stout and will not be moved by doubt. Faith that hopes. Faith that believes in Me. Faith that stands on My Word. Faith that marches on and endures all things, knowing that I will not fail and cannot fail.
This gift of faith is faith that will move mountains, and will stand when all else fails, faith that will change the world and conquer the minds and hearts of men. This anointing of faith that I give to you is the victory that will overcome the world.
Do not fear for the times of testing that tumble about you. Know that through these I am able to give you a great gift of faith. This great faith is a work of My hand; it is My gift to you. It descends from above as you simply place your trust in Me, regardless of the circumstances you face.
I am working and I will come alive within you as you walk on and simply trust. Be encouraged, for you will know Me in ways that you have never known before. Rest now. Have peace. I am near! Eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, the things that I have prepared for you who accept this gift of faith that I freely give to all who ask.
Establishing the connection
“I own the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird on the mountains, and all the animals of the field are mine. … All the world is mine and everything in it. Make thankfulness your sacrifice to God, and keep the vows you made to the Most High. Then call on me when you are in trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will give me glory.”—Psalm 50:10–12, 14–154As the master of the universe, all true riches and abundance belong to Me. I have in My hands all that you ask for, all that you seek, and all that you strive for.
I am willing and able to bless you in the ways that you seek, but I can only fully bless you and supply for you when you place your trust in Me and have faith in My will and plan for your life. As you do your part to place your trust fully in Me, I will never fail to guide and keep you, and give you the perseverance and strength to overcome everything you meet throughout your life journey.
Take the time to be like Mary, who was content to sit at My feet, listen to My words, and spend time with Me. Then you will find the strength for your work, and it will be blessed. You will reap dividends of faith and peace that will give you the strength to travel down the path of My will.
The secret is found in spending time with Me—time in My Word, time to be strengthened, to have your faith renewed and your connection and link with Me established. That is the secret to overcoming and success.
Published on Anchor August 2016. Read by Jerry Paladino.
Music by John Listen. http://anchor.tfionline.com/post/his-anointing/
1 ESV.
2 NASB.
3 NLT.
4 NLT.
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Light at the End of the Valley
Audio length: 9:38
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Have you ever faced something that seemed totally hopeless; you felt like there wasn’t any way out of your difficulties and everything looked lost? Or maybe you’re in one of those places right now where the situation seems impossible and it looks like it’s going to go on and on, and there’s no hope in sight.
Maybe you seem all alone and feel like no one else is going through such intense and painful circumstances, like you’re encircled on all sides with no place to run. You can’t seem to hear God speak to you, and nothing seems to indicate that He’s there.
Maybe it would help to remember that there have been some pretty well-known people who have felt the same way—those who experienced great adversity. If you think I’m going to tell you that they slid by basically unscathed with great joy and victory in their hearts, no, I’m not, because that’s not what happened.
Here are a few examples of men in the Bible who suffered incredibly. We are given little glimpses into what they went through, but a few words on a page can scarcely convey the enormity of the struggles and battles that they had to fight.
We all know about Job. It wouldn’t hurt to go back and read the very vivid accounts of what he went through. He was in such anguish and distress that he bitterly blamed God for even letting him be born. He was at the point where he begged God to end his life.
Abraham is another one who could hardly bear the excruciating pain when God asked him to send away his firstborn son, Ishmael. It’s painful to even think about the indescribable agony he went through when he was faced with sacrificing Isaac, his son of hope, his son of promise, the one to carry on the family line, the one to support them in their old age, and the one he loved so very dearly.
I imagine Moses got pretty disheartened (to put it mildly) when the people he was giving his life to help turned against him and became vindictive and critical, constantly finding fault and barraging him with their grievances and assailing him with their verbal abuse. They leveled serious charges against him, repeatedly accusing him of bringing them into the wilderness to kill them, until at one point he cried out to God desperately, saying, “What am I going to do, Lord? These people are getting ready to stone me.”
David lost some of his sons, he lost his kingdom, he lost his health, and he lost a whole series of battles against his enemies. It’s hard to imagine the torment and trauma he must have endured for long periods. His feelings of woe and despair spilled over into his writings in Psalms. Listen to this one: “Will the Lord turn away from us forever? And isn’t He going to be kind to us any longer? Is His unfailing love gone permanently? Has His word come to nothing? Has He forgotten to be compassionate? Is He withholding His tender mercies because He’s angry with us?”1 It sounds like he was at the end of his rope.
I think Jeremiah must have felt deeply discouraged. It could hardly get any worse than this: Very influential people were plotting to kill him. He was rejected, he was mocked and despised, he was thrown in jail, and he was dumped into a well that had no water in it, only deep mud into which he sank.—Thank God, or that would have been the end of him! So there are always things to praise God for. But I have a feeling he must have gone through some major depression over all that, deeper than the pit he'd been thrown into and the mud he was mired in.
And Joseph! Poor Joseph! He must have faced intense discouragement and times of depression. He was sold into slavery, and then as soon as things began to look up, as most of you know, he was unjustly thrown into prison with no hope of getting out. Hopeless. Helpless. Impossible.
Peter was evidently ready to give up his calling after he denied Jesus. Think about what kind of feelings that must have brought with it. Having denied knowing his own Savior, not once, but three times, how could he ever want to show his face in public again, much less be trusted as a leader of the early church?
Even Paul, who mostly tried to present his victories in his letters of encouragement to the churches, felt hopeless and despondent at times. In 2 Corinthians 4:8 Paul voiced the well-known verse, “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed. We are perplexed, but not in despair,” and yet in the same epistle, he also said, “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life.”2It just shows that we can still have faith in Jesus even when things are so bad that it seems like it would be better not to even be alive.
These men are some of God’s greats. If they passed through such terrible anguish of spirit in their lives for God, why should we think it strange that we, as God’s children today, have our times of desolation and even despair when we can’t see anything good coming from our lives? We can’t see the rewards. We can’t always see the fulfillment of His promises. It often just looks like failure.
Everyone goes through the valley of weeping and mourning at some point. David described it as the “valley of Baca,” meaning literally weeping, lamentations—a vale of tears.3
The key is that we go through it, and as we do, we can, as the Bible puts it, “make it a well.” It can become a place of refreshing springs.
In the previous two verses, David states that those who are praising God find their strength in Him. In their hearts are the ways of those who, passing through this valley of tears, make it a well.4 We can tend to equate praising God with something we do when we feel all warm and happy and content, but one thing that all these “men of faith” have in common is that they continued to praise God through their valleys of Baca, their misery and suffering. They were in agony.
Sometimes they were enduring such intense suffering or despair that all they could do was cry out for the Lord’s mercy, but even that was a praise because it was acknowledging God’s total control and their faith in His mercy and power to deliver.
Verse 6 in the original text then goes on to tell us a beautiful secret. According toStrong's Concordance, the phrase that the King James translators translated as “the rain also filleth the pools” in the original Hebrew can also be translated as “The Teacher (referring to God, the Great Teacher) overshadows with blessings.” What a beautiful interpretation, and how fitting it is.
So as we pass through the valley of tears and suffering and hardships, yet still praising Him, we can make that desolate valley of suffering into a spring of refreshing, and our Teacher overshadows us with blessings.
The water that becomes a fountain of refreshing can turn our journey of life—that would otherwise be gloomy and sad—into joy; turn our mourning into dancing, and give us comfort and beauty.5 And later when we’ve come through the valley, we can look back with gratitude, realizing that these things have given enrichment and enhancement to our lives. Our Great Teacher will have enveloped us with priceless blessings of spiritual growth and a deeper understanding of Himself, and a heart that comes to resemble His own more and more.
Originally published September 2012. Adapted and republished August 2016.
Read by Debra Lee. http://anchor.tfionline.com/post/light-end-valley/
1 Psalm 77:7–9.
2 2 Corinthians 1:8 NIV.
3 Psalm 84:6.
4 Psalm 84:4–5.
5 Psalm 30:11.
