Danger, Handle with Care! by Allen Randolph

http://www.allenrandolph.com/?tag=anger 

“Don’t sin by letting anger control you.” Ephesians 4:26 NLT

“Anger, when counter balanced by virtues of God’s character, can remain righteous in its expression.”

My thoughts today are about “danger, handle with care.”

Anger is one of those emotions that should have a sign on it,“Danger. Handle with care!” Anger is best in the smallest of doses, and managed with the greatest of care and caution. It is an emotion that is not necessarily sinful, but even God places some wise restrictions on it. “Don’t let the sun go down while you are still angry,” and then Scripture tells you why, “for anger gives a mighty foothold to the devil.” Ephesians 4:26-27. Anger unchecked ruins friendships, families, and lives.

It is not the emotion itself that is wrong, but the origin of anger at that moment and your manner of expressing it. Anger can be a doorway through which the worst of your flesh proudly storms through. Anger is unrighteous that is inconsistent with God’s nature and ways, does not serve God’s purpose for your life or others’, and yields control of your passion, words, and actions to something other than the Holy Spirit within you. All violence begins as anger.

God is described in the Bible as being angry. He was angry when Israel turned from God to idols. But know this about God: “His anger is but for a moment; His favor is for life.” Psalm 30:5. “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy.” Psalm 103:8. “. . full of compassion, slow to anger.” Psalm 145:8. “. . slow to anger, and of great kindness; and He relents from doing harm.” Joel 2:13.

When anger is counter balanced by such virtues of God’s character, it will remain righteous in its cause and expression. That’s anger you can trust. Righteous anger is the emotion that is in harmony with God’s emotion about something. There are many things that should make good people righteously angry. You should not be passive about wrongdoing when the powerful take advantage of the weak, when the rich abuse the poor, when the mean prey on the helpless. Those things make God righteously angry, and should arouse a passion for fairness and righteousness in you.

Sadly, most of the anger with which you contend is not about God or others, but is aroused when your will has been denied and your rights have been ignored. In that regard, this is God’s counsel: “My dear brothers and sisters, be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Your anger can never make things right in God’s sight.” James 1:19. That’s good and practical advice.

That works! I have found that when I take time to listen, really listen first, and I reserve my words longer than I would like, anger is more readily managed productively.

Solomon said, “It is better to be patient than powerful; it is better to have self-control than to conquer a city.” Proverbs 16:32. Nothing could be more true or practical than that. Remember the danger, and handle with care.

My prayer is that you will rule your spirit and handle your passions with care.

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"A man´s wisdom gives him patience... to overlook an offense." Proverbs 19:11 By Allen Randolph

http://www.allenrandolph.com/?tag=anger

“A man’s wisdom gives him patience . . to overlook an offense.” Proverbs 19:11 NIV

“The true stature of a person may best be reflected in the size of offense they overlook.”

My thoughts today are about “expiration dates.”

Though unintentional, it seems people often overlook an appointment, a promise, a birthday, an anniversary, or even fail to notice a favor or kindness shown them, yet most of us find it incredibly difficult to overlook offenses. They are just so, well, offensive! The Bible warned you, “It is impossible that no offenses should come . . behold, how great a matter a little fire kindles.” Luke17:1 NKJV/James 3:5 KJV.

Yes, they are going to happen, most often over small things that only seem large at the moment. A lot of people are hurting;hurting people hurt other people. The issue is not whether offenses will happen to you, but when. The issue is not what happened to you; the issue is how you respond.

Most offenses should just be overlooked, many quietly forgiven, some ignored, a few confronted; all must be resolved – some unilaterally, some mutually. “A man’s wisdom gives him patience; it is to his glory to overlook an offense.” Proverbs 19:11 NIV. I think the true stature of a person may be best reflected in the size of offense they are willing to overlook.

My Dad described some people as, “wearing their feelings on their sleeve.” My Dad, a pastor, was describing people quick to be hurt but slow to heal, whose sensitivity was on the surface, but their hurts went deep and lodged there. Solomon observed such souls when he wrote, “It’s harder to make amends with an offended friend than to capture a fortified city. Arguments separate friends like a gate locked with iron bars.” Proverbs 18:19 NLT. The longer you nurse the offense, the harder the solution.

James, the brother of Jesus, gave this wise, practical advice: “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Your anger can never make things right in God’s sight.” James 1:19-20 NLT. However right you feel you are to feel the way you do, your hurt and anger is wrong if not righteously and promptly resolved. The Bible says, “In your anger do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.” Ephesians 4:26-27 NIV. Don’t let hurts and offenses settle in your heart and sour your spirit.

Ever notice how many things you use every day come with an expiration date? Discount coupons, special sales events, food and dairy products, parking meters, and even life itself. Offenses, and the emotions they stir, should have an expiration date. Deal with them!

Take your hurt and feelings of offense to God first. Remember that you also have often been an offender. Accept healing; seek a solution, ask for wisdom; obey His direction. Your goal mustalways be healing, restoration, and relationship, not settling who’s right and wrong. Deal with the offense with self-examination and forgiveness, or deal with the offender with humility and honesty, or deal with yourself through prayer and submission to God’s grace – or ultimately God will have to deal with you!

My prayer for you today is that you keep a big heart for ready forgiveness.

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Humildade: Porta para a Bêncão

Compilação

A humildade é como um ímã que atrai favor e bênçãos. Quanto mais humilde você é, mais magnetizado se torna! O espírito humilde atrai honra, favor e bênção, coisas que o espírito de orgulho repele.

Quando você se coloca em uma posição humilde, o Espírito Santo carrega o peso. A humildade permite que Deus aja, é a chave para mais autoridade espiritual. Mais humildade = mais autoridade.

Para ver Deus operar de maneiras mais poderosas, basta deixá-lO agir e não O atrapalhar. Como? Humildade! Dobrar os joelhos é a maneira de não atrapalhar Deus! Em outras palavras, a humildade é a melhor maneira de sair da frente e empoderar Deus para fazer o que Ele deseja!

Deus pode realizar mais em um dia do que você em mil anos, mas é preciso uma postura de humildade. É preciso permanecer humilde e faminto no espírito. Ficar de joelhos é a maneira mais garantida, rápida e real de cumprir o que Deus deseja para a sua vida.

Caia de joelhos!—Mark Batterson

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Deus desce ao humilde assim como as águas escorrem pelos montes na direção dos vales.—Tikhon

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Não há espaço para Deus na pessoa que se sente completa consigo mesma.—Martin Buber

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Sendo humilde desfruta das bênçãos do Meu amor, alegria, paz, fé, paciência, entendimento, e dos frutos do Meu Espírito. Abençoa a sua interação com outros, lima as arestas, e torna a sua relação Comigo mais viva e real, porque entende que é principalmente a Minha bênção na sua vida que lhe dá felicidade, e não algo que possa fazer por conta própria.—Jesus, falando em profecia.

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A parábola do fariseu e do publicano nos oferece um sermão conciso sobre humildade e louvor a si mesmo. O Fariseu, convencido, cheio de si, enxergando apenas as suas próprias obras, tecia elogios para si mesmo diante de Deus, desprezando o pobre publicado a pouca distância. Ele exalta a si mesmo, louva as suas próprias obras, é egocêntrico e sai dali sem ser justificado, pelo contrário, condenado e rejeitado por Deus.

O publicano, por outro lado, não reconhece nada de bom na sua pessoa… nem se atreve a olhar para o Céu, mas, com o semblante triste, bate no peito clamando, “Deus, tem misericórdia de mim, que sou pecador”.

O nosso Senhor então nos oferece de maneira exata a sequência da história desses dois, um totalmente sem humildade, e o outro nela mergulhado... humilde a seus próprios olhos.

“Digo-lhe, este homem voltou para casa justificado; por todo o que se exaltar será humilhado, e o que se humilhar será exaltado.”[1]

Deus valoriza muitíssimo a humildade no seu coração. É bom revestir-se de humildade, como se fosse um traje. Está escrito, “Deus resiste ao soberbo, mas dá graça ao humilde.”[2] A humildade de coração é que aproxima a pessoa que ora de Deus. O que faz a oração alçar voo é a humildade de coração. Orgulho, exaltar-se a si mesmo e considerar-se superior, na realidade fecham a porta da oração. Aquele que se aproxima de Deus deve fazê-lo sem pensar em si. Não pode inflar-se com presunção, supervalorizando suas virtudes e boas obras.

A humildade é uma graça cristã incomum e muito valiosa nos átrios do Céu, inerente à oração eficaz. Quando outras qualidades falham, ela viabiliza o acesso a Deus. Ela se desenha por completo apenas por meio do nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo. Nos ensinamentos do Senhor a humildade é um elemento bastante importante no Seu sistema de religião, e uma característica do Seu caráter. Por isso, seria inapropriado deixá-la fora desta lição de oração, não estaria de acordo com o Seu caráter nem com o seu sistema religioso.

Felizes aqueles que não têm justiça própria para rogar a Deus e nenhuma bondade própria da qual se gabar. A humildade floresce no solo de um verdadeiro e profundo senso do seu pecado e incapacidade. Em nenhuma situação a humildade avança tão rápido nem reluz com tanto fulgor como quando admite pecado e confirma confiança e graça. “Eu sou o maior dos pecadores, mas Jesus morreu por mim.” Essa é a base da oração, da humildade, da modéstia, aparentemente afastado, mas, na realidade, aproximado pelo sangue do nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo. Deus habita nos lugares baixos, os quais Ele exalta para a alma que ora.

A humildade é um requisito indispensável da verdadeira oração. Deve ser uma qualidade, uma característica da oração. A humildade deveria ser como a luz do sol na vida de quem ora. A oração não tem início, fim, nem valor sem a humildade. Assim como o barco é construído para o mar, também a oração é específica para a humildade, e vice-versa.

A humildade não é uma abstração do eu, nem ignora o pensar em si, mas resulta do buscar a Deus e a Sua bondade. Verdadeira nobreza e grandiosidade residem na humildade, uma condição que conhece e respeita as inestimáveis riquezas da cruz, e as humilhações que Jesus sofreu.

A humildade vai muito além da ausência de vaidade e orgulho. É uma qualidade, algo positivo, uma força que energiza a oração. A humildade brota de uma atitude humilde em relação a si e do que se pensa merecer. O Fariseu, apesar de estudado e de estar acostumado a orar, não orou, porque proferiu palavras sem humildade. O publicano orou, mesmo sendo rejeitado pelas pessoas e sem receber encorajamento dos membros da igreja, porque orou em humildade. A humildade está relacionada a sentir-se menos, porque somos menos. Humildade é entender que nada merecemos, porque não merecemos mesmo, é nos sentirmos e declararmos pecadores, porque essa é a nossa condição. Dobrar os joelhos diante de Deus é uma atitude que nos vêm com a oração, porque a ela está relacionada.

Sem Cristo não existe humildade. Sem humildade não existe oração. Para aprender a arte de orar é preciso aprender a ser humilde.—E. M. Bounds

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Os sacrifícios para Deus são o espírito quebrantado; a um coração quebrantado e contrito não desprezarás, ó Deus.[3]

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Ainda que o Senhor é excelso, atenta para o humilde; mas ao soberbo, conhece-o de longe.[4]

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Porque assim diz o alto e o sublime, que habita na eternidade e cujo nome é santo. Em um alto e santo lugar habito, e também com o contrito e abatido de espírito, para vivificar o espírito dos abatidos e para vivificar o coração dos contritos.”[5]

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O galardão da humildade e o temor do Senhor são riquezas, e honra, e vida.[6]

Publicado no Âncora em julho de 2012.
Tradução Hebe Rondon Flandoli. Revisão Denise Oliveira.


[1] Lucas 18:14.

[2] Tiago 4:6.

[3] Salmo 51:17.

[4] Salmo 138:6.

[5] Isaias 57:15 .

[6] Provérbios 22:4.

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Holy Holes

By David Brandt Berg

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Where would we be without holes? Where would people be without seven holes in their heads? If it weren’t for your seven holes, you couldn’t eat or taste or smell or hear orsee or even breathe. And actually, you’ve got lots more holes than that, because every little pore in your skin is a hole. Without those little pores, your skin couldn’t breathe or sweat. You wouldn’t have any hair, either, because every hair grows in a little hole called a follicle.

Holes are almost an endless subject, because there are so many of them. It seems likeeverything is composed of holes. Your whole body is full of holes. Your blood vessels are holes, your lungs are holes, and your heart’s got big holes in it for the blood to flow in and out. Your navel is a hole, without which you wouldn’t have been able to be a baby. We’re really full of holes.

The whole world is so full of holes. If it weren’t for holes, nobody could even live.There wouldn’t be any pretty trees and flowers and vegetables and fruits, because they all grow in holes in the ground and they’re full of holes. The sap in the trees flows through holes, and the juice in the leaves flows through holes. Almost everything is made of holes—mostly holes with just a little bit of something around them.

What is a house but a hole that you live in? And if your house didn’t have holes for windows, you couldn’t look out or let the light and the air in. It would be all dark. There wouldn’t be any taps for water, and you’d get awful thirsty. And there couldn’t be any sink or toilet, so you couldn’t even go to the toilet or wash the dishes.

There wouldn’t be any stoves to cook the food, because the gas goes through little pipes with holes in them. And worst of all, the house wouldn’t even have a door, so you couldn’t get into it in the first place, or if you were inside, you couldn’t get out.

How many holes can you think of that are useful holes?

So you should never feel bad if you feel like nothing or a big zero, because the world is full of holes, and there wouldn’t be any world if it weren’t for holes! Just think, if it weren’t for a hole, a 10 would only be a 1. And if you add another hole or zero, it makes the one a100. And if you add another zero hole, it makes it a thousand. Add three more holes, and it makes a million. So just a little old one can be a million if you just add six holes—six nothings, six zeros—because a zero’s nothing but a hole with a line around it. But it takes lots of zeros to make millions.

All circles are holes, and the whole world is made of circles called atoms made of more circles called neutrons, electrons, and protons, which are nothing but electricity. Nobody knows what electricity is but God. Nobody’s ever seen it, and they don’t even know what it looks like, because it’s invisible. It’s just plain energy—nothing that’s something.

In fact, the earth is a hollow sphere full of fire, and every now and then the fire comes out through holes called volcanoes. All the seas are great big holes in the ground full of water, and all the lakes and springs and the wells are holes too. We get coal out of holes in the ground called mines, and diamonds and jewels and all kinds of minerals, like gold and silver and copper and iron and tin, and all these useful and valuable things which we wouldn’t have if it weren’t for holes.

The whole world is a great big ball of holes. In fact, almost everything is mostly made up of nothing. The whole universe is mostly space, mostly nothing but a great big hole, except for a few tiny particles called planets and stars, suns and moons and things like that. But they’re very, very small things compared to all that nothing called space, which is so big we don’t even know where it all ends. So much nothing!

God must like holes, He made so many of them—and He likes to fill them all. The Bible says God even hung the world on nothing.1 In fact, He says He made it out of nothing,2 and He “calls things that are not as though they were.”3 So don’t feel bad if youfeel like nothing, because there wouldn’t be anything without nothing.

In fact, with God, nothing is impossible!4 If you can believe in God, everything is possible, because He makes everything out of nothing—even you and me.5 We’re nothing, and we’re impossible except for God. He takes our nothing and makes it something. Our nothing can be anything with God! Nothings aren’t anything without God, because He’s like the circle around our nothing that makes it something. With God all around you, even your nothing can be something. In fact, you can be almost anything, because God makes everything out of nothing—nothing surrounded by Him.

So surround yourself with God’s something and you can become a very useful and important little hole—nothing surrounded by God, out of which He made everything. There are square holes and round holes, all kinds of holes, and it takes all kinds of pegs to fill them. So whatever kind of peg you are, there’s a hole somewhere where you’ll fit. And no matter what kind of hole you are, God’s got you pegged! There’s something for you somewhere—whether you’re round or square.

There’s no end to nothing. There’s always an end to something, but there’s never an end to nothing. So if you’ll just be nothing, you can even be bigger than something.

The poet Emily Dickinson6 once wrote:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
Then there is a pair of us!
They'd banish us, if they knew.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!7

Are you a hole? Then God’s got something for you. Folks that aren’t holes can’t have anything, because they already think they’re something when they’re really nothing. The Bible says, “He has satisfied the hungry heart, but the rich He has sent empty away.”8 So be glad you’re a hole, so God can make something out of nothing and fill you up.

God loves holes, and He made lots of holes so He could fill them up. So if you’re a hole, God can fill you up. If you’re nothing, you can be full of something. You see, if a hole is so full already, God can’t put anything in it. Everything falls out when He tries to put something in it, because it’s already so full of something that it can’t hold anything more.

And you know what love is? It’s a hole that needs to be filled, plus something to fill it with, like you and me and Jesus.

Jesus even called Himself a hole: the door.9 He said, I am the door! I am the hole you have to get through to get into My house, and I am the only hole you can get through, and there isn’t any other hole you can go through and get in but by Me.10

Did you know that God is very holy? So let’s be holy too, okay? If you’re unholy, it’s because you’re not holey enough. If you’re not a hole, you can’t hold or behold or have theHoly Spirit. So let’s all be holes and holy, and then we’ll all be holy holes.

Are you one of God’s holes full of nothing so He can fill you with something? Let’s all be holy holes for His Holiness—Jesus. “Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty.” Amen? An “amen” is a hole full of praise for a hole full of Jesus, and that’s the whole idea.

Originally published April 1973. Updated and republished July 2012.
Read by Simon Peterson.


1 Job 26:7.

2 Genesis 1; Hebrews 11:3.

3 Romans 4:17.

4 Luke 1:37.

5 Mark 9:23.

6 1830–1886.

7 Adapted.

8 Luke 1:53.

9 John 10:9.

10 John 14:6.

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Portugal Decriminalized All Drugs Eleven Years Ago And The Results Are Staggering!

Samuel Blackstone, Business Insider, Jul. 17, 2012

On July 1st, 2001, Portugal decriminalized every imaginable drug, from marijuana, to cocaine, to heroin. Some thought Lisbon would become a drug tourist haven, others predicted usage rates among youths to surge.

Eleven years later, it turns out they were both wrong.

Over a decade has passed since Portugal changed its philosophy from labeling drug users as criminals to labeling them as people affected by a disease. This time lapse has allowed statistics to develop and in time, has made Portugal an example to follow.

First, some clarification.

Portugal’s move to decriminalize does not mean people can carry around, use, and sell drugs free from police interference. That would be legalization. Rather, all drugs are “decriminalized,” meaning drug possession, distribution, and use is still illegal. While distribution and trafficking is still a criminal offense, possession and use is moved out of criminal courts and into a special court where each offender’s unique situation is judged by legal experts, psychologists, and social workers. Treatment and further action is decided in these courts, where addicts and drug use is treated as a public health service rather than referring it to the justice system (like the U.S.), reports Fox News.

The resulting effect: a drastic reduction in addicts, with Portuguese officials and reports highlighting that this number, at 100,000 before the new policy was enacted, has been halved in the following ten years. Portugal’s drug usage rates are now among the lowest of EU member states, according to the same report.

One more outcome: a lot less sick people. Drug related diseases including STDs and overdoses have been reduced even more than usage rates, which experts believe is the result of the government offering treatment with no threat of legal ramifications to addicts.

While this policy is by no means news, the statistics and figures, which take years to develop and subsequently depict the effects of the change, seem to be worth noting. In a country like America, which may take the philosophy of criminalization a bit far (more than half of America’s federal inmates are in prison on drug convictions), other alternatives must, and to a small degree, are being discussed.

For policymakers or people simply interested in this topic, cases like Portugal are a great place to start.

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Living Out Your Worldview!

http://rzim.vo.llnwd.net/o43/MP3/JT/LO/JT20120423.mp3

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Sacrilegious Saints

By Hugh Halter

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He loves the smell of warm dog breath and milk.

Bosco is now 42 years of age. An atheist. A really benevolent one, who travels the globe making documentaries to expose homelessness, hunger, and horrific exploitation of people.

Thirty-seven years earlier, at the age of 5, Bosco found himself hiding under a table in his family’s small Northern Irish cottage, desperately trying to keep his dog quiet by distracting him with a bowl of milk. He was hiding under the table because a band of IRA henchmen were coming to kill his father, who was a rival kingpin in the resistance.

In that moment Bosco prayed a sincere prayer that God would spare his father’s life. Two seconds went by and then he heard the gunshot and saw his father fall to the ground. He still remembers the aroma of the puppy and the milk. He also remembers seeing his father’s killer two weeks later in mass, singing hymns and bowing his head in prayer. That day, he decided there was no God.

How do I know Bosco? I just performed a marriage between him and his fiancée. Terri, a struggling God-seeker, was trying to give me some context for his life. “Bosco has been the most gentle, kind, and respectful man I’ve ever known. I do hope that someday as I try to figure God out, he may be more open with me. Deb told me that you would be a good person for him to meet, and I really appreciate you doing our wedding ceremony.”

I started with this story because a person’s story really matters to God. He doesn’t categorize people as atheists, agnostics, good Christians or bad Christians, pagans or saints. He simply sees people where they are and understands the disorientation or spiritual vertigo people fight through, especially the vertigo caused by religion and religious people.

This is why the incarnation of Christ happened. In John 1:14, it says, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

We overspiritualize or theologize why God came to earth through His son, but the real reason is that He knew that men and women were unable to understand, see, or perceive His true glory unless He came and lived among us as the least religious person they would have ever met.

That was the sacrilegious beauty of Jesus.

He hung with the wrong people, He was kind to the sinners, He embraced those who were sick, He allowed the children to come to Him, and His disciples were even worse. They didn’t wash their hands correctly, they ate, played, and worked on the Sabbath, and He constantly deconstructed their religious systems of temple and priest-focused faith. He was the holiest man they had seen, but for sure He was eccentrically irreligious … even sacrilegious!

Sacrilege may sound bad, but it simply means to challenge what others think is religious in order to expose the true God. And out of all the things Jesus did as an “incarnated God-man,” the most sacrilegious aspect of His life was how He dignified each person's story.

Now, this may be off the grid for many of you, but just 30 minutes before the ceremony I called Bosco over to my jeep and drove him off the “alcohol-free church premises,” parked the car, and took a small flask of Jameson Irish Whiskey from my glove box. As I handed it to him, he got teary-eyed and said, “I can’t believe you did this for me. I have flown my friends from all over the country to come celebrate my wedding, but the Christians here forbid me from having any alcohol. I have been embarrassed all day.

“Why have you as the pastor gotten me this gift?” I replied, “Because God knows your story and He seemed to be fine with letting people drink at weddings.”

He took a swig, then I took a swig, and without a gap in time, he put his arm around me and said an Irish blessing over me. Then I prayed an Irish prayer over him.

“So why don’t you finish the shot,” I asked. As he screwed the lid back on, he said, “because I want to share the rest with my friends. Thanks for honoring me and my friends today.”

It was a good moment, a God moment, and he knew his story mattered to me and maybe he began to see God differently.

Incarnation calls you to care about everyone’s story. The incarnational life is about listening with a specific ear to those things that have disoriented a person’s heart and mind. And as you learn to lay down trite generalizations, debilitating dogma, useless legalism, and out-of-context Bible verses, you’ll understand the true context of a person’s heart and find the most strangely appropriate ways of helping people move toward Jesus.

Sacrilege is the key to your friends finding God, and if you will be a disciple of Jesus and make it your life’s goal to be as irreligious, and even sacrilegious, you may find that all the cold, black-and-white world of Christianity explodes with colors of the kingdom.

Fromhttp://www.catalystspace.com/content/read/sacrilegious_saints_what_the_world_needs_and_what_god_wants_us_to_become/.
Published on Anchor July 2012. Read by Stephen Larriva.

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The Lily-Pad Strategy

By David Vine, Antiwar.com, July 15, 2012

The first thing I saw last month when I walked into the belly of the dark grey C-17 Air Force cargo plane was a void—something missing. A missing left arm, to be exact, severed at the shoulder, temporarily patched and held together. Thick, pale flesh, flecked with bright red at the edges. It looked like meat sliced open. The face and what remained of the rest of the man were obscured by blankets, an American flag quilt, and a jumble of tubes and tape, wires, drip bags, and medical monitors.

That man and two other critically wounded soldiers—one with two stumps where legs had been, the other missing a leg below the thigh—were intubated, unconscious, and lying on stretchers hooked to the walls of the plane that had just landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A tattoo on the soldier’s remaining arm read, “DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR.”

I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. “A lot from the Horn of Africa,” he added. “You don’t really hear about that in the media.”

“Where in Africa?” I asked. He said he didn’t know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. “A lot out of Djibouti,” he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main U.S. military base in Africa, but from “elsewhere” in the region, too.

Since the “Black Hawk Down” deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago, we’ve heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in Africa (other than a strange report last week about three special operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by U.S. military sources as “Moroccan prostitutes,” in a mysterious car accident in Mali). The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in 21st-century U.S. military strategy.

These casualties are likely to be the vanguard of growing numbers of wounded troops coming from places far removed from Afghanistan or Iraq. They reflect the increased use of relatively small bases like Camp Lemonnier, which military planners see as a model for future U.S. bases “scattered,” as one academic explains, “across regions in which the United States has previously not maintained a military presence.”

Disappearing are the days when Ramstein was the signature U.S. base, an American-town-sized behemoth filled with thousands or tens of thousands of Americans, PXs, Pizza Huts, and other amenities of home. But don’t for a second think that the Pentagon is packing up, downsizing its global mission, and heading home. In fact, based on developments in recent years, the opposite may be true. While the collection of Cold War–era giant bases around the world is shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope.

Unknown to most Americans, Washington’s garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls “lily pads” (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and pre-positioned weaponry and supplies.

Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia’s tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more.

As Mark Gillem, author of America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, explains, “avoidance” of local populations, publicity, and potential opposition is the new aim. “To project its power,” he says, the United States wants “secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located” around the world. According to some of the strategy’s strongest proponents at the American Enterprise Institute, the goal should be “to create a worldwide network of frontier forts,” with the U.S. military “the ‘global cavalry’ of the 21st century.”

Such lily-pad bases have become a critical part of an evolving Washington military strategy aimed at maintaining U.S. global dominance by doing far more with less in an increasingly competitive, ever more multi-polar world. Central as it’s becoming to the long-term U.S. stance, this global-basing reset policy has, remarkably enough, received almost no public attention, nor significant Congressional oversight. Meanwhile, as the arrival of the first casualties from Africa shows, the U.S. military is getting involved in new areas of the world and new conflicts, with potentially disastrous consequences.

You might think that the U.S. military is in the process of shrinking, rather than expanding, its little-noticed but enormous collection of bases abroad. After all, it was forced to close the full panoply of 505 bases, mega to micro, that it built in Iraq, and it’s now beginning the process of drawing down forces in Afghanistan. In Europe, the Pentagon is continuing to close its massive bases in Germany and will soon remove two combat brigades from that country. Global troop numbers are set to shrink by around 100,000.

Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, D.C. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.

In Afghanistan, the U.S.-led international force still occupies more than 450 bases. In total, the U.S. military has some form of troop presence in approximately 150 foreign countries, not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces—essentially floating bases—and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated $250 billion annually maintaining bases and troops overseas.

Some bases, like Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, date to the late 19th century. Most were built or occupied during or just after World War II on every continent, including Antarctica. Although the U.S. military vacated around 60% of its foreign bases following the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Cold War base infrastructure remained relatively intact, with 60,000 American troops remaining in Germany alone, despite the absence of a superpower adversary.

However, in the early months of 2001, even before the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a major global realignment of bases and troops that’s continuing today with Obama’s “Asia pivot.” Bush’s original plan was to close more than one-third of the nation’s overseas bases and shift troops east and south, closer to predicted conflict zones in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Pentagon began to focus on creating smaller and more flexible “forward operating bases” and even smaller “cooperative security locations” or “lily pads.” Major troop concentrations were to be restricted to a reduced number of “main operating bases” (MOBs)—like Ramstein, Guam in the Pacific, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean—which were to be expanded.

Despite the rhetoric of consolidation and closure that went with this plan, in the post-9/11 era the Pentagon has actually been expanding its base infrastructure dramatically, including dozens of major bases in every Persian Gulf country save Iran, and in several Central Asian countries critical to the war in Afghanistan.

In the Philippines, whose government evicted the U.S. from the massive Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base in the early 1990s, as many as 600 special forces troops have quietly been operating in the country’s south since January 2002. Last month, the two governments reached an agreement on the future U.S. use of Clark and Subic, as well as other repair and supply hubs from the Vietnam War era. In a sign of changing times, U.S. officials even signed a 2011 defense agreement with former enemy Vietnam and have begun negotiations over the Navy’s increased use of Vietnamese ports.

Elsewhere in Asia, the Pentagon has rebuilt a runway on tiny Tinian island near Guam, and it’s considering future bases in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, while pushing stronger military ties with India. Every year in the region, the military conducts around 170 military exercises and 250 port visits. On South Korea’s Jeju island, the Korean military is building a base that will be part of the U.S. missile defense system and to which U.S. forces will have regular access.

“We just can’t be in one place to do what we’ve got to do,” Pacific Command commander Adm. Samuel Locklear III has said. For military planners, “what we’ve got to do” is clearly defined as isolating and (in the terminology of the Cold War) “containing” the new power in the region, China. This evidently means “peppering” new bases throughout the region, adding to the more than 200 U.S. bases that have encircled China for decades in Japan, South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii.

And Asia is just the beginning. In Africa, the Pentagon has quietly created “about a dozen air bases” for drones and surveillance since 2007. In addition to Camp Lemonnier, we know that the military has created or will soon create installations in Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mauritania, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, South Sudan, and Uganda. The Pentagon has also investigated building bases in Algeria, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria, among other places.

Next year, a brigade-sized force of 3,000 troops, and “likely more,” will arrive for exercises and training missions across the continent. In the nearby Persian Gulf, the Navy is developing an “afloat forward-staging base,” or “mothership,” to serve as a sea-borne “lily pad” for helicopters and patrol craft, and has been involved in a massive buildup of forces in the region.

In Latin America, following the military’s eviction from Panama in 1999 and Ecuador in 2009, the Pentagon has created or upgraded new bases in Aruba and Curaçao, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru. Elsewhere, the Pentagon has funded the creation of military and police bases capable of hosting U.S. forces in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and even Ecuador. In 2008, the Navy reactivated its Fourth Fleet, inactive since 1950, to patrol the region. The military may want a base in Brazil and unsuccessfully tried to create bases, ostensibly for humanitarian and emergency relief, in Paraguay and Argentina.

Finally, in Europe, after arriving in the Balkans during 1990s interventions, U.S. bases have moved eastward into some of the former Eastern Bloc states of the Soviet empire. The Pentagon is now developing installations capable of supporting rotating, brigade-sized deployments in Romania and Bulgaria, and a missile defense base and aviation facilities in Poland. Previously, the Bush administration maintained two CIA black sites (secret prisons) in Lithuania and another in Poland. Citizens of the Czech Republic rejected a planned radar base for the Pentagon’s still unproven missile defense system, and now Romania will host ground-based missiles.

A lily pad on one of the Gulf of Guinea islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the oil-rich west coast of Africa, helps explain what’s going on. A U.S. official has described the base as “another Diego Garcia,” referring to the Indian Ocean base that’s helped ensure decades of U.S. domination over Middle Eastern energy supplies. Without the freedom to create new large bases in Africa, the Pentagon is using São Tomé and a growing collection of other lily pads on the continent in an attempt to control another crucial oil-rich region.

Far beyond West Africa, the 19th century “Great Game” competition for Central Asia has returned with a passion—and this time gone global. It’s spreading to resource-rich lands in Africa, Asia, and South America, as the United States, China, Russia, and members of the European Union find themselves locked in an increasingly intense competition for economic and geopolitical supremacy.

While Beijing, in particular, has pursued this competition in a largely economic fashion, dotting the globe with strategic investments, Washington has focused relentlessly on military might as its global trump card, dotting the planet with new bases and other forms of military power. “Forget full-scale invasions and large-footprint occupations on the Eurasian mainland,” Nick Turse has written of this new 21st-century military strategy. “Instead, think: special operations forces… proxy armies… the militarization of spying and intelligence… drone aircraft… cyber-attacks, and joint Pentagon operations with increasingly militarized ‘civilian’ government agencies.”

Add to this unparalleled long-range air and naval power; arms sales besting any nation on Earth; humanitarian and disaster relief missions that clearly serve military intelligence, patrol, and “hearts and minds” functions; the rotational deployment of regular U.S. forces globally; port visits and an expanding array of joint military exercises and training missions that give the U.S. military de facto “presence” worldwide and help turn foreign militaries into proxy forces.

And lots and lots of lily-pad bases.

Military planners see a future of endless small-scale interventions in which a large, geographically dispersed collection of bases will always be primed for instant operational access. With bases in as many places as possible, military planners want to be able to turn to another conveniently close country if the United States is ever prevented from using a base, as it was by Turkey prior to the invasion of Iraq. In other words, Pentagon officials dream of nearly limitless flexibility, the ability to react with remarkable rapidity to developments anywhere on Earth, and thus, something approaching total military control over the planet.

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Global Financial Fraud & its Gatekeepers

By Naomi Wolf, The Guardian, July 15, 2012

The notion that the entire global financial system is riddled with systemic fraud—and that key players in the gatekeeper roles, both in finance and in government, including regulatory bodies, know it and choose to quietly sustain this reality—is one that would have only recently seemed like the frenzied hypothesis of tinhat-wearers, but this week’s headlines make such a conclusion, sadly, inevitable.

The New York Times business section on 12 July shows multiple exposes of systemic fraud throughout banks: banks colluding with other banks in manipulation of interest rates, regulators aware of systemic fraud, and key government officials (at least one banker who became the most key government official) aware of it and colluding as well. Fraud in banks has been understood conventionally and, I would say, messaged as a glitch. As in London Mayor Boris Johnson’s full-throated defense of Barclay’s leadership last week, bank fraud is portrayed as a case, when it surfaces, of a few “bad apples” gone astray.

In the New York Times business section, we read that the HSBC banking group is being fined up to $1bn, for not preventing money-laundering (a highly profitable activity not to prevent) between 2004 and 2010—a six years’ long “oops”. In another article that day, Republican Senator Charles Grassley says of the financial group Peregrine capital: “This is a company that is on top of things.” The article goes onto explain that at Peregrine Financial, “regulators discovered about $215m in customer money was missing.” Its founder now faces criminal charges. Later, the article mentions that this revelation comes a few months after MF Global “lost” more than $1bn in clients’ money.

What is weird is how these reports so consistently describe the activity that led to all this vanishing cash as simple bumbling: “regulators missed the red flag for years.” They note that a Peregrine client alerted the firm’s primary regulator in 2004 and another raised issues with the regulator five years later—yet “signs of trouble seemingly missed for years”, muses the Times headline.

A page later, “Wells Fargo will Settle Mortgage Bias Charges” as that bank agrees to pay $175m in fines resulting from its having—again, very lucratively—charged African-American and Hispanic mortgagees costlier rates on their subprime mortgages than their counterparts who were white and had the same credit scores. Remember, this was a time when “Wall Street firms developed a huge demand for subprime loans that they purchased and bundled into securities for investors, creating financial incentives for lenders to make such loans.” So, Wells Fargo was profiting from overcharging minority clients and profiting from products based on the higher-than-average bad loan rate expected. The piece discreetly ends mentioning that a Bank of America lawsuit of $335m and a Sun Trust mortgage settlement of $21m for having engaged in similar kinds of discrimination.

Are all these examples of oversight failure and banking fraud just big ol’ mistakes? Are the regulators simply distracted?

The top headline of the day’s news sums up why it is not that simple: “Geithner Tried to Curb Bank’s Rate Rigging in 2008”. The story reports that when Timothy Geithner, at the time he ran the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, learned of “problems” with how interest rates were fixed in London, the financial center at the heart of the Libor Barclays scandal. He let “top British authorities” know of the issues and wrote an email to his counterparts suggesting reforms. Were his actions ethical, or prudent? A possible interpretation of Geithner’s action is that he was “covering his ass”, without serious expectation of effecting reform of what he knew to be systemic abuse.

And what, in fact, happened? Barclays kept reporting false rates, seeking to boost its profit. Last month, the bank agreed to pay $450m to US and UK authorities for manipulating the Libor and other key benchmarks, upon which great swaths of the economy depended. This manipulation is alleged in numerous lawsuits to have defrauded thousands of bank clients. So Geithner’s “warnings came too late, and his efforts did not stop the illegal activity”.

And then what happened? Did Geithner, presumably frustrated that his warnings had gone unheeded, call a press conference? No. He stayed silent, as a practice that now looks as if several major banks also perpetrated, continued.

And then what happened? Tim Geithner became Treasury Secretary. At which point, he still did nothing.

It is very hard, looking at the elaborate edifices of fraud that are emerging across the financial system, to ignore the possibility that this kind of silence—“the willingness to not rock the boat”—is simply rewarded by promotion to ever higher positions, ever greater authority. If you learn that rate-rigging and regulatory failures are systemic, but stay quiet, well, perhaps you have shown that you are genuinely reliable and deserve membership of the club.

Whatever motivated Geithner’s silence, or that of the “government official” in the emails to Barclays, this much is obvious: the mainstream media need to drop their narratives of “Gosh, another oversight”. The financial sector’s corruption must be recognized as systemic.

Meanwhile, Britain is sleepwalking in a march toward total email surveillance, even as the US brings forward new proposals to punish whistleblowers by extending the Espionage Act. In an electronic world, evidence of these crimes lasts forever—if people get their hands on the books. In the Libor case, notably, a major crime has not been greeted by much demand at the top for criminal prosecutions. That asymmetry is one of the insurance policies of power. Another is to crack down on citizens’ protest.

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Forced Vaccinations and the Death of Health Freedom

by James Corbett

BoilingFrogsPost.com
July 17, 2012

Nothing could be more antithetical to the very idea of individual freedom than to have governments telling us that we must put some substance in our bodies. Without ownership of our body and the attendant right to refuse this or that medicine as we see fit, we are nothing more than slaves of the state. This is a principle that has been long understood.

But the reasons against mandating medical treatments rest on practicalities as much as ideal. The plain fact is that even if we can trust that governments only ever work in the interest of the people and not the medical-industrial lobby that pumps billions of dollars a year into Washington, D.C., they are still prone to error and thus their medical judgements should never be mandated on the public.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his “Notes on the State of Virginia“:

“Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potato as an article of food. […] It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”

Most of these points are intrinsically understood by the population without need of explanation. If the government were to come out tomorrow and mandate the eating of broccoli to be enforced by door to door visits by the police, there would be outrage, and rightly so.

Yet somehow, when it comes to vaccinations, these types of thuggish behaviors are seen as perfectly reasonable by a sizable proportion of the general public.

Almost since their inception, vaccinations have been treated as a medical procedure that can be mandated on large groups of people.

In 1777 George Washington mandated that the entire Continental Army be inoculated against smallpox.

In 1855, Massachusetts became the first state to mandate vaccinations for schoolchildren.

In 1898, the British parliament passed an act allowing conscientious objectors to opt out of mandatory smallpox vaccinations.

Meanwhile, back in the US, in 1905 the Supreme Court ruled mandatory smallpox vaccinations constitutional, such authority resting in the “police power” of the state, and denying any British-style exemption of personal choice.

In 1922, the Supreme Court again ruled in favor of mandatory vaccination, claiming that schools were within their right to exclude students who failed to provide proof of vaccination.

By 1926, anti-vaccine sentiment was on the rise. When health officials in Delaware attempted to vaccinate the townsfolk of Georgetown, a retired Army lieutenant and a city councilman successfully led an armed mob in routing them out of town.

In 1947, a new medical precedent was set with the Nuremberg Laws, passed in the wake of the Nazi medical experimentation atrocities. It set the principle that all patients should have voluntary, informed consent and the right to control their own body.

In 1966, New York passed a religious exemption statute in their public health law. Minnesota followed suit the next year with a religious and medical exemption in their school immunization law. By 1978, the category was changed from religious belief to “conscientiously held belief.”

Now every state in the union has at least two of the three possible exemptions from mandatory vaccination: medical, religious or philosophical. Still, the issue continues to be tested in the courts, with the Wyoming Supreme Court hearing a case in 2001 where the Health Department refused a patient’s religious exemption. The Court ruled that the government has no right to decide the credibility or sincerity of medical exemptions.

Now the fight against government-mandated vaccines is coming to a head in California, where a newly-introduced bill, AB 2109, would force parents to go to their doctor to get a personal belief exemption to prevent their children from being vaccinated.

The war on vaccination exemptions has been part of a long battle against freedom of choice in vaccination, one that has long intimidated and confused parents into having their children vaccinated against their will and in violation of the principle of informed consent. Earlier this year, Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center joined Peter B. Collins and Sibel Edmonds on the Boiling Frogs Post podcast to discuss the issue.

In the end, this fight is not about anyone’s personal beliefs over the efficacy or inefficacy of any particular vaccine. It is about the right to say no to enforced medical treatment. The decisions that our society are making today about how, when, and why we will accept government mandates over medical procedures will have repercussions on generations of future children who will be subject to those laws.

If the vaccine proponents are serious in their belief in the necessity of vaccination, using the government as a big stick to make everyone else conform to their beliefs is surely the wrong way to go about convincing anybody of anything. After all, as Jefferson noted, only folly and error requires government mandate; truth can stand on its own.

What, then, to make of this push in recent years to introduce more restrictive laws pushing for greater governmental coercion in vaccination? Do we as a society really want to sign our country over to the whims of whatever bunch of cronies find themselves in public office, receiving unknown funds from big pharma lobbies to push new, untested vaccines on our children?

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