The War Prayer - Mark Twain
Friday, October 20, 2017
Why Jesus?
The following link http://y-jesus.com/ has some good articles on the question of faith especially around the life of Jesus. Has the Da Vinci Code or the supposed Tomb of Jesus' Family made you wonder if Jesus really is what He claimed to be? What about the Gnostic Gospels and the Gospel of Mary Magdelene? Are these accurate? If you have questions like these, please take time to investigate the y-Jesus site. You'll find material that will help answer your questions or those of your friends and loved one. Jesus said, "Ye shall seek me and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart."[1] "Seek and ye shall find."[2] "If you continue in my word, then are you my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."[3] Happy reading. Dennis
[1] Jeremish 29:13
[2] Matthew 7:7
[3] John 8:31-32
[1] Jeremish 29:13
[2] Matthew 7:7
[3] John 8:31-32
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Keeping the Faith
Question: My family and most of the other people I’m around every day aren’t interested in spiritual matters. How can I “keep the faith” in what seems to be an increasingly skeptical world?
Answer: Faith is at the core of our spiritual lives, so it’s worth fighting for. Here are a few tips that can help yours not only survive, but thrive:
Feed on the Word of God. Faith is built by faithful study of God’s Word. As you read and absorb it daily, as you think about its truths and how they apply to you, your faith will grow. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.”1 Jesus promises, “If you abide in My Word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”2
Pray and meditate. God wants to have a personal relationship with you through His Son, Jesus. “There is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus.”3 Communing in spirit with Jesus—sharing your heart with Him and receiving His love, encouragement, and answers in return—will strengthen your connection and deepen your relationship.
Live your faith. “Faith without works is dead,”4 but conversely, putting faith into action brings it to life. As you apply God’s Word to daily living, its principles and promises will ring true time after time, and your faith in it and its Author will grow.
Look for the good. Nothing can put a damper on faith like adverse circumstances, but the Bible promises, “All things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”5 Learn to find and focus on that good, and your faith will be buoyant enough to survive anything.
Draw from the experience of others. Reading accounts of what God has done for others will increase your faith. What God has done for them, He can do for you!
Thank God for the good. Praising God for His goodness propels us into His presence. “Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.”6 The more you thank God for His goodness, the more you’ll find to be thankful for and the more He will bless you. It’s an upward spiral that makes God and the spiritual realm more real to you; it strengthens your faith.
1. Romans 10:17
2. John 8:31–32
3. 1 Timothy 2:5
4. James 2:26
5. Romans 8:28
6. Psalm 100:4
Is Truth Relative?
It is a central heresy of our culture to say that all truth is relative; that one thing may be true for me and quite another may be true for you. This absurdity destroys the very notion of truth … and is the result of muddled thinking. No one can seriously believe that a belief which contradicts his or her own is just as true. The expression “It is true for me” is self-confuting. Either a thing is true or it is not. … Can we imagine saying, “Well, the earth is round to me; but it may be flat to you”? The earth is either round or flat; it cannot be both; and what you or I think about it is irrelevant. You may claim that religion and ethics is not a matter of truth at all. Very well, do not use the word “true”; but if you use it, do not render it unintelligible by adding that empty phrase, “for me.”—Keith Ward
Thursday, October 12, 2017
How We Learned Not To Care About America’s Wars
By Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch, Oct. 9, 2017
Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less.
Nor can it be said that we don’t care because we don’t know. True, government authorities withhold certain aspects of ongoing military operations or release only details that they find convenient. Yet information describing what U.S. forces are doing (and where) is readily available, even if buried in recent months by barrages of presidential tweets. Here, for anyone interested, are press releases issued by United States Central Command for just one recent week:
September 19: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
September 20: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
Iraqi Security Forces begin Hawijah offensive
September 21: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
September 22: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
September 23: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
Operation Inherent Resolve Casualty
September 25: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
September 26: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq
Ever since the United States launched its war on terror, oceans of military press releases have poured forth. And those are just for starters. To provide updates on the U.S. military’s various ongoing campaigns, generals, admirals, and high-ranking defense officials regularly testify before congressional committees or brief members of the press. From the field, journalists offer updates that fill in at least some of the details–on civilian casualties, for example–that government authorities prefer not to disclose. Contributors to newspaper op-ed pages and “experts” booked by network and cable TV news shows, including passels of retired military officers, provide analysis. Trailing behind come books and documentaries that put things in a broader perspective.
But here’s the truth of it. None of it matters.
Like traffic jams or robocalls, war has fallen into the category of things that Americans may not welcome, but have learned to live with. In twenty-first-century America, war is not that big a deal.
While serving as defense secretary in the 1960s, Robert McNamara once mused that the “greatest contribution” of the Vietnam War might have been to make it possible for the United States “to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.” With regard to the conflict once widely referred to as McNamara’s War, his claim proved grotesquely premature. Yet a half-century later, his wish has become reality.
Why do Americans today show so little interest in the wars waged in their name and at least nominally on their behalf? Why, as our wars drag on and on, doesn’t the disparity between effort expended and benefits accrued arouse more than passing curiosity or mild expressions of dismay? Why, in short, don’t we give a [expletive deleted]?
Perhaps just posing such a question propels us instantly into the realm of the unanswerable, like trying to figure out why people idolize Justin Bieber, shoot birds, or watch golf on television.
Without any expectation of actually piercing our collective ennui, let me take a stab at explaining why we don’t give a @#$%&! Here are eight distinctive but mutually reinforcing explanations, offered in a sequence that begins with the blindingly obvious and ends with the more speculative.
Americans don’t attend all that much to ongoing American wars because:
1. U.S. casualty rates are low. By using proxies and contractors, and relying heavily on airpower, America’s war managers have been able to keep a tight lid on the number of U.S. troops being killed and wounded. In all of 2017, for example, a grand total of 11 American soldiers have been lost in Afghanistan–about equal to the number of shooting deaths in Chicago over the course of a typical week. True, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries where the U.S. is engaged in hostilities, whether directly or indirectly, plenty of people who are not Americans are being killed and maimed. (The estimated number of Iraqi civilians killed this year alone exceeds 12,000.) But those casualties have next to no political salience as far as the United States is concerned. As long as they don’t impede U.S. military operations, they literally don’t count (and generally aren’t counted).
2. The true costs of Washington’s wars go untabulated. In a famous speech, dating from early in his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower said that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Dollars spent on weaponry, Ike insisted, translated directly into schools, hospitals, homes, highways, and power plants that would go unbuilt. “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he continued. “[I]t is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” More than six decades later, Americans have long since accommodated themselves to that cross of iron. Many actually see it as a boon, a source of corporate profits, jobs, and, of course, campaign contributions. As such, they avert their eyes from the opportunity costs of our never-ending wars. The dollars expended pursuant to our post-9/11 conflicts will ultimately number in the multi-trillions. Imagine the benefits of investing such sums in upgrading the nation’s aging infrastructure. Yet don’t count on Congressional leaders, other politicians, or just about anyone else to pursue that connection.
3. On matters related to war, American citizens have opted out. Others have made the point so frequently that it’s the equivalent of hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at Christmastime. Even so, it bears repeating: the American people have defined their obligation to “support the troops” in the narrowest imaginable terms, ensuring above all that such support requires absolutely no sacrifice on their part. Members of Congress abet this civic apathy, while also taking steps to insulate themselves from responsibility. In effect, citizens and their elected representatives in Washington agree: supporting the troops means deferring to the commander in chief, without inquiring about whether what he has the troops doing makes the slightest sense. Yes, we set down our beers long enough to applaud those in uniform and boo those who decline to participate in mandatory rituals of patriotism. What we don’t do is demand anything remotely approximating actual accountability.
4. Terrorism gets hyped and hyped and hyped some more. While international terrorism isn’t a trivial problem (and wasn’t for decades before 9/11), it comes nowhere close to posing an existential threat to the United States. Indeed, other threats, notably the impact of climate change, constitute a far greater danger to the wellbeing of Americans. Worried about the safety of your children or grandchildren? The opioid epidemic constitutes an infinitely greater danger than “Islamic radicalism.” Yet having been sold a bill of goods about a “war on terror” that is essential for “keeping America safe,” mere citizens are easily persuaded that scattering U.S. troops throughout the Islamic world while dropping bombs on designated evildoers is helping win the former while guaranteeing the latter. To question that proposition becomes tantamount to suggesting that God might not have given Moses two stone tablets after all.
5. Blather crowds out substance. When it comes to foreign policy, American public discourse is–not to put too fine a point on it–vacuous, insipid, and mindlessly repetitive. William Safire of the New York Times once characterized American political rhetoric as BOMFOG, with those running for high office relentlessly touting the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God. Ask a politician, Republican or Democrat, to expound on this country’s role in the world, and then brace yourself for some variant of WOSFAD, as the speaker insists that it is incumbent upon the World’s Only Superpower to spread Freedom and Democracy. Terms like leadership and indispensable are introduced, along with warnings about the dangers of isolationism and appeasement, embellished with ominous references to Munich. Such grandiose posturing makes it unnecessary to probe too deeply into the actual origins and purposes of American wars, past or present, or assess the likelihood of ongoing wars ending in some approximation of actual success. Cheerleading displaces serious thought.
6. Besides, we’re too busy. Think of this as a corollary to point five. Even if the present-day American political scene included figures like Senators Robert La Follette or J. William Fulbright, who long ago warned against the dangers of militarizing U.S. policy, Americans may not retain a capacity to attend to such critiques. Responding to the demands of the Information Age is not, it turns out, conducive to deep reflection. We live in an era (so we are told) when frantic multitasking has become a sort of duty and when being overscheduled is almost obligatory. Our attention span shrinks and with it our time horizon. The matters we attend to are those that happened just hours or minutes ago. Yet like the great solar eclipse of 2017–hugely significant and instantly forgotten–those matters will, within another few minutes or hours, be superseded by some other development that briefly captures our attention. As a result, a dwindling number of Americans–those not compulsively checking Facebook pages and Twitter accounts–have the time or inclination to ponder questions like: When will the Afghanistan War end? Why has it lasted almost 16 years? Why doesn’t the finest fighting force in history actually win? Can’t package an answer in 140 characters or a 30-second made-for-TV sound bite? Well, then, slowpoke, don’t expect anyone to attend to what you have to say.
7. Anyway, the next president will save us. At regular intervals, Americans indulge in the fantasy that, if we just install the right person in the White House, all will be well. Ambitious politicians are quick to exploit this expectation. Presidential candidates struggle to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but all of them promise in one way or another to wipe the slate clean and Make America Great Again. Ignoring the historical record of promises broken or unfulfilled, and presidents who turn out not to be deities but flawed human beings, Americans–members of the media above all–pretend to take all this seriously. Campaigns become longer, more expensive, more circus-like, and ever less substantial. One might think that the election of Donald Trump would prompt a downward revision in the exalted expectations of presidents putting things right. Instead, especially in the anti-Trump camp, getting rid of Trump himself (Collusion! Corruption! Obstruction! Impeachment!) has become the overriding imperative, with little attention given to restoring the balance intended by the framers of the Constitution. The irony of Trump perpetuating wars that he once roundly criticized and then handing the conduct of those wars to generals devoid of ideas for ending them almost entirely escapes notice.
8. Our culturally progressive military has largely immunized itself from criticism. Put simply, critics who in an earlier day might have blasted military leaders for their inability to bring wars to a successful conclusion hold their fire. Having women graduate from Ranger School or command Marines in combat more than compensates for not winning.
A collective indifference to war has become an emblem of contemporary America. But don’t expect your neighbors down the street or the editors of the New York Times to lose any sleep over that fact. Even to notice it would require them–and us–to care.
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
If you exercise a lot, you probably think your heart is in good shape. Maybe not.
By Emily Sohn, Washington Post, October 7, 2017
Jason Lathrop was training for a solo backpacking trip in 2015 when he started to feel a creaking sensation in his knees during morning runs near his home in Portland, Ore.
Expecting to learn that he’d torn his meniscus or strained a ligament, he went to his doctor, who told him his knees were just fine. Instead, he learned, he had a heart murmur. Six weeks later, the 43-year-old father of two was undergoing open-heart surgery to repair a faulty mitral valve.
After a lifetime of active and virtuous living that including frequent exercise, healthy eating and no smoking, Lathrop was stunned to learn that something could be wrong with his heart.
“Your heart is your aerobic engine along with your lungs, and I thought if there were any organs I would not have problems with, it would be those two because I took such good care of them,” says Lathrop, an analyst at Intel. “It was such a shock.”
Exercise does a lot to strengthen the heart and lengthen lives, experts say. But heart problems are still common–and sometimes dramatic–in active people. It’s a point that’s likely to come up during this fall’s marathon season, given the cases of sudden cardiac death and heart attacks that sometimes occur during long races.
Those rare but often highly publicized events offer an opportunity to deliver a nuanced message about heart health to active people: Exercise is good, but nothing is 100 percent protective, says Aaron Baggish, director of the Cardiovascular Performance Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“No amount of exercise confers complete immunity to heart disease,” Baggish says. “You can’t outrun heart problems completely.”
Decades of research on tens of thousands of people have drawn a direct connection between routine exercise and heart health. Among other measures, studies show, getting the recommended 150 minutes of moderate exercise each week can lower rates of blood pressure, heart disease, death and more.
“If you had to pick one pill for the American public to take, exercise is more perfect than any other pill you could come up with,” says Mark Link, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
But reducing risk isn’t the same as eliminating it. Sometimes exercise can exacerbate heart risks, especially at extreme levels–although scientists are still working out the details of what an athlete’s heart should look like.
In one 2013 study, researchers looked at the health records of more than 52,000 Swedish cross-country skiers who competed in a 56-mile race between 1989 and 1998. They found that male athletes who had skied faster and those who had competed in more races showed higher rates of irregular heart rhythms, called arrhythmias, over a period of 10 years.
Compared with men who had competed just once, those who completed five races were twice as likely to be hospitalized for bradyarrhythmias, or unusually slow heart rates. Atrial fibrillation, an irregular or very fast heart rate, was also more common in the most-serious skiers.
But overall, the athletes reaped plenty of benefits. Rates of death were lower in skiers who did more races compared with those who did fewer. Mortality rates were lower in the skiers compared with the general population.
This is not the only example where evidence is revealing that vigorous training alters hearts in ways that require more research. For example, serious athletes seem to show increased levels of calcium deposits in the arteries of the heart. These plaques are normally a sign of elevated risk for heart attacks, but new studies suggest that they may be less worrisome in otherwise healthy athletes. “To some degree,” Baggish says, “the jury is still out on this.”
A more common risk that active people face is the belief that exercise gives them freedom to indulge in heart-damaging behaviors. And excessive alcohol, junk food and tobacco in early adulthood can catch up to people later in life, Baggish says.
Genetic predispositions also matter, even for people who do everything right. That’s something that Jay Kuo, a 49-year-old Broadway composer and producer in New York, has been struggling with since his blood pressure and triglycerides spiked a couple of years ago, despite his healthy habits.
Already spooked by a family history of heart disease, including the death of his father at age 44, Kuo had stopped smoking, reduced his salt intake, cut out processed meats and started drinking a kale smoothie every morning. He also jogs, does yoga, meditates and takes medications to improve his blood pressure and triglyceride levels. Despite all that, he’s not making as much progress as he’d like.
“It’s frustrating,” he says. “I need to not have what happened to my dad happen to me.”
Screening for heart conditions remains controversial, as researchers continue to debate whether looking for trouble would wind up harming more people than it might help.
See a doctor if you have concerns, Baggish suggests. But don’t let stories of athletes with heart problems scare you away from exercise.
“Our country’s problem is not too much exercise,” he says. “It’s too little exercise.”
And a diagnosis doesn’t have to mean the end of an athletic lifestyle. Two years after his heart surgery, Lathrop is running three days a week, often for 10 miles or more at a time.
“I’m running much farther than I ever did before the surgery,” he says. “I have a new lease on life.”
How to Actually Get Rest
By Brad Stulberg, New York Magazine, Oct. 4, 2017
The thing about scrolling through social media is that it often feels like it should be a restful activity. It even looks like one. You’re barely moving, after all; you might even be lying down. And yet when is the last time you closed Twitter feeling refreshed?
In case you haven’t yet heard, rest is important. It’s when our bodies repair and grow; our brains become smarter and more creative; and our minds replenish willpower and gain emotional control. Rest is so important to working in a happy, healthy, and sustainable manner that we’d be wise to think of it not as something separate from doing good work, but rather, as an integral part of doing good work; sometimes, not working is the work.
But there is a science–and art–to resting well, and not all forms of kicking back are created equal. It turns out that lots of the activities we think are restful may actually leave us feeling more tired and stressed.
Before we get into the best ways to rest, it’s instructive to agree on a common definition of what rest even is. Most researchers agree that rest is a physiological state during which your innate fight-or-flight stress response, or sympathetic nervous system, subsides in favor of a more relaxed condition. Your heart rate and blood pressure come down, and your shoulders usually follow. Psychologically, rest is considered a shift from deliberate and effortful thinking–for example, straining to solve a problem or trying to figure out the best way to communicate a complex topic–to a more passive state, sometimes characterized by mind-wandering or zoning out.
While both “stress” and “rest” are somewhat subjective–a five-mile run might be a restful activity for one person and a stressful one for another–there are a few ingredients that are essential to any truly restful activity.
You aren’t exerting self-control. At first, it might take some willpower to resist worrying about work or other seemingly pressing issues, but once you’re in the midst of a nice bout of rest, it should feel pretty easy. Trying really hard to rest–for example, forcing yourself to listen to music and breathe deeply when all you really want to do is respond to emails–defeats its purpose. Either find an activity that more easily lets your mind drift away (more on that below), or just respond to the emails and try relaxing afterwards.
You aren’t consciously thinking about your work or other issues that may be weighing on you. Perhaps your subconscious mind is still connecting dots and problem solving in the background, but your conscious awareness is not on your work–instead, it’s floating freely. Likewise, a restful activity can’t be one that’s triggering anxiety. (See: cable news or a polarizing Twitter feed.)
You aren’t disrupting your ability to fall and remain asleep, which is the ultimate form of rest. As for two of the developed world’s favorite evening activities: If watching television (though not the news) allows you to check out, and doesn’t interfere with your falling asleep, then by all means go for it. Same goes for a glass of wine. But beware: Studies show that if consumed within a few hours prior to bed, both can interfere with sleep–the culprits being blue light from the former and alcohol from the latter. If you are struggling to fall or stay asleep, it’s probably best to eliminate late-night TV and your nightcap.
Plenty of activities meet the above criteria for rest, but a few in particular come with strong evidence of benefits.
Walking: In a study aptly titled “Give Your Ideas Some Legs,” researchers from Stanford University found that individuals who took a short (6 to 15 minute) walking break increased creative thinking by 40 to 60 percent, as compared to those who remained seated at a desk. At first, they speculated that increased blood flow to the brain was the primary reason for walking’s benefits. But it appears the benefits might also emerge from the interplay between walking and attention: mainly, walking requires just enough coordination to occupy the parts of the brain responsible for effortful thinking, allowing us to more easily zone out and mind-wander, both of which are associated with creativity and insight.
Hanging out with friends. The ratio of the hormones testosterone to cortisol acts as a good indicator of stress and recovery. Testosterone is associated with growth and rejuvenation whereas cortisol is associated with stress and degradation–so the higher the ratio, the better. Studies have found that following stressful periods–like a competitive sporting event, for example–individuals who kick back and relax with friends experience a much quicker rebound in their testosterone to cortisol ratio. Other research shows that social connection helps to shift the nervous system into a restful state and releases hormones that have anti-inflammatory properties, like oxytocin and vasopressin.
Experiencing nature. Time spent in nature is associated with more relaxed physiological and psychological states–even just looking at pictures of natural settings for a few minutes has been shown to increase creative thinking. Writing in her book The Nature Fix, Florence Williams suggests that “nature lulls us with soft fascination, helping to rest our top-down, direct attention faculties.”
Hiking. Combine the above three strategies! Group forest walks have been found to decrease stress hormones and attenuate virtually every part of the fight-or-flight stress response. For the full effect, leave your smartphone behind (or at least keep it turned off if you feel the need to bring it). I’ve never met anyone who regretted a digital-device-free hike with friends.
Sleeping! The obvious one, but still: No form of rest is as powerful. During sleep, your body repairs and grows and your mind retains, consolidates, and connects the information that you were exposed to during the day. Short naps (10 to 30 minutes) can give you a boost in energy and creativity, but nothing can replace the massive importance of sleeping seven to nine hours every night. Put simply: Sleep is one of the most productive things you can do.
When it comes to how much you should rest, though there are no straightforward guidelines, a good rule of thumb is to balance stress with rest. The more stress in your life, the more you should offset it with rest. Another good way to think about rest is to mimic “interval” training throughout your days, by alternating between bursts of intense, deep-focus work and short breaks.
If you want to prioritize rest (and you should!), be careful not to fall for a common trap, one that leaves many well-intentioned people believing they’re resting but never feeling too well-rested. The activities that may seem like rest are often far from it. Trade in couch time and screens for walking, nature, mind-wandering, and hanging out with friends. Doing so may seem hard at first, but once you get going, you’ll feel a lot better.
