EndrTimes: January 2015

Saturday, January 31, 2015

USA Today columnist calls for arrest and imprisonment of vaccine skeptics

Thursday, January 29, 2015
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

(NaturalNews) Now we finally come to the real agenda of the vaccine industry. After vaccines have been repeatedly documented by the Natural News Lab to contain neurotoxic chemicals such as mercury, formaldehyde and MSG; after vaccine shots have been repeatedly shown to kill people who take them; and after flu shots have been exhaustively shown to be based on no science whatsoever -- with vaccine manufacturers openly admitting there are no clinical trials to show they even work -- the rabid vaccine pushers are unveiling their end game: throw vaccine resistors in prison.

This is the call by USA Today columnist Alex Berezow. "Parents who do not vaccinate their children should go to jail," he writes in this USA Today column.

And just to be clear, what Berezow means is that parents who do not vaccinated their children no matter how toxic the vaccine ingredients really are should be thrown in prison. There is no exemption being discussed or recommended that would allow parents to object to vaccines because of the neurotoxic chemicals they contain (such as the heavy metal mercury, still found in flu shots given to children in America). There is also no discussion that informed parents might reasonably object to vaccines based on the recent confession of a top CDC whistleblower who reveals how the CDC committed scientific fraud to bury scientific evidence showing a link between vaccines and autism.

But continuing with the imprisonment idea now being touted by USA Today, it begs the practical question: What exactly should happen after the parents are thrown in prison? Well, of course, the state will take custody of the children because they are now parentless.

So the suggestion that parents who seek to protect their children from toxic vaccine ingredients should be thrown in jail is simultaneously a call for the state to seize custody of all children who are not yet vaccinated with Big Pharma's toxic vaccines.

Vaccine skepticism to be criminalized in America?

Let's all be perfectly clear about the crux of this argument published by USA Today. Because police resources in U.S. cities are finite at any given time, Berezow is essentially arguing that law enforcement officers -- who are already spread dangerously thin almost everywhere -- should be diverted from stopping real criminals such as rapists, murderers and child molesters, and instead should fan out across U.S. cities, going door to door to handcuff and arrest vaccine skeptics while demanding Child Protective Services seize their children.

This argument, dutifully printed by the blindly obedient mainstream media, represents the total abandonment of scientific reasoning and the desperate invocation of the very same policies espoused by Mao, Pol Pot, Mussolini and Adolf Hitler: If the People can't be persuaded to do what you want through reason, then force them to do so at gunpoint.

Compliance problem solved!

This is, by definition, the very essence of a medical police state. To find that such a policy is boldly called for in the pages of USA Today demonstrates just how treacherously far we have now ventured into the all-too-familiar territory of the world's past dictatorial regimes which routinely violated human rights in the name of compliance.

And yet this column in USA Today is actually a tremendous victory for vaccine skeptics. There is no greater admission of the failure of vaccine "science" than this call for vaccines to be enforced at gunpoint. It is the wholesale abandonment of any philosophy that might respect human freedom, dignity or choice. Instead, this pronouncement equates intelligent, informed vaccine skeptics with murderers and rapists, implying they should share the same fate, if not the same prison cell.

It is an admission, ultimately, that the vaccine pushers have run out of reasonable ideas and must now resort to force as their last remaining weapon against common sense.

Medical tyranny lives in AmericaBerezow, like most vaccine promoters, is a medical tyrant. He openly calls for government to use the threat of violence to destroy families, ripping them apart at gunpoint and seizing their children, in order to achieve a level of vaccine compliance that Berezow claims is based on irrefutable evidence of safety and efficacy.

That evidence, of course, is entirely imagined by the vaccine industry itself -- the same industry that includes printed inserts in its own vaccines which openly admit things like, "...there have been no controlled trials adequately demonstrating a decrease in influenza disease after vaccination with FLULAVAL."

Here's the photo of the vaccine insert so you can see it for yourself:

As Natural News has exhaustively documented, many vaccine inserts openly admit they don't work. Vaccine virologists working for Merck even went public with detailed admission that Merck faked vaccine clinical trials and committed scientific fraud. Beyond that, all vaccine inserts openly admit to a shockingly long list of side effects which include seizures, skin disorders, neurological problems and more:

To make a broad claim that all vaccines are "safe and effective" is to label yourself hopelessly ignorant of medical reality and utterly unqualified to comment on vaccine safety in the first place. To say "vaccines are universally safe and effective" is as cognitively incompetent as saying, "the Earth is flat" or that mercury is also good for children when it's installed in their teeth. (That's the official position of the American Dental Association, by the way, a chemical-pushing industry front group still hopelessly stuck in the chemical denials of the 1950's.)

And the yet the tremendous appeal of government coercion -- from the point of view of a medical tyrant -- is that it no longer requires consent. This "miracle of compliance" is of course the science method of choice in North Korea, Communist China and the old U.S.S.R. The basis of the idea of coercion is that "people should be free to make their own choices, but only as long as those choices are the ones we demand they make."

When American media outlets begin to print opinion pieces that resemble the logic of Kim Jong-Un, you know something has gone terribly awry.

No one can threaten your safety... except US!In his USA Today column, Berezow argues that "no person has the right to threaten the safety of his community," yet he personally threatens millions of Americans with arrest and imprisonment in his own column. He alone has the right to make such threats, you see, because his threats of taking away your children and imprisoning you as a parent are conducted under the contrived banner of "science."

His threats don't count as threats in exactly the same way the Obama administration's murder of over 3,000 civilians with drone strikes don't count as civilian casualties, either. Or how the national debt of $18 trillion -- most of it accrued under Obama alone -- doesn't count either because "the federal budget is balanced!" (Hint: it isn't.)

Speaking of civilian casualties, in the name of "science," Berezow obviously wants to see an armed medical Gestapo going house to house, taking children away from parents and turning them over to the state while those parents are incarcerated in a prison system that's already bursting at the seams.

This picture imagines what a future vaccine enforcement police team might look like:

The same government that Berezow hopes would use armed police to enforce vaccine compliance has, of course, already granted absolute legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers. So children who are harmed by vaccines have no legitimate legal recourse.

The obvious catch-22 is damning to the industry: Here, take these vaccines at gunpoint, but if your child is harmed or even killed by these vaccines we've forced upon you, that's your problem, not ours. Even the Associated Press recently conducted an investigationinto the kangaroo vaccine court system in the United States and concluded it was a comedy of justice that denied payouts to parents for ten years or more.

This imprisonment argument by Berezow also begs the question: Does Mr. Berezow support government coercion and the threat of violence against the citizens of America solely in the arena of vaccines? Or does he also think government should arrest and imprison people who don't comply with the government's wishes in all other areas, too?

By Berezow's own logic, people who refuse to purchase Obamacare health insurance should also be arrested and imprisoned. Probably even people who write about vaccine dangers should be arrested and imprisoned too, by simply legislating that pesky First Amendment out of existence. And why stop there? Why not arrest and imprison people who refuse to testify against themselves, refuse to quarter government soldiers in their private homes, refuse to submit to illegal searches and seizures or refuse to remain silent in their own defense?

Perhaps one day the government will demand that everybody eat Soylent Green. Those who refuse will not merely be arrested, but scooped up and "processed" into more Soylent Green to force-feed to the obedient, ignorant masses.

USA Today promotes a medical police stateThe fact that USA Today would even run a column like this shows the late hour of the medical police state which the American people have apathetically allowed to emerge under their watch. In an era where the U.S. government now openly spies on all our phone calls, emails and phone texts -- and where the Obama administration has prosecuted more truth-telling whistleblowers than any other administration in U.S. history -- the systems of oppression, propaganda and control have reached a tipping point of public revolt.

The mass militarization of local police forces across the country is a screaming red alert that civil liberties are being crushed while the government itself seems to be arming for war against the American people. Local police departments now possess mine-resistant armored cars, automatic military weapons, surveillance drones and even futuristic thermal vision devices that can see through walls. If vaccine skepticism is criminalized, all these weapons of war -- many transferred to police departments after returning from the front lines of battle in the Middle East -- will be turned against citizens who refuse to inject their children with the toxic chemical poisons still found in vaccines.

This picture imagines what a future vaccine enforcement police vehicle might look like:

The next simple step is to declare vaccine skeptics to be "domestic terrorists." From that point, all varieties of government coercion, violence, torture and murder of these people is "ethically justified" according to the vaccine pushers.

Rather than removing the toxic chemicals, the vaccine industry wants to force them on you at gunpointPublic trust in the government is at an all-time low. Public trust in the lying mainstream media continues to plummet by the day. Public trust in toxic vaccines continues to fall as well, and this trend will never be reversed until the vaccine industry decides to remove toxic heavy metals and chemicals from its vaccines (if ever).

Rather than cleaning up its own products, the vaccine industry turns to people who call for government violence against citizens in order to achieve involuntary compliance.

We've seen these kind of people before, of course. They are the same kind of people who shoved Obamacare down our throats, hitting us all with hefty fines if we refuse to purchase an insurance product that the government totally lied about with claims that it would be "affordable." Remember, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?" It's the same kind of malicious lie uttered by vaccine poisoners who claim vaccines are "totally safe and effective."

But in his USA Today column, Berezow ups the ante. He does not merely call for vaccine skeptics to be fined. That financial coercion tactic is apparently too mild for a man who is so sure he's 100% correct that he's willing to bet YOUR family on it. No, Berezow calls for vaccine skeptics to be arrested and imprisoned. If you do not get your children vaccinated, he unabashedly argues, you are an enemy of the state.

He's sure of it. In fact, he knows far better than you what should be injected into your children. You are too stupid to know the right answer, he implies, so leave it to the pharma companies that conduct deadly drug experiments on children to tell you what to do with your own children.

Inform yourself of the facts about Big Pharma's ongoing chemical child abuse by reading about The top ten medical conspiracies that actually happened.

I want to thank Berezow for finally removing all doubt about the true agenda of the vaccine pushers. I'm sure it won't be long before non-vaccinated children and adults will be required by law to wear Scarlet-letter shame symbols much like the Jews in 1939, and at some point people like Berezow will no doubt call for parents who don't vaccinate their children to be rounded up and sent to "re-education camps" where they will be subjected to PowerPoint presentations dreamed up by GlaxoSmithKline, the same company found guilty of felony bribery crimes by the U.S. Dept. of Justice.

Medical freedom was almost written into the U.S. ConstitutionBerezow has done us a service in all this, however. He has made the argument for a national "medical freedom" amendment to the United States Constitution.

It is because of tyrant-minded people like Berezow that America's founders created a First Amendment, Second Amendment, Third Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment and so on. All of these Constitutional amendments grew out of systematic government abuses of civil liberties and human freedoms.

Interestingly, a "medical freedom" amendment was also considered at the time by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Over 230 years ago, he warned:

"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of Men and deny equal privileges to others; the Constitution of the Republic should make a Special privilege for medical freedoms as well as religious freedom."

Dr. Rush, in other words, foresaw precisely the kind of medical tyranny now published by USA Today. "Medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship" is exactly what we've seen happen. That dictatorship, argues Berezow, should be enforced at gunpoint by the government itself. This is the definition of fascism: a corporate-government partnership to force obedience onto the population through coercion dished out under the threat of violence and incarceration.

USA Today should be ashamed that it has published a medical dictatorship propaganda piece that would have made Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proud.

When the facts don't support the agenda, turn to government guns insteadThe call to imprison vaccine resistors is an open admission that the SCIENCE behind vaccines isn't compelling and must therefore be replaced with GUNS.

How else will you arrest people, take their children away and imprison them unless you bring men with guns and badges to the "guilty" households, anyway? Where junk science fails, government guns are clearly the answer. And if guns alone don't work, they always have tanks, too.

In essence, the argument being made in the USA Today column is that guns should be used to force vaccine compliance. It's not even a leap, as guns in the hands of government goons are already being used to force children into toxic chemotherapy treatments against their will.

Click here to read the list of government-sponsored medical kidnappings taking place in America right now. This list will, of course, never be published by USA Today for the simple reason that these real medical facts are not consistent with the mainstream media's vaccine propaganda agenda.

Why stop at vaccines? Why not threaten to arrest anyone who disagrees with a doctor on anything?If total medical compliance -- at any cost to human freedom and dignity -- is the goal, then why not launch a whole new domestic army called D.M.S.; the Department of Medical Security. Declare that all who oppose Big Pharma's medical advice are "threats to national security" and ship them all to Gitmo where the U.S. government continues to run torture operations.

Once you start down the road of medical tyranny, it doesn't end well for humanity. Just ask the victims of the Nazi chemical conglomerate IG Farben, which was later split into chemical corporations, one of which is now known as Bayer. Under the guidance of the "science" of Nazi Germany, heinous chemical crimes were committed against countless Jews, including gassing them to death and using Jewish prisoners for medical experiments.

The former chairperson of Bayer, for the record, was convicted of Nazi war crimes at the Nuremburg tribunals and sentenced to prison. Today, pharma executives routinely commit felony crimes yet go free, even while USA Today calls for parents to be imprisoned for saying no to Big Pharma's deadly chemicals.

No doubt the vaccine promoters of today who demand the arrest and imprisonment of American vaccine resisters would also approve of using those prisoners for their medical experiments. See the full history of U.S. medical experiments here, here and here. Most of these inhumane medical experiments were carried out against prisoners, minorities or soldiers.

It's quite clear that the very same ethically-perverse medical system that's right now calling for the imprisonment of vaccine skeptics would, of course, have no hesitation using those people for "important medical research in the interests of the public good."

This is how crimes against humanity are born. You are watching it unfold right before your very eyes, right in America today, in the pages of USA Today. This is history in the making, and it is a history that will march us all right down the road of state-sponsored medical terrorism that's openly supported by the mainstream media.

Some people learn from the mistakes of history. But Berezow is determined to repeat them.

No, the Jesuits didn’t start World War I

by Damian Thompson
posted Thursday, 22 Jan 2015

Statues of saints overlook St Peter’s Square as the sun sets (CNS)

We laugh at ludicrous anti-Catholic conspiracies. But we underestimate how many minds they poison, thanks to the latest developments in digital technology

This week I discovered that Jesuits sank the Titanic. I was shocked, naturally, and hope that the Holy Father – himself a Jesuit – won’t be too distressed when the evidence is laid out in front of him. But facts are facts, and here we go.

The building of the Titanic at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast coincided with a meeting of top bankers at the Jekyll Island Club, Georgia, an exclusive winter retreat for the super-rich. It was here, in November 1910, that representatives of J P Morgan, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers agreed to set up the US Federal Reserve, America’s central banking system.

This much is a matter of historical record. What isn’t widely known is that these men were acting on behalf of their paymasters, the Jesuits, who “desperately wanted a central bank in America so that they would have a bottomless reservoir from which to draw money for their many wars and other hideous schemes around the world”.

This quotation is taken from a book published by the Pacific Institute of San Diego, California, which bravely exposes Catholic conspiracies, as well as offering “astounding” interpretations of Bible prophecy. (It meets every Saturday morning at the Ramona Community Centre, should you find yourself in the area and want “conclusive proof” of its claims.)

Anyway, the Jesuits knew that the creation of the “Fed” would be opposed by powerful men outside the Rothschild/Morgan/Rockefeller cartel. These opponents “had to be destroyed by a means so preposterous that no one would suspect they were murdered”. So the Society of Jesus, displaying its trademark cunning, ordered the building of an “unsinkable” death ship that would take its plutocrat passengers – who included members of the Guggenheim and Astor families – to a watery grave.

To this end, they employed a ship’s captain, Edward Smith, who was a “Jesuit tempore coadjator” [sic] – not a priest, but a “Jesuit of the short robe” who furthered the Society’s aims in his secular profession. To cut a long story short, he was ordered by his masters to steer the ship towards an iceberg and did just that. The real estate magnate John Jacob Astor, who might have used his $85 million to block the central bank, perished in the floating palace.

No sooner had the Titanic sunk, on April 15 1912, than US public opinion began to swing in favour of a federal reserve and it was duly set up in 1913. Job done. The Jesuits then had the cash to embark on their next project – the First World War.

You might wonder: why would the shock troops of the papacy allow so many Catholics – Irish, Italians and French emigrating to the New World – to die alongside Mr Astor? Answer: they had to be sacrificed “to shield the papacy from suspicion”.

This is, of course, a conspiracy theory and – as I’m sure you don’t need to be told – rubbish from beginning to end. Dealing, as it does, with events that occurred over a century ago, it’s easy to laugh at. But on second thoughts, we shouldn’t. Conspiracy theories are as harmful in the 21st century as at any point in the past. As I’ll explain, the Church cannot afford to pretend they don’t exist.

The Pacific Institute is a contemporary organisation that, in addition to exploiting the agonising deaths of 1,500 people in the Titanic disaster, also blames the Jesuits and the Vatican for the murders of 9/11. Thanks to the internet, it is keeping alive the so-called “black legend” of Jesuit world domination. Let’s take a quick look at that phenomenon.

The legend dates back at least as far as 1614, when an anonymous book entitled Monita Secreta was published in Poland.

To quote John W O’Malley SJ in his new history of the order, this “crude forgery purported to be secret instructions from the superior general of the Society telling select members how to fleece widows of their fortunes, how to use confessional secrets to blackmail rulers, and how by these and other despicable means to climb to the pinnacle of political power”.

This story circulated almost unchanged in 19th-century America, where Puritan-inspired fear of Catholics remained a potent political force until the middle of the 20th century. Nearly always it took the form of a conspiracy theory.

But Catholics were not the only victims of this way of thinking. Confusingly, the same people who detected the swish of the Jesuit robe behind every locked door were often equally paranoid about Freemasons – the traditional enemies of the Catholic Church.

It’s well known that many of the founders of the American Republic, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were masons; some of the principles of the constitution, including freedom of religion, were derived in part from Freemasonry. This made the brotherhood deeply unpopular with hardline Protestants, who turned their religious crusade against it into America’s first third-party movement: the Anti-Masonic Party.

This body drew heavily on conspiracy theories very similar to ones directed against the Catholic Church. Many voters believed in both sets of allegations. This would have been baffling to, say, citizens of France, where you picked your side, pious Catholic or anti-clerical mason, and subscribed exclusively to the appropriate conspiracy theory.

But the simultaneous popularity of anti-Jesuit and anti-Freemason legends in America is not as strange as it might appear. What it illustrates is the malleability of conspiracy thinking throughout history. The demons are interchangeable: Catholics, Freemasons, the Illuminati and, most persistently, Jews. The structure of the story remains broadly the same. “They” are rich, powerful, secretive and plotting world domination. The righteous must act now to thwart their plans.

The Catholic Church has had an intimate association with conspiracy theories throughout its history. Often it has been the target of the same sort of propaganda directed against other groups: the Monita Secreta forgery bears a strong resemblance to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax written in Tsarist Russia in which Jews supposedly plot to subvert the morals of the Gentiles and impose Zionism through the banking system. The Protocols inspired Hitler – and Henry Ford, who sponsored the publication of half a million copies of them. Today they are popular among Muslims in London (I bought my copy in an Islamic bookshop in Bayswater).

Alas, certain Right-wing Catholics have not been able to resist the lure of the Protocols: they were favourite reading material of Bishop Richard Williamson, disgraced bishop of the Society of St Pius X (which expelled him in 2012). Williamson, though an Englishman, was immersed in a French Catholic conspiratorial subculture that predates the Protocols. Ultra-clericalist Frenchmen in the Third Republic blamed all their misfortunes on Jews and Freemasons.

This mindset persists in traditionalist circles, to the point where it undermines attempts by benevolent Catholic conservatives to popularise their old-fashioned devotions. To quote Francis Phillips, writing in the Catholic Herald in 2011, “some very dodgy elements have lately attached themselves to the campaign long and bravely fought by Daphne McLeod [emphatically not a bigot] to restore proper catechesis in Catholic schools. Masonic plots? Third Secret of Fatima skulduggery? You name it, they believe it.”

Catholics need to face up to the reality that, over 2,000 years, elements in the Church have been progenitors as well as victims of conspiracy theories. Mostly this should be a source of shame – but we need to bear in mind that paranoid thinking is to some extent part of the DNA of Christianity in general; Protestants and Eastern Orthodox are also vulnerable to it.

The Book of Revelation is in the canon of the New Testament. It’s also a conspiracy theory whose authors introduced early Christians to the notion of the Antichrist, littering the text with mathematical codes and lurid allegory. Most scholars think that 666, the Number of the Beast, is derived from assigning numerical values to the letters of the name of the Emperor Nero. Nowadays we associate this kind of behaviour with orange-haired Protestant televangelists. But the game of decoding Revelation and its Jewish predecessor, the Book of Daniel, was played enthusiastically by the medieval Church.

Today it seems repugnant to Catholics that Luther should have identified the Pope as Antichrist. We forget that both pontiffs and Catholic monarchs had previously taken great pleasure in identifying their own enemies as this Satanic figure, whom the Bible explicitly tells us will emerge from disguise shortly before Jesus returns.

I’m not qualified to say what the Church’s theological response should be to this aspect of its heritage. But in practical terms it should be alert to its persistence on the fringes of Catholicism. The Church did not invent the conspiracy theory: it flourished in Second Temple Judaism and possibly Zoroastrianism before that; arguably it is a natural human reaction to inexplicable, troubling and disappointing events. Christians do, however, have a responsibility to monitor it – for the simple reason that the self-appointed investigators of “hidden plots” spread lies with the aim of hurting people they dislike.

Pope Francis is perceived – and presents himself – as a new broom in the Vatican. Ironically, this may make it more difficult to sweep away the conspiratorial mindset, since he himself hints that corrupt curial officials have seized control of dicasteries. Also, through no fault of his own, he is in the bizarre position of living next door to his predecessor. This has revived a well-worn Catholic conspiracy theory: that the “real” Pope is being held prisoner in the Vatican by an interloper. As soon as Benedict announced his resignation I knew there would be trouble. Lo and behold, a mysterious prophet called Maria Divine Mercy (MDM) has appeared online to reveal that “my poor Holy Vicar, Pope Benedict XVI” has been ousted by a false prophet from Argentina by the name of Bergoglio. Although MDM has no significant following in the Church, milder versions of this scenario play well in some traditionalist circles. No doubt Pope Francis will shrug them off.

There is, however, a more pressing reason for the Church to study conspiracy thinking. Sometimes allegations are made against the Vatican that demand investigation. The “court” that the Holy Father dislikes so much is secretive and gossipy – and, as we must now accept, not beyond covering up grave financial and sexual crimes. Distinguishing truth from rumour and falsehood in such an environment is tricky – but the Church has a duty to do so if it is to heal the wounds it has created.

That process will be made easier if bishops, priests and lay advisers know how to recognise the signs of a conspiracy theory. These ancient nightmares have come back to haunt Catholics and other minorities thanks, paradoxically, to the latest developments in digital technology. Propagandists everywhere are having a field day constructing alternative realities that frighten us and poison our minds. As a first step, may I suggest that the Vatican finally learns how to use the internet?

This article first appeared in the Catholic Herald magazine (23/1/15)

Source

France's Sunday Pirouettes

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

By ROBERT ZARETSKYJAN. 25, 2015

Before the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks on Jan. 7, France was bracing for a dispute that, though neither violent nor volatile, nevertheless goes to the heart of the internal tensions over the role of religion in this devoutly secular country. After a tense, week-long negotiation between a special committee and the minister of the economy, Emmanuel Macron, the National Assembly will begin debate Monday on whether department stores and shops will be allowed to open more often on what has been a traditional day of rest.

During his presidential campaign in 2012, François Hollande lambasted the Right for its efforts to transform Sunday into a day like any other, devoted to business and material gain. The great battle of 2012, he declared, was over “the principle of Sunday as a day of rest, one that workers can devote to sport, to family, culture and to liberty.” If elected, Mr. Hollande promised, he “would keep vigil” over this sacrosanct day.

After three years of political disarray, economic malaise and mounting unemployment, however, Mr. Hollande has grown increasingly desperate. In mid-December, his treasury minister, Mr. Macron, offered a battery of legislation that seeks to liberalize some of the nation’s laws governing commerce and the liberal professions. One proposal in particular drew the ire of Mr. Hollande’s Socialist party rank-and-file, not to mention the Communists: The proposed law would allow stores or businesses to open 12 Sundays a year rather than just the five now permitted.

The Socialist dissident Martine Aubry published an opinion article in Le Monde that appeared the same day the government rolled out its legislation. Architect of the 35-hour week, a signature achievement of the Socialists introduced in 2000, Ms. Aubry dwelt on the meaning of the Sunday law. It is, she claimed, “a moment of truth speaking to the one question that truly matters: What kind of society do we want to live in?” Is this, she wondered, all the Left has left to offer: “A Sunday stroll in a shopping mall and the accumulation of consumer goods?”
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fiery leftist, was even more categorical. A relentless critic of the “savage capitalism” he associates with America, Mr. Mélenchon declared that the Revolution had freed the French to be human, not to become captives of a “blind consumerism.”

In the heat of battle, Mr. Mélenchon has found an unlikely ally in a traditional antagonist, the Catholic Church, which has also denounced the law. As one cleric explained, the church has joined the Communists for social as well as religious reasons. Rallying to the support of the Socialist Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who also opposes the new law, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois reminded his flock that France’s economic difficulties, though great, do not justify ignoring the benefits of “a common day of rest.”

The French have long had conflicted feelings about Sundays. In the early 1950s, the singer Juliette Greco — one of the muses for French existentialists — made her reputation with “I Hate Sundays.” While she derides Sunday as dead time, made for funerals and the hollow rites of the bourgeoisie, Greco also praises Sunday as the day for making love, not things.

Decidedly, as the French psychiatrist Serge Hefez notes: “Sundays are engraved in the French psyche.” But the day is also engraved in France’s history. During the last decades of the 19th century, French workers, laboring 10 hours a day, seven days a week, repeatedly went on strike to win a day of rest. In 1906, the government grudgingly conceded Sundays as a day of repose, hoping that if workers spent more time at home they would spend less time drinking in cafes. By the end of World War I, Sunday had taken root in the French cultural landscape — so much so that, in a 2008 poll, 84 percent declared that it was “important, indeed primordial, for family, cultural and religious life that Sunday remain the day of common rest.”

Pirouetting 180 degrees, Mr. Hollande, who had insisted Sunday was a day of republican repose, now dismisses it as a relic of an earlier age. Hammering at the same speaking points as Mr. Macron and Prime Minister Manuel Valls, President Hollande touts the liberty not to rest if one prefers to work (with greater pay, he always adds).

There is no clear consensus on the proposed law’s economic payoff. But one suspects that such concerns are secondary for both sides. Instead, traditionalists and modernizers are wrestling over a symbol — no small matter in a nation that, from the taking of the Bastille to the making of “Je suis Charlie,” understands the importance of political emblems.

As if to emphasize this very point, the marathon meeting between the Assembly representatives and Macron reached the finish line ... last Sunday. This was an unprecedented event in the annals of the Fifth Republic — even the National Assembly takes Sunday off.

Like politicians everywhere, France’s lawmakers are attached to symbols, but they are even more attached to being re-elected. The compromise bill that will be presented on Monday punts the issue to city governments, leaving it to mayors to decide on the number of Sundays stores can open. And so, as the philosopher André Comte-Sponville presciently observed: One spends one’s time “working, hurrying, waiting for the weekend. ... Finally, Sunday. For what? For nothing.”

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of World cultures and literatures at the University of Houston, and the author of the forthcoming “Boswell’s Enlightenment.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 26, 2015, in The International New York Times.

Source

Preparation for what Lies Ahead

Seek ye the Lord, all ye meek of the earth, which have wrought his judgment; seek righteousness, seek meekness: it may be ye shall be hid in the day of the Lord's anger. Zeph. 2:3.

Transgression has almost reached its limit. Confusion fills the world, and a great terror is soon to come upon human beings. The end is very near. God's people should be preparing for what is to break upon the world as an overwhelming surprise.

The "time of trouble, such as never was," is soon to open upon us; and we shall need an experience which we do not now possess and which many are too indolent to obtain. It is often the case that trouble is greater in anticipation than in reality; but this is not true of the crisis before us. The most vivid presentation cannot reach the magnitude of the ordeal. In that time of trial, every soul must stand for himself before God. "Though Noah, Daniel, and Job" were in the land, "as I live, saith the Lord God, they shall deliver neither son nor daughter; they shall but deliver their own souls by their righteousness." Ezekiel 14:20.

The last great conflict between truth and error is but the final struggle of the long-standing controversy concerning the law of God. Upon this battle we are now entering--a battle between the laws of men and the precepts of Jehovah, between the religion of the Bible and the religion of fable and tradition. We should study the great waymarks that point out the times in which we are living. . . .
We should now pray most earnestly that we may be prepared for the struggles of the great day of God's preparation.

Those who place themselves under God's control, to be led and guided by Him, will catch the steady tread of the events ordained by Him to take place. Inspired with the Spirit of Him who gave His life for the life of the world, they will no longer stand still in impotency, pointing to what they cannot do. Putting on the armor of heaven, they will go forth to the warfare, willing to do and dare for God, knowing that His omnipotence will supply their need.

Maranatha, p.162

Pope Francis initiates Vatican push for global work-free Sunday

Posted on July 11, 2014

by Utopia: the Collapse

July 2014 – RELIGION - If your job has you working on Sunday, the world leader of the Roman Catholic Church says maybe that’s not a good thing. “A work-free Sunday — with the exception of necessary services — says that our priority is not to economics, but the human being, gratuity, non-commercial relations, rather family and friends, for believers it means a relationship with God and with the community,” Pope Francis told a massive crowd in Molise, Italy, on July 5, according to Vatican Radio. “Perhaps it is time to ask whether it is a true freedom to work on Sundays.” The address was the pontiff’s first public appearance in the southern Italian city and focused on the world of work and the needs of families. Francis initially met with a university official, a Fiat factory worker, and a young mother who is pregnant with her second child, he said. The Molise region is suffering from high unemployment, reports indicate, and Sunday work is often cited as a way to grow the local economy. “Another challenge was voiced by this good working mother, who also spoke on behalf of her family: her husband, her young child and the baby in her womb. Her’s is a plea for work and at the same time for the family. Thank you for this testimony! In fact, it is a case of trying to reconcile work with family life,” the pope stated, referencing the woman’s concern about having Sunday as a time to play with her children. Francis continued, “This also raises the issue of working Sundays, which affects not only believers, but it affects everyone, as an ethical choice. We are losing this free space!

The question is what do we want to prioritize?” The quest for “free space” once a week is not a new theme for a pope or for the Catholic Church. In 1998, Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic letter, Dies Domini, or “The Lord’s Day,” in which the former archbishop of Krackow pleaded for a more spiritual emphasis. “(W)hen Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes merely part of a ‘weekend,’ it can happen that people stay locked within a horizon so limited that they can no longer see ‘the heavens,’” John Paul wrote. “Hence, though ready to celebrate, they are really incapable of doing so. The disciples of Christ, however, are asked to avoid any confusion between the celebration of Sunday, which should truly be a way of keeping the Lord’s Day holy, and the ‘weekend,’ understood as a time of simple rest and relaxation.” Francis’ remarks did not go as far as those of his predecessor, but media reporting interpreted his words as calling for a return to a simpler age: “Pope Francis has lamented the abandoning of the traditionally Christian practice of not working on Sundays, saying it has a negative impact on families and friendships,” the Associated Press reported. The call for a work-free Sunday has expanded — in Europe, at least — beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic Church. A European Sunday Alliance exists to lobby for legal recognition of workers’ rights to a day off, as embodied in various European Union charters. Such calls have engendered concerns over the rights of individuals who do not observe Sunday as a holy day, however: “Economic arguments aside, religious minorities in Europe — among them Muslims, Jews and Seventh-day Adventists — worry the proposal could infringe on free expression of religious beliefs, despite its seemingly well-intentioned goals of reducing stress and overwork,” the Adventist News Network reported in February 2014. Taking a day off each week has clear benefits for individuals and their families, as a Deseret News report in April outlined. –Central Talky News/

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The Way We Are: Setting Sunday Apart

Photo (Courtesy) http://listverse.com/2013/01/25/10-great-hoaxes-of-the-18th-century/

When religion meets economics

Posted By Rita Kohn on Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 1:33 PM

Blue Laws. What are they? When did they appear? How did they get the color designation? Whom do they affect? Why did they become essential to Indiana's way of life? Where are they taking us now?

Jan. 22, at the Indiana State Museum, an audience engaged in a spirited conversation with a panel including Ball State Professor Michael Hicks, Butler Professor Jason Lantzer, ISM staff member Katherine Gould and journalist John Krull.

Blue Laws generally refer to activities not allowed on Sunday. Most prominent is disallowing sale of alcoholic beverages in one form or another. Among other forbidden activities are car sales, hunting and various forms of entertainment. There's a website dedicated to "Silly Sunday Laws."

Sunday laws entered into the mainstream of what is now the U.S. from the beginning of European settlement on the North American continent. The very same groups of people who sailed away from 'home' for religious freedom established their sets of beliefs as the norm for everyone when they colonized the New World. Religion and secular merged as one entity.

No one knows for certain how laws pertaining to Sunday restrictions came to be called "blue." Of the many suppositions, scholars on the subject tend to agree "blue" refers to "morally rigid" in a disparaging sense rather than having gained its epithet from the blue paper Samuel A. Peters used to print his now largely discredited 1781 history of laws in Connecticut.

The panelists referred to the "ebb and flow" of religious to secular regarding acceptable behavior, with the dominant religion taking precedence. Everyone living within a geopolitical entity has been expected to abide by what the simple majority considered right. But individual choice has fought for a foothold. "What has been the spur for Indiana to maintain Blue Laws?" posited Krull. Lantzer believes it's public perception. Over time Sunday restrictions define who we are, even if we don't actually belong to the originating religion.

Blue Laws came into being as municipal and state prerogatives and once on the books remained intact even when Federal law, the 18th Amendment, negated Blue Laws as such. What Repeal did, however, is give even more power to local control. Each state can regulate at will. So what happens when Indiana has restrictive Sunday alcohol sales and all the other states surrounding have open Sunday sales? Legislators look at lost tax revenues, residents look at free will, business owners look at bottom line.

Degree of ease of transportation determines how we live, and how we can obtain products we want when we want them. Some of us don't want to have to plan ahead or go to multiple sites to shop.

Hicks asked us to consider the accepted notion of a day of rest, and how that is affecting current debate about changing or not Indiana's Sunday sales of alcoholic beverages. "A day off" has different meanings to different people. Small retail business models have been predicated on the notion that it's a level playing field for Indiana's alcohol industry, mostly dominated by the products of now foreign-owned corporations. Who gets hurt, who prospers when there's a change in long-standing business practices originally dictated by Blue Laws?

Religion has morphed into economics. Gould pointed to the long-range effects of Prohibition, including obliterating an entire industry and changing the notion of acceptable beverage to sugared "soft drinks." Prohibition also changed mores and attitudes towards each other.

"No other issue cuts so deep and wide as does Prohibition," said Lantzer. "It touches every strand in the fabric of society and is part of what drives moral and economic elements, intellectual and emotional issues, of our society."

Exhibit: American Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

When: continues through Feb. 15

Where: the Indiana State Museum

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Reasons to rest on a Sunday

By Pam Spano, Friday at 1:03 pm

My husband cooks dinner on Sundays. I let him. ;-)

I am from an era when everything was closed by 5 PM on Saturday and all day Sunday. Not a gas station, grocery store, department store or anything else I can think of was open. Sunday was truly a day of rest and for family.

What happened? Women joined the work force (I only knew one working mom when I was growing up), people in general worked more hours and there was no time to do the things that were usually put off for the weekend. Businesses began staying open longer hours and more days.

I occasionally work on Sundays. I don't mind it because I attend Mass on Saturday at 5 PM. The job I have now affords me the time to do that. A previous job said I couldn't have Saturday afternoons off to go to Mass. I was told, "If everyone was at church, who would be in the store?"

My husband works full time, so the weekend and especially Sunday is important to him. He picks and chooses what he wants to do and I don't interfere with that. If he decides to sit in front of the TV, I don't say anything. If he picks a household project, that's okay with me. If he decides to cook Sunday dinner ... well, I let him do that!

Now more than ever, I think we need reasons to rest on Sunday. We are overworked, overstressed and overwhelmed. We're SO BUSY! We've become a society of dazed and confused humans running around trying to get those errands done and for what? An early heart-attack or other stress-related illnesses?

Here are my reasons to rest on a Sunday:

You work Monday through Friday, 40-50 hours a week and on Saturday or Sunday you do household chores.
You bring your work home and do that in-between loads of laundry on Saturday or Sunday.
You grocery shop on Saturday or Sunday because you're too tired to stop on your way home from work during the week.
You've been carpooling kids all over the place to their activities that you feel like your car and you are conjoined.

So what do you do on Sunday? You go to church on Sunday. It's the armor that you'll need to face the rest of the week. It's what you'll fall back on when you are overworked, overstressed, overwhelmed and SO BUSY!

Please join me and other Catholics (and some not-so-Catholics!) on my Facebook page and on Twitter.

Type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time. A free blessing is included!

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Friday, January 30, 2015

Remember the Sabbath...

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Man Dies on Set of Martin Scorsese's Latest Film

Martin Scorsese
IMEH AKPANUDOSEN/GETTY

BY MICHELE CORRISTON @mcorriston

01/29/2015 AT 12:55 PM EST
An accident on the Taiwan set of Martin Scorsese's most recent movie has killed one worker and injured two others.

Chen Yu-lung died Thursday after scaffolding he was trying to dismantle collapsed on top of him, the Taipei City Fire department told the country's Central News Agency. The others were hospitalized with leg and head injuries.

Scorsese's latest directorial effort,Silence, is in pre-production at Taiwan's Chinese Culture and Movie Center Studios. The film is slated for release in 2016 and stars Liam Neeson and Andrew Garfield as 17th century Jesuit priests working in Japan.

"An existing structure on the CMPC backlot had been deemed unsafe by the production, and accordingly a third-party contractor was hired to reinforce and make it safe prior to any production-related work commencing in this building," a spokesman told Deadline Hollywood of the tragedy. "Sadly, during this process, the ceiling collapsed, resulting in the death of one of the contractor's employees and injuries to two others.

"Everyone is in shock and sorrow and expresses their deepest concern and sympathy to the families of the individual who died and those who were injured."

Scorsese, 72, is currently in Taiwan, but it is not known whether he was on the lot when the accident occurred, according to the Associated Press.

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An Overwhelming Surprise.

Christians should be preparing for what is soon to break upon the world as an overwhelming surprise, and this preparation they should make by diligently studying the word of God and striving to conform their lives to its precepts. The tremendous issues of eternity demand of us something besides an imaginary religion, a religion of words and forms, where truth is kept in the outer court. God calls for a revival and a reformation. The words of the Bible and the Bible alone, should be heard from the pulpit. But the Bible has been robbed of its power, and the result is seen in a lowering of the tone of spiritual life. In many sermons of today there is not that divine manifestation which awakens the conscience and brings life to the soul. The hearers cannot say, "Did not our heart burn within us, while He talked with us by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?" Luke 24:32.There are many who are crying out for the living God, longing for the divine presence. Let the word of God speak to the heart. Let those who have heard only tradition and human theories and maxims, hear the voice of Him who can renew the soul unto eternal life.

Prophets and Kings, p.626
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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

The Secret Catholic Sex Cult

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

William O’Connor

BAD HABITS
01.28.15

Lecherous Nuns And Priests, Murder Plots and Coverups: Meet The Mother Superior of Catholic Scandals

In the 19th century, a scandal involving sex and murder at a Rome convent ensnared practically every major player in the Catholic Church hierarchy.

Nuns using visions of God to persuade novices to have sex, threesomes with priests, the poisoning of a fat German princess, a prominent theologian shacking up with a vicaress, young nuns murdered, fetuses removed from an abbess, and cardinals, the Jesuit superior general, and the pope all enthralled by a beautiful and charismatic fraudulent saint—it’s enough to put The Decameron to shame.

The hard-to-believe story that contains all of these juicy nuggets—the 1858 scandal at the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome—is the subject of Hubert Wolf’s rigorous and stunning new book, The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal. Translated by Ruth Martin, it is a hybrid of high and low perfect for the modern reader—racy and yet simultaneously erudite.

The level of intrigue and the variety of scandal are at some points so bewildering that it’s hard to keep things straight. So, perhaps it’s best to start with the woman who triggered the whole mess—the twice-widowed, famously corpulent Princess Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.

Despite health issues, Katharina was determined to join a convent. After one failed attempt, her adviser, Cardinal Reisach, suggested she join the convent at Sant’Ambrogio.

However, after a mere 15 months, in 1859 Katharina would be rescued from the convent by her cousin, the Archbishop Hohenlohe-Schillingfurst, and rushed to recuperate at his estate, Villa d’Este.

What pushed the princess to flee? According to her denunciation to the Holy Tribunal of the Sanctum Officium (the Roman Inquisition), she had discovered the convent to be a cult venerating a false saint, a hotbed of sexual intrigue, and broken confessional seals. And she hysterically claimed there had been an attempt to poison her.
Maria Luisa was a monster who used her supposed visions to entice novices into her bed, embezzle convent funds, and poison opponents.

The book then follows the determined and detailed investigation by judge Vincenzo Leone Sallua, who worked from 1859 to 1860 to determine what exactly went on at the convent so that Pope Pius IX could determine whether a trial should be opened. The story he uncovered was far more dramatic than the princess could have imagined, and implicated some of the most powerful cardinals of the day, the Jesuit general, and multiple popes. It was the kind of scandal opponents of the church joked about—libidinous nuns and priests run amok behind the closed doors of the convent.

via Amazon

This was not the first scandal for the convent. Its founder, Maria Agnese Firrao, had once been the toast of the Catholic world for her visions and healing powers. The former pope, Leo XII, considered her a close spiritual adviser, as did numerous cardinals and the king of Sardinia. She was later found out to have fraudulently claimed to have performed miracles, had an affair with her confessor, had two abortions by the church when she got pregnant by clerical officials, engaged in a threesome with her confessor and another nun, and encouraged her novices to venerate her as a living saint. The Vatican publicly denounced her for her actions, and stripped her of her abbess title. However, that same Leo XII issued a brief in 1829 largely exonerating Firrao from the 1816 Inquisition verdict.

One of the sins the princess charged the convent with was that the nuns were venerating Firrao, a false saint. She was right, Sallua discovered to his horror, but there was also a rival for the nuns’ adoration.

Maria Luisa, at just 27 years of age, was the convent’s alluring novice mistress and vicaress. It turns out that Maria Luisa, who Katharina accused of the poisoning, was seen as an upstart fraud by the founder Firrao. She claimed to have visions from Mary and Jesus, and the nuns at the convent—including the abbess—believed she had miraculous powers. However, as Sallua discovered, she was a monster who used her supposed visions to entice novices into her bed, embezzle convent funds, and poison opponents.

One nun, who was luckily exiled and not killed by Maria Luisa, told Sallua that Maria Luisa claimed the Lord told her in a vision she needed to treat a sickness in the nun’s private parts. She claimed that another vision had told her that a liquid that came from the Lord “flowed over my whole body, collecting in the lower part of my body, as in a little hollow where it then remained,” and that they should share in this liquid.

Another nun confessed that Maria Luisa was “keen” on something she called “giving,” which involved asking “me to lie in a certain position, with my legs raised, while she “entwined” herself with me … she then made movements and a sound such as I cannot express in words, and she instructed me to position myself so that I could receive her bodily fluids into me.” Or, continued the nun, “she wanted me positioned above her, so that we were body to body and mouth to mouth.” Maria Luisa told this nun that her bodily fluid was a gift from God to heal the nun’s sickness. She also created an initiation rite in which novices had to sleep with Maria Luisa the night before they were made nuns, made to “lay face-to-face and breast-to-breast.”

However, in a twist of events that will be unsurprising to modern audiences, when Maria Luisa confessed to these actions, she also disclosed that she had once been a victim, and that Firrao herself had once done the whole this-liquid-in-my-privates-is-from-God routine to her when she was a novice.

Maria Luisa also admitted to trying to poison the princess, who had figured out that Maria Luisa was less than saintly. She gave the princess gruel with ground glass, tartar emetic, and opium in an attempt to kill her. While Katharina would suffer (she passed what Wolf believes was stomach lining in her excrement), the portly princess survived. So Maria Luisa went about killing off her accomplices. One of them survived. Three others—one 21, one 22, and an elder nun—were not so lucky.

Wolf’s book, and the story of Sant’Ambrogio, are not merely concerned with tales of lurid sexual escapades. Sant’Ambrogio was also at the center of a significant theological war within the Catholic Church, as influential players in that war were ensnared in its drama. The scandal and its aftermath also highlighted a degree of unfathomable leniency when it comes to grave crimes committed by members of the church—again, something all too familiar to modern readers.

As Sallua finished his investigation into the nuns, he turned to the two Jesuit confessors, Giuseppe Leziroli and Giuseppe Peters, who Katharina accused of being in league with Maria Luisa and of breaking the confessional seal.

The investigation into Leziroli revealed that he had continued to venerate Firrao in spite of the Inquisition’s decision that she was a fraud. However, the investigation into Peters proved far more rewarding, and problematic.

Maria Luisa had admitted to a full-blown sexual affair with Peters, as well as confirming his role in supporting her manipulation of the rest of the convent via the confessional. But Peters was in fact not his only name—he was actually Joseph Kleutgen, one of Rome’s more prominent theologians, whose writings influenced everyone from the Jesuit Superior General to conservative cardinals to the pope himself.

Kleutgen hailed from the wing of the Church most determined to reinforce papal authority through theological dogma in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (the notion of papal infallibility, for instance, originated in this time period). Kleutgen and his allies, which included the aforementioned Cardinal Reisach, were opposed within the Curia by none other than Katharina’s cousin, the Archbishop Hohenlohe-Schillingfurst. Kleutgen had also used Maria Luisa’s visions, which were believed by the Jesuit Superior General, to expose the homosexual relationship of two theological rivals within the order.

Now Kleutgen and his work were being undercut by his own deeds. In one honest to goodness laugh-out-loud section of the book, Kleutgen defends his sexual affair with Maria Luisa with the theological argument that the sex he had with her was without lust and so therefore was not a sin.

Maria Luisa, quite simply, was guilty of embezzlement, sexual abuse, and murder. This was explicitly aided and abetted by her Jesuit confessor Peters (the theologian Kleutgen). But their guilt also undermined the authority of the papacy just as it was trying to consolidate it. When it came time for their sentencing, they were each to be “imprisoned” in a monastery or convent. While Maria Luisa might have faced the death penalty and Kleutgen a heavy sentence in most secular societies, Pope Pius IX actually reduced their already lenient sentences. After much debate, Kleutgen was “imprisoned” for three years, which Pius reduced to two—which Kleutgen served at a house of retreat on Lake Nemi. One of the cardinals involved had actually wanted no punishment for him. Maria Luisa was sentenced to 20 years, and Pius reduced it to 18. This came after multiple attempts by Pius to suppress or avert a full-blown investigation into the convent.

Wolf largely avoids a direct comparison between the 19th century scandal at the convent, the leniency of punishments, and subsequent attempts to keep it under wraps and the 20th century priest abuse scandals. However, it’s hard to read the book without that hovering in the mind. Maintenance of the Church’s image and preservation of those in power took precedence over justice for murdered nuns and sexually abused novices. The decision by the Jesuit order, even its own historians, to downplay or erase the affair from works about Kleutgen or this time period is especially disheartening. “This damaging picture—the father of new scholasticism as a criminal and seducer, and the Jesuits and their friends in the Curia as a society of gullible bigots—should on no account be allowed to enter the public imagination,” writes Wolf, when taking stock of why the Jesuits were not open about it.

After Pope Pius IX reduced the sentences, Wolf makes his views clear, writing, “Was two years really an appropriate punishment for the serious offenses Kleutgen had committed? It’s clear where the pope’s sympathies lay in this trial … the padre was part of his Jesuit network. Kleutgen and the Jesuits shored up the pope’s sovereignty—this called for care and leniency.”

Wolf manages to check so many boxes for anti-Catholic Church fans that the book could be mistaken for a complete indictment of the Church. But that would miss one of the greatest ironies of the book—that of the refreshing dedication of the Inquisition’s investigating judges. While popular history associates it with gruesome torture, the Inquisition in Wolf’s telling treats issues of faith with such exacting skepticism that it feels like watching an atheist at work. And with a book filled with a scandal this explosive about an institution so important to so many people, that kind of balance that Wolf provides is reassuring.

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Music Industry Exposed Part 2 - The Agenda to Promote the Dark Side

The Conscious Reporter

Music Industry Exposed Part 2 - The Agenda to Promote the Dark Side - The Conscious Reporter

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Why the Damage to the Economy Caused by the Oil Crash...

Is Going To Get Progressively Worse

Read article

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/damage-economy-caused-oil-crash-going-get-progressively-worse

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Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Mormon Leaders Call for Measures Protecting Gay Rights

Mormon Leaders Call for Measures Protecting Gay Rights

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France's Sunday Pirouettes

Read article
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/opinion/frances-sunday-pirouettes.html?_r=0&referrer=
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More on Sunday shopping:
Sunday Shopping
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Saturday, January 24, 2015

"No, the Jesuits didn't start World War I"

Read article :

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/january-23rd-2015/no-the-jesuits-didnt-start-world-war-i/?shr=g
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P.S.
Sure they didn't; and the Jesuits weren't founded to counteract the Reformation, either. No, they are teachers, confessors, scholars, and scientists.
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Happy Sabbath

Jindal Headlining All-Day Prayer Rally in Baton Rouge

Jindal Headlining All-Day Prayer Rally in Baton Rouge

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Thursday, January 22, 2015

EndrTimes: Redmond Washington Blog?

Since the phenomenon hasn't ceased I have to re-post this:

EndrTimes: Redmond Washington Blog?:

As I check my blog and the Feedjit traffic feed on it... I notice that Redmond Washington is 9 of the 10 last visitors to EndrTime...

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Doomsday approaching?

Clock clicking closer to midnight.

Pelosi: Boehner Invite to Netanyahu Inappropriate

Pelosi: Boehner Invite to Netanyahu Inappropriate

Now, inviting the pope?

What a great idea!

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Prepare the Way of the Lord

End-Times-Prophecy

Published on Jan 18, 2015

A beautiful song set to pictures. We need to prepare the way for the Lord's second coming. The time is at hand and we need to reach the world with God's truth, and be a shining light for Jesus Christ.
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