Thursday, May 30, 2024
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Monday, May 27, 2024
Saturday, May 25, 2024
Pray for Dr Ganoune Diop - GC PARL Director
23 MAY 2024
BUC COMMUNICATIONS
PRAY FOR DR GANOUNE DIOP - GC PARL DIRECTOR
The British Union Conference (BUC) invites you to join the Adventist World Church in prayer for Dr Ganoune Diop, whose hospitalisation for cardiac treatment comes as a shock to us at the BUC. Dr Diop was recently here in the UK to conduct a Public Affairs and Religious Liberty programme for the BUC at Hinckley nearly two weeks ago, blessing those who attended with his insightful presentations. GC President Ted Wilson shared the following words for our collective prayers.
Dr Ganoune Diop, General Conference Public Affairs and Religious Liberty director, was admitted to the hospital on May 16, 2024. He is being treated in an intensive care unit for a cardiac ailment of uncertain cause. He is receiving excellent, state-of-the art medical treatment.
The Diop family have shared that Pastor Diop's condition is currently stable and includes certain surgical procedures that have been performed.
Pr Ted Wilson thanks the world church family for your prayers of intercession on behalf of a complete recovery for Dr Diop.
We ask everyone to earnestly pray for the entire Diop family and for Pastor Diop's healing and complete restoration by the Master Physician.
GC Communication Department
Thursday, May 23, 2024
Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Tuesday, May 21, 2024
Digital Lockdown Becomes Law: No Digital ID, No Job, No Travel, No rent, A Tsunami Of Genocide
Disclaimer:
Personally, I don't agree with all the opinions expressed on this video, but most of the information expressed here is very important.
✴
Monday, May 20, 2024
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Pope: US Catholic Conservatives Have 'Suicidal Attitude'
Sunday, 19 May 2024 12:44 PM EDT
Pope Francis said his conservative critics within the Roman Catholic Church in the United States are trapped in a "suicidal attitude," according to an interview with CBS.
During the April 24 interview with "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday, Francis was asked his thoughts on the conservative backlash against his papacy, with many of his critics being American clergy members.
Francis responded by saying a conservative is someone who "clings to something and does not want to see beyond that."
"It is a suicidal attitude," the pontiff said.
"Because one thing is to take tradition into account, to consider situations from the past, but quite another is to be closed up inside a dogmatic box."
Francis has clashed with the conservative wing almost since he was elected as head of the church in 2013.
Moves conservatives have opposed include papal attempts to make the church more welcoming to the LGBT community and to give lay people more responsibility in the church.
When asked during the interview about his decision to allow priests to bless same-sex couples, the pope replied that the church cannot actually bless the union, as it is against church teaching, but they can bless the individual.
"The blessing is for everyone — for everyone. To bless a homosexual-type union, however, goes against the given rite, against the law of the church. But to bless each person, why not? The blessing is for all. Some people were scandalized by this, but why? Everyone, everyone."
Francis replied when asked about his being more open and accepting than his predecessors that "you have to be open to everything. The church is like that. Everyone, everyone, everyone. That so-and-so is a sinner. Me, too. I am a sinner. Everyone.
"The gospel is for everyone. If the church places a customs officer at the door, that is no longer the church of Christ. Everyone."
Francis last year dismissed a conservative U.S. bishop who was a withering critic of his papacy and said the conservative wing in the U.S. church was "reactionary." He also stripped a conservative American cardinal of some Vatican privileges.
When asked about the state of Texas potentially shutting down a Catholic charity on the U.S.-Mexico border that gives humanitarian aid to migrants, Francis replied that it is "sheer madness."
"To close the border and leave them there, that is madness. The migrant has to be received. Thereafter you see how you're going to deal with them. Maybe you have to send them back. I don't know. But each case ought to be considered humanely, right?"
Regarding surrogacy, Pope Francis said that "in each case, the situation should be carefully and clearly considered, consulting medically and then morally as well. I think there is a general rule in these cases, but you have to go into each case in particular to assess the situation — as long as the moral principle is not skirted."
Newsmax staffer Jeremy Frankel contributed to this report.
© 2024 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.
Saturday, May 18, 2024
Friday, May 17, 2024
The Trouble With World Government
The World Health Organization logo is seen at the entrance of its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on March 9, 2020. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
By Jeffrey A. Tucker
5/14/2024Updated:
5/15/2024
Commentary
Well, at least that’s one setback for world government.
A court in Australia has told the government’s own eSafety Commission that Elon Musk is correct: One country cannot impose censorship on the world. The company X, formerly known as Twitter, must obey national law but not global law.
Mr. Musk seems to have won a very similar fight in Brazil, where a judge demanded not just a national but global takedown. X refused and won. For now.
This really does raise a serious issue: How big of a threat are these global government institutions?
Dreamy, dopey, and often scary intellectuals have dreamed of global government for centuries. If you are rich enough and smart enough, the idea seems to be the perennial temptation. The list of advocates includes people who otherwise have made notable contributions: Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, Walter Cronkite, Buckminster Fuller, and many others.
Often the dream comes alive following huge upheavals such as war and depression. Or a pandemic period such as the one we’ve just gone through. The use of “disinformation” as a cross-border test case of global government power is designed to deploy a new strategy of governance in general, one that disregards national control in favor of global control.
That has always been the dream. In history, for example, following the Great War, we saw the creation of the League of Nations, which was a forerunner to the United Nations, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson. Both were seen by the intellectual class as necessary building blocks for what they really wanted, which was a binding world state.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s what they said and what they wanted.
In 1919, H.G. Wells, inspired by the League, became so excited about the idea that he wrote a sweeping reinterpretation of world history that extended from the ninth century B.C. until that present moment. It was called “The Outline of History.”
The goal of the book was to turn on its head the popular Whig theory from the previous century, which saw history as the story of ever more freedom for individuals and away from powerful states. Wells told a story of tribes turning to nations and then to regions, with ever less power to the people and ever more to dictators and planners. His purpose was to chronicle and defend exactly this.
It was a huge bestseller at a time when the appetite for books was voracious because they were becoming affordable and there was a burning passion in the population for universal education. The thesis of his book, however valuable in some historical respects, was genuinely bizarre. He imagined a future world state ruled by a tiny elite of the smartest people who would plan all economies, information flows, migration patterns, and governance systems while crushing national ambitions, free enterprise, traditions, and constitutions.
It was crazy stuff and didn’t really happen. But the efforts never stopped among a certain class of intellectuals. Following World War II, we saw similar efforts, the U.N. being only one. In the agreement hammered out at Bretton Woods in 1944, we had forged the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which were seen as the basis of a global planning apparatus, together with a new world monetary system.
None of this worked out either. The IMF and World Bank ended up being well-funded sinecures for elite academics but not really the financial basis of a world state. The U.N. turned into a disappointment for many. The efforts at global management of trade finally came to fruition with the World Trade Organization, but that machinery has proven mostly toothless and unable to stop the sweeping turning back on free trade that has taken place over the past five years. Today, no nation really fears that entity.
The drive to unite Europe was advertised as a liberal move to inspire cooperation on trade and travel and to make economic cooperation possible. But that was just the pitch. The reality of the European Union was the creation of a mean bureaucracy in Brussels that would override the sovereignty of nations and force deference to a new central state in Europe that actually had no historical precedent. It was an experiment in region-wide government planning.
Britain was always a reluctant member, but when its worst fears were realized, the people voted to leave the whole thing. The result was Brexit, a political movement that panicked elites all over the world. They saw the plans of decades going up in smoke. Boris Johnson became prime minister with the task of making Brexit happen, but his rule was confounded at every step. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic came along to upend his entire tenure.
One way to understand the COVID-19 pandemic response is as a further experiment in world government, a way for the elites to broadcast to the entire planet that they can achieve global cooperation when they want to.
In most every nation, the response was the same in terms of timing and protocol. Social distancing was everywhere, and masks, too. The breakup of gatherings including worship, along with idiotic schemes such as one-way grocery aisles, were imposed everywhere. The slogans (“We are all in this together”) and signage (wash hands, keep distance, mask up) were also the same.
It was creepy in the extreme, especially when you consider the way it all happened at once, even though we knew for sure that there are huge hemispheric differences in the way respiratory pathogens spread. Something can be a problem in New York but not in Sydney. Why did this happen all at once? The message seemed to be: This is just what we do in a global pandemic.
What they did not tell anyone is that none of this constituted “common sense public health measures” but rather amounted to an experiment without any precedent in the history of humanity. Nowhere had all this cockamamie stuff ever been implemented. Only crazy people had recommended them in the past, but the crazies somehow carried the day. There was a message behind the entire effort: We are the government, and we rule the world, populists’ resentment be damned.
In the aftermath, the World Health Organization (WHO) has picked up the mantle to goad the nations of the world to give up their sovereignty and agree to implement the same protocols anytime that the WHO demands it. They have this treaty or agreement that they have been shopping around the planet for signers. At first, it seemed to be in the bag. But with the calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic response in the rearview mirror, it turned out to not be so easy.
The group REPPARE started looking carefully at this agreement and the amendments and saw that the entire thing rested on faulty premises, twisted thinking, and fiscal profligacy. Governments around the world are now flat-out rejecting the offer to give up their control over nations. It appears now that the World Health Organization’s agreement is in trouble. We are even starting to see movements in the direction of leaving the WHO completely, just as President Donald Trump attempted to do back in 2017.
No question that a nascent world government is in operation today. It is hugely influential over media, technology, and the operation of the internet. It is managing global money flows and asset prices. It aims to reduce national sovereignty to mere brand names of the same thing and make it impossible for the will of the voters to prevail in any policy outcomes. It consists of large and well-funded elites that swim between the public and private sectors and operate through foundations and nongovernmental organizations. It is utterly detached from democratic processes.
“Nothing more disastrous could happen in the field of international economic relations than the realization of such plans,” Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1944. “It would divide the nations into two groups—the exploiting and the exploited; those restricting output and charging monopoly prices, and those forced to pay monopoly prices. It would engender insoluble conflicts of interests and inevitably result in new wars.”
In other words, like all government actions, the results of a world government would end in the opposite of the promise: not peace but war, not prosperity but poverty, not health but sickness, not a better environment but a worse one. It would be a prison for the world and utterly unworkable. People of the world need to be on the lookout for what is happening and reject it whenever the opportunity presents itself to do so.
For this reason, we should cheer anytime global government impositions such as censorship experience a setback. Government in one country causes enough trouble. A unitary government ruling all countries would doom what’s left of civilization.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
By Jeffrey A. Tucker
5/14/2024Updated:
5/15/2024
Commentary
Well, at least that’s one setback for world government.
A court in Australia has told the government’s own eSafety Commission that Elon Musk is correct: One country cannot impose censorship on the world. The company X, formerly known as Twitter, must obey national law but not global law.
Mr. Musk seems to have won a very similar fight in Brazil, where a judge demanded not just a national but global takedown. X refused and won. For now.
This really does raise a serious issue: How big of a threat are these global government institutions?
Dreamy, dopey, and often scary intellectuals have dreamed of global government for centuries. If you are rich enough and smart enough, the idea seems to be the perennial temptation. The list of advocates includes people who otherwise have made notable contributions: Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, Walter Cronkite, Buckminster Fuller, and many others.
Often the dream comes alive following huge upheavals such as war and depression. Or a pandemic period such as the one we’ve just gone through. The use of “disinformation” as a cross-border test case of global government power is designed to deploy a new strategy of governance in general, one that disregards national control in favor of global control.
That has always been the dream. In history, for example, following the Great War, we saw the creation of the League of Nations, which was a forerunner to the United Nations, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson. Both were seen by the intellectual class as necessary building blocks for what they really wanted, which was a binding world state.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s what they said and what they wanted.
In 1919, H.G. Wells, inspired by the League, became so excited about the idea that he wrote a sweeping reinterpretation of world history that extended from the ninth century B.C. until that present moment. It was called “The Outline of History.”
The goal of the book was to turn on its head the popular Whig theory from the previous century, which saw history as the story of ever more freedom for individuals and away from powerful states. Wells told a story of tribes turning to nations and then to regions, with ever less power to the people and ever more to dictators and planners. His purpose was to chronicle and defend exactly this.
It was a huge bestseller at a time when the appetite for books was voracious because they were becoming affordable and there was a burning passion in the population for universal education. The thesis of his book, however valuable in some historical respects, was genuinely bizarre. He imagined a future world state ruled by a tiny elite of the smartest people who would plan all economies, information flows, migration patterns, and governance systems while crushing national ambitions, free enterprise, traditions, and constitutions.
It was crazy stuff and didn’t really happen. But the efforts never stopped among a certain class of intellectuals. Following World War II, we saw similar efforts, the U.N. being only one. In the agreement hammered out at Bretton Woods in 1944, we had forged the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which were seen as the basis of a global planning apparatus, together with a new world monetary system.
None of this worked out either. The IMF and World Bank ended up being well-funded sinecures for elite academics but not really the financial basis of a world state. The U.N. turned into a disappointment for many. The efforts at global management of trade finally came to fruition with the World Trade Organization, but that machinery has proven mostly toothless and unable to stop the sweeping turning back on free trade that has taken place over the past five years. Today, no nation really fears that entity.
The drive to unite Europe was advertised as a liberal move to inspire cooperation on trade and travel and to make economic cooperation possible. But that was just the pitch. The reality of the European Union was the creation of a mean bureaucracy in Brussels that would override the sovereignty of nations and force deference to a new central state in Europe that actually had no historical precedent. It was an experiment in region-wide government planning.
Britain was always a reluctant member, but when its worst fears were realized, the people voted to leave the whole thing. The result was Brexit, a political movement that panicked elites all over the world. They saw the plans of decades going up in smoke. Boris Johnson became prime minister with the task of making Brexit happen, but his rule was confounded at every step. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic came along to upend his entire tenure.
One way to understand the COVID-19 pandemic response is as a further experiment in world government, a way for the elites to broadcast to the entire planet that they can achieve global cooperation when they want to.
In most every nation, the response was the same in terms of timing and protocol. Social distancing was everywhere, and masks, too. The breakup of gatherings including worship, along with idiotic schemes such as one-way grocery aisles, were imposed everywhere. The slogans (“We are all in this together”) and signage (wash hands, keep distance, mask up) were also the same.
It was creepy in the extreme, especially when you consider the way it all happened at once, even though we knew for sure that there are huge hemispheric differences in the way respiratory pathogens spread. Something can be a problem in New York but not in Sydney. Why did this happen all at once? The message seemed to be: This is just what we do in a global pandemic.
What they did not tell anyone is that none of this constituted “common sense public health measures” but rather amounted to an experiment without any precedent in the history of humanity. Nowhere had all this cockamamie stuff ever been implemented. Only crazy people had recommended them in the past, but the crazies somehow carried the day. There was a message behind the entire effort: We are the government, and we rule the world, populists’ resentment be damned.
In the aftermath, the World Health Organization (WHO) has picked up the mantle to goad the nations of the world to give up their sovereignty and agree to implement the same protocols anytime that the WHO demands it. They have this treaty or agreement that they have been shopping around the planet for signers. At first, it seemed to be in the bag. But with the calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic response in the rearview mirror, it turned out to not be so easy.
The group REPPARE started looking carefully at this agreement and the amendments and saw that the entire thing rested on faulty premises, twisted thinking, and fiscal profligacy. Governments around the world are now flat-out rejecting the offer to give up their control over nations. It appears now that the World Health Organization’s agreement is in trouble. We are even starting to see movements in the direction of leaving the WHO completely, just as President Donald Trump attempted to do back in 2017.
No question that a nascent world government is in operation today. It is hugely influential over media, technology, and the operation of the internet. It is managing global money flows and asset prices. It aims to reduce national sovereignty to mere brand names of the same thing and make it impossible for the will of the voters to prevail in any policy outcomes. It consists of large and well-funded elites that swim between the public and private sectors and operate through foundations and nongovernmental organizations. It is utterly detached from democratic processes.
“Nothing more disastrous could happen in the field of international economic relations than the realization of such plans,” Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1944. “It would divide the nations into two groups—the exploiting and the exploited; those restricting output and charging monopoly prices, and those forced to pay monopoly prices. It would engender insoluble conflicts of interests and inevitably result in new wars.”
In other words, like all government actions, the results of a world government would end in the opposite of the promise: not peace but war, not prosperity but poverty, not health but sickness, not a better environment but a worse one. It would be a prison for the world and utterly unworkable. People of the world need to be on the lookout for what is happening and reject it whenever the opportunity presents itself to do so.
For this reason, we should cheer anytime global government impositions such as censorship experience a setback. Government in one country causes enough trouble. A unitary government ruling all countries would doom what’s left of civilization.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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