God’s reckoning upon a
wayward world
For years, Israel has had to live with
existential threats from Iran and its neighbors, yet hardly anyone has done
anything about it. The world seems to
take for granted that Israel must live with such threats without ever doing
anything about it either. Imagine what would happen if Russia, or China, made
such threats to America, or vice versa.
A few years ago, when the media went into
another one of those cyclical frenzies with the notion that Israel was about to
attack Iran and destroy that nation’s nuclear facilities before it developed
nuclear weapons, we said that according to biblical prophecies it is Iran who
will attack Israel, not the other way around.
Our prediction has proven true.
In February 2012, Iran attacked a number of Israeli missions abroad – in
Georgia, India, and Thailand, to mention those that made it into the media.
From there, attacking Israel itself is only a short step away.
Iran has shown that its threats to Israel are
not mere talk; that it is prepared to act on them. This has changed the name of the game. Israel is now entitled to reply and take
action before a greater disaster hits the nation.
This is not going to make Israel many
friends. On the contrary, biblical
prophecies tell us that this tiny nation will face the wrath of the entire
world. We have said much about those prophecies in the past, and may yet say
more in the future, God willing, but for now we will only post this prophecy as
a reminder.
Zec 12:1 The burden of the word of the LORD against
Israel. Thus says the LORD, who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation
of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him:
Zec
12:2 "Behold, I will make Jerusalem
a cup of drunkenness to all the surrounding peoples, when they lay siege
against Judah and Jerusalem.
Zec
12:3 And it shall happen in that day
that I will make Jerusalem a very heavy stone for all peoples; all who would
heave it away will surely be cut in pieces,
Zec
12:4 though all nations of the earth are
gathered against it. In that day,"
says the LORD, "I will strike every horse with confusion, and its rider
with madness; I will open My eyes on the house of Judah, and will strike every
horse of the peoples with blindness.
Zec
12:5 And the governors of Judah shall
say in their heart, 'The inhabitants of Jerusalem are my strength in the
LORD of hosts, their God.'
Zec 12:6 In
that day I will make the governors of Judah like a firepan in the woodpile, and
like a fiery torch in the sheaves; they shall devour all the surrounding
peoples on the right hand and on the left, but Jerusalem shall be inhabited
again in her own place—Jerusalem.
Zec 12:7 "The LORD will save the tents of Judah
first, so that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the inhabitants
of Jerusalem shall not become greater than that of Judah.
Zec 12:8 In that day the LORD will defend the
inhabitants of Jerusalem; the one who is feeble among them in that day shall be
like David, and the house of David shall be like God, like the Angel of
the LORD before them.
Zec 12:9 It shall be in that day that I will
seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.
Zec 12:10 "And I will pour on the house of David
and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then
they will look on Me whom they pierced. Yes, they will mourn for Him as one
mourns for his only son, and grieve for Him as one grieves for a
firstborn.
Zec 12:11 In that day there shall be a great mourning
in Jerusalem, like the mourning at Hadad Rimmon in the plain of Megiddo.
Zec 12:12 And the land shall mourn, every family by
itself: the family of the house of David by itself, and their wives by
themselves; the family of the house of Nathan by itself,
Zec 12:13 and their wives by themselves; the family of
the house of Levi by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of
Shimei by itself, and their wives by themselves;
Zec 12:14 all the families that remain, every family by
itself, and their wives by themselves.
Many times in the past we have said that the
world is in ‘the preceding stages to the Great Tribulation.’ We amend that now
to read, ‘the preceding stages of the
Great Tribulation.’
The Arab revolutions, the fall of the Libyan
dictator and Assad massacring of his own people in Syria, while the world
stands paralyzed in the face of Russian and Chinese vetoes in the Security
Council, Europe’s and America’s monumental debt burdens, the acute shortages of
water, food, energy and resources around the world, and starving millions in Africa,
have well and truly set the Apocalypse in motion.
This is exactly what we have warned the world
about for two decades. But the world has
not listened to us. It listened instead to its own prophets who have opposed us
in every way and at every step. Now let them get their nations out of this
predicament. God is very angry with this
wayward world, and about to unleash His terrifying vengeance upon it.
Isa
63:1 Who is this who comes from
Edom, With dyed garments from Bozrah, This One who is glorious in His
apparel, Traveling in the greatness of His strength?— "I who speak in
righteousness, mighty to save."
Isa
63:2 Why is Your apparel red, And
Your garments like one who treads in the winepress?
Isa
63:3 "I have trodden the winepress
alone, And from the peoples no one was with Me. For I have trodden them in My anger, And trampled them in My fury;
Their blood is sprinkled upon My garments, And I have stained all My robes.
Isa 63:4 For
the day of vengeance is in My
heart, And the year of My redeemed has come.
Isa
63:5 I looked, but there was no
one to help, And I wondered That there was no one to uphold; Therefore
My own arm brought salvation for Me; And My own fury, it sustained Me.
Isa
63:6 I have trodden down the peoples in My anger, Made them drunk in My
fury, And brought down their strength to the earth."
Now consider what Jesus Christ said in His famous Mount of
Olives prophecy about the end time.
Mat
24:3 Now as He sat on the Mount of
Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, "Tell us, when will
these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the
end of the age?"
Mat
24:4 And Jesus answered and said to
them: "Take heed that no one deceives you. . .
Mat
24:21 For then there will be great
tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this
time, no, nor ever shall be.
Mat
24:22 And unless those days were
shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect's sake those days will be
shortened.
Unless those days are shortened, no flesh would be saved
alive. It is the elect of God that will
keep alive some people in some nations, for many nations will vanish from the
face of the earth altogether.
Zec
14:16 And it shall come to pass that
everyone who is left of all the nations
which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the King,
the LORD of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles.
So few people will survive this worldwide
catastrophe that EVERYONE is expected to come to Jerusalem, to keep what? Easter, Christmas, Halloween, Birthdays,
Saints Days? No, they come to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. I am sure the prophets of your church will be
able to tell you what that is and when to keep it. Happy Feast of
Tabernacles!
Prophetic developments that
portend catastrophe in our
time
The wizard if ID, looking into a crystal ball:
“I see a time when peace
will reign throughout the whole world”.
Interlocutor:
“I bet people are happy”.
The wizard:
“I don’t see any people”.
Scientists, politicians, even comics, are now
contemplating the possibility that this world may have no future. Yet although the notion of an end to this
world is on many a people’s lips, there is universal rejection of the one and
only way by which humanity could be saved.
Mal 4:4 "Remember the Law of Moses, My servant,
Which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel, With the statutes and
judgments.
Mal 4:5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet
Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD.
Mal 4:6 And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to
the children, And the hearts of the children to their fathers, Lest I come and strike
the earth with a curse [utter
destruction, Tanakh].
When God
says that unless the world changes its ways and keeps His Commandments He will
destroy it, He means it. And what does
He expect from human beings above all?
LOVE! Love
of children, love of parents, and especially love of our heavenly Father.
This kind
of love is possible only in the context of the Ten Commandments – the first
four regulate our relationship with our heavenly Father, while the last six
regulate the relationship between human beings; the fifth one dealing
specifically with love between parents and children.
The problem
is that mainstream churches – Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Baptist,
Presbyterian, etc. – have been preaching for centuries that the Commandments of
God have been done away with and are no longer relevant for daily life or
needed for salvation.
Fundamentalist
churches on the other hand, while preaching that the Commandments of God are
needed for salvation, have put so much emphasis on the Law, they have forgotten
about grace. They fail to understand that while the Law is required of all
human beings, grace and salvation is granted only to those who overcome their
carnal nature and place their life in God’s hands, allowing Him to create in
them a character suitable for His eternal Kingdom.
As Jesus
Christ said in one of His prayer to His Father and our Father (John
20:17):
Joh 17:20 "I do not pray for these alone, but also
for those who will believe in Me through their word;
Joh 17:21 that they all may be one, as You, Father, are
in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may
believe that You sent Me.
Before a
human being can become One with God he must present his body as a living
sacrifice to Him.
Rom 12:1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the
mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy,
acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.
Rom 12:2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is
that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Rom 12:3 For I say, through the grace given to me, to
everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he
ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of
faith.
Rom 12:4 For as we have many members in one body, but
all the members do not have the same function,
Rom 12:5 so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually
members of one another.
Jesus
Christ could not be more specific about the importance of God’s Commandments in
our struggle for salvation.
Mat 19:16 Now behold, one came and said to Him,
"Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal
life?"
Mat 19:17 So He said to him, "Why do you call Me
good? No one is good but One, that is, God. But if you want to
enter into life, keep the commandments."
Mat 19:18 He said to Him, "Which ones?" Jesus
said, " 'YOU SHALL NOT MURDER,' 'YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY,' 'YOU
SHALL NOT STEAL,' 'YOU SHALL NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS,'
Mat 19:19 'HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR MOTHER,' and,
'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.' "
Mat 19:20 The young man said to Him, "All these
things I have kept from my youth. What do I still lack?"
Mat 19:21 Jesus said to him, "If you want to be
perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have
treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."
Mat 19:22 But when the young man heard that saying, he
went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
Mat 19:23 Then Jesus said to His disciples,
"Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven.
Mat 19:24 And again I say to you, it is easier for a
camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of God."
He went on
to say the following to His disciples:
Joh 14:15 "If you love Me, keep My commandments.
Joh 14:16 And I will pray the Father, and He will give
you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever—
Joh 14:17 the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot
receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He
dwells with you and will be in you.
Now all
these things Jesus Christ said during His ministry on earth, but for those who
say that the Commandments of God were nailed to the cross at the time of His
crucifixion, here is the glorified Christ speaking to us from heaven, not once
but twice
Rev 12:17 And the dragon was enraged with the woman,
and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus
Christ.
Rev 14:1 Then I looked, and behold, a Lamb standing on
Mount Zion, and with Him one hundred and forty-four thousand, having His
Father's name written on their foreheads.
Rev 14:2 And I heard a voice from heaven, like the
voice of many waters, and like the voice of loud thunder. And I heard the sound
of harpists playing their harps.
Rev 14:3 They sang as it were a new song before the
throne, before the four living creatures, and the elders; and no one could
learn that song except the hundred and forty-four thousand who were
redeemed from the earth.
Rev 14:4 These are the ones who were not defiled with
women, for they are virgins. These are the ones who follow the Lamb wherever He
goes. These were redeemed from among men, being firstfruits to
God and to the Lamb.
Rev 14:5 And in their mouth was found no deceit, for
they are without fault before the throne of God.
Rev 14:12 Here is the patience of the saints; here are
those who keep the commandments of God
and the faith of Jesus.
Anyone who
loves God and Jesus Christ keeps the Commandments; anyone who does not keep the
Commandments will not receive the Holy Spirit and cannot be saved.
Apostle
John, the youngest of the Apostles, who received the book of Revelation, put a
cap on this discussion with the following unmistakable statement.
1Jn 2:4 He who says, "I know Him," and does
not keep His commandments, is a liar,
and the truth is not in him.
Many
Christians make a virtue of going to church with a Bible under their arm. They read from it with their preacher, and
then go home where they are supposed to continue to study it and meditate upon
it. Well, they are supposed to read and
meditate upon it, but it is doubtful that many do it. How else can one explain the fact that
although they all read the same Book, they end up believing different gospels,
and following churches whose doctrines are diametrically opposed to each
other?
What
happens is that they are conditioned to read the Bible not to discover its
truths and the mysteries of God, but rather to confirm the gospel preached by
their minister.
Four
decades ago, while member of the Worldwide Church of God, I was encouraged to
do the same. However, it seems that I
took the leaders’ advice too seriously, for instead of confirming what the
ministers were preaching, I discovered that their gospel was quite different
from the one preached by Jesus Christ and His apostles.
I learned
English studying the Bible. I used to
have a dictionary on my left, the Bible in the middle, and a notebook on the
right. Yet even in my rudimentary
English, after a couple of years, I could see that the gospel of the Worldwide
Church of God was different from the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
That
disturbed me enormously, for the implications were horrendous. When one became a member of that Church, he
had to leave behind everything, every aspect of his previous life, including
friends and relatives.
I did not
want to come in conflict with the leaders; I liked being a member of that
Church. Aside from the fact that they convinced me they were the ‘one and only
true Church of God in the world’, and that our destiny was God’s paradise, I
began to make friends and was contemplating marrying one of the girls from the
Church.
However
when doubts arise in your mind, you can only bottle up for so long then you
have to speak up, risking all you have achieved, including losing ‘God’s
paradise’.
I raised
the issue with the minister, and the conclusion was exactly what I
expected. No sooner did I finish
speaking that he said, ‘if that is what you believe then you are out’. And out of that Church I was, but not out of
God’s grace, as I would discover later on.
For a short
while I was both angry and unhappy about it, not so much about what I was
losing, but about their hypocrisy and their un-Christian methods. I wanted them to hear what I had to say, what
I discovered in the Bible, but they would have none of it. That was a blatant
disregard of Jesus advice on how to deal with such situations.
Mat 18:15 "Moreover if your brother sins against
you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you
have gained your brother.
Mat 18:16 But if he will not hear, take with you one or
two more, that 'BY THE MOUTH OF TWO OR THREE WITNESSES EVERY WORD MAY BE
ESTABLISHED.'
Mat 18:17 And if he refuses to hear them, tell it
to the church. But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you
like a heathen and a tax collector.
It did not
take me long to realize that what they did to me was a blessing in disguise.
You would
not believe the burdens the members of the Worldwide Church of God had to bear;
far greater than the ones the Pharisees were putting on their people.
What saved
me was the fact that my love of the Bible was not affected by their act. I spoke to them only after I became convinced
that I was right. Such being the case, I could not see how God and Jesus Christ
would support them and condemn me for raising important issues of salvation and
morality.
Time
passed, I emigrated from Canada to Australia, I carved myself a new career, and
I settled down to what I hoped would be a long and comfortable life. My life was comfortable all right, until that
Church caught up with me again. Nearly
two decades after we parted company, I saw posters about an evangelistic
campaign in Australia. I joined them
briefly to see whether they were preaching the same old, false, and ruinous
doctrines, and when I discovered that they did, I determined to do something
about it. So in 1990, the first edition of The
Christian Herald made its appearance. Little did I know then that what
started as an attempt to expose fundamentalist hypocrisy and falsehoods would
soon turn into a cry against the sins of the whole world.
When I left
the WCG, and saw that those who claimed to be true ‘Christians’ were in fact a
‘synagogue of Satan’, to use the words of Jesus Christ, I began a search for the ‘little flock’ of
Jesus Christ over which ‘the gates of Hell shall not prevail.’
Luk
12:32 "Do not fear, little flock,
for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
Mat 16:18
“and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not
prevail against it.”
So I
devised a test which I used to determine whether a church or religion was, or
held in its ranks, that ‘little flock’ of Jesus Christ. Here is that test.
1. No
idolatry;
2. No
doctrines of demons;
3. Sabbath
keeping;
4. Passover
observance.
It is a
simple test – and one could add countless more points to it – but it was enough
for me to determine relatively quickly whether I was on the right track or
not. Let us have a brief look at each
point to see how this applies to the flock of Jesus Christ.
1. No
idolatry.
This is the second of the Ten Commandments.
Exo
20:4 "You shall not make for
yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in
heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the
water under the earth;
Exo
20:5 you shall not bow down to them nor
serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the
iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations
of those who hate Me,
Exo
20:6 but showing mercy to thousands, to
those who love Me and keep My commandments.
When I walked into a church and found it to be adorned
with statues and images of heavenly things, icons as they like to call them
these days, I knew that the ‘little flock’ of Jesus Christ would not be there.
2. No
doctrines of demons.
Hard to believe, but I could not find a single church,
mainstream or fundamentalist, that does not observe doctrines of demons. What are these?
1Ti
4:1 Now the Spirit expressly says that
in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving
spirits and doctrines of demons,
1Ti
4:2 speaking lies in hypocrisy, having
their own conscience seared with a hot iron,
1Ti
4:3 forbidding
to marry, and commanding to abstain from foods which God created to
be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.
1Ti
4:4 For every creature of God is
good, and nothing is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving;
1Ti
4:5 for it is sanctified by the word of
God and prayer.
1Ti
4:6 If you instruct the brethren in
these things, you will be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished in the
words of faith and of the good doctrine which you have carefully followed.
Old
Testament forbade interracial marriages because that was designed for one
nation only, but the New Testament is for the entire world. This is why
Christians could not say to converts from other nations that they could not
intermarry because they are of a different race, color or culture. Remember also what Jesus Christ said before
He rose to heaven.
Mat 28:18 And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying,
"All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.
Mat 28:19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
Mat 28:20 teaching them to observe all things that I
have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the
age." Amen.
And this is
what the apostles preached.
Gal 3:26 For you are all sons of God through faith in
Christ Jesus.
Gal 3:27 For as many of you as were baptized into
Christ have put on Christ.
Gal 3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is
neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one
in Christ Jesus.
Gal 3:29 And if you are Christ's, then you are
Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
In regard
to abstinence from foods, the same principle applies. Old Israel had many
dietary and sacrificial laws, but these were designed to ‘bring us to Christ’,
then finished.
Gal 3:23 But before faith came, we were kept under
guard by the law, kept for the faith which would afterward be revealed.
Gal 3:24 Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might
be justified by faith.
Gal 3:25 But after faith has come, we are no longer
under a tutor.
It is these
laws that Jesus Christ put an end to with His sacrifice, not the Ten
Commandments. Those who keep dietary
laws forget what Jesus Christ said about food too.
Mar 7:15 There is nothing that enters a man from
outside which can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are
the things that defile a man.
In the Old
Testament, the people of Israel were considered defiled if they so much as even
touched an ‘unclean’ animal, let alone eat it.
In the New Testament, however, nothing that enters a man from outside
defiles him; but the words that come out of his mouth defile him.
False
ministers have added a new twist to this question. They ask their followers: ‘does God care
about your health?’ The answer of course
is yes. And how does He show that
care? By telling them which animals are
good for food, and which are not!
Naturally, they never discuss these Scriptures.
Mar 16:17 And these signs will follow those who
believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new
tongues;
Mar 16:18 they will take up serpents; and if they drink
anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the
sick, and they will recover."
Nothing
hurts the true believers, not even deadly poison. Apostle Paul certainly believed that when he
said the following.
1Co 10:25 Eat whatever is sold in the meat market,
asking no question for conscience' sake;
1Co 10:26 "for the earth is the Lord's, and
the fullness of it."
1Co 10:27 If any of those who do not believe invite you
to a feast, and if you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before
you, asking no questions for conscience' sake.
3. Sabbath keeping.
The Sabbath
has been the sign between God and His people since ancient times.
Exo 31:12 And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,
Exo 31:13 "Speak also to the children of Israel,
saying: 'Surely My Sabbaths you shall keep, for it is a sign between Me and you throughout
your generations, that you may know that I am the LORD who
sanctifies you.
Exo 31:14 You shall keep the Sabbath, therefore, for it
is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for
whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his
people.
Exo 31:15 Work shall be done for six days, but the
seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD. Whoever does any
work on the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to
Exo 31:16 death.
Therefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, to observe the
Sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant.
Exo 31:17 It is a sign between Me and the children of Israel forever; for in
six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He
rested and was refreshed.”
Exo 31:18 And when He had made an end of speaking with
him on Mount Sinai, He gave Moses two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of
stone, written with the finger of God.
Is this
sign still valid in the New Testament? Absolutely! Israel according to the flesh lost the status
of ‘chosen people’ because they could not keep God’s Commandments. And why could they not keep them? Because they did not have the Holy
Spirit! In the New Testament, however,
there is no longer such an excuse.
Joh 16:7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to
your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not
come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you.
Joh 16:12 "I still have many things to say to you,
but you cannot bear them now.
Joh 16:13 However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has
come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority,
but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.
Joh 16:14 He will glorify Me, for He will take of what
is Mine and declare it to you.
Joh 16:15 All things that the Father has are Mine.
Therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you.
Joh 16:20 Most assuredly, I say to you that you will
weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; and you will be sorrowful, but
your sorrow will be turned into joy.
Joh 16:21 A woman, when she is in labor, has sorrow
because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child, she
no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into
the world.
Joh 16:22 Therefore you now have sorrow; but I will see
you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you.
Joh 16:23 "And in that day you will ask Me
nothing. Most assuredly, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in My name
He will give you.
Joh 16:24 Until now you have asked nothing in My name.
Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.
Joh 16:25 "These things I have spoken to you in
figurative language; but the time is coming when I will no longer speak to you
in figurative language, but I will tell you plainly about the Father.
Joh 16:26 In that day you will ask in My name, and I do
not say to you that I shall pray the Father for you;
Joh 16:27 for the Father Himself loves you, because you
have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God.
Joh 16:28 I came forth from the Father and have come
into the world. Again, I leave the world and go to the Father."
Such
promises were never made to Israel of old.
In the New Testament, however, Jesus Christ is creating a new Israel,
for a different world. Remember what He
told Pilate about His Kingdom, and what He told Peter about the twelve
apostles?
Joh
18:33 Then Pilate entered the Praetorium
again, called Jesus, and said to Him, "Are You the King of the Jews?"
Joh
18:34 Jesus answered him, "Are you
speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you this concerning
Me?"
Joh
18:35 Pilate answered, "Am I a Jew?
Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered You to me. What have You
done?"
Joh
18:36 Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world. If My
kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be
delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here."
Joh
18:37 Pilate therefore said to Him,
"Are You a king then?" Jesus answered, "You say rightly
that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come
into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the
truth hears My voice."
Mat
19:27 Then Peter answered and said to
Him, "See, we have left all and followed You. Therefore what shall we
have?" So Jesus said to them,
Mat
19:28 "Assuredly I say to you, that
in the regeneration, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of His glory, you who have followed Me will also sit on
twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
If the
Sabbath was a sign between God and people whom He knew would fail, how much
more is it a requirement for people who have been granted the Holy Spirit in
order to overcome the weaknesses of their human nature?
The Old
Covenant was made with carnal human beings for a purpose – to show them that
they could not keep it and they need a New Covenant.
Jer
31:31 "Behold, the days are coming,
says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and
with the house of Judah—
Jer
31:32 not according to the covenant that
I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to
lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was
a husband to them, says the LORD.
Jer
31:33 But this is the covenant
that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I
will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be
their God, and they shall be My people.
Jer
31:34 No more shall every man teach his
neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' for they all
shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD.
For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more."
Therefore
the Sabbath is more a sign between God and His people in the New Testament than
it ever was in Old. Remember also that
when Jesus Christ returns to this world He expects to find His disciples
observing not Sunday (which was never sanctioned by God or Jesus Christ to be a
Holy Day), but the Sabbath.
Mat
24:20 And pray that your flight may not
be in winter or on the Sabbath.
Mat
24:21 For then there will be great
tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this
time, no, nor ever shall be.
They must
pray that their flight may not be in winter because it is cold and they may
freeze in the mountains or wherever they flee, and not on the Sabbath because,
even in the Great Tribulation, they are not allowed to carry heavy burdens on
that day.
4. Passover observance.
This is
what Jesus Christ said about the Passover, and how the apostles observed
it.
1Co
11:17 Now in giving these instructions I
do not praise you, since you come together not for the better but for
the worse.
1Co
11:18 For first of all, when you come
together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and in part I
believe it.
1Co 11:19 For there must also be factions among you,
that those who are approved may be recognized among you.
1Co
11:20 Therefore when you come together
in one place, it is not to eat the Lord's
1Co
11:21 Supper. For in eating, each one takes his own supper
ahead of others; and one is hungry and another is drunk.
1Co
11:22 What! Do you not have houses to
eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have
nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you in this? I do not praise you.
1Co
11:23 For I received from the Lord that
which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same night in
which He was betrayed took bread;
1Co
11:24 and when He had given thanks, He
broke it and said, "Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for
you; do this in remembrance of Me."
1Co
11:25 In the same manner He also took
the cup after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood.
This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me."
1Co
11:26 For as often as you eat this bread
and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's
1Co
11:27 death till He comes. Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this
cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of
the Lord.
1Co 11:28 But let a man examine himself, and so let him
eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
1Co
11:29 For he who eats and drinks in an
unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's
body.
1Co
11:30 For this reason many are weak
and sick among you, and many sleep.
It is clear
that failure to observe the Passover brings about God’s judgment. Yet most members of mainstream churches have
not so much as even heard of Passover let alone observe it in the manner
prescribed by Jesus Christ.
This then
was the test with which I search the world for decades for the little flock of
Jesus Christ. In the end, the result was
as astounding as it was unexpected.
Surprise
result in the search for
the ‘little flock’ of Jesus
Christ
After
parting company with the Worldwide Church of God, and armed with my simple
test, I set out to locate the little flock of Jesus Christ among the many
denominations of this world. I was
convinced that Jesus Christ would lead me to His people, but after a long and
unsuccessful search, I began to have doubts; something was not right, but
what?
Had God and
Jesus Christ changed policy and decided to accept the almost unrecognizable and
diluted versions of the true Gospel that are being preached in the world today?
If so, the early Christians, and thousands after them, endured extreme
persecutions and died unnecessarily for their beliefs. I could not accept that
this would be the case, especially since I could not find anything in the Bible
that would remotely justify this fact.
I never
stopped studying the Bible, even during my university days, and when I could
not get results among Christian congregations, I wondered whether Jesus’
disciples could be found among other religions. So for a while I shifted my
attention back to Judaism, as distinct from the Old Testament, then I looked at
Islam, and after that I looked at eastern religions: Hinduism, Buddhism,
Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto, and others, and when I did not get results among
them either, I returned to Christianity.
I remember
how during my university days, the head of the Religious Studies Department
wondered where I was heading with my studies.
After satisfying the requirements for one major in biblical studies,
instead of enlarging and deepening those studies for the required second major,
I shifted my attention to eastern religions. He thought I would have a good
future in biblical studies, and without saying so directly, I felt he thought I
was making a mistake. I could not tell
him why I was doing it, or that I had a better knowledge of the Bible than all
my lecturers and tutors in those subjects.
I had a hard time abstaining from shouting aloud that they were wrong in
what they were teaching, but that would have put an end to any hope of me
obtaining a degree.
Shifting my
search for the little flock of Jesus Christ to eastern religions was not based
on a whim but on long introspection. The
Bible says that people will be judged on their works, and that transcends the
boundaries of religion. My problem was
on how to reconcile good works with the beliefs in Brahma, Vishnu, Buddha, or
any of the myriad of eastern gods.
In the end,
I had no choice but to return to the Bible and pure Christianity. This is what the apostles believed and there
is no argument, or possibility of any derailment from it.
Act 4:12 Nor is there salvation in any other, for
there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be
saved."
And this is
what Jesus Christ said of those who want to follow Him.
Mat 7:21 "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord,
Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father
in heaven.
Mat 7:22 Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord,
have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done
many wonders in Your name?'
Mat 7:23 And then I will declare to them, 'I never
knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'
Now the
will of Jesus’ Father in heaven is unalterable:
Exo 20:3 "You shall have no other gods before
Me.”
If eastern
religions are good at anything, inventing gods is one of them. There is hardly an animal or a dead person
that is not a god with them. I trust the
God of the Bible who says that those who obey Him will be blessed and those who
disobey Him will be cursed. One only has
to look at the world and its history to see which God has proven to be
beneficial. So coming back to the Bible
and Christianity was inevitable.
Looking at
religions from all angles, I concluded that anyone can put on a good show for a
while, or show acts of kindness and charity under ideal situations, but few do
so under extreme conditions. There is a
reason why the disciples of Jesus Christ are subjected to extreme trials and
tribulations, and why only those who overcome to the end attain eternal life
and make it into the eternal Kingdom of God. This is what Apostle Paul
said.
Act 14:21 And when they had preached the gospel to that
city and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch,
strengthening
Act 14:22 the souls of the
disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and saying,
"We must through many tribulations
enter the kingdom of God."
And this is
what Apostle Peter said.
2Pe 2:19 While they promise them liberty, they
themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom a person is overcome, by him
also he is brought into bondage.
2Pe 2:20 For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the
latter end is worse for them than the beginning.
One cannot
escape the pollutions of this world except through the knowledge of the Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ, and that knowledge can be obtained only through the
study of the Bible, not through the myriad of commentaries and ‘Bible studies’
that have filled this world.
It seems
that everyone who had spent a little time on the Bible feels that he can write
a commentary on it and teach others on how to study it. What they teach instead is how to conform to
the doctrines of their particular church.
How can one explain the fact that hardly anyone puts the Commandments of
God at the centre of the Christian faith?
Here is
Jesus Christ again.
Joh 14:15 "If you love Me, keep My commandments.
Joh 14:16 And I will pray the Father, and He will give
you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever—
Joh 14:17 the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot
receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He
dwells with you and will be in you.
Joh 14:26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the
Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your
remembrance all things that I said to you.
Joh 14:27 Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to
you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled,
neither let it be afraid. You have heard Me say,
Joh 14:28 'I am going away and
coming back to you.' If you loved Me, you would rejoice because I said,
'I am going to the Father,' for My Father is greater than I.
Joh
15:10 If you keep My commandments, you
will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father's commandments and abide
in His love.
Salvation
is not possible outside the framework of belief and obedience to God and His
Commandments. The Holy Spirit, the Helper, cannot arrive in any other name but Jesus
Christ, and without the Holy Spirit there is no salvation, no eternal life, no
Kingdom of God.
Works
cannot be separated from faith; the two, plus overcoming to the end, create
candidates for the Kingdom of God. Out
of this pool of people, God is exercising His grace to choose whomever He wants
for His Kingdom. As Apostle Paul
explained:
Rom 9:13 As it is written, "JACOB I HAVE LOVED,
BUT ESAU I HAVE HATED."
Rom 9:14 What shall we say then? Is there
unrighteousness with God? Certainly not!
Rom 9:15 For He says to Moses, "I WILL HAVE MERCY
ON WHOMEVER I WILL HAVE MERCY, AND I WILL HAVE COMPASSION ON WHOMEVER I WILL
HAVE COMPASSION."
Rom 9:16 So then it is not of him who wills,
nor of him who runs, but of God who shows
Rom 9:17 mercy.
For the Scripture says to the Pharaoh, "FOR THIS VERY PURPOSE I
HAVE RAISED YOU UP, THAT I MAY SHOW MY POWER IN YOU, AND THAT MY NAME MAY BE
DECLARED IN ALL THE EARTH."
Rom 9:18 Therefore He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom
He wills He hardens.
Rom 9:19 You will say to me then, "Why does He
still find fault? For who has resisted
Rom 9:20 His will?" But indeed, O man, who are
you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it,
"Why have you made me like this?"
God does
whatever He wants with His creation.
Everyone can obey God and accept the faith of Jesus Christ for
salvation. Most people, however, would
rather have a good life in this world than overcome trials and tribulations
necessary to bring human nature under control and qualify for the grace of
God.
Eastern
people may have works, some works, but they do not have the faith of Jesus
Christ and the Holy Spirit, and without them overcoming this world is not
possible.
So
unhesitatingly I returned to the Bible and to Christianity, but still without
fellowshipping with anyone in the name of Jesus Christ. I never got this promise out of my mind that
He would be with His disciples to the very end?
So where were they?
My
colleagues at work, at university, everywhere, found me friendly but distant
and absent minded. I just could not tell
them what was in my mind, for they would have thought me crazy as well. How could I tell people who hardly believed
in God that I was meditating on the Law of God and on deep biblical
mysteries? For me, the words of Jesus
Christ were unshakable, and since He said that the Word of God is true, I
unquestioningly believed it.
Joh 17:8 I have given to them the words which You have
given Me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came
forth from You; and they have believed that You
Joh 17:9 sent Me.
"I pray for them. I do not pray for the world but for those whom
You have given Me, for they are Yours.
Joh 17:10 And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine,
and I am glorified in them.
Joh 17:11 Now I am no longer in the world, but these
are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep through Your name those
whom You have given Me, that they may be
Joh 17:12 one as We are. While I was with them in the world, I kept
them in Your name. Those whom You gave Me I have kept; and none of them is lost
except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.
Joh 17:13 But now I come to You, and these things I
speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves.
Joh 17:14 I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them because they are
not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
Joh 17:15 I do not pray that You should take them out
of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one.
Joh 17:16 They are not of the world, just as I am not
of the world.
Joh 17:17 Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.
So I kept
searching and looking at the Bible from every possible angle, always trying to
see whether I was missing something, or making a mistake somewhere.
Then, after
two decades, I had a new encounter with the Worldwide Church of God. Their inroads into Australia with their old,
false, and ruinous doctrines could not go unanswered, hence the decision to
publish The Christian Herald.
That
decision would turn out to be as momentous for my life as the decision to join
that Church in the first place. It was
like a window opened up in heaven. Not only did I see a myriad of Bible
prophecies unravel before my eyes, but I finally had the answer to my years of
search for the ‘little flock’ of Jesus Christ.
There was
no ‘little flock’ of Jesus Christ in the world anymore.
That
discovery was as astounding as it was frightening; astounding because it was
totally unexpected; frightening because it had extraordinary end time
implications.
There comes
a time in the history of the world when every church in the world, including
the Churches of God mentioned in the book of Revelation, fall away from the
truth of God.
2Th 2:1 Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering
2Th 2:2 together to Him, we ask you, not to be soon
shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if
from us, as though the day of Christ had come.
2Th 2:3 Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the
falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of
perdition,
2Th 2:4 who opposes and exalts himself above all that
is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of
God, showing himself that he is God.
2Th 2:5 Do you not remember that when I was still
with you I told you these things?
2Th 2:6 And now you know what is restraining, that he
may be revealed in his own time.
2Th 2:7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at
work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the
way.
2Th 2:8 And then the lawless one will be revealed,
whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the
brightness of His coming.
2Th 2:9 The coming of the lawless one is
according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders,
2Th 2:10 and with all unrighteous deception among
those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they
might be saved.
2Th 2:11 And for this reason God will send them strong
delusion, that they should believe the
2Th 2:12 lie, that they all may be condemned who did
not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
2Th 2:13 But we are bound to give thanks to God always
for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you
for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth,
2Th 2:14 to which He called you by our gospel, for the
obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
2Th 2:15 Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the
traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle.
2Th
2:16 Now may our
Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and our God and Father, who has loved us and given us
everlasting consolation and good hope by grace,
2Th 2:17 comfort your hearts and establish you in
every good word and work.
The lawless
one, who has been at work deceiving the world ever since, will be revealed just
prior to the return of Jesus Christ, and destroyed by none other than Jesus
Christ Himself. This realization was as
frightening as it was full of hope. I realized then that I was never alone in
my search, that God and Jesus Christ were directing my every step and leading
me to this conclusion. That changed the
name of the game. My initial intention
to focus my attention on the Worldwide Church of God and its daughter churches
would now shift to the whole world, crying out its sins and trying to bring it
back to God before it was too late.
The death
of its founder, Herbert W Armstrong, in 1986, started a slow process of decline
of that Church. Some two decades later, the Church ceased to exist as a single
entity. A mad scramble for its members
ensued among its evangelists, with the result that more than three hundred new
‘Churches of God’ made their appearance.
Most are a
carbon copy of their mother Church, but some have swung the pendulum to the
opposite extreme, from deep fundamentalism to extreme liberalism.
Now even
though I had little connection with them, from the beginning of this work some
of them have never ceased harassing and defrauding us, trying desperately to
derail us from our mission. Here is a
typical exchange of emails with one of them.
Anthony
Buzzard, December 27, 2009
Grigore, Is this a sabbatarian (saturday sabbath) movement?
Yes,
Anthony! G.S.
Thanks,
but I wonder why Paul then in Col 1:16, 17 states that the trio of observances
is a shadow now superseded by Jesus who has come: Let no one tell you what to do in relation to
holy days, new moons and sabbaths, which are a single shadow, but the substance
is Christ's. Anthony
Hello,
Anthony!
I
can see that you are in a mood to argue a little here. Normally, I do not
bother answering people that have lapsed from the truth, as the Scriptures tell
us that it is impossible to bring them back to it. However, since I am not
quite sure where you stand and where you are heading, I give you the benefit of
the doubt. I presume you come from the stable of H.W. Armstrong, for you
seem to struggle with the same doctrinal points that have divided that
community for decades. I was once part of that stable too, but I left it behind
long time ago.
First
of all, I think you mean Col. 2:16,17, and not 1:16,17. "Therefore
let no one judge you in food or in drink, or in respect of a feast, or of the
new moon, or of the sabbaths. For these are a shadow of things to come, but the
body is of Christ".
Assuming that this is the case, the answer can
be found just a few verses later: Col 2:20 – 22. "If then you
died with Christ from the elements of the world, why, as though living
in the world, are you subject to its ordinances: touch not, taste
not, handle not; which things are all for corruption in the using, according to
the commands and doctrines of men?" This goes well with Gal.
4:10 "You observe days and months and seasons and years"?
Therefore my answer will cover them both.
The
operative words here are, "according to the commands and doctrines of
men". Apostle Paul was not referring to the Commandments, statutes
and judgments that God gave Moses at Mount Horeb, but to "commandments and
doctrines of men", of which the Jews had a lot. Remember what God
said about the mission of Elijah:
Mal 4:4 "Remember the Law of Moses, My servant,
Which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel, With the statutes and
judgments.
Mal 4:5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet
Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD.
Mal 4:6 And he will turn The hearts of the fathers to
the children, And the hearts of the children to their fathers, Lest I come and
strike the earth with a curse.
The
Law that God gave to Moses in Mount Horeb with the statutes and judgments, will
be valid to the very end of this world. And just the same, remember what
Jesus Christ said about the Jews?
Mat 15:1 Then the scribes and Pharisees who were from
Jerusalem came to Jesus, saying,
Mat 15:2 "Why do Your disciples transgress the
tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat
bread."
Mat 15:3 He answered and said to them, "Why do
you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition?
Mat 15:9 AND IN VAIN THEY
WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE COMMANDMENTS OF MEN.' "
In
Colossians and Galatians, Apostle Paul was not preaching against the
Commandments and the Holy Days that God gave Moses, but against the
"ordinances" that the Jews had added in the course of time. I can
give you two examples that prove this fact. In the book of Acts, Apostle
Paul directed his followers to the "oracles" that God gave to the
Jews. Look carefully at what he said:
Act 7:38 "This is he who was in the congregation
in the wilderness with the Angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai, and with
our fathers, the one who received the living oracles to
Act 7:39 give us, whom our fathers would not obey, but
rejected. And in their hearts they turned back to Egypt.
What
happened when the Jews rejected those "oracles"? They turned
back to Egypt; in other words they went back to paganism. It is the same
these days: those who reject God's "oracles" are left with nothing
but paganism.
The
second proof comes from 1 Cor 11:20 - 30. Here it is:
1Co 11:20 Therefore when you come together in one
place, it is not to eat the Lord's Supper.
1Co 11:21 For in eating, each one takes his own supper
ahead of others; and one is hungry and another is drunk.
1Co 11:22 What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink
in? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing? What
shall I say to you? Shall I praise you in this? I do not praise you.
1Co 11:23 For I received from the Lord that which I
also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which He
was betrayed took bread;
1Co 11:24 and when He had given thanks, He broke it
and said, "Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you; do this in
remembrance of Me."
1Co 11:25 In the same manner He also took
the cup after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood.
This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me."
1Co 11:26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink
this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death
1Co 11:27 till He comes. Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this
cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of
the Lord.
1Co 11:28 But let a man examine himself, and so let him
eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
1Co 11:29 For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy
manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.
1Co 11:30 For this reason many are weak and sick
among you, and many sleep.
If
one were to take Col 2:16,17 literally, and not discern between genuine
Commandments and Holy Days of God, and doctrines and commandments of men,
then observing Passover would make no sense. Once again, what happens
when people take this bread and drink in an unworthy manner? They bring
judgment upon themselves, not discerning the Lord's sacrifice. Therefore, be careful what you preach,
friend, for you could be on very shaky ground. I hope this
solves your dilemma. G. S.
Grigore,
thanks for taking time. However your
points are quite odd! If the Law of Moses is in force for us all today,
then physical circumcision for everyone (Gen 17) is mandated. If that is your view, then Paul was terribly
wrong! I hope you know that Jesus speaks
in Paul. You write us off! "impossible to bring them back"
In
Col 2:16, 17(thanks for the correction on the chapter, 2 and not as I wrote 1),
Paul
obviously (to all commentary, except those touched by the HWA movement),
contrasts Christ with the shadows of the Jewish calendar. You are living in the shadows, alas. I think you have completely misunderstood
Paul here.
Thanks
for writing, and please reckon with the crippling effects of HWA!
Anthony
Circumcision
was not given to Moses at Mt Horeb, but to Abraham. You can find answers
to your other queries in The Christian
Heralds. I think you need to spend a lot more time with the Bible.
G.S.
Thanks:
the point I was making is that you are not following Paul who did not insist in
any way on circumcision in the flesh. As
Jesus said circumcision was part of God's law? This shows you do not really
keep the Mosaic Law. Nor should you.
The
same applies to the calendar which as superseded shadow (Col 2:16, 17).
Jesus abolished the
law in dogmas, Paul said. What do you make of that (Eph. 2:15-17).
Anthony
Circumcision
was indeed part of God's law under the Old Testament. When Jesus Christ spoke
about it, the Jews, and the world, were still under the Old Testament.
You seem to have problems understanding the difference between the Old and the
New Testaments, where the Old ended and the New began, or what tenets of the
Old Testament are still valid under the New Testament. If you cannot find
these answers in the Bible, go to The Christian
Heralds. All these issues have been amply covered in our magazines.
Apostle
Peter made the point that some of Apostle Paul's writings are hard to
understand. Since Apostle Paul kept the Sabbath and the Holy Days and
God's Ten Commandments, which aside from the weekly Sabbath, are the true
Mosaic law - it should be obvious that in Col 2:16,17 he was not referring to
these things, but to Jewish additions to the Law of God, a point made clear by
the context of the passage, which speaks of commandments and doctrines of
men.
I
have had a brief look at your "Is Jesus Human". Pure and utter
blasphemies! G.S.
Grigore,
It (Circ in the flesh) is included in the Law of Moses (of course you are right
about it originating with Abraham). But Jesus speaks of it as also of Moses as
you know).
We
all know that the New Covenant is passed. [Pardon?
The New Covenant is passed? What are we under then? G.S.]
It
is quite clear that Paul describes the calendar as a SHADOW in Col 2:16, 17!
The
weekly and annual holy days are the past shadow. [Then why did Apostle Paul keep the Sabbath, the Passover, and other
Holy Days? G.S.]
Paul
simply states that: so why are you insisting on the shadow?
The
New Covenant begins with Jesus and continues with Jesus speaking in Paul.
The
contrast between the two covenants is dealt with in II Cor 3 and Gal 4.
Anthony
You've
had your three tries; now as Jesus said, behind me Satan. Beware of
coming back to me again with your blasphemies. G.S.
You,
happily, are not God! or Jesus!
I
am amazed at your brutality. Anthony
I
warned you not to come to me again with your blasphemies. Therefore, you have
chosen Satan, to Satan you shall go. In the name of the Father, and the Son,
and the Holy Spirit. Amen!
G.S.
This is a
former fundamentalist follower of Herbert W. Armstrong for whom there is
nothing sacred anymore: not in the Old Testament, not in the New Testament, no
Commandments, no Holy Days, nothing, because we now live under shadows, he
says. I do not know how big his
congregation is or how many followers he has, but it is surprising that anyone
would accept such blatant departure from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And he calls himself a minister of Jesus
Christ. But then, the world is full of them.
He forgets
that even though what Moses received in Mount Horeb were ‘shadows of heavenly
things’, Israel was under strict command to observe them nevertheless.
We could
have so much to say here, but we would rather let the Bible speak for itself;
one can hardly do better than the Scriptures.
Here are three chapters from the book of Hebrews. See how wonderfully
its author (most likely Apostle Paul) handled these issues.
(Please
note: most of our biblical quotations come from the New King James version of
the Bible. In this version, when the Old
Testament is quoted in the New, it is always in capital letters so as to make a
distinction. Consequently, capital
letter passages in our quotes come from the original. However, the emphasis on bold letters, underlining,
and italic letters are ours).
Heb 8:1 Now this is the main point of the
things we are saying: We have such a High Priest, who is seated at the right
hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens,
Heb
8:2 a Minister of the sanctuary and of
the true tabernacle which the Lord erected, and not man.
Heb
8:3 For every high priest is appointed
to offer both gifts and sacrifices. Therefore it is necessary that this
One also have something to offer.
Heb
8:4 For if He were on earth, He would
not be a priest, since there are priests who offer the gifts according to the
law;
Heb
8:5 who serve the copy and shadow of the
heavenly things, as Moses was divinely instructed when he was about to make the
tabernacle. For He said, "SEE THAT YOU MAKE ALL THINGS ACCORDING TO THE
PATTERN SHOWN YOU ON THE MOUNTAIN."
Heb 8:6 But now He has obtained a more excellent
ministry, inasmuch as He is also Mediator of a better covenant, which was
established on better promises.
Heb 8:7 For if that first covenant had been
faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second.
Heb 8:8 Because finding fault with them, He says:
"BEHOLD, THE DAYS ARE COMING, SAYS THE LORD, WHEN I WILL MAKE A NEW
COVENANT WITH THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL AND WITH THE HOUSE OF JUDAH—
Heb 8:9 NOT ACCORDING TO THE COVENANT THAT I MADE
WITH THEIR FATHERS IN THE DAY WHEN I TOOK THEM BY THE HAND TO LEAD THEM OUT OF
THE LAND OF EGYPT; BECAUSE THEY DID NOT CONTINUE IN MY COVENANT, AND I
DISREGARDED THEM, SAYS THE LORD.
Heb 8:10 FOR THIS IS THE COVENANT THAT I WILL MAKE
WITH THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL AFTER THOSE DAYS, SAYS THE LORD: I WILL PUT MY LAWS IN
THEIR MIND AND WRITE THEM ON THEIR HEARTS; AND I WILL BE THEIR GOD, AND THEY
SHALL BE MY PEOPLE.
Heb 8:11 NONE OF THEM SHALL TEACH HIS NEIGHBOR, AND
NONE HIS BROTHER, SAYING, 'KNOW THE LORD,' FOR ALL SHALL KNOW ME, FROM THE
LEAST OF THEM TO THE GREATEST OF THEM.
Heb 8:12 FOR I WILL BE MERCIFUL TO THEIR
UNRIGHTEOUSNESS, AND THEIR SINS AND THEIR LAWLESS DEEDS I WILL REMEMBER NO
MORE."
Heb 8:13 In that He says, "A NEW COVENANT,"
He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old
is ready to vanish away.
Heb
9:1 Then indeed,
even the first covenant had ordinances of divine service and the earthly
Heb 9:2 sanctuary.
For a tabernacle was prepared: the first part, in which was
the lampstand, the table, and the showbread, which is called the sanctuary; and
behind
Heb 9:3 the second veil, the part of the tabernacle
which is called the Holiest of All,
Heb 9:4 which had the golden censer and the ark of
the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which were the golden
pot that had the manna, Aaron's rod that budded, and the tablets of the
covenant;
Heb 9:5 and above it were the cherubim of glory
overshadowing the mercy seat. Of these things we cannot now speak in detail.
Heb 9:6 Now when these things had been thus prepared,
the priests always went into the first part of the tabernacle, performing the
services.
Heb 9:7 But into the second part the high priest went
alone once a year, not without blood, which he offered for himself and for
the people's sins committed in ignorance;
Heb 9:8 the Holy Spirit indicating this, that the way
into the Holiest of All was not yet made manifest while the first tabernacle
was still standing.
Heb 9:9 It was symbolic for the present time
in which both gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot make him who
performed the service perfect in regard to the conscience—
Heb 9:10 concerned only with foods and drinks, various
washings, and fleshly ordinances imposed
until the time of reformation.
Heb 9:11 But Christ came as High Priest of the
good things to come, with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with
hands, that is, not of this creation.
Heb 9:12 Not with the blood of goats and calves, but
with His own blood He entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained
eternal redemption.
Heb 9:13 For if the blood of bulls and goats and the
ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the
flesh,
Heb 9:14 how much more shall the blood of Christ, who
through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your
conscience from dead works to serve the living
Heb 9:15 God?
And for this reason He is the Mediator
of the new covenant, by means of death, for the redemption of the
transgressions under the first covenant, that those who are called may receive the promise of the eternal
inheritance.
Heb 9:16 For where there is a testament, there
must also of necessity be the death of the
Heb 9:17 testator.
For a testament is in force after men are dead, since it has no
power at all while the testator lives.
Heb 9:18 Therefore not even the first covenant
was dedicated without blood.
Heb 9:19 For when Moses had spoken every precept to
all the people according to the law, he took the blood of calves and goats,
with water, scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and
all the people,
Heb 9:20 saying, "THIS IS THE BLOOD OF THE
COVENANT WHICH GOD HAS COMMANDED YOU."
Heb 9:21 Then likewise he sprinkled with blood both
the tabernacle and all the vessels of the
Heb 9:22 ministry.
And according to the law almost all things are purified with blood, and
without shedding of blood there is no remission.
Heb 9:23 Therefore it was necessary that the
copies of the things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the
heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.
Heb 9:24 For Christ has not entered the holy places
made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself,
now to appear in the presence of God for us;
Heb 9:25 not that He should offer Himself often, as
the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood of another—
Heb 9:26 He then would have had to suffer often since
the foundation of the world; but now, once at the end of the ages, He has
appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.
Heb 9:27 And as it is appointed for men to die once,
but after this the judgment,
Heb 9:28 so Christ was offered once to bear the sins
of many. To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart
from sin, for salvation.
Heb 10:1 For the law, having a shadow of the good
things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with
these same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make
those who approach perfect.
Heb 10:2 For then would they not have ceased
to be offered? For the worshipers, once purified, would have had no more
consciousness of sins. [Notice carefully,
it was the law of sacrifices that has ceased, not the Ten Commandments. G.S.]
Heb 10:3 But in those sacrifices there is a
reminder of sins every year.
Heb 10:4 For it is not possible that the blood
of bulls and goats could take away sins.
Heb 10:5 Therefore, when He came into the world, He
said: "SACRIFICE AND OFFERING YOU DID NOT DESIRE, BUT A BODY YOU HAVE
PREPARED FOR ME.
Heb 10:6 IN BURNT OFFERINGS AND SACRIFICES FOR SIN YOU
HAD NO PLEASURE.
Heb 10:7 THEN I SAID, 'BEHOLD, I HAVE COME— IN THE
VOLUME OF THE BOOK IT IS WRITTEN OF ME— TO DO YOUR WILL, O GOD.' "
Heb 10:8 Previously saying, "SACRIFICE AND
OFFERING, BURNT OFFERINGS, AND OFFERINGS FOR SIN YOU DID NOT DESIRE, NOR HAD
PLEASURE IN THEM" (which are offered according to the law),
Heb 10:9 then He said, "BEHOLD, I HAVE COME TO DO
YOUR WILL, O GOD." He takes away the first that He may establish the
second.
Heb 10:10 By that will we have been sanctified through
the offering of the body of Jesus
Heb 10:11 Christ once for all. And every priest stands ministering daily and
offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.
Heb 10:12 But this Man, after He had offered one
sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God,
Heb 10:13 from that time waiting till His enemies are
made His footstool.
Heb 10:14 For by one offering He has perfected forever
those who are being sanctified.
Heb 10:15 But the Holy Spirit also witnesses to us; for
after He had said before,
Heb 10:16 "THIS IS THE COVENANT THAT I WILL MAKE
WITH THEM AFTER THOSE DAYS, SAYS THE LORD: I WILL PUT MY LAWS INTO THEIR
HEARTS, AND IN THEIR MINDS I WILL WRITE THEM," [Now why does God put His Law in
our hearts if not to obey it? And which Law does He put in our hearts? Not the Law of sacrifices, but the holy Law
of the Ten Commandments that prepares people for God’s grace. G.S.].
Heb 10:17 then He adds, "THEIR SINS AND THEIR
LAWLESS DEEDS I WILL REMEMBER NO MORE."
Heb 10:18 Now where there is remission of these, there
is no longer an offering for sin.
Heb 10:19 Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter
the Holiest by the blood of Jesus,
Heb 10:20 by a new and living way which He consecrated
for us, through the veil, that is,
Heb 10:21 His flesh, and having a High Priest
over the house of God,
Heb 10:22 let us draw near with a true heart in full
assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our
bodies washed with pure water.
Heb 10:23 Let us hold fast the confession of our
hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.
Heb 10:24 And let us consider one another in order to
stir up love and good works,
Heb 10:25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves
together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another,
and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.
Heb 10:26 For if we sin willfully after we have
received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for
sins,
Heb 10:27 but a certain fearful expectation of
judgment, and fiery indignation which
Heb 10:28 will devour the adversaries. Anyone who has rejected Moses' law dies
without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
Heb 10:29 Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose,
will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted
the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and
insulted the Spirit of grace?
Heb 10:30 For we know Him who said, "VENGEANCE IS
MINE, I WILL REPAY," says the Lord. And again, "THE LORD WILL JUDGE
HIS PEOPLE."
Heb 10:31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands
of the living God.
Heb
10:32 But recall
the former days in which, after you were illuminated, you endured a great
struggle with sufferings:
Heb 10:33 partly while you were made a spectacle both
by reproaches and tribulations, and partly while you became companions of those
who were so treated;
Heb 10:34 for you had compassion on me in my chains,
and joyfully accepted the plundering of your goods, knowing that you have a
better and an enduring possession for yourselves
Heb 10:35 in heaven.
Therefore do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward.
Heb 10:36 For you have need of endurance, so that
after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise:
Heb 10:37 "FOR YET A LITTLE WHILE, AND HE WHO IS
COMING WILL COME AND WILL NOT TARRY.
Heb 10:38 NOW THE JUST SHALL LIVE BY FAITH; BUT IF
ANYONE DRAWS BACK, MY SOUL HAS NO PLEASURE IN HIM."
Heb 10:39 But we are not of those who draw back to
perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul.
Now, even
if I have to repeat myself a thousand times, here are the words of Jesus
Christ, both from here on earth and from heaven.
Joh 14:15 "If you love Me, keep My commandments.
Joh 14:16 And I will pray the Father, and He will give
you another Helper, that He may abide
Joh 14:17 with you forever— the Spirit of truth, whom
the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you
know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.
Rev
14:12 Here is the patience of the
saints; here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of
Jesus.
The
Commandments, the Passover and the Holy Days of God are synonymous with the
faith and Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Without these, no one will ever be saved.
A Great Christian World or a Great Falling
Away
If one were to judge this world by the number of
people who profess to be Christians he would conclude that the world is in good
hands. But if he judged it by the number of people who believe the Gospel
according to the Scriptures, he would conclude that the word is in big trouble.
What does it matter if the world is not following the
Scriptures one hundred per cent, someone may say; as long as they believe in
Christ they are saved. Does not the Bible say that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten
Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
(Joh 3:16).
Yes, the Bible does say that, but it also says this:
Mat
7:21 "Not everyone who says to Me,
'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My
Father in heaven.
Mat
7:22 Many will say to Me in that day,
'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name,
and done many wonders in Your name?'
Mat
7:23 And then I will declare to them, 'I
never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'
It is not enough to believe in Christ, cast out demons
in His name, and do miracles in His name.
One must do the will of the Father in heaven, and His will is not found
in just one sentence; His will is in the entire Bible. However, one does not need to know the entire
Bible in order to qualify for eternal life.
There are two aspects to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The first one
presents us with a simple message. This
is what Jesus Christ told a young man.
Mat
19:16 Now behold, one came and said to
Him, "Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal
life?"
Mat
19:17 So He said to him, "Why do
you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. But if
you want to enter into life, keep the commandments."
Mat
19:18 He said to Him, "Which
ones?" Jesus said, " 'YOU SHALL NOT MURDER,' 'YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT
ADULTERY,' 'YOU SHALL NOT STEAL,' 'YOU SHALL NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS,'
Mat
19:19 'HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR
MOTHER,' and, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.' "
Mat
19:20 The young man said to Him,
"All these things I have kept from my youth. What do I still lack?"
Mat
19:21 Jesus said to him, "If you
want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will
have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."
Mat
19:22 But when the young man heard that
saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
Mat
19:23 Then Jesus said to His disciples,
"Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven.
Mat
19:24 And again I say to you, it is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to
enter the kingdom of God."
Mat
19:25 When His disciples heard it,
they were greatly astonished, saying, "Who then can be saved?"
Mat
19:26 But Jesus looked at them
and said to them, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things
are possible."
If you want to enter into life, keep the
Commandments. The young man could have
said, what do you mean ‘enter into life’, am I not alive now? Jesus Christ could have quoted Scriptures
which tell us that this world is merely God’s workshop, like a potter’s
workshop, in which He is preparing human beings for His eternal Kingdom (Isa
29:16; 45:9-13).
But the young man asked instead, ‘which
Commandments?’ Jesus listed six of the
Ten Commandments that God gave Moses in Mount Horeb. He left out the first four, because He knew that
the Jews were, on the whole, observing these.
Jesus
Christ told something else to the young man which reflects the problem rich men
have when it comes to salvation. “Sell what you have and give to the poor,
and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” What do you think the preachers of today would tell the young
man? To sell what you have and give to
the poor? Far from it! More likely they
would say, sell what you have and give to the church, then follow us.
Jesus’ message of salvation could not be any
simpler. If you want to gain eternal
life, keep the Commandments. One does
not need to be highly educated to understand this message. Indeed, one hardly needs to be educated at
all to be a candidate for salvation.
Many of the people who formed the early Churches
of God were, in most likelihood, illiterates.
They did not have a national education system that required every child
to attend school up to a certain age as we have these days. They learned letters from parents, brothers
and sisters, or if they could afford it, from private tutors. Those who started
attending church meetings could have learned from their church fellows. All we
know for sure is that the apostles enjoined the disciples to study the Bible to
make themselves approved before God.
2Ti
2:10 Therefore I endure all things for
the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation which is in
Christ Jesus with eternal glory.
2Ti
2:11 This is a faithful saying: For if
we died with Him, We shall also live with Him.
2Ti
2:12 If we endure, We shall also reign
with Him. If we deny Him, He also will deny us.
2Ti
2:13 If we are faithless, He remains
faithful; He cannot deny Himself.
2Ti
2:14 Remind them of these things,
charging them before the Lord not to strive about words to no profit, to
the ruin of the hearers.
2Ti
2:15 Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not
need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
One
cannot obtain that kind of education in the educational institutions of
today. If they ever study the Bible,
they do it not to discover the truth of God, but to dissect it, to find out who
said what and when, and who borrowed from whom – things that have nothing to do
with God’s message. The Holy Spirit has no role in the august educational
institutions of our time. This is why
the world is perishing.
The second aspect of Jesus’ message is reflected
in a discussion He had with a Pharisee.
Joh 3:1 There was a man of the Pharisees named
Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.
Joh
3:2 This man came to Jesus by night and
said to Him, "Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no
one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him."
Joh
3:3 Jesus answered and said to him,
"Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the
kingdom of God."
Joh
3:4 Nicodemus said to Him, "How can
a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb
and be born?"
Joh
3:5 Jesus answered, "Most
assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot
enter the kingdom of God.
Joh
3:6 That which is born of the flesh is
flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
Joh 3:7 Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must
be born again.'
Joh
3:8 The wind blows where it wishes, and
you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it
goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit."
Joh
3:9 Nicodemus answered and said to Him,
"How can these things be?"
Joh
3:10 Jesus answered and said to him,
"Are you the teacher of Israel, and do not know these things?
Joh
3:11 Most assuredly, I say to you, We
speak what We know and testify what We have seen, and you do not receive Our
witness.
Joh
3:12 If I have told you earthly things
and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?
Jesus
Christ did not expect the young man to know or understand the mysteries of the
Kingdom of Heaven, but He expected it of the Pharisee. Why?
Because the Pharisee was a teacher of Israel, and from teachers and
preachers a lot more is expected. This
is why if one is not sufficiently proficient in the Scriptures, he should not
take it upon himself to teach others, for both will end up on the road to
perdition. This is what the apostles
taught.
1Ti
1:1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by
the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope,
1Ti
1:2 To Timothy, a true son in the faith:
Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord.
1Ti
1:3 As I urged you when I went into
Macedonia—remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other
doctrine,
1Ti
1:4 nor give heed to fables and endless
genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is in
faith.
1Ti
1:5 Now the purpose of the commandment
is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from
sincere faith,
1Ti
1:6 from
which some, having strayed, have turned aside to idle talk,
1Ti
1:7 desiring
to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things
which they affirm.
1Pe
4:17 For the time has come for
judgment to begin at the house of God; and if it begins with us first,
what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God?
Ancient
Israel paid a heavy price for departing from the standards of their God. But God is patient and willing to receive
back those who repent and amend their ways. This is how Hezekiah, one of
Israel’s better Kings, resolved this problem.
2Ch
30:1 And Hezekiah sent to all Israel and
Judah, and also wrote letters to Ephraim and Manasseh, that they should come to
the house of the LORD at Jerusalem, to keep the Passover to the LORD God of
Israel.
2Ch
30:2 For the king and his leaders and
all the assembly in Jerusalem had agreed to keep the Passover in the second
month.
2Ch
30:3 For they could not keep it at the
regular time, because a sufficient number of priests had not consecrated
themselves, nor had the people gathered together at Jerusalem.
2Ch
30:4 And the matter pleased the king and
all the assembly.
2Ch
30:5 So they resolved to make a
proclamation throughout all Israel, from Beersheba to Dan, that they should
come to keep the Passover to the LORD God of Israel at Jerusalem, since they
had not done it for a long time in the prescribed manner.
2Ch
30:6 Then the runners went throughout
all Israel and Judah with the letters from the king and his leaders, and spoke
according to the command of the king: "Children of Israel, return to the LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Israel; then He will return to the remnant of you who have escaped from the
hand of the kings of Assyria.
2Ch
30:7 And do not be like your fathers and
your brethren, who trespassed against the LORD God of their fathers, so that He
gave them up to desolation, as you see.
2Ch
30:8 Now do not be stiff-necked, as your
fathers were, but yield yourselves to the LORD; and enter His sanctuary,
which He has sanctified forever, and serve the LORD your God, that the
fierceness of His wrath may turn away from you.
2Ch
30:9 For if you return to the LORD, your brethren and your children will
be treated with compassion by those who lead them captive, so that they may
come back to this land; for the LORD your God
is gracious and merciful, and will not turn His face from you if
you return to Him."
Hezekiah linked their return to God with keeping
of the Passover. It may surprise people to know this but observance of the
Passover is a condition of being right with God and Jesus Christ in the New
Testament too.
1Co
11:17 Now in giving these instructions I
do not praise you, since you come together not for the better but for
the worse.
1Co
11:18 For first of all, when you come
together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and in part I
believe it.
1Co
11:19 For there must also be factions
among you, that those who are approved may be recognized among you.
1Co
11:20 Therefore when you come together
in one place, it is not to eat the Lord's Supper.
1Co
11:21 For in eating, each one takes his
own supper ahead of others; and one is hungry and another is drunk.
1Co
11:22 What! Do you not have houses to
eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have
nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you in this? I do not praise you.
1Co
11:23 For I received from the Lord that
which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same night in
which He was betrayed took bread;
1Co
11:24 and when He had given thanks, He
broke it and said, "Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for
you; do this in remembrance of Me."
1Co
11:25 In the same manner He also took
the cup after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood.
This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me."
1Co
11:26 For as often as you eat this bread
and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till He comes.
1Co
11:27 Therefore whoever eats this bread or
drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the
body and blood of the Lord.
1Co
11:28 But let a man examine himself, and
so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
1Co
11:29 For he who eats and drinks in an
unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's
body.
1Co
11:30 For this reason many are
weak and sick among you, and many sleep.
How many Christians keep the Passover in the
manner commanded by Jesus Christ? Most
of them do not even know the meaning of Passover, let alone observe it
properly.
Jesus Christ referred to His followers as a
‘little flock.’ Now do you know of any
church to which this epithet could be applied?
Today’s preachers make a virtue out of making their church bigger and
bigger, rather than being obedient to God and Jesus Christ.
Jesus told His little flock that He will be with
them to the end of the world. He did not say that His little flock would become
a huge flock by the time of the end.
When the Bible speaks of a huge religious
organization, it refers to it as Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots (Rev
17). And what does this Mother of
Harlots do to the little flock of Jesus Christ?
It deceives them, persecutes them, or murders them! And it does it all in the assumed name of
Jesus Christ.
Joh 16:2 They will put you out of the synagogues; yes,
the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God
service.
Because Jesus Christ used the term ‘synagogue’, people
assume that this happened only in the early days of Christianity from the
Jews. They forget what Catholic
inquisition did to those who dared posses and read the Bible for
themselves.
Unlike other religions, Christianity has to
contend with false prophets whose role is to lead people away from the truth of
God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, rather than lead them to salvation. And why
would they do that? Because they serve
not the true God but a false one, not Jesus Christ the Lord of light, but Satan
the lord of darkness.
Mat
8:11 And I say to you that many will
come from east and west, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the
kingdom of heaven.
Mat
8:12 But the sons of the kingdom will be
cast out into outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of
teeth."
2Co
11:12 But what I do, I will also
continue to do, that I may cut off the opportunity from those who desire an
opportunity to be regarded just as we are in the things of which they boast.
2Co
11:13 For such are false
apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ.
2Co
11:14 And no wonder! For Satan himself
transforms himself into an angel of light.
2Co
11:15 Therefore it is no great
thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of
righteousness, whose end will be according to their works.
Rom
16:18 For those who are such do not
serve our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly, and by smooth words and
flattering speech deceive the hearts of the simple.
Php
3:18 For many walk, of whom I have told
you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of
the cross of Christ:
Php
3:19 whose end is destruction,
whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their
shame—who set their mind on earthly things.
Jesus Christ and the apostles never tired
warning the disciples against deceivers.
This is
what Jesus Christ had to say.
Mat
24:24 For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and
wonders to deceive, if possible, even
the elect.
Mat
24:25 See, I have told you beforehand.
And this is
what Apostle Paul said.
2Ti
3:1 But know this, that in the last days perilous times will
come:
2Ti
3:2 For men will be lovers of
themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to
parents, unthankful, unholy,
2Ti
3:3 unloving, unforgiving, slanderers,
without self-control, brutal, despisers of good,
2Ti
3:4 traitors, headstrong, haughty,
lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,
2Ti
3:5 having a form of godliness but
denying its power. And from such people turn away!
2Ti
3:6 For of this sort are those who creep
into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led
away by various lusts,
2Ti
3:7 always learning and never able to
come to the knowledge of the truth.
2Ti
3:8 Now as Jannes and Jambres resisted
Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, disapproved
concerning the faith;
2Ti
3:9 but they will progress no further,
for their folly will be manifest to all, as theirs also was.
2Ti
3:10 But you have carefully followed my
doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, perseverance,
2Ti
3:11 persecutions, afflictions, which
happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra—what persecutions I endured.
And out of them all the Lord delivered me.
2Ti
3:12 Yes, and all who desire to live
godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.
2Ti
3:13 But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being
deceived.
And here is Apostle Peter.
2Pe 2:1 But there were also false prophets among the
people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring
in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and
bring on themselves swift destruction.
2Pe
2:2 And many will follow their
destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed.
2Pe
2:3 By covetousness they will exploit
you with deceptive words; for a long time their judgment has not been idle, and
their destruction does not slumber.
2Pe
2:4 For if God did not spare the angels
who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into
chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment;
2Pe
2:5 and did not spare the ancient world,
but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness,
bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly;
2Pe
2:6 and turning the cities of Sodom and
Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them
an example to those who afterward would live ungodly;
2Pe
2:7 and delivered righteous Lot, who
was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked
2Pe
2:8 (for that righteous man, dwelling
among them, tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and
hearing their lawless deeds)—
2Pe
2:9 then the Lord knows how to deliver
the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust under punishment for the
day of judgment,
2Pe
2:10 and especially those who walk
according to the flesh in the lust of uncleanness and despise authority. They
are presumptuous, self-willed. They are not afraid to speak evil of
dignitaries,
2Pe
2:11 whereas angels, who are greater in
power and might, do not bring a reviling accusation against them before the
Lord.
2Pe
2:12 But these, like natural brute
beasts made to be caught and destroyed, speak evil of the things they do not
understand, and will utterly perish in their own corruption,
2Pe
2:13 and will receive the wages
of unrighteousness, as those who count it pleasure to carouse in the
daytime. They are spots and blemishes, carousing in their own deceptions
while they feast with you,
2Pe
2:14 having eyes full of adultery and
that cannot cease from sin, enticing unstable souls. They have a heart
trained in covetous practices, and are accursed children.
2Pe
2:15 They have forsaken the right way
and gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Beor, who loved
the wages of unrighteousness;
2Pe
2:16 but he was rebuked for his
iniquity: a dumb donkey speaking with a man's voice restrained the madness of
the prophet.
2Pe
2:17 These are wells without water,
clouds carried by a tempest, for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness
forever.
2Pe
2:18 For when they speak great swelling words
of emptiness, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through lewdness, the
ones who have actually escaped from those who live in error.
2Pe
2:19 While they promise them liberty,
they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom a person is overcome, by
him also he is brought into bondage.
2Pe
2:20 For if, after they have escaped the
pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse
for them than the beginning.
2Pe
2:21 For it would have been better for
them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it,
to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them.
2Pe
2:22 But it has happened to them
according to the true proverb: "A DOG RETURNS TO HIS OWN VOMIT," and,
"a sow, having washed, to her wallowing in the mire."
And Apostle John:
3Jn 1:1 The Elder, To the beloved Gaius, whom I love
in truth:
3Jn
1:2 Beloved, I pray that you may prosper
in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.
3Jn
1:3 For I rejoiced greatly when brethren
came and testified of the truth that is in you, just as you walk in the
truth.
3Jn
1:4 I have no greater joy than to hear
that my children walk in truth.
3Jn
1:5 Beloved, you do faithfully whatever
you do for the brethren and for strangers,
3Jn
1:6 who have borne witness of your love
before the church. If you send them forward on their journey in a manner
worthy of God, you will do well,
3Jn
1:7 because they went forth for His
name's sake, taking nothing from the Gentiles.
3Jn
1:8 We therefore ought to receive such,
that we may become fellow workers for the truth.
3Jn
1:9 I wrote to the church, but
Diotrephes, who loves to have the preeminence among them, does not receive us.
3Jn
1:10 Therefore, if I come, I will call
to mind his deeds which he does, prating against us with malicious words. And
not content with that, he himself does not receive the brethren, and forbids
those who wish to, putting them out of the church.
3Jn
1:11 Beloved, do not imitate what is
evil, but what is good. He who does good is of God, but he who does evil has
not seen God.
3Jn
1:12 Demetrius has a good
testimony from all, and from the truth itself. And we also bear witness, and
you know that our testimony is true.
3Jn
1:13 I had many things to write, but I
do not wish to write to you with pen and ink;
3Jn
1:14 but I hope to see you shortly, and
we shall speak face to face. Peace to you. Our friends greet you. Greet the
friends by name.
Now consider this: if they did such things to
Apostle John, the youngest of the apostles and the one Jesus Christ loved the
most, before the ink was even dry on the epistles that formed the New
Testament, what would be the condition of the Churches of God by now?
Apostle Paul gave us the answer.
2Th
2:1 Now, brethren, concerning the coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you,
2Th
2:2 not to be soon shaken in mind or
troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though
the day of Christ had come.
2Th
2:3 Let no one deceive you by any means;
for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the
man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition,
2Th
2:4 who opposes and exalts himself above
all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the
temple of God, showing himself that he is God.
2Th
2:5 Do you not remember that when I was
still with you I told you these things?
2Th
2:6 And now you know what is
restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time.
2Th
2:7 For the mystery of lawlessness is
already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken
out of the way.
2Th
2:8 And then the lawless one will be
revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy
with the brightness of His coming.
2Th
2:9 The coming of the lawless one
is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders,
2Th
2:10 and with all unrighteous deception
among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth,
that they might be saved.
2Th
2:11 And for this reason God will send
them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie,
2Th
2:12 that they all may be condemned who
did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
Jesus Christ does not return before a great
falling away took place and the man of sin is revealed. Who is this man of sin?
This question has preoccupied theologians for millennia. We can do no better now than to quote an
article published in an earlier edition of TCH.
“Garner Ted Armstrong said that the "man
of sin" will be sitting in the holy place, in a temple of God which is yet
to be built in Jerusalem. He based his
prophecy on Apostle Paul's letter to the Thessalonian Church. Here is a quotation from his booklet (p.20),
with his comments interspersed in square brackets.
"Let no man
deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come [the second coming of
Christ], except there come a falling away [apostasy!] first, and that the man
of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposed and exalted himself above
all that is called God, or that is worshiped; so that he as God sitteth in the
temple of God [a temple which is yet to be constructed in Jerusalem!], showing
himself [claiming] that he is God...
And now ye know
what withholdeth [withstands; resists.
Paul is speaking of himself, as one who was "holding back"
this growing apostasy] that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery
of iniquity [it was a "mystery" religion; one which condoned sin, or
" iniquity"] doth already work; only he who now letteth [restrain]
will let [continue to restrain], until he be taken out of the way." (II
Thess. 2:3-7).
Then he
continued:
"Here we
see a human religious leader who will ensconce himself inside the temple in
Jerusalem and actually claim to be divine! - claim to be god!" (pp. 20
-21).
And again:
"Paul
clearly said the 'man of sin' would sit in the temple of God. But today, there is no temple in
Jerusalem." (p. 27).
There is no
better example of unfounded assumptions being read into the Scriptures than
this one. Apostle Paul never said that
the "man of sin" would sit in the temple of God, but that he was
ALREADY SITTING in that temple when he wrote his epistle.
Neither did he
mention Jerusalem as the city of the temple of God. That is a very important
biblical passage, which requires an in-depth analysis. For this reason, we will quote it again in
its entirety from the New King James Version:
2Th
2:1 Now, brethren, concerning the coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you,
2Th
2:2 not to be soon shaken in mind or
troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though
the day of Christ had come.
2Th
2:3 Let no one deceive you by any means;
for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the
man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition,
2Th
2:4 who opposes and exalts himself above
all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the
temple of God, showing himself that he is God.
2Th
2:5 Do you not remember that when I was
still with you I told you these things?
2Th
2:6 And now you know what is
restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time.
2Th
2:7 For the mystery of lawlessness is
already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken
out of the way.
2Th
2:8 And then the lawless one will be
revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy
with the brightness of His coming.
2Th
2:9 The coming of the lawless one
is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders,
2Th
2:10 and with all unrighteous deception
among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth,
that they might be saved.
2Th
2:11 And for this reason God will send
them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie,
2Th
2:12 that they all may be condemned who
did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
There are several important
points in this passage that need to be remembered:
* There will be a great falling away from the
truth of God before the return of Jesus Christ (v.3);
* The "man of sin" and "son of
perdition," will be revealed before the return of Jesus Christ (v.3);
* He was already sitting in the Temple of God
claiming to be God when Apostle Paul wrote his epistle to the Thessalonians
(v.4);
* The "mystery of lawlessness" was already at work (v.7);
* The position which this man was holding
will be in existence when Jesus Christ returns (v.8);
* The "man of sin" has the power of Satan behind him
(v.9);
* Those who follow him will perish,
"because they did not receive the love of the truth" (v.10);
* There was a certain lie which this man was preaching at that time
(v.11).
The first
question to be answered is where was the temple of God in which this "man
of sin" was sitting? Instinctively,
people think that it was in Jerusalem, but this cannot be true for a number of
reasons:
1) The Jews did
not worship any human being who claimed to be God. Had they not just killed Jesus Christ for
saying that He was the Son of God? How
much less would they have worshiped someone who claimed to be not the Son, but
the very God Himself?
2) There are no
historical or religious documents speaking of a human being who ensconced
himself in the temple of God in Jerusalem claiming to be God, between the time
of Jesus Christ and the time the temple was destroyed in 70 AD. If that had
been the case it would, most certainly, have been mentioned by the Apostles or
by the historians of that period, but no such mention was ever made.
3) Why was
Apostle Paul afraid to name this "man of sin" in his letter? “Do you not remember that when I was still with
you I told you these things?" If he had been a Jew he would have had no
hesitation telling the churches who he was, for he openly blasted those people
who caused problems to the Churches of God.
But whoever this man was, he was a feared person.
The reason he
could not be mentioned was that the letter could have fallen into the wrong
hands. Now, who were the people who were
feared by both the Jews and the Thessalonians at that time? The Romans, of course!
The Romans were
masters of the ancient world and they did not take kindly to anyone who spoke
disparagingly about them and especially about their leaders. It is in Rome, therefore, that we must look
for the “man of sin" who sat in the temple of God claiming to be God.
It is a great
error to assume that Jerusalem was the only city in the world in which there
was a temple of God. It is true that
only the temple in Jerusalem was sanctified by God, but that does not mean that
there were no temples of God in other cities.
Virtually every ancient city had a temple dedicated to God or to some
other deity.
With this in
mind, let us now compare what Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans with what he
wrote to the Thessalonians.
Rom 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven
against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in
unrighteousness,
Rom 1:19 because what may be known of God is manifest
in them, for God has shown it to them.
Rom 1:20 For since the creation of the world His
invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things
that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are
without excuse,
Rom 1:21 because, although they knew God, they did not
glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their
thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Rom 1:22 Professing to be wise, they became fools,
Rom 1:23 and changed the glory of the incorruptible
God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals
and creeping things.
Rom 1:24 Therefore God also gave them up to
uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among
themselves,
Rom 1:25 who exchanged the truth of God for the lie,
and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed
forever. Amen.
Notice the
similarities between the two epistles:
* The people mentioned in both of them take
delight in unrighteousness.
* They both reject the love and the truth of
God.
* Both worshipped what they ought not to.
* Both were given by God to strong delusions
and passions.
* Both believed the lie.
* And both did things that were Satanic in
nature, even though Satan was mentioned by name only in the letter to the
Thessalonians.
It is obvious
that in both epistles Apostle Paul was speaking about the same people. Since we know that the first were Romans, it
follows that the second were Romans too.
We should not be surprised then if we find that the "man of
sin" was a high standing Roman.
The Romans, more
than any other people, were infatuated with images of "four-footed beasts
and creeping things" and have remained so ever since, as any visitor to
Italy would confirm this. That is why we
must look for the "man of sin" not among the Jews, who to this day
have observed God's injunction against making and worshipping images and
statues (Ex. 20:4-5), but among the Romans who take pleasure in such things.
In the book of
Acts we find that when Apostle Paul visited Athens, "his spirit was
provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols"
(Acts 17:16). If he was so
"provoked" by the idols of Athens, we can hardly imagine that there
could have been such idols in Jerusalem.
No such complaint was made by any of the Apostles against the Jews. Athens, however, could not have been the city
of the "man of sin" because the Greeks had no dominion over the Jews
and, after this episode, Athens played little role in the life of the early
Christians, whereas Rome played a mighty and murderous one.
We notice that
Apostle Paul made no comment about his "spirit being provoked within
himself" when he visited Rome, even though that city was given over to
idols more than Athens was. The Romans
had the habit of carting anything of value from the conquered territories to
their capital, and monuments, artifacts and idols were of high value to them.
The reason
Apostle Paul said nothing about the Romans was that he knew when to keep his
mouth shut. He knew that he would not
have received the same reception in Rome as he did in Athens. The Romans were too busy with their murderous
pleasure games to have time for philosophical discussions as did the Athenians
in the Areopagus (Acts 17).
It is
fashionable these days to think of the Romans as a civilization far advanced
for their time, and in many respects they were.
But we must never forget how the "Pax Romana" was
achieved. Only the Romans were capable
of decorating their roads with impaled human beings, left to die a slow
agonizing death; or use them as torches for their night carnivals; or make a
spectacle of them being torn apart by animals; or watch them fighting
gladiatorial games till death.
It was the Roman
predilection for the macabre that provided a fertile ground for the murderous
Catholic inquisition later on. Can
anyone imagine such "sports" being practiced openly these days in any
country of the world?
The Romans were
tolerant of other peoples' religions as long as they acknowledged the supremacy
of the Roman gods. But the Jews and the
Christians refused to do so, and paid heavily for their attitude.
As happened
throughout history, the religion of the dominant civilization influenced that
of the conquered peoples. We should not
be surprised then, that the Roman religion exercised a powerful influence over
other religions of the empire, including Christianity. Apostle Paul saw that occurring already
during his time, and warned his followers to be on guard against it.
It is from Rome
that he saw "the mystery of lawlessness already at work". It is there that he saw the man who came
"according to the working of Satan”.
It is from there that he saw the lie being spread over the conquered
nations.
Who then was the
“man of sin" who had authority over religious matters, who sat in the
temple of God claiming to be God? Was he
the emperor? No! It could not have been
the emperor for a number of reasons:
- First, not all
emperors received divine honors. Caesar
and Augustus were deified after they died; Tiberius disapproved of the cult of
emperor worship; Caligula demanded to be worshipped while alive and was
murdered; Claudius I, the ruling emperor when Apostle Paul wrote his epistles
to the Thessalonians, suffered from a speech impediment and was despised by the
Senate.
You may have
seen the British television series "I Claudius" which dealt with that
period. Claudius was depicted as a
bumbling, stuttering individual, always outwitted by his wives. Did he look as if he might have been the man
who was worshipped as God?
The film
producers were not particularly concerned with historical accuracy, for the
records show that he was in fact one of the better and more sensible of the
Roman emperors. He improved the
administration and the judicial system over the empire and was generous with
Roman citizenship, but because he was held in low esteem by the disgruntled
senators, he did not receive divine honors even after death, let alone while
alive. Neither was it Nero, the next
emperor and the one in whose reign Apostle Paul wrote the epistle to the
Romans. Under Nero, the Christians
suffered their first major persecution, but that not because he demanded divine
honors, but because he needed scapegoats for the fire which destroyed Rome.
Emperor worship
was not a common practice until much later.
Domitian, Trajan and Hadrian were the first emperors who persecuted the
Christians for that reason, and that was after the Apostles had disappeared
from the scene.
- Second, even
when some emperors received divine honors, there is no evidence that any of
them actually sat on the throne in the temple of God claiming to be God.
- Third, the
Scriptures say that the "man of sin" will be destroyed at the return
of Jesus Christ. Since no man could have
survived that long, it means that the Scriptures are referring not to an
individual, but to a position or office.
Since the position of emperorship disappeared with the disintegration of
the Roman Empire, it follows that the emperor could not have been the "man
of sin."
The only
position in the Roman world which was held in high esteem then, which rivaled
that of the emperor, and which has survived to this day, is that of Pontifex
Maximus.
Armstrong’s idea
that Apostle Paul was putting some restraints on Pontifex Maximus and keeping
him from being revealed (2 Thess. 4:6-8), is as spurious as the one that he was
a Jew. It was the emperor who
overshadowed and kept in check the power of Pontifex Maximus, but when the
emperors were no longer on the scene, Pontifex Maximus became the undisputed
leader of the Roman world, and still is to this day.
The position of
Pontifex Maximus goes as far back in Roman history as there are recorded
documents. Indeed, the earliest
chronicles of Roman history, dealing with events of religious significance
(famines, eclipses, etc.), called "Annales Pontificum," were written
by Pontifex Maximus. As the chief priest
of the Roman religion, he presided over religious ceremonies in the temple of
God, served by a group of girls called the Vestal Virgins.
The story is
that when the Romans abolished their monarchy and instituted a Republic, late
in the sixth century BC, they still needed a king for religious
ceremonies. So they bestowed the title
of "Rex Sacrificulum" (King of Sacrifices), and "Rex
Sacrorum" (Sacred or Divine King) upon Pontifex Maximus.
But there was
another title of which Pontifex Maximus was very fond of: "Father of the
nation". It is not clear how he
obtained that title, but since the Romans believed that he came down from the
gods, it is not hard to see why he felt that he was the “Father of the nation”.
When you combine
the titles, "Divine King" with "Father of the nation” you come
up with "Divine Father", a title which belongs to God and to Him
alone. Can you see now why Apostle Paul
spoke of a "man of sin" sitting in the temple of God claiming to be
God?
During the
Republic, the legislative power was held by the Senate, the executive power by
the two praetors, later consuls, but the religious power with all its
accoutrements and honors was held by Pontifex Maximus.
When Julius
Caesar became the undisputed leader in Rome, he acquired for himself the title
of Pontifex Maximus. He felt that he was
entitled to it because his genealogy reached back to the Trojan hero Aeneas,
the founder of Lavinium - the parent city of Rome - and through him to the
goddess Venus. But other Roman senators
were not happy that he declared himself "Sacred King", and fearing
that he intended to re-establish the monarchy they killed him. Unfortunately, what they feared in Julius Caesar
they got in Octavian Augustus.
Augustus, who is
considered to be the first Roman emperor, also acquired for himself the title
of Pontifex Maximus. After him, that
title passed on to all Roman emperors, but for them it was only an honorific
title; the real function and religious authority remained with the chief Roman
priest who continued to sit in the temple of God as "Divine Father"
surrounded by the Vestal Virgins.
There is a
similarity here between the Roman imperial system and the present arrangement
in the Anglican Church. Nominally, the
Queen of Great Britain is also head of the Anglican Church, but the religious
authority and functions lie with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
After the Roman
Empire disintegrated, the title ‘Pontifex Maximus’ remained the sole preserve
of the chief Roman priest.” (The
Christian Herald No 3, p.23ff)
This resolves the question of the identity of the ‘man
of sin’ and the ‘beast’ of Revelation.
They are one and the same. The
question is why does he rebel against Christ? And the answer has to be because
the religion of Pontifex Maximus is predicated on the notion that Rome is an
eternal city, and the return of Jesus Christ will put an end to that. The world
is being led to believe that it is fighting an ‘Alien’ that comes to destroy
the earth.
Of course, the real power behind this is Satan.
Remember what Apostle Paul said.
2Th
2:9 The coming of the lawless one
is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders,
2Th
2:10 and with all unrighteous deception
among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth,
that they might be saved.
Why is Satan so vehemently opposed to the returning
Christ? Because it will be the end of
his reign upon this world! Here is
further proof that Satan is in control of this world.
Eph
2:1 And you He made alive, who
were dead in trespasses and sins,
Eph
2:2 in which you once walked according
to the course of this world, according
to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of
disobedience,
Eph
2:3 among whom also we all once conducted
ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of
the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.
Eph
6:10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in
the Lord and in the power of His might.
Eph
6:11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the
wiles of the devil.
Eph
6:12 For we do not wrestle against flesh
and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age,
against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
2Co
4:3 But even if our gospel is veiled, it
is veiled to those who are perishing,
2Co
4:4 whose minds the god of this age has
blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ,
who is the image of God, should shine on them.
And here is proof of the end of Satan’s reign.
Rev
20:1 Then I saw an angel coming down
from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain in his
hand.
Rev
20:2 He laid hold of the dragon, that
serpent of old, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand
years;
Rev
20:3 and he cast him into the bottomless
pit, and shut him up, and set a seal on him, so that he should deceive the
nations no more till the thousand years were finished. But after these things
he must be released for a little while.
Rev
20:7 Now when the thousand years have
expired, Satan will be released from his prison
Rev
20:8 and will go out to deceive the
nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather
them together to battle, whose number is as the sand of the sea.
Rev
20:9 They went up on the breadth of the
earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. And fire came
down from God out of heaven and devoured them.
Rev
20:10 The devil, who deceived them, was
cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are.
And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
The question that needs to be answered now is how far
we are from these end time developments.
When Jesus’ disciples asked Him that question, this is what He told
them.
Mat
24:14 And this gospel of the kingdom
will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the
end will come.
Preaching
the Gospel as a witness to all the nations is the sign that the end is upon us.
This would have been close to impossible before the Internet, but now that
Gospel has been going out to all nations for years. The question is why did Jesus Christ say that
the Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached to all the nations as a witness, and not as a means of calling
them to repentance and salvation? Because Satan’s ministers would have done
their job too well, and no one believes that Gospel anymore! This explains why the witness is not being
done by churches, but by two lone individuals, just as prophecies have foretold
long ago.
One last
point: Biblical scholars have come to understand that the Bible contains a code
according to which this world has been set up to last seven thousand years and
no more. However, at the end of six thousand years and the beginning of the
seventh thousand years, the world undergoes a radical change that will reshape
the face of the earth. That is the Great
Tribulation that Jesus Christ spoke about.
According
to biblical chronology, we are now at, or about, six thousand years since
creation. You can draw your own
conclusion as to what that means. That
is if you believe the Bible, but if you believe evolutionary fallacies, you can
go about unperturbed by such developments.
We cannot change the minds of those who have closed them to the truth of
God, but we can say this: a decade from now there will not be a single person
in the world who believes in evolution, and everyone in the world will bend
their knees and bow their head before God Almighty and Jesus Christ our Lord.
…………………………….
Newsletter
We have had
requests from people to make our
Newsletters available for them too.
Consequently, until we make a different arrangement, we have decided to
publish each Newsletter in the next
edition of The Christian Herald. Here now is Newsletter 23.
Newsletter 23 (10/11)
Friends and Leaders Around the
World, Greetings Again
Have you
considered why the Christian world is in such turmoil? They have eradicated diseases, prolonged
human life, brought the world to our living rooms, taken humans to the moon,
yet they have not learned how to govern themselves. After glorifying greed for so long, they are
now discovering that greed is not good after all. Two decades ago, in the very first edition of
The Christian Herald, we wrote:
“The United States of America has become the
most, morally and spiritually, polluted land on earth. They glorify homosexuality, bestiality,
satanism, adultery, teenage promiscuity, crime, theft, and blasphemies, in
movies that are then exported to every corner of the world. Everything God
condemns in the Bible, they do and encourage others to do too. And now the children, the last frontier as it
is, have to be corrupted and infested with these unspeakable abominations
through the insidious use of modern technology.
And as if it is not enough to do it to their own people, they are
forcing other nations to adopt their norms and lifestyle too. These days, in
order to be in the good grace of the USA, you must allow your people the same
kind of “freedoms” that they allow to their people, otherwise you are not a
good friend.
For
centuries, the U.S.A. and the British Commonwealth have been the beneficiaries
of the greatest of God's blessings.
These countries have well and truly been “flowing with milk and honey”,
a promise God made to those nations that obey His voice and keep His
Commandments. Until recent times, they seemed to be good examples to the world,
with a work ethic and spiritual values that were worthy of emulation. Their pioneers gave us the term, “Puritan
work ethic”, and zealously tried to make the Word of God the foundation of
their living. These nations also
produced and exported most of the Bibles of this world, and were always ready
to help others less fortunate who fell on hard times. But what has happened to them lately is
nothing short of astonishing. They have
fallen into a deep morass from which there seems to be no way out. Their obsessive emphasis on personal freedoms
and “human rights” is threatening the very fabric of their societies. Freedom without responsibility, without
decency, without God, is no freedom at all; it is enslavement to one's
uncontrolled passions and desires, and to Satan's clever devices and
deceptions.
The Bible, the
unshakable Word of God, has preserved for us the example of those nations that
had defiled themselves with the kind of pollutions that are now rampant in the
western world, and especially in the USA.
God made it clear that there is a heavy penalty for such depravity, even
to the point of national annihilation (. . .)
Can President Bush
(senior) see now where his nation's truly vital interest lies? Does he realize the danger in which he finds
himself, and the catastrophe that is about to engulf his nation and the world? If he does, he ought to take quick measures
to rectify it, for the conditions are all set for the most spectacular fall in
the history of the world. That this
coincides with the fast approaching Great Tribulation that will change the face
of the earth, should make it that much more obvious that the nations of this
world in general, and the U.S.A. in particular, are about to face the truth and
consequences of their way of life.”
Then,
in the second edition of The Christian
Herald, we wrote:
“People believe that communism failed. Communism never failed, atheism did! Communism never failed because it has never
been tried. What they practiced in the
Soviet Union and its satellite nations was not communism but a parody of it. It
is a satanic ploy to undermine every good idea that comes from the Bible. True communism will work in the Kingdom of
God.
Soviet communism has failed, but so has American
capitalism. Such is the vulgarity of
capitalism that at a time when a company like General Motors is closing down
dozens of factories and laying off thousands of people, it grants its retiring
Chairman an annual pension of $US1.2 million.
The Chairman of Chrysler, who has an allocated salary of $4.5 millions,
went to Japan with President Bush to lecture the Japanese on work ethics. When it was pointed out to him that the
Chairman of Toyota, a much more successful company, earns a fifth of his
salary, he stormed out of the meeting and left Japan indignant.
No social conscience on the part of those who
clamber their way to the top. No Christian
concern for one's fellow human beings from the leading citizens of the,
supposedly, number one Christian nation on earth. Has no one ever told these people that
"it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a
rich man to enter the Kingdom of God" (Mat.19:24). Even at the retiring
age they still do not think of the purpose of life and what lies beyond this
temporary existence.
Where are the spiritual leaders of that
nation? What have they achieved? Why are they silent in the face of such
blatant greed and exploitation? Or are
they part of the same mentality?
The country wonders why its economy is faltering
so badly. Unfettered capitalism is just
as unchristian as totalitarian communism.
Soviet communism has collapsed; now watch for the collapse of
capitalism. Those who believe that the
USA will once again dominate the world, or that Great Britain will rule the
waves as during the height of its empire, have some surprises coming their way.”
Ever
since we published those editions, things have been going downhill exactly how
we predicted. Now we have just
published The Christian Herald No 24
in which we show how nations and empires sow the seeds of their own fall – not
for the reasons that you would find in history books.
The
‘experts’ have had their say about why things have been going from bad to
worse; now hear what God has to say about it.
Truly, the world is on the brink.
The Christian Herald editions are
freely available on this web site: www.thechristianherald.info.
Here
are some of the articles you will find in the latest edition.
-
How
Did It Ever Come To This?
-
How
nations and empires sow the seeds of their own fall:
.
The Fall of Egypt;
.
The Fall of Canaan;
.
The Fall of Greece;
.
The Fall of Rome;
.
The Fall of America;
.
The Fall of Judah;
-
How Jewish ‘Queen of Heaven’ became Catholic
‘Queen of Heaven’;
-
When
Jews and Catholics find common ground, prepare to meet your Maker;
-
‘Daniel’s
Last Great Mysteries Unveiled.’
In the service of Jesus Christ.
Grigore Sbarcea,
Coordinator A.O.C.F.
Post Scriptum (12/11)
The above newsletter has been sent out to world
leaders and to thousands other people. This time, however, we are sending
it to Australian Members of Parliament, Senators, and selected recipients.
Please do not burden this country with the abominable
sin of homosexuality, for the country will not be spared the
fate of those who have taken this path. Do not challenge God,
for you, your family, the people you represent, and the people of
Australia will not forgive you for the catastrophe you will bring upon
this nation.
This is not the time to sink further into the
morass of sin that God hates the most [Not
that it is ever a good time to do so].
The world is already in the preceding stages to
the Great Tribulation of which Jesus Christ said will reduce the world's
population to a trickle. Watch out for developments in Russia.
Vladimir Putin is the man of destiny; he is already working hard to put
together the end time coalition that will come against Israel and
trigger a worldwide nuclear war. [Of course, he does not know that he is fulfilling an important end time
prophecy]. For years, he has tried to create a breach between the
Anglo-Saxons and their European allies.
Britain’s refusal to join European nations in stricter budgetary rules
and more fiscal integration across the euro-zone, and America’s refusal to
contribute to the EU bailout fund have achieved that. The proverbial “Jacob’s trouble” is reaching
its climax now.
God has chosen Australia as the base from which to
send out His messages to the world. Many
people take credit for the good fortune of this country, but they should never
forget that it is God who determines the destiny of nations. He does it on the basis of how they honour
and obey Him. So if you want to please
him, and gain credit in heaven, join us in the faith of Jesus Christ, and be
part of this little known, yet vital end-time work. With the love of God! G. S.
THE CHRISTIAN
HOLY DAYS FOR THE YEARS 2012 - 2014
|
|
2012
|
2013
|
2014
|
The Passover (Pesach
– Nissan 14)
Unlike the Jews,
who used to kill the Passover lamb “at the twilight” of Nissan 14 (meaning in
the evening towards Nissan 15), we, Christians, observe the Passover when our
“Lamb” – Jesus Christ – was sacrificed. That happened on the afternoon
of Nissan 14, before the twilight of Nissan 14, meaning that we keep it a
little earlier than the Jews. We commemorate His death, not His supper,
which occurred the previous evening, as some churches do; the time when His
body was broken, not when He broke the symbolic bread.
|
|
6
April
|
25
March
|
14
April
|
Days of Unleavened Bread (Nissan 15 – 21)
On the first and seventh days there shall be holy convocations.
No customary work shall be done on these days.
|
|
7 April –
13 April
|
26 Mar.
- 1 April
|
15 April -
21 April
|
Pentecost (Shavuot – Sivan 6)
|
|
27 May
|
15 May
|
4
June
|
Feast of Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah – Tishri 1)
|
|
17
Sept.
|
5
Sept.
|
25
Sept.
|
Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur – Tishri
10)
|
|
26
Sept.
|
14
Sept.
|
4
Oct
|
Feast of Tabernacles (Succoth – Tishri 15 – 22)
On the
first and the eighth days there shall be holy convocations. No customary work shall
be done on
these days.
|
|
1 Oct. –
8 Oct.
|
19 Oct. –
26 Oct.
|
9 Oct. -
16 Oct.
|
State of the World
Society and
Culture
Bindi lrwin launches war
on overpopulation
Bindi
Irwin says she is determined to spread the word about the perils of
overpopulation. [She]
is no longer the little girl we all remember. In fact, at 14 she is all
grown up and on a mission to change the world.
The elder child of "Crocodile Hunter'' Steve Irwin has dedicated
herself to wildlife conservation since her father's death in 2006.
Now, the
teenage star is turning her attention to the issue of overpopulation, and she's
showing has no shortage of vision and enthusiasm. "The older I get, the more I want to
tackle the issues people don't want to talk about,'' she told AAP today.
"I've been working a lot with Dick Smith on overpopulation. Our human
population continues to expand at such a scary rate - it's unbelievable.
"With
fewer resources to share around more people, how can the poor have improved
lifestyles?'' Last month, an essay on
overpopulation Bindi was asked to write for then US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton was drastically edited by American authorities. The edit prompted the
young Queenslander to write to Ms Clinton's office asking,
"What
happened to freedom of speech?'. Bindi
insisted the edited version not be published on Ms Clinton's e-journal. Despite
the setback, Bindi remains determined to spread the word about the perils of
overpopulation.
"What I'm
trying to do is to get the message across. If we can at least start discussing
this issue, maybe we could create some positive change, because if we don't
start talking about it, we're not going to get anywhere.
"The
issue can be quite daunting because it's so huge, but I think it's one of those
things that you need to just chip away at and never give up.'' Despite being in
the public eye her whole life, Bindi insists she feels no pressures to live up
to any expectations. "I don't really feel like there are any pressures
because I'm able to help others - and that's what life is really all about.
"If I am able to pass on what I've learnt in my life, that's really
wonderful, especially after losing Dad.'' Bindi says she still gets to do most
of the things other teenagers do. "I have friends who come to Australia
Zoo, and it's just instead of playing video games, we get to hug and kiss a
giraffe, or walk a tiger.
"It's
really special. "I think you have to remember the difference between
'normal' and `common'. "My life is certainly not common, but I think of
myself as ... a 'normal' teenager.'' She
is, however, going to "wait'' when it comes to going out with boys - she
has bigger issues to tackle first.
"I'd like to continue to spread my message on conservation and make
sure my dad's message - his legacy - lives on,'' she said. (AAP/The
Telegraph, Feb. 18, 2013)
Hillary Clinton tries to
silence Bindi Irwin on population growth
PASSIONATE wildlife campaigner Bindi Irwin
has gotten into a biff with one of the world's most powerful women. The 14-year-old has stood
her ground after an essay she was invited to write for US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton's e-journal was drastically edited before it was to be
published.
The young
conservationist, daughter of the late "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin,
was asked to write 800-1000 words on why she had chosen to devote her life's
work to wildlife conservation. The piece
was supposed to be published in the December issue titled Go Wild Coming
Together for Conservation as part of Secretary Clinton's
endangered species initiative. But after
writing exactly 1000 words urging society to address overpopulation, the former
first lady's department returned it for final approval with most of it edited
out.
Bindi used the
simple analogy of throwing a party and having too many guests turn up to
explain her point of view. "How is
it possible that our fragile planet can sustain these masses of people?"
Bindi wrote.
"Think of
it this way. Pretend for a moment that I'm having a party, inviting 15 of my
closest friends. I've rented a room big enough to fit 15 people, I've bought 15
sandwiches for each of my friends to eat, and I have put together 15 party
bags, one for each friend. "My
party is about to start, and I hear a knock at the door. My friends are here!
Only, when I open the door, 70 of my friends are standing there wanting to come
to the party!
"What do
I do? My room is only big enough to fit 15, with 70 we won't have any room to
move and dance. I don't have enough food. Do I divide the sandwiches among the
70 people? But then everyone will still be hungry. What about the party bags?
Do I only give the party bags out to my closest friends? Isn't that unfair to
everyone else?
"That is the crisis facing mother earth today."
Terri Irwin,
who is raising Bindi and her nine-year-old brother Robert at their Australia
Zoo on the Sunshine Coast, said her daughter was less than impressed with the
response from the US State Department.
"It's interesting that she was asked to write an essay about the
environment and included the consideration of population (growth) and they
returned her essay edited and completely edited that out," she said. "So Bindi wrote to Hillary Clinton's
organisation and said 'what happened to freedom of speech? This is my opinion
and I don't want that edited out'."
The tough-talking teen – who onscreen has freed Willy, fought pirate animal
poachers and hosted Bindi's Boot Camp – pulled the essay from the publication
in anticipation of a response.
Hillary
Clinton
Hillary
Clinton's organisation edited out huge sections of an essay they asked Bindi
Irwin to submit. "The edited version was not published per
Bindi's request," Mrs Irwin said. "She said 'that's not what I
wrote', so that's where we're at with it." Secretary Clinton's department
then told Bindi there was not enough time for her to do a re-write, which the
Queensland teen refused to do anyway.
"Bindi just respectfully said that she's not willing to go with the
edited version of the story," a zoo spokeswoman said. "She said that
while it was a good message that they were trying to convey in the publication,
she just wanted her whole essay to be printed rather than just a snippet of it
without the other points she wanted included.
"So that's how it's ended."
Mrs Irwin said
Bindi, who is following in her father's footsteps in promoting nature
conservation and helping preserve the planet, had become increasingly
passionate about the cause in recent years. "In fact Bindi is so
passionate about it that she became very interested in what Dick Smith was
talking about," she said. "Dick Smith did a documentary called
Population Puzzle and Bindi watched that.
"Bindi became so passionate about the issue that she talked to Dick
about it and helped launch his book Population Crisis and has become a real
advocate."
Bindi and
Terri Irwin
Terri Irwin is supporting her
daughter Bindi's views on population growth. The mother-of-two said population growth was an
unpopular topic. "It's astounding
that in just over 100 years we've gone from 1.5 billion people on the planet to
7 billion so you think 'what do we do in the next 100 years?' We're going to be
warring over water and space and food," she said. "I just think it's fascinating that when
Bindi does an interview and talks about population, more than 50 per cent of
the time it's edited out. "It's something we do need to talk about or the
ship's going to sink man."
Mrs Irwin said she had visited communities in
Australia which were in desperate need of family planning support. "Certainly when Bindi, Robert and I were
in South Africa four years ago filming a movie we saw a lot of that in Africa
as well. It's a global problem but we recognise it in Africa and we forget it's
something that's in our own back yard," she said. "Everyone talks
about recycle and manage your resources but how do you do that when we've got
so many people? "It's not terribly popular but I'm not trying to insult
anyone's ability to decide how many kids they want … but I continue to meet
children in foster care and people living on the poverty line who did not chose
to have so many children and for who options weren't made readily available." News.com.au has requested a response from the US State
Department. (Kristin Shorten, news.com.au, January 24, 2013)
The reality of abortion
is exposed
Healthy
babies deserve our protection, but we have normalised abortion to a point where
we risk destroying the taboo against murder. We’ve made abortion such a sanitised,
abstract subject, guarded by aggressive feminism, that discussion of its
realities is off-limits in polite company.
Even the word "abortion" is politically
incorrect, replaced by the euphemism "choice", or more recently,
"reproductive justice".
While societal
attitudes are becoming more nuanced in the face of technological advances
allowing us to see clearly inside the womb and keep premature babies alive
earlier than ever, the zeal of abortion enthusiasts to shield women from the
truth continues unchecked.
No nuance is
reflected in the demonisation of the Catholic Opposition Leader, Tony
Abbott. As health minister in the Howard
government he once said Australia's high rate of abortion was "an
unambiguous moral tragedy", but did nothing to change abortion law.
That is the province of state governments anyway.
What he did
was offer vulnerable women more choice _ in the form of a Pregnancy Support
Helpline _ to make them aware of all the options available in the
case of an unwanted pregnancy. Thus, he is enemy No.1 to the Emily's List
brigade. There is no nuance, either, in the campaigns by GetUp and the Greens
to liberalise state abortion laws nationwide. Nor in Tasmania's
Labor-Green government's determination to introduce draconian legislation,
modelled on existing Victorian law, threatening doctors, counsellors and
protesters with jail and hefty fines for opposing abortion. Take, for instance, Melbourne GP Mark Hobart,
who refused to refer a woman pregnant with a female foetus for an abortion
because she and her husband wanted a boy. That's choice for you.
The couple
procured an abortion anyway, but Hobart says he broke the law by refusing
the referral and risks being suspended or deregistered. Since the story broke in this newspaper,
commentary on the case has sought to dismiss Hobart as a political
partisan because he is a member of the pro-life Democratic Labor Party.
But how does
the revelation of his pro-life belief excuse the practice of sex selection
abortion?
Perhaps it
just means he is more attuned to the moral problems involved and less
influenced by our collective denial of reality. Every now and then, a story
arrives to expose the unpalatable truth about abortion, that it is not just a
medical procedure to remove tissue, but entails the death of a small helpless
human.
The Kermit
Gosnell trial winding up in the US does so with horrendous clarity.
Gosnell is the
Philadelphia abortion doctor charged with murdering four babies who were
born alive while being aborted and over the death of a woman allegedly
administered too much anaesthetic during an abortion.
The clinic he
operated for 30 years has been described as a "house of horrors",
piled high with body parts.
One former
staffer testified: "It would rain foetuses." Another testified about the sound of a baby
screaming after it was born alive. "I can't describe it. It sounded like a
little alien." Some pregnancies were as advanced as 30 weeks, and some
aborted babies lived for as long as 20 minutes. One boy was so big Gosnell
joked he could "walk me to the bus stop". The detail is complete with colour photographs
of perfect, chubby, fully formed dead babies, whose bodies were found by police
on a routine prescription drug bust.
The horrors of
the Gosnell case are so inescapably graphic that even half a world away people
are paying attention. There is little
room for abstract arguments when you are confronted with jars of severed
babies' feet.
Of course,
local abortion enthusiasts have been busy claiming the case is an aberration,
that it proves the need for less regulation of abortion and that blame belongs
with abortion protesters.
The Gosnell
case offends them because it renders absurd their contention that abortion is
just another medical procedure, without a moral dimension. And the fact is that babies do survive
late-term abortion, even in Australia, although few hit the headlines. There
was the case of baby Jessica Jane, aborted at 22 weeks in Darwin Private
Hospital in 1998, but who was born alive, weighing 515 grams, and with
"good vital signs". She lived for 80 minutes, alone in a kidney dish,
though a sympathetic nurse wrapped a warm blanket around her as she died. At
the time, the Northern Territory coroner said similar deaths had occurred
elsewhere in Australia and that his counterpart in NSW had disclosed that
"many terminated foetus live after they are expelled from the
mother". This apparently ho-hum
fact was dealt with last year by Australia's medico-ethical establishment when
two Victorian academics published an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics advocating
"after-birth abortion". They claimed "the same reasons which
justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when
it is at the stage of a newborn". This is really the only logical end game
to a culture of normalised abortion.
Once you destroy the taboo protecting human life, Gosnell-style killing
factories are the result. (Miranda Devine, The Sunday Telegraph, May 05, 2013)
Egypt cruelty death
knell for live exports, warns Wilkie
AUSTRALIA'S live export trade is under
renewed pressure after footage of shocking cruelty to Australian cattle in two
Egyptian abattoirs was aired on the ABC last night. The segments,
one recorded by a local vet last October and the other by an Animals Australia
investigation team last month, show cattle being atrociously treated,
deliberately injured and cruelly slaughtered. Animals Australia has renewed its
calls for the entire industry to be banned. It says the continuing occurrences
of cruelty in abattoirs in Egypt,
Indonesia, Pakistan and Kuwait show industry and government efforts to
introduce and maintain new welfare standards are not working.
Animals
Australia handed footage of the two Egyptian incidents to the Agriculture
Department last Wednesday. They were viewed by cattle and export industry
groups on Thursday, and the voluntary suspension of all live trade with Egypt
was announced on Friday night. Federal Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig told the
ABC's 7.30 last night he had faith in the existing tracking and audit system
and that "99.9 per cent" of exported cattle were treated humanely. He
based that on the number of complaints received by his department and his own
confidence.
"It's the
confidence that I can inform you and the confidence that the statistics, that
the audits, which are on the website, demonstrate," he said. The Exporter
Supply Chain Assurance System was established after the Indonesian live cattle
export suspension in 2011, and makes Australian exporters accountable for their
animals when they go overseas. Animals Australia campaign director Lyn White
said the ESCAS measures were not enough. "I think the Australian industry
is treating the Australian public like fools," she said.
Independent MP
Andrew Wilkie last night declared the latest incident spelled the "death
knell" for the live export industry and said it must be stopped. The footage taken at the Red Sea abattoir at
Ain Sokhna was recorded only a few weeks ago by a visiting Animals Australia
team after an Egyptian veterinarian alerted the organisation to cruelty at the
northern meat works at Ismailia near Alexandria. He had shot an earlier video
in October but Animals Australia said yesterday it had become aware of the
Ismailia footage only early last month.
The Australian
government is investigating the incidents, which include an injured animal
being appallingly treated before being killed. Australian Live Exporters
Council executive director Alison Penfold said while she was "distraught,
sickened and disgusted" by the videos, banning all live exports would not
advance animal welfare worldwide. "No one in our industry, and no
Australian, accepts such treatment of animals, and I believe the Egyptian
authorities will not tolerate this," Ms Penfold said. She said Australia
was the only one of 100 live-exporting nations that was working to improve
animal welfare standards. "Take us out of the marketplace (and) who is
left to provide that training and the resources to provide (it)?" she
said. The exporters have sent a delegation to Egypt to investigate. (Sue Neales, The Australian, May
07, 2013. Additional reporting: Mitchell Nadin)
Negotiation: Roles are still up for debate
Have you been haggling over the housework this weekend? And did your
earnings have any bearing on the negotiations?
The way
housework is distributed in families is a puzzle. Even though women have
greatly increased the amount of paid work they do over several decades, the
time men spend on unpaid work in the household hasn't changed much. You'd
expect that men would spend more time on things like cooking, cleaning and
shopping in response to such a momentous economic shift. But that hasn't happened.
One explanation for this, proposed by
those who research the economics of households, is that men and women bargain
over household labour based on how much money they earn. Since unpaid housework
is considered unpleasant and menial, those with the most resources, usually
men, bargain their way out of it. Partners with fewer resources - usually women
- have less power and therefore spend more time on domestic unpaid work. When a
woman starts to earn more money relative to her partner she bargains down the
amount of housework she does. In other words, relative earnings determine how
much each partner spends on housework.
But some interesting new evidence has come to light in the US. Analysis
of housework patterns by researcher Sanjiv Gupta shows women's absolute
earnings, rather than their earnings relative to their partner, determine how
much time they spend on housework. The more a woman earns, the less time she
spends on housework, no matter what her partner earns. One possibility is that
America's partnered women use their earnings to pay for household help. It
might also be that women with higher earnings are just not that interested in
housework and more willing to live in an untidy house. Could it be that money
is finally becoming more important than gender in the allocation of housework?
The American findings prompted University
of Queensland researchers Janeen Baxter and Belinda Hewitt to undertake a fresh
investigation of how Australian couples distribute housework. Their detailed
study Negotiating Domestic Labor: Women's Earnings and Housework Time in
Australia shows Australia is quite different to America: the earlier
bargaining theory still explains our housework patterns best. For Australian
women the time they spend doing housework is more strongly affected by their
relative earnings rather than by their absolute earnings.
Women who contributed an additional 1 per
cent of relative weekly earnings, on average, did approximately 17 minutes less
housework per week. When women work more, the amount of housework they do falls
a little overall (about seven minutes less on housework per week for each
additional hour of paid work). But having children significantly increases the
amount of housework women do - about 40 extra minutes a week on average and an
additional 1.7 hours if the children are aged under five. Baxter says she's
found no evidence in her research that men increase hours of housework after
having children (although they tend to spend more time doing childcare than in
the past). But there's a curious twist.
When women's earnings start to get close to their partner, the average time
they spend on housework starts to rise again. Baxter and Hewitt summarise the
patterns like this: "As women's relative earnings increase, they spend less
time on housework, but only until they earn 66.56 per cent of weekly joint
earnings, after which their time on housework increases." Other researchers have also found that as
Australian women's earnings approach or surpass their partners', their
housework time increases. It may be that
women who earn as much or more than their partners feel they have to
"counter their gender-deviant behaviour" by doing more housework.
Often men with lower incomes than their partners also respond by doing even
less around the house.
"In circumstances where women earn as
much or more than their partners, both men and women display gender-appropriate
behaviour by reverting to stereotypical involvement in domestic labour,"
say Baxter and Hewitt.
They conclude Australian men and women are
more strongly tied to a traditional division of domestic labour than their
counterparts in the US. It seems gender
still trumps money in deciding who does the household chores in Australia.
(Matt Wade, The Sun-Herald , April
21, 2013)
Scammed tourists begin class action
Australian holidaymakers are pursuing a
class action lawsuit against one of the world's largest banks after hundreds of
false accounts were used in an international travel scam.
Over the past 18 months, tourists have
wired millions of dollars into accounts with London-based Barclays Bank to pay
for luxury accommodation in dream destinations around the world. The vacations
are booked through popular holiday rental websites including HomeAway and
FlipKey, which is mostly owned by TripAdvisor.
However, the Barclays Bank accounts are
run by criminals who, after hacking the sites and ''phishing'' the original
email inquiry, assume the identity of the property owner and steer customers
into making bogus bookings.
The internet is awash with blogs and
forums where victims recount how they booked holiday accommodation and
travelled overseas, only to discover the property owner had never heard of
them.
In the past 12 months, Australians have
become a prime target. While some have been left stranded in Miami, Florida and
Paris, it is the luxury Balinese villas closer to home that are proving the
most popular bait.
Fairfax Media can reveal that a group of
Australian victims and Bali villa owners has enlisted London-based law firm
Edwin Coe - which has successfully tackled one of the world's largest banks in
other group actions - to commence a legal action against Barclays Bank. Beth King, from Victoria, who owns a holiday
rental villa in Seminyak, Bali, said: ''With their sophisticated hacking skills
and inside knowledge of travellers' booking behaviour, these scammers are
trapping people daily. This could all end tomorrow, if Barclays met its legal
obligations and vetted the identity of account holders.'' Nick Hyam, another Seminyak villa owner,
said: ''I've had my identity cloned five times so far - and each time I contact
Barclays, I hit a wall of indifference. This has affected hundreds of
travellers. We are gathering documentation and a class action suit will be
filed.'' On Saturday, a Barclays Bank
spokesman said the company ''complies with all regulatory requirements''. ''When we are made aware of inappropriate
conduct on accounts, we immediately investigate and take the necessary steps to
close them,'' he said.
Former two-time Winter Olympian Hannah
Campbell-Pegg was one of dozens of victims to contact Fairfax Media after last
week's report on the scam. She presumed she had been dealing with the
Australian owner of a luxury villa in Canggu, Bali, a fortnight ago, but it was
an impostor who had intercepted their communications.
Ms Campbell-Pegg, 30, said: ''I booked
through FlipKey. After reading the article, I became sceptical because I also
transferred payment into a Barclays account in London. She added: ''I contacted the owner, only to
discover I had not been dealing with her. It seems her reply to my original
email never made it through to me. It was intercepted by the scammer who then
posed as her and sent one of his own … I consider myself one of the lucky ones.
Yes, I lost $1600 but we were taking my partner's daughter on her first big
trip overseas. Like countless others, we could so easily have arrived at the
villa, only to discover we had nowhere to stay.''
Criminals previously ran the scam using
dozens of accounts opened through another Britain-based bank, Lloyds. The bank
subsequently tightened its identification process. The scammers then began swarming Barclays branches
across London, starting some 18 months ago.
Money continues to pour in from around the globe. Last November,
Jennifer Bobyk, from Sydney, booked a three-month stay in Chiang Mai, Thailand,
through online travel site TripAdvisor, forwarding a $2000 cash transfer via
Barclays. ''We took a taxi to the estate
but the owner said she had not received the booking or the money. When I
Googled the address of the account holder (in England), it was a house for
sale. I contacted TripAdvisor, our bank and the ACCC. Nobody was interested.''
Fiona Melia, from Merimbula on the NSW
south coast, parted with $2900 in February to book a luxury villa in Seminyak,
where she was due to arrive next week. When the property owner recently
contacted her to ask whether she was still interested in staying, the truth unravelled. ''The scammer intercepted my email, then
acted as the owner. He replied to all my individual emails about particulars
like breakfast. Everything appeared normal.''
The Barclays spokesman said the bank
regularly provides advice to help customers avoid fraud, including ''using
reputable third-party payment processing sites rather than making a direct
transfer to the seller's bank account."
FlipKey failed to respond to questions
from Fairfax Media but HomeAway, which lists more than a 1000 privately owned
rental villas and apartments in Bali alone, said it had launched a ''massive
education effort'' and a basic rental guarantee which reimburses phishing
victims up to $1000. General manager
James Cassidy advised travellers to always ''call the owner before they send
any money, to confirm their reservation''.
Stung speak out against litany of
lies:
Anna Jaques, Sydney: ''My 21-year-old daughter Laura rented a
condo in Miami advertised via Vacation Rentals [a subsidiary of HomeAway]. This
was her first trip away from home after completing school. She rang me in
hysterics. When she arrived in March, she was told by the manager she had been
scammed. The scammer had intercepted communications between vacation rentals
and himself, subsequently taking his name to conduct business. She is still
travelling the US. I have filed a fraud complaint with the ACCC and Barclays
Bank, London. I've heard nothing.''
Nicole Leighton, Sydney: ''We booked and paid for a villa in Ubud,
Bali, for seven nights (in March). The villa owner had no record of our booking
… he had had four other cases. He helped us contact Barclays Bank. Barclays
simply said 'thanks for the call' and advised us if we wanted our money back,
we would have to hire a lawyer to do so.''
Jon Jones: owner of Villa Amrita, Ubud,
Bali: ''The latest
person who believed he was coming to stay with us arrived Wednesday. I have
been trying to speak to Barclays since January. I told them, 'look at the
pattern. You have a bunch of accounts receiving wires from all over the world'.
They wouldn't even let me submit any documentary evidence to demonstrate what's
happening. They don' t want to know.''
Robyn Graham, Melbourne: ''We sent through a request on
HomeAway.com and began email exchanges with the 'owner' of a luxury villa in
Bali. We were sent a rental agreement and paid £950 into an English Barclays
account. We were due to arrive this Tuesday. But we became suspicious when we
had to chase the owner to make sure the money had gone through. When we Googled
the name attached to the bank account, pages of scams appeared. He had done the
same to people around the world. The most horrible part is, a renowned website
put us in direct touch with him. Their response, to date, has been appalling.''
Nicole Harding: ''In January 2013 I sent a booking
request through HomeAway.com requesting availability of dates in October for
Villa Zara in Bali. I transferred $2025 to Barclays as payment for the
accommodation on February 27, 2013, after numerous emails back and forth
between myself and 'Paul' confirming dates. As Paul never replied, I did a
Google search and found … sites advising of the scam.''
Full statement by Barclays Bank. “Barclays can confirm that
in opening and managing accounts, it complies with all regulatory requirements
including in respect of identification and verification. When we are made aware of
inappropriate conduct on accounts, we will immediately investigate and take the
necessary steps to close them.
“We recognise that some consumers’ interests have been
damaged as a result of the conduct of some customers and that money has been
lost. Regrettably, we are unable to provide any refund for individuals
who lost money before we were made aware of the situation. “We regularly give advice to our customers to
help them to avoid this type of fraud for example by using reputable third
party payment processing sites rather than making a direct transfer to the
seller’s bank account.” Victims are encouraged to contact: vacationrentalscamvictims@yahoo.com (Eamonn Duff, The Sun-Herald,
April 21, 2013)
Why
Stressed-Out Men Prefer Heavier Women
Most
men prefer leggy and lean women, Gisele Bündchen lookalikes, right? Not
necessarily. In fact, the body type that a man finds attractive can change
depending on his environment and circumstances, a new study finds: when under stress, for instance, men prefer
heavier women.
The
study, published in the
journal PLoS ONE,
reports that when men were placed in stressful situations, then asked to rate
the attractiveness of women of varying body sizes, they tended to prefer
beefier frames, compared with unstressed men whose tastes skewed thinner.
“This
suggests that our body size preferences are not innate, but are flexible,” said
study co-author Martin Tovée of Newcastle University in the U.K., in an email,
noting that they may be influenced by our particular environment and
resources. The findings fall in line
with evolutionary theories that suggest when resources are scarce or
unpredictable, a woman’s thin physique may signal illness, frailty and the
inability to reproduce. Indeed, Tovée and colleague Viren Swami of the
University of Westminster in London
have previously found that men under trying conditions — like extreme hunger —
tend to rate heavier women as more attractive. The researchers suggest also
that underlying biological mechanisms, such as blood sugar and hormone levels,
are major players in how we perceive our surroundings. “Our work in parts of Malaysia and Africa has shown that in poorer
environments where resources are scarce, people prefer a heavy body in a
potential partner,” said Tovée. “If you live in an environment where food is
scarce, being heavier means you have fat stored up as a buffer against a
potential food reduction in the future, and that you must be higher social
status to afford the food in the first place. Both of these are attractive
qualities in a partner in those circumstances.” Moving from a low-resource
environment to a richer one, like the U.K. or the U.S., can cause a shift in
these preferences, says Tovée, and to test the theory further, the researchers
recruited some male volunteers and manipulated their stress levels — a key
problem for people living in poor environments.
The
study examined 81 heterosexual men, about half of whom underwent the Trier
Social Stress Test. In the test, the men participated in an impromptu job
interview in front of four interviewers. They were asked them to “sell”
themselves for five minutes, and then calculate answers to simple math problems
under time pressure. Afterward, all the
study participants were shown images of 10 women with body types ranging from
emaciated to obese and were asked to rank them based on their
attractiveness. The images were numbered
on a scale of 1 to 10 based on the women’s body mass index (BMI), with 1
representing very thin and 10 obese. The largest body size rated
attractive by the stressed-out men was 7.17, which fell in the overweight
category. The largest body type deemed attractive by the unstressed control
group was 6.25, which was considered normal on the BMI scale.
Overall,
stressed men preferred a bigger body — their “ideal” figure was a 4.44 — than
the unstressed men, who idealized a thinner body type, at 3.90. Stressed-out
men not only rated heavier women as more attractive, but they also gave higher
ratings to a wider range of body types overall.
“This shift suggests that stress alters what
you find attractive in a potential partner, and it is another factor helping
you to optimize the fit of your partner preferences to your environment,” said
Tovée. Understanding how body preferences may change or be influenced by
circumstance also sheds light on the development of warped body image, the
authors say. “People suffering from conditions such as anorexia nervosa have a
distorted perception of body size and body ideals, and it’s important that
research focus on the mechanisms underlying and influencing the perception of
body size,” says Tovée. Despite our
media’s seeming reverence for size-zero models and ripped muscle men, it may
help people suffering from eating disorders and other body-image problems to
know that such body “ideals” are not exactly ideal after all. “The information
from this article could be useful in therapy of anxiety and eating disorders,”
Dr. Igor Galynker, associate chairman of the department of psychiatry and
behavioral sciences at Beth Israel Medical Center, told ABC
News. “The information could be an alternative to thoughts such as, ‘I am
fat; no man would find me attractive.’” (Alexandra Sifferlin, Time, Aug.
09, 2012)
Who you gonna call? Not me
·(1)
Tech-addict Megan Levy gets used to an
electronics-free break with surprisingly little trouble.
The view across the still bay and up into
the pink granite peaks is so striking it's crying out to be Instagrammed. But
that won't be happening in this quiet pocket of Tasmania, where a man in a dark
suit has confiscated my iPhone and iPad, and sentenced them to sit in the
naughty corner for the weekend.
For many Australians for whom the devices
have become an appendage, two days without the dings and buzzes of email,
Facebook and Twitter is a monumental challenge. Sit on any bus or train in the
city and watch the masses stooped over, swiping away furiously with their index
fingers. Ridiculously, I was sitting at
home tethered to both my laptop and iPad when the email pinged in from our
southern cousins. Would I like to come down for the weekend to Saffire
Freycinet, a lodge on the fringe of the Freycinet National Park on Tasmania's
wild east coast, to disconnect, quite literally, for the weekend? All phones
and digital devices would be banned. It's not so much a detox, but an etox, and
I'm the first to admit it: I'm a technology addict.
If there's an ideal place to calm a busy
brain, this luxury lodge would be among the leading contenders. Certainly you
pay handsomely for the experience - a four-figure sum a night - but the
experience is, well ... it's electric.
There are 20 spacious private suites, each
with glass walls positioned to take in sweeping views of Coles Bay and the
Hazards mountain chain. Some have private plunge pools. The bath, again with a
view, looks as though a small car could be submerged in it. I was wondering what could possibly occupy my
"device hand". It turns out the extensive minibar is all
inclusive. It's a short, covered walk to
the main, stingray-shaped lodge, which contains the lounge and gourmet
restaurant, touted as the best in Tasmania. Again, all food and drinks are
included. And it's here that, on check-in, the concierge plucks my electronic
devices from my hands and banishes them to the safe.
The first morning at Saffire began with a
tweet of a different kind: a kookaburra, pecking at the window at breakfast. If
I was on the outside gazing in on my ricotta hotcakes and rice pudding -
fancier than the kind mum used to make (sorry, mum) - I'd want in on the action
too. At Palate Restaurant, chef Hugh Whitehouse, a champion of Tassie produce
and the former chef at Darleys in the Blue Mountains, has put together an
exceptional menu to rival any city eatery. The dinner menu includes truffles
and oysters, pulled from the bay that day, slow-braised quail and gently
poached striped trumpeter, to name just a few dishes, with wine to match.
The Apple Isle has turned on a stunner,
and we're off on the boat for a cruise around Schouten Island and along the
isolated white sand wilderness that is Great Oyster Bay. Phoneless, I've had to
remember to bring a camera. My phone is also my clock, and I begin to ask
Captain Wally for the time before I realise that, really, it doesn't matter.
Where do I have to be, except sitting starboard-side enjoying the bay breeze as
we push quietly up the coast in the autumn sunshine? We pull up close to a
colony of seals and watch as they slide into the sea with a splash. Then we
cruise into a turquoise bay for a cuppa and cake on deck.
There's another initial urge to Instagram
that afternoon when I'm standing thigh-deep in an estuary in an ugly pair of
waterproof waders. Our guide, Joel, has whipped out a white cloth to cover the
table that's perched in the water. We gather oysters from the water and shuck
them, before slurping them down. Bless whoever remembered the bottle of
sparkling. The next day starts with a private yoga lesson in my suite from
Helen, who stretches my legs into angles they'll never grace again. Then it's
an etox facial and scrub, the gold-standard in beauty treatment. Or the diamond
standard - my body is literally polished with crushed diamonds.
Perhaps the most tranquil moments are
spent sitting and watching as the bay transforms in the evening light, and
gazing up at the star-choked sky at night. There's a sense of freedom without
the need to look at those small screens that have somehow barged into my life.
In a world of digital domination, it's a relief to switch off and recharge your
inner batteries, rather than the ones on your digital devices. (Megan Levy, The Sun-Herald, April 28, 2013)
We're not all born the same but we can provide equality in
education
Among certain Aussies, the colloquial term
''goneski'' is used as a play on the word ''gone'', meaning used up or
finished. It's also often applied to a
person who is thoroughly befuddled by alcohol or love, incapacitated by serious
injury, or soon to be found guilty of criminal charges. If you're ''goneski'', you're screwed.
I therefore found it unfortunate that the
most important changes to our nation's education system in years were named the
''Gonski reforms'', after their author, businessman David Gonski. It doesn't
bode well for their adoption.
Some people might blanch at the idea of a
multimillionaire investment banker like Gonski offering structural advice on
public education, but he strikes me as the perfect candidate.
More than most, Gonski would be aware of
an ugly little fact of life: all human beings are not equal.
Born to wealth, educated at the best
institutions this country has to offer, Gonski must know how much the accident
of birth and life's disproportionately distributed opportunities can shape a
life.
Politically incorrect as it may be to say
it, the harsh truth is we're born unequal and live myriad unequal lives. Then
we die. Even our death and the way the
world views it is unequal (as we saw in Boston and Iraq recently). Some of us
get state funerals and obituaries published on the front page of the newspaper.
Some of us liquefy in an armchair before we're found three months later by a
gas-company worker. ''Nature has not
read the American Declaration of Independence or the French Revolutionary
Declaration of the Rights of Man,'' wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning historians
Will and Ariel Durant. I'm pretty sure nature's not seen a copy of Australia's
equal opportunities act, either.
The reality of Australia is we have
hundreds of laws to enforce an equality that does not, never has, and never
will exist in nature. The best we can hope for is ''an approximate equality''
from our legal system and education opportunities - a society where all of our
potentials are nurtured and given the chance to bloom.
This is why education matters. It's why
early education and the funding we give it matters even more than how we endow
our universities and technical colleges.
By the time a child becomes a youth, the inequalities of birth,
geography, class and opportunity have largely crystallised. A burst of
subsidised university fees is not going to help the blue-collar teen who can
barely spell because his primary school was a dump staffed by indifferent
gumps. This is not a political viewpoint, it's an undeniable lesson of history.
It strikes me as uncharitable and disingenuous to argue the contrary, because
to deny education's transformative and equalising power benefits most those who
don't need it. If we do nothing, the
strong, the rich, the exceptional, win by default. Prioritising and improving
our primary and secondary education systems is arguably the only way we can
level life's playing field - at least at the beginning of people's lives. Then
nature takes over once more. (Sam de
Brito, The Sun-Herald, April 28,
2013)
Bloomberg News
apologises for data access 'error'
BLOOMBERG News has apologised for an
"error" that allowed its journalists to access private client data
through its financial terminals, saying it would "strive to continue to
uphold the highest standards" in its reporting.
"Our
reporters should not have access to any data considered proprietary,"
Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler said in a statement posted on the
news website. "I am sorry they did.
The error is inexcusable. Last month, we immediately changed our policy so that
reporters now have no greater access to information than our customers
have." The Bloomberg financial
terminals, which are operated separately from the news service, allow banks and
other financial professionals the ability to research virtually any type of financial
asset and carry out trades.
The Wall
Street Journal and USA
Today reported meanwhile that the US Treasury and Federal Reserve
had asked for information on whether Bloomberg reporters had accessed the
accounts of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury secretary Timothy
Geithner. Bloomberg announced on Friday
it was curbing reporter access to certain data on its financial terminals after
reports claiming its journalists used the devices to spy on Wall Street
banks. A Bloomberg spokesman acknowledged
that "limited customer relationship data has long been available to our
journalists", without "security-level" data, trading data or
messages.
Winkler said
that the access standards were "are almost as old as Bloomberg News,"
noting that "our reporters used to go to clients in the early days of the
company and ask them what topics they wanted to see covered".
But the editor
added that its journalists, "upon hiring, enter into a confidentiality
agreement that strictly prohibits them from discussing non-public Bloomberg
documents and proprietary information about the company and its clients in
their reporting". Following the
recent revelations, Winkler said that "we should go above and beyond in
protecting data, especially when we have even the appearance of
impropriety."
"We
apologise for our error as it does not reflect on our culture or our
heritage," Winkler said.
"And we
will strive to continue to uphold the highest standards while adhering to the
best practices in the industry as long as we may be fortunate to serve our
customers as they would have us serve them."
The New York Post reported Friday
that Goldman Sachs confronted Bloomberg over concerns that reporters at the
news service had been using the financial information terminals to keep tabs on
employees of the bank.
According to
the report, Goldman found that Bloomberg staffers could determine which
employees had logged into Bloomberg's proprietary terminals and how many times
they had used particular functions. A
separate report by the Financial
Times said JPMorgan Chase had also complained that Bloomberg
reporters were spying on activities by bank employees. Bloomberg was founded by
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is not involved in management due to his
political activities. (AFP, May 13, 2013)
Science and the Environment
Aussies fix 'stagnated' email
·(0)
Email has "stagnated" and three Australians
who quit Google say they have built a product that will change the way we
interact with email and allow us to get through our bulging inboxes "20
per cent faster". Cameron Adams, 32, and Dhanji Prasanna, 31, began work
on Fluent full-time about six months ago, after becoming
frustrated at Google's work culture and leaving the company about the middle of
last year. The third co-founder, Jochen Bekmann, left Google to join them in
November. The trio quit Google after the
company's Wave
messaging product was axed, and their comments about being frustrated at Google (below) are similar to
those made by Lars Rasmussen, another Australian member of the Wave team who left Google, joining
Facebook.
Ironically, Fluent integrates only with the team's
ex-employer's Gmail service to create an experience that shows users their
email and its contents in a stream-like fashion similar to how one views a
friend's posts on Facebook or Twitter. In the future it will also allow other
email services such as Hotmail to be integrated. "We're trying to ...
imagine the future of email," Adams said. "We think that email has
sort of stagnated and got into these set patterns of people using it and it's not
being pushed forward any more." One
thing Fluent aimed to change about email was presenting it in a stream that
lets one action items as quickly as possible, Adams said. "So rather than having to receive a
message, look at the subject, click on it, read the conversation, and then
decide what to do, we sort of present you with the information that you need to
immediately action on it."
Other features of Fluent include letting users quickly
browse attachments such as images in a slide show format, the ability to search
for emails as one types - something Google's search engine pioneered with
"Instant Search" but is not available in Gmail - and the ability
to pinpoint emails one has sent to a specified email address on a
timeline. Another feature in Fluent,
which Adams said most webmail clients were "pretty horrible" at
dealing with, was its focus on letting users access multiple email accounts
under one log-in. "The market that
we're going for initially is sort of independent professionals and small
businesses that tend to have personal accounts [and] maybe several work
accounts," Adams said. "It's quite important for them to be able to
check their multiple accounts at the same time."
He claimed Fluent users would be able to get through
their email "20 per cent faster" than they do now. Co-founder Prasanna said one of the features
that he worked on in Fluent that made it faster to browse an email inbox was
search. "What we're trying to do with
search is really alter the dynamics of how you go through your email,"
Prasanna said. One way of doing that was
by implementing a feature he called "search as you type", which, as
the name suggests, brings up search results in real time as you type in each
character of a search query.
"It's really slick and fast," Prasanna said,
adding that it was something that "no webmail client does right
now". "Not even Outlook or
Thunderbird do a good job of this. It's really weak for them," he
said. The search functionality works by
Fluent indexing all of one's emails when it first imports all of one's messages
from Gmail. Once imported, all future emails are automatically indexed and
synchronised with Gmail. Another thing
Fluent is "trying to pioneer" apart from really fast search, Prasanna
said, was the idea of searching by time. "If you look through a
conversation with a specific person ... we show you a timeline of all your
emails with that person on a scale. So [if] you know you got an email from Cameron
like a month ago ... you click that [month] and it just shows you that month
backwards."
Adams said that, from today, Fluent would let a
limited number of users trial its product as beta users. He said the business
plan was to offer the basic email experience - which might or might not be free
- but also offer a premium version with features that went beyond standard
email, such as offering document collaboration, file-sharing and integration
with services such as Dropbox, Evernote and Google Docs. A price for
the premium features was yet to be worked out. "We still have to test the
market on that one," Adams said. Mobile versions of the app were also
being worked on, which catered to the strengths of the iPad, iPhone and Android
touch capabilities, Adams said.
"When you're on your mobile or you're on your
iPad you're less in a replying mode and more in a consumption triage mode. So
one thing we wanted to make Fluent do was make it sort of easy to organise your
inbox. "So with touch you can just
swipe to the right to [mark an email] as a to do or archive by swiping it to
the left. The idea is that if you're on your phone you can 'to do' a bunch of
stuff or get a bunch of stuff out of your inbox when you're on the ferry to
work ... and then once you land at work you can jump on to your desktop and get
the same sort of experience but have a much easier typing experience for
replying and doing more of the hard work."
Bart Jellema, founder of ZEROmail
, a service similar to Fluent which
focuses primarily on getting rid of emails in a user's inbox,
said Fluent had "a very slick user interface" but questioned how
it worked in reality. "Having worked with email for a full year now, it's
very messy. How do you work around all that? That's yet to be seen."
Jellema said Fluent made doing email "a little faster" but said
he didn't "see any sort of new thinking" in the product from what he
had seen the Fluent team do so far.
Why they left Google
Adams said he left Google towards the end of July last year because the
design culture was "still maturing and finding its feet". He had been
working for about three years on the Google Wave project, which was cancelled
in August 2010, and said his experience as an employee of Google in Sydney made
him feel like he "wasn't contributing much" to Google's
products. "They value engineers a
lot more highly than designers and often you're just there to make things look
pretty," he said, adding that designers like himself tended "to get
slightly frustrated at Google".
"There's definitely some designers that make a good go of it but
particular out in Sydney I think it's quite hard to have an effect. Sydney
tends to sort of have a satellite office effect where you get smaller projects
and there is less involvement in the whole life cycle of product
development."
Prasanna had similar reasons for leaving. After Google Wave was cancelled
he began work on building new features for Google+, the search giant's attempt
at building a social network similar to Facebook, with Cameron. "The
problem was that every time we brought it to a particular stage and took it to
[Google in Mountain View, California] they were not keen on launching it just
yet. They said, 'Why don't you guys go back and change it a little bit and do
this and do that.' So it became quite frustrating and ... being in a satellite
office you're not plugged into the main project's arteries." Adams said that what they were contributing
to Google+ "was quite experimental" and was yet to be used. "It
wasn't going to be a core feature of Google+. It was kind of more a
forward-thinking thing [about] what the next stage of Google+ would
be." He added that being in Sydney
meant it was "hard to stay in the minds of the people over in Mountain
View". "When we did our work we'd take it over to them and they'd be
like 'Yeah that's cool but we can't do anything with it.'" Adams said Fluent's other co-founder, Jochen
Bekmann, had a "similar story" in working for Google. Prasanna said that Bekmann first worked on a
Google Maps project before it got cancelled. He then joined Wave before it was
cancelled and then went back to work on Maps. "He was doing that for a
while and then Cameron and I approached him.
(Ben Grubb, SMH, February 21,
2012)
Fasten your seatbelt, international
flights are likely to encounter more turbulence as a result of global warming,
according to British researchers. Their paper, published in the journal Nature
Climate Change, estimates that by 2050, increased carbon dioxide levels
could create a 170 per cent increase in turbulence over the north Atlantic and
a 40 per cent increase in its intensity. The study's authors say other areas of
the atmosphere are likely to be similarly affected, and flights will get longer
and more expensive as passenger aircraft are forced to avoid areas of
turbulence. More fuel used as flights alter their courses means more carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere, which means even more . (Lissa Christopher, April
19, 2013)
Economics
BIG companies devote whole
departments to it.
If you are a small business operator,
chances are that, on top of all the other jobs you are juggling, you are
wearing the chief marketer's hat. But
what is marketing? It works on the idea
that you might have the world's best product or service but if no one knows
about it, it is pointless.
Marketing is also described as
everything you do that keeps happy customers coming back to buy your goods and
services. It requires a plan that will lay out how to find customers, how to
satisfy them, how to get them back and how to keep adding value and
loyalty. Unlike the big marketing
departments with their arsenal of heavy-hitters and big bucks to target
advertising, sponsorship, social media and events, you will have to keep it
simple. Flying Solo founder Robert Gerrish says there is plenty of free and
simple advice. "Go to a bookshop. For $25, you can get the best knowledge
you can buy," he says. "It's a very retro thing but all the best
marketers have written books."
Flying Solo, which is an online
support network for micro businesses, says small business operators should
block aside 20 minutes every morning to focus on marketing.
"Marketing is creating a feeling
or a situation where someone likes the look of what you do," Gerrish says.
But he warns marketing is about
building a slow and steady relationship. "You don't go into a room full of
people and start yelling at them."
Gerrish says too often small businesses panic and go on a marketing
binge. He says people don't need to spend a lot of money, but many will need
help expressing their message.
People should look at having a number
of meaningful conversations with prospects every day. They could be with
potential clients and people from their recent past they have lost contact
with. Gerrish says social media, in its various forms, is a wonderful tool if
used properly. Successful businessman and Small Business Mentoring Service
mentor Bruce Hall tells his clients to set aside time each day, or a morning a
week, specifically for marketing.
"Where people allocate time to
promote their business, they see results," he says.
Hall says it might be as easy as a
new business operator taking the time to meet other businesses and leaving a
card. He says one of the best things small business operators can do is speak
to customers regularly. "Find out about their needs, their concerns and
what is not being delivered." In addition to identifying desired
customers, business owners need to take the time to learn about their world,
needs and challenges.
While there is a shift to the
competitive world of online marketing, Hall says businesses providing
comparisons, tips and information on their websites do much better. "It
can't just be an online brochure. People might look at 10 to 12 websites, so
your website needs to inform and educate the customer," he says. Hall says
businesses with a bricks and mortar presence need to step back and look at
their premises to see how the customer sees it.
> Marketing 101: Get your pricing
right.
* A poor retail site, with low rent
and low traffic, will require more marketing.
* Don't choose an obscure, hard to
pronounce name. Word-of-mouth won't work if people can't say it.
* Getting your logo right is
important as it is expensive to rebrand.
* Websites are getting cheaper and
more DIY. Make Google happy by including as many key words (terms that people
will use in their searches) in your text. Keep content fresh and think of doing
a blog.
* Join an industry association and
morph yourself into an expert on a given topic.
(Claire Heaney, The Telegraph, May 05, 2013)
End of war undercuts US economic
recovery
A steep slowdown in defense spending tied to the end of the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan is undercutting the country’s economic recovery, new government
data released Friday revealed. The
report showed gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.5 percent
during the first three months of the year — significantly slower than most
economists had expected. The culprit? A surprising 11.5 percent annualized
drop-off in military spending.
Many Americans report that they are feeling better about their personal
finances and are even paying down their debt, or just refinancing into lower
rates. Even so, the U.S. savings rate still lags most of the rest of the world.
And the key to long-term stability, experts say, is building better habits to
sock that money away. The decline comes
on the heels of an even bigger plunge in defense spending at the end of
last year that brought economic growth to a standstill.
Taken together, the two quarters represent the steepest declines in military
outlays since the Korean War, according to JPMorgan Chase economist Michael
Feroli. The GDP report amounts to a
caution about the looming consequences of federal spending cuts known as the
sequester. The cuts officially began in March but could take months — or even
years — to fully digest. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the
sequester will shave nearly half a percentage point from economic growth
this year, delaying projections for economic
liftoff to 2014.
“The longer-running
story has not changed, as the economy remains mired in the pattern of slow and
uneven growth seen since the end of the Great Recession,” said Richard Moody,
chief economist at Regions Bank.
Consider just the
past year of the recovery. Last spring, the economy was treading water before
the pace of growth picked up to more than 3 percent at an annual rate over the
summer. But hopes for a sustainable recovery dissipated by the end of the year
when economic growth stalled. The
bounce-back this year has been weaker than expected by many analysts, who have
already begun warning that any momentum that had built up has likely already
cooled. Economists forecast that the growth
rate during the second quarter will be an anemic 1 to 2 percent.
Even the good news in the GDP report came tempered with caveats: The
biggest single driver of growth during the first quarter was a surge in
business inventories, contributing about one percentage point of growth. But
economist Ben Herzon of Macroeconomic Advisers noted that most of that
stockpiling was done in January.
Consumer spending was also strong during the first quarter, rising 3.2
percent. Analysts have attributed the jump to the large number of bonuses paid
late last year to avoid the bite of higher taxes this year. Consumers spent
that extra money in the first quarter, but that boost will disappear over the
year. In fact, some data suggest households are already beginning to draw back
as higher payroll taxes squeeze paychecks.
Meanwhile, defense spending has been a drag on growth for the past two
years. A decade after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2011, America
officially ended the war in Iraq and killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
President Obama also announced in 2011 a timeline for withdrawing from
Afghanistan.
That shift in foreign policy is still trickling through the real economy.
Compensation for military and civilian employees working in defense have fallen
every quarter since 2012. Major contractors such as Lockheed Martin have laid
off or bought out hundreds of employees, including top executives, and
consolidated facilities in recent years.
Defense procurement reached its height in 2008 at nearly
$400 billion for the year, and it has fallen steadily since. Last year,
contract awards dropped 15 percent below the peak, after adjusting for
inflation.
But many of those contracts are for complex weapons and machinery that
can take years to build. The GDP report does not count them as government purchases
until they are actually delivered. In other words, much of the slowdown in
contract awards is only now showing up as a decline in government
spending. That also means the Pentagon’s
$500 billion in budget cuts required by the sequester could hold back GDP
growth for years to come.
“If you’re looking at earnings of defense companies, you’re not going to
see a hit on that for a while as a result of sequestration,” said Todd
Harrison, a senior fellow in defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments. Fairfax-based
ManTech International is a prime example of the effect of wartime spending
reductions. The contractor depended heavily on battlefield work and has seen
significant financial declines. Its 2012 profit of $95 million was down nearly
30 percent from 2011.
Now the company is also facing cuts from sequestration. In an earnings
call in February, as the deadline for implementation loomed, top executives
highlighted the uncertainty of its impact on their bottom line.
“Nobody has a crystal ball on what’s going to happen with sequestration,”
Chief Financial Officer Kevin M. Phillips said. “We’re taking a conservative view
based on the uncertainty. . . . Does it cover the worst-case
scenario? There’s no ability to tell right now.” (Ylan Q. Mui and Marjorie Censer, The Washington Post, April
26, 2013)
BRUSSELS, Belgium — Ever since
last month's disclosure that ex-budget minister Jerome Cahuzac lied about
stashing almost $800,000 in a secret Swiss bank account, the French have become
obsessed by their politicians' money. So
as they sat down to their croissants and cafe au lait on Tuesday morning, many
were gratified to be able to delve into the personal finances of their
government’s ministers for the first time.
That’s because members of the Socialist government have been obliged to
post their assets online, thanks to a political clean-up campaign by President
Francois Hollande.
Among the revelations, voters discovered Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius
is the richest cabinet member with $7.2 million in assets, including a Paris
apartment, a house in Normandy and $1.7 million in shares. Prime Minister
Jean-Marc Ayrault is the proud owner of a 1988 Volkswagen microbus valued at $1,300.
And Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici has saved a mere $350,000 during his long
political career.
The Cahuzac scandal may have lifted the lid on the wealth of officials
Hollande had promised on taking office would be clean and “exemplary.” However, France's neighbors
are far more worried about the country’s finances.
"France's public sector indebtedness represents a vulnerability, not
only for the country itself but also for the euro area as a whole,"
European Union headquarters warned last week.
As Hollande tries to extricate himself from political scandal, the
economy is in deeper trouble than many had believed. And the unusually blunt
language from Brussels underscores fears that unless he manages to get it back
into shape, the euro zone's second-largest economic power could bring down the
whole bloc.
"France is a core country in terms of its size and its geo-economic
position," EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told a news
conference last week. "Its health has a very direct impact on the overall
health of the euro zone."
Markets have generally been kind to France throughout the euro crisis,
treating it alongside Germany as one of
Europe's virtuous northern members. Its
"spread" — the difference between the interest Paris has to pay on key
government bonds and the benchmark German rate — is just 0.5 percent.
In contrast, southern European countries have seen the markets push their
borrowing costs far above the German level. Italy's spread is
at 3 percent, Spain's at 3.5
percent, Portugal's at 5 percent and Greece's, 10.2.
France has never been close to levels likely to raise fears that it can
no longer finance itself and might require a bailout. However, some of the
country’s numbers have a distinctly southern feel.
The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday forecast France would slip
into recession this year after zero growth in 2012. Unemployment is rising
steadily and scheduled to top 11 percent next year.
Public finances are getting worse. The government missed deficit targets
last year and is expected to fail again in 2013. At 4.6 percent, its deficit last year was 40
times higher than Germany's, way above Italy's and close to that of bailed-out
Portugal. National debt has soared since the early 2000s, rising from 56
percent of economic output in 2001 to the 93.4 percent forecast for this year. Last week's EU report warned of declining competitiveness, labor market rigidity, falling
exports and rising labor costs. French companies have the lowest profit margins
in the euro zone. "The resilience
of the country to external shocks is diminishing and its medium-term growth
prospects are increasingly hampered by long-standing imbalances," the
European Commission warned.
Hollande has tried to address the problems since he
came to power almost a year ago by launching reforms to cut labor costs,
reducing bureaucratic hurdles for business and encouraging innovative
investment. But he is caught between campaign promises and economic
realities. Before his election, the
president pledged to fight against Europe's austerity orthodoxy. Plans included
cutting the retirement age, slapping the rich with a 75 percent income tax,
hiring tens of thousands of public school teachers and protecting the 35-hour
working week limit along with other cherished social standards. But none of that is doing much to attract
foreign investment away from rivals in Asia and Central Europe, or reducing
government spending — which is the highest in the euro zone at 56 percent of
GDP.
German and EU officials are urging deeper reforms,
but with his popularity ratings already at a record low of 26 percent due
largely to rising unemployment, Hollande is reluctant to upset his Socialist
base by pushing unpopular liberalization measures. "Among the ruling party, there is no
consensus on what should be done,” says Tomasz Michalski, associate economics
professor at the leading French business school HEC Paris. “That's why it looks
so inept.” Michalski sees little sign
Hollande's government is ready to tackle the "horrendous" level of
public spending or scrap a "Byzantine" system of bureaucracy,
subsidies and vested interests.
"This government is going to drift and do the
absolute minimum necessary hoping there's going to be some external adjustment,
some external demand that's going to lift growth in France," he said in an
interview.
Although Hollande has stressed the need to get
serious with reform, he’s been deeply skeptical about Europe’s ability to
recover while it's being force-fed a diet of unadulterated austerity.
"We need to get growth going again in Europe,
austerity can't be the only policy envisaged," the president told a news
conference in Paris last week. "The policy I'm driving forward is one that
permits us to avoid austerity, to revive growth, but it has to be
serious." Hollande’s aversion to
austerity has helped push him apart from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, just
as the gap has grown between the French and German economies. That presents a
double danger for Europe. Political
differences between the euro zone's two big powers will weaken the chances of
finding consensus over long-term solutions to the euro zone crisis — through
tighter banking and budget rules or greater economic burden sharing, for
example. At the same time, a moribund
French economy would be a dead weight too heavy for the euro zone to carry. The
risk of long-term French stagnation while the German economy pulls ahead could
place unbearable strains on a relationship that’s at the heart of European
integration. "The success of the euro zone depends on France performing
well," Michalski says. But with no end in sight to the cycle of French
economic decline and political estrangement, the euro’s outlook looks set only
to worsen. (Paul
Ames, Global Post, April 18,
2013)
Monetary Fund Chief Warns Against
‘3-Speed’ Recovery
Christine
Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund,
called for moving the world into a “full-speed recovery” at a news conference
on Thursday at the opening of the fund’s annual spring meetings with its sister
institution, the World Bank. Ms. Lagarde,
echoing an earlier warning, expressed concern about what she called a
“three-speed” global economy, with developing nations growing rapidly, the
United States healing faster than most other advanced industrial countries, but
Europe continuing to suffer from insufficient demand and incomplete government
policies. “It’s not the healthiest recovery,” Ms. Lagarde said. But “we believe
that we have avoided the worst, and the economic world no longer looks quite as
dangerous as it did.”
She added: “The pickup in financial
conditions, financial markets, is clearly not translating into a sustained
pickup in growth and jobs.” The news
conference came shortly after news broke that a French court had ordered Ms.
Lagarde to appear at a hearing on her handling of a financial scandal during
her time as finance minister in Paris. Asked about the affair at the news
conference, Ms. Lagarde said that she had known of the possibility of being
interviewed by the investigative commission for years. “There is nothing new
under the sun,” Ms. Lagarde said, dismissing any concerns that the inquiry
would affect her position as the head of the I.M.F. “I will be very happy to
travel for a couple of days to Paris. I look forward to it.” The investigation,
which led to a police raid of Ms. Lagarde’s apartment in Paris last month,
concerns her decision in 2007 to refer to an arbitration panel a decades-old
dispute between Bernard Tapie, a wealthy friend of France’s president at the
time, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the state-owned bank Crédit Lyonnais. The panel
ultimately brokered a settlement that awarded Mr. Tapie, the flamboyant former
owner of the Olympique Marseille soccer team, about $580 million, including
interest.
The court’s summons of Ms. Lagarde
could lead to the opening of a formal investigation of her role in the affair.
But in France, being placed under formal investigation does not necessarily
lead to charges and does not imply a presumption of guilt. Ms. Lagarde has
repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the Tapie matter. At the news conference,
Ms. Lagarde gave her blessing to recent actions taken by the Bank of Japan to
help bolster growth. She also said that the European Central Bank had more room
to aid the recovery in Europe, where many countries are still undergoing
economic contraction, unemployment is still rising and the credit markets
remain broken.
“Of all the major central banks in
the world, the E.C.B. is the only one who clearly still has room to maneuver,”
Ms. Lagarde said. Asked if Spain needed more time for fiscal adjustment, Ms.
Lagarde replied that it did. She added that the country needed to put a
budget-tightening plan in motion, but that it need not be “upfront, heavy duty”
fiscal consolidation. At a separate news conference, Jim Yong Kim, the head of
the World Bank, which focuses on economic development, laid out his vision for
a “two-pronged approach for a world free of poverty.” Dr. Kim has called for eradicating extreme
poverty by 2030 and for fostering income growth for the bottom 40 percent in
every country. “For that second goal,” he said, “we also mean sharing
prosperity across generations, and that calls for bold action on climate
change.” (Annie Lowrey, International Herald
Tribune, April 18, 2013)
Spain is in a great depression, and
it is one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen.
Five years after its housing boom
turned to bust, Spanish unemployment hit a record high of 27.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013. It's almost too horrible to comprehend,
but 19.5 percent of the total workforce has not had a job in the
past six months; 15.3 percent have not in the past year; and 9.2 percent have
not in the past two years. You can see this 1930s-style catastrophe in the
chart below from the National Statistics Institute.
Here's the story of Spanish unemployment in three acts. During the boom,
joblessness was relatively high due to persistent structural problems. Then it shot up fast and faster as Spain's building bust and then
Lehmangeddon hit in 2008. But it has kept climbing up since the panic abated,
albeit at a less catastrophic pace, due to the toxic combination of too tight
money and budgets. In other words,
austerity hasn't been the path to prosperity. It's been the path to
perma-slump. But the real story of the
Spanish depression has been the story of the indignados: the mostly young, long-term unemployed. It's a bit hard to see just how
dramatic it [the unemployment] has been. . . .
Almost all of the
increase in unemployment since 2010 has been due to the increase in long-term
unemployment of two years or more. In other words, unemployment is a trap
people fall into, but can't fall out of. Indeed, the rate of new unemployment
has stabilized at a terrible, but not quite-as-terrible, level. . . . But the steadily rising of the number
of unemployed of more than two years, shows us that the rate of job-finding for
the jobless has collapsed. That is what
a permanent underclass looks like.
Housing Lows and
Hiring Laws Feed a Disaster
Why has Spain's jobs
depression been so great? After all, its GDP is "only" 4.1 percent below its 2007 level, compared to 5.8 percent below for Portugal, 7 percent
below for Italy, and 20 percent below for Greece. But despite this better
(negative) growth, unemployment is higher in Spain than the others. In other
words, Spanish unemployment isn't just about inadequate demand. Part of it is
structural.
Spain's labor market problems fall into two big buckets: too much
regulation, and not enough education. It's almost impossible for companies to
get rid of older workers, which creates a horribly bifurcated labor market.
There are permanent workers who can't be fired, and temporary ones who can –
and are. Indeed, as Clive Crook points out, about a third of Spain's workforce are temporary workers who
enjoy few protections and fewer opportunities. Companies go through these
younger workers without bothering to invest much in their human capital,
because why would they? These temporary workers will be let go at the first
sign of economic trouble. Young people get stuck in a never-ending cycle of
under-and-unemployment since firms are always hesitant to hire permanent
workers who will always be on their books.
But it gets worse. The housing bust hasn't just cast a shadow over
household and bank balance sheets; it's cast one over young people's educations
too. At its peak, building made up a whopping 19 percent of Spain's economy,
which, as Tobias Buck of the Financial Times points out, lured many young men into
dropping out of school for well-paying construction gigs. But now that building
has gone into hibernation, all of those young men are left with no work and no
education to fall back on. And, again, even if they can find temporary jobs,
it's not as if the companies will spend money to develop their skills.
No Hope
It's hard to see anything resembling a case for optimism. Even though the
Spanish government's borrowing costs have fallen since the ECB introduced its
backstop, Spanish corporate borrowing costs have not. Businesses can't get capital except on prohibitively expensive terms.
As Ryan Avent of The Economist points out, this broken monetary transmission
mechanism means austerity is hurting Spain more than it otherwise would --
which is clear enough in the data. Despite its cuts, Spain's deficit actually
worsened from 9.4 percent of GDP in 2011 to 10.6 percent of GDP in 2012, because its economy fell more than its borrowing costs. The only hint
of good news here is Spain just announced it will take two more years to hit its deficit target. But less (self-defeating) austerity isn't enough. Spain needs stimulus.
And it might need bailouts (or, if Cyprus does turn out to be a "template", bail-ins). Indeed, The Economist calculates Spanish
housing prices are still overvalued by 20 percent or so -- which will be even more bad news for its banks. I wasn't exaggerating when I said this is one
of the most terrifying things I have ever seen. Spain needs shock therapy for
its labor markets, but that's an impossible political sell when more than a
quarter of the population is unemployed. In an ideal world, Spain would pair
major reforms with major stimulus; in the real world, it will drag its feet on
reforms, try to cut its deficit, and fall deeper into depression. Let me leave you with this depressing
question: Assuming everything goes perfectly, how long will it be till Spanish
unemployment gets below 20 percent?
Don't answer that. (Matthew
O’Brien, The Atlantic, April 26, 2013)
Coming of age in a recession has set back Millennials for decades. The
good news? In the age of abundance, they could turn out to be pretty great
decades, anyway.
The nearly 3.7 million American babies born in 1982 weren't special,
except to their families. But in the eyes of demographers, they were
categorically different from the 3.6 million Americans born in 1981. They were
the first members of a new club: Generation Y.
This so-called millennial cohort, the largest generation in American
history, landed in the cradle during an awful recession, learned to walk during
the Reagan recovery, came of age in the booming 1990s, and entered the labor
market after the Sept. 11 attacks and before the Great Recession, the two
tragedies of the early 21st century. They've survived an eventful few
decades. Yet nothing in those
vertiginous 30 years could have prepared them for the economic sledgehammer
that followed the collapse of the housing market in 2007-08. And the
aftereffects, economists fear, may dog them for the rest of their working
lives.
Generation Y is the most educated in
American history, but its education came at a price. Average debt for graduates
of public universities doubled between 1996 and 2006. Students chose to take it
on because they expected to find a job that paid it off; instead, they found
themselves stranded in the worst economy in 80 years. Young people who skipped
college altogether have faced something worse: depressed wages in a global
economy that finds it easier than ever to replace jobs with technology or to
move them overseas. Finding a good job
as a young adult has always been a game of chance. But more and more, the rules
have changed: Heads, you lose; tails, you're disqualified. The unemployment
rate for young people scraped 18 percent in 2010, and in the past five years,
real wages have fallen for millennials--and only for millennials.
Adulthood, Deferred
It costs a lot to be a grown-up. It means more than saying "please"
or holding doors for the elderly, although those are nice to do. It also means
moving out of your parents' home, renting a place of your own, paying for food
and clothes, buying a car, getting married, having children, buying a
house--all the trappings and expenses of a middle-class life.
These life stages drive a consumer
economy. "Housing IS the Business Cycle" is the memorably brief title
of a 2007 study by University of California (Los Angeles) economist Edward E.
Leamer showing that the housing market both presages recessions and bolsters
recoveries. A generation that buys new homes is a generation that pushes the
economy forward. But millennials have
responded with a collective "No, thanks." Or at least "Not
yet." More than one in five Americans ages 18-34 told Pew Research Center
pollsters last year that they've postponed having a baby "because of the
bad economy." The same proportion said they were holding off marriage
until the economy recovered. More than a third of 25- to 29-year-olds had moved
back in with their parents. Millennials have been scorned as perma-children,
forever postponing adulthood, or labeled with that most un-American of
character flaws: helplessness. The case for pessimism is depressingly easy to
make. Even after the economy recovers, the penalty for graduating into a
recession may still apply to young people's wages. When Lisa Kahn, an economist
at Yale, studied how the 1981-82 recession affected the lifetime earnings of
young workers who graduated during the 1980s, she found that for every
percentage-point increase in total unemployment, the starting incomes of new
graduates slipped by as much as 7 percent. Two decades later, because of their
bad timing, these graduates had taken a $100,000 hit to their cumulative
earnings. If this pattern applies to
millennials, the consequences will be grim for an economy that relies on
big-ticket items such as houses and cars. Half of a typical family's spending
goes to transportation and housing. But Americans ages 21-34 bought only 27
percent of the new vehicles sold in the United States in 2010, compared with 38
percent in 1985; from 2008 to '11, only half as many young Americans as a
decade earlier acquired their first mortgage. Having been rejected by the
economy, millennials are in turn rejecting cars and houses--the pillars of the
modern consumer economy.
Life Gets Better (and Cheaper)
Still, do millennials really count as the unluckiest generation since World War
II? It's true that wages haven't grown this slowly in decades, and
globalization and technology have held down wages for millions of young workers
to an unprecedented extent. But in some
ways, millennials are also the luckiest.
For one thing, they're living in an
age of affordable abundance. Food has never been cheaper as a share of the
typical American family budget. The price of apparel is also falling relative
to wages. The Internet, while no substitute for gainful employment, has made
many things cheaper that used to take extra income to buy--communication,
notably, including private information-sharing and professional collaboration.
It has made casual retail cheaper (and more convenient). It has also made mass
entertainment cheaper, especially music and amateur videos. These commodities
have grown cheaper, in part, by replacing and lowering the cost of human work.
That we live in a golden era of cheap
essentials and entertainment might register as cold statistical comfort for the
millions of unemployed millennials who watch their dreams fade with every passing
year. This group can hope for another mitigating factor: time. The U.S. economy
is expected to continue its recovery--unemployment falling, wages rising, debts
slowly getting repaid, life going on as it did before 2008. In an economy that
is now creating 200,000 private-sector jobs a month, the total debt held by
young adults has shrunk to its lowest level in 15 years.
Even if millennials haven't read
about these trends, they seem to feel them in their bones. The Pew study that
found twentysomethings moving back home also reported that nine in 10
millennials said they already earn (or have) enough money, or expect to in the
future. If optimism has any currency, the millennials may well outgrow their
miserable circumstances and bequeath to their own children a more prosperous
nation than their parents left for them. They're the best-educated generation
in American history, moving into their prime working years while home prices
remain fairly cheap. Is that so unlucky?
Still, their timing couldn't be
unluckier. The past 30 years have seen enduring income stagnation capped by an
economic collapse. Average household wealth nearly doubled between 1983 and
2010, the Urban Institute recently found, but younger generations shouldn't
expect the same. They already lag their parents in wealth (by 7 percent) at the
equivalent age, and "now, stagnant wages, diminishing job opportunities,
and lost home values may be merging to paint a vastly different future for Gen
X and Gen Y," Eugene Steuerle and three coauthors concluded. "Despite
their relative youth, they may not be able to make up the lost
ground." (Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, April 26, 2013)
Long-term unemployment is our most
urgent crisis, and we're doing nothing about it. In fact, Congress can barely be bothered to even talk about it.
As Niraj Chokshi of National Journal reports, only four lawmakers showed up for
the Congressional hearing on long-term unemployment on Wednesday. And three of
them got there late.
In Congress' defense, there is a new Bowles-Simpson plan out.
For the first time since the 1930s, there are millions of people who want
work who can't find it, no matter how long they look. That's what what happens
when a downturn goes too long and a recovery doesn't go far enough. You can see
that depressingly enough in the chart below that compares job openings and
layoffs the past decade (which is as far back as the data goes). After Lehman
failed, and it looked like everyone might need to brush up on their farming
skills, there were more people getting fired each month than there were jobs
available. But even after the panic passed, the jobs have been slow to return
given the depth of the hole. Look at how
few job openings there were six months after Lehmangeddon. It was just
incredibly tough for people who got laid off during the depth of the crisis to
find work soon afterwards -- or even years later. The chart below, via Megan McArdle, shows the cumulative effect of our horribly dysfunctional labor market:
there were over 6.5 unemployed people per job opening in 2009, and that dismal
ratio has since only gradually declined to something approximating a less
complete disaster.
In other words, there are lots of people who have been out of work for
six months or longer who only made the mistake of losing their job at the wrong
time. But that's unfortunately been enough to make them finding a new job a
long shot. Something happens when you've
been out of work for half a year. Employers ignore you completely. That was the
conclusion of a new field study by Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Fed and a PhD candidate at
Northeastern University, that showed that resumes with otherwise identical
qualifications get called back far less if they list six months of unemployment.
As Matt Yglesias points out, the problem is this kind of statistical discrimination
against the long-term unemployed is pretty rational. Companies with a big stack
of resumes to get through (which is all of them nowadays) will still have more
than enough strong candidates left over if they screen out the long-term
jobless, who presumably would have gotten a job before if they themselves were
strong candidates. Now, this heuristic makes sense, but it makes less sense in
the aftermath of the worst crisis in 80 years -- and much less sense on a macro
level. After all, it makes us collectively poorer if the long-term unemployed
become unemployable. What is to be done
about this unemployment trap? Well, there are two possible policy approaches:
macro or micro. In other words, trying to reduce unemployment in general, or
long-term unemployment in particular. Mike Konczal, for one, thinks we should just focus on the economy, stupid, since
nothing helps the long-term unemployed like a tighter labor market. As you can see
in his chart below, people out of work for a year or more were 40 to 80 percent
more likely to get a job during the tech boom as they are today. This is true,
but being true isn't enough. It's not as if Congress is about to do more fiscal
stimulus anytime soon or the Fed is about to do much more monetary stimulus
beyond its already open-ended easing. In the meantime, long-term unemployment
threatens to consign people to lives permanently at the fringes of the labor
market. We can't wait for more stimulus.
There are some smaller-bore things we can and should do to help the
long-term unemployed. Indeed, that's exactly what the sparsely-attended Congressional
hearing was about. Former Romney economic adviser and current American
Enterprise Institute fellow Kevin Hassett thinks it's time for a whatever-it-takes approach.
Practically-speaking, that means the government should introduce work-sharing
programs like Germany's Kurzarbeit, give businesses tax incentives to hire the long-term jobless, and hire
the long-term jobless itself if nobody else will. Congressional Republicans
probably wouldn't go along with this last idea, but the first two are the kind
of thing that, in a sane world, shouldn't be ideologically
polarizing. Now, these kind of targeted policies would admittedly only help at
the margins, but helping at the margins is better than not helping at all. (Or,
in the case of the sequester, actively hurting). More stimulus and more direct help for the
long-term unemployed are two great tastes that go great together. Either or
both would be a welcome change from our malign neglect of the urgent crisis all
around us. (Matthew O’Brien, The Atlantic, April 25, 2013)
National
TWO months
ago I suggested Wayne Swan try [Labor Treasurer] something different in this
year's Budget and tell the truth. I have put together a draft of the speech
that might be useful for this purpose. It goes something like this: Mr Speaker, I guess by now you
have all figured out I don't know what I'm doing. That awful truth has finally
dawned on me as well. I hadn't been too
good before, but last year's budget was the one where I totally blew myself up
- you remember? It was May 8. I thought I needed a dramatic opening. So I began
by saying: "The four years of surpluses I announce tonight ... " No one heard the rest of the sentence because
of the guffaws from the other side. That smart alec Costello called it some of
the best stand-up comedy ever delivered in the House of Representatives. But
the thing is I really believed it. I'm not good at numbers - of the financial
kind. As state secretary of the Queensland ALP I used to run numbers for party
ballots. But the outcome was always fixed in advance. I thought that's how you
did budgets. I was just getting into my
stride when I declared that Labor's core purpose was: "To share the
tremendous benefits of the mining boom."
We were going to do this with a company tax cut starting from July 1
this year but I cancelled that in last year's budget. Also we were going to
restore the Liberals' contribution levels for superannuation but I postponed
that in last year's budget. And last
year I said we would give $1.8 billion to families in more generous payments
from July 1 this year. But I'm cancelling that in this year's Budget. That's
the thing about my budgets. I do take up a lot of time cancelling what I've
announced before.
Anyway, there are only so many
billion-dollar packages that you can fund out of a tax that raises $126
million. That Resources Super Profits Tax (RSPT) has shown me no R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
When I announced it, I said it would raise $9 billion in the forthcoming year -
whoops! I had high hopes for that tax. I called it "the greatest economic
change in our lifetime". Of course I had no idea what I was saying but the
Liberals are always going on about GST which raises $50 billion per year so I
thought I had better lodge my nomination for the greatest tax
"reform" ever.
Last year, I came home with a wet
sail declaring: "The deficit years are behind us. The surplus years are
here."
Looks like I got the words the wrong
way around. I should have said that the surpluses were behind us and the
deficit years are here. But I did so want to balance one budget before losing
office. I've been thinking about who to
blame. For the first few budgets I blamed the financial crisis. But that was
five years ago and we've been through a mining boom since then. Now I'm blaming the high dollar although
someone in the Treasury told me last year's budget forecasts were based on the
dollar being just where it is. I'm desperate that people don't think it's my
overspending because that is something I could have controlled. So we've been
on a media blitz to say it's an unexpected revenue shortfall. In April, I said the revenue was down $7.5
billion. A week later Julia said it was down $12 billion. Then Penny went out
last week to say it was down $17 billion. I leaked out a Treasury briefing on
the weekend to say we were $26 billion down.
How do you reconcile all these figures? Well, it beats me and I hope it
beats all of you because that is the whole point - to try to cloud the issue.
At least no one in the press ever
asks me to explain what these forecasts are "down" against. Because
the truth is they are down on the false forecasts I made last year. Get it? I
am not the victim of these downgrades, I am the culprit. Every time I
downgrade, it just illustrates again how wrong I got it last year. I know we can always rely on the ABC, but the
thing that amazes me about those other guys in the press is they keep writing
what I say - as if that is going to happen (LOL). How many times do you have to
get it wrong before they start to see there is a pattern?
I want people to think I am cutting
costs. I've told you every budget that I am about to do that. But when I see a
state premier who is really cutting costs - like Campbell Newman -- I just take
cheap shots. That's my default position, to attack expenditure restraint. As well as cutting expenditure I also want
you to think I am increasing it - on NDIS and Gonski. Last year I told you the
most important thing for our economy was to balance the budget and this year I
am telling you to do so would damage jobs. So how do I reconcile all this? Well
I can't. And I don't have to because on September 14 I'm handing it all over to
the Liberals. That's their job: to clean up my mess.
(Peter Costello [Liberal treasurer from 1996 to
2007], The Daily Telegraph, May 14, 2013)
·(1)
Fred
Nile has pulled his crucial support for state government legislation after
Premier Barry O'Farrell's public comments in favour of same-sex marriage. In a letter sent to Mr O'Farrell on Monday
night, Mr Nile said he was ''very upset at the Premier's public support for
homosexual marriage and his challenge to Tony Abbott's rejection of a
conscience vote on the Homosexual Marriage Bill. "Our Christian Democratic
Party will withdraw its support for O'Farrell legislation until his challenges
to Tony Abbott's policy cease.''
The
Premier last week said he had changed his mind on the issue and now believes
same-sex marriage should be given legal status under the federal Marriage
Act. Mr O'Farrell also said the
Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, should allow a conscience vote on the
issue. "The Premier needs to show
some loyalty to Tony Abbott," Mr Nile said.
Mr
O'Farrell came out publicly in favour of same-sex marriage after the New
Zealand Parliament voted to change its laws. ''My view - a view that I've come
to in recent years - is that as a Liberal who believes that commitment and
family units are one of the best ways in which society is organised, I support
the concept of same-sex marriage,'' Mr O'Farrell said. Asked about Mr Abbott's
position, Mr O'Farrell argued Federal Parliament ''ought to reflect the
community and allow same-sex marriage. I think in coming to that decision the
Federal Parliament should do so by way of a conscience vote across all
parties.'' The O'Farrell government has
been dependent on Mr Nile's vote to pass legislation to privatise state
electricity assets. A NSW upper house
inquiry is considering whether the state is constitutionally able to legalise
same-sex marriage. In November, a
cross-party working group gave notice it would introduce the State Marriage
Equality Bill to the upper house. Last
May the NSW upper house voted 22-16 in favour of a motion supporting same-sex
equality, but many believe any attempt to legalise same-sex marriage would be
defeated in the lower house. (Anna Patty,
SMH, April 24, 2013)
Carjack victim thought he might die
A carjacking victim has spoken of the chilling moment his captor fired a
bullet just inches from his head and declared: "I'll f---ing shoot you if
I have to." Still badly shaken from
his 200-kilometre trip of terror at the hands of a pistol-wielding carjacker on
Saturday, Darlington Point man Alfio Maugeri told The Area News he feared he may never see his wife and two children again. Mr Maugeri was driving home from his shift in
the fruit and vegetables department of Woolworths Griffith about 3.45pm when he
came across the man standing in the middle of Old Willbriggie Road, near the intersection with Hanwood Avenue.
"I
just thought, what's this guy doing, does he need help?" Mr Maugeri
said. "I pulled over and asked if
he needed something and he wanted a lift to Wagga. I said I was going as far as
the Point and he said, 'that'll do'."
He said the man appeared "pretty normal" at first but his
behaviour changed dramatically once Mr Maugeri turned onto the Kidman Way. "He pulled out a gun and ordered me to
drive to Wagga," Mr Maugeri said.
"It
was just a feeling of instant terror. Your heart starts beating out of your
chest and you just think, 'what the hell?'
"My instant reaction was just to do whatever he wanted me to."
The carjacker's demeanour then switched between threatening and friendly, he
said. "He kept saying he was desperate, that he wasn't a bad guy but that
he'd had a lot of bad luck," Mr Maugeri said. "At one stage I pulled over and said he
could have the keys, he could just take my car, but he insisted I keep driving." The gun, a loaded pistol, was sitting on the
man's lap for the two-hour trip.
"He
kept reiterating he wouldn't hurt me provided I did what he said," Mr
Maugeri said. But it took just one
ill-timed comment by Mr Maugeri to send the carjacker into a rage. "He
kept saying this was the only way he could get to Wagga and I stupidly said
back to him 'ever heard of a bus?'," Mr Maugeri said. "He grabbed the gun, wound down my
window and fired a shot out of the car to prove he had ammo in the gun. "Then he said to me, 'I'll f---ing shoot
you if I have to'." After almost
two hours, the car, a Ford Fairmont, arrived at Wagga Wagga and the carjacker
directed Mr Maugeri to Travers Street. "He got out of the car, said
'thanks mate', and shook my hand," Mr Maugeri said. "The second he shut that door I took off
and drove to Wagga Police Station."
He said he was still coming to grips with what had happened. "You
just go on to auto-pilot; I think I'm still in shock," he said. "But
you've got to get on with life. "I've got the support of my wife, Stacey,
and my two kids and that makes all the difference."
A
massive police manhunt has failed to track down the carjacker and Mr Maugeri
has pleaded with anyone who saw the man to contact authorities. "Even if it was only something really
small they saw, police need to know," he said. "I want my day in court; I want to be
able to look him in the eye." The
carjacker is described as caucasian and aged in his early 30s, about 180-185
centimetres tall with a solid build, shoulder-length black hair and about a
month's growth of facial hair. He was
wearing a blue and white chequered shirt and faded blue jeans at the time.
Anyone
with information should call Griffith Police on 6969 4299 or Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. (Daniel Johns, SMH, April 23, 2013)
Tony
Abbott is pushing his pedals between Adelaide and Geelong this week, feeling
pretty chuffed about putting in a decent performance on the ABC's 7.30
program last Wednesday. He was on message, disciplined and, as usual, pretty
light with details. The same can't be
said of the rabid social media commentators who took it upon themselves to
critique not Abbott's performance, but that of the show's presenter Leigh
Sales. As interviews go it was somewhat
pedestrian - no killer question or knockout punch. Yet because Abbott emerged
from the 13-minute conversation unscathed, some blamed Sales. That's probably to be expected and there is
nothing wrong with an interviewer's performance being discussed publicly. What
was alarming about the Twitter debate following Abbott's appearance was its
ugly tenor. Elements of the left thought
it just fine to describe Sales in abusive and sexist terms because her grilling
of Abbott did not meet their expectations.
It's not OK, yet the debate rolled on for most of the week sending mixed
messages about what the left is up to right now. Have they resorted to antics
more often employed by the far right?
Sales was accused, in some instances with very vile language, of being
too easy on Abbott and even biased towards him.
How soon they forget. Last August Sales had Abbott not only on the
ropes, but flat out on the mat and wishing for an early end to the bout. During
the August interview, Sales got Abbott to admit he hadn't read a BHP statement
he wrongly claimed was blaming the carbon tax for the suspension of the Olympic
Dam mining project.
Abbott
haters were more than pleased with that exchange, leaving the right angry and
feverishly circulating their own nasty claims of bias. But now it's the left that is furious. The
commentary says more, however, about where the left is at psychologically as a
movement. Facing the likelihood of a
conservative government and a Prime Minister Abbott, parts of the left have
taken to desperate gutter tactics. They seem to be now insisting that media
interviewers push their cause and help prevent a Coalition victory in
September.
Meanwhile,
Julia Gillard's ability to win over the electorate remains far from where she
and her party would like it to be, but Labor MPs have mostly resolved they must
now fall in behind her. As obvious a
statement as that might be, it is only over this past week that most inside
Labor have reached that conclusion.
Just
two weeks ago there were rumblings Gillard would be facing renewed leadership
pressure before the election. The possibly honourable, but certainly kamikaze
move by Simon Crean last month in calling for a spill sent him to the
backbench. But it also fuelled speculation he would throw his own hat into the
leadership ring in the near future. Even
as Gillard's new frontbenchers were moving into their ministerial offices, word
was getting around to some that their reward for loyalty to the PM would not
last long. They were not referring to the likelihood of losing government in
September, the message was that a post-budget leadership challenge was on the
cards and the old frontbench would be back to reclaim some jobs. The leadership
contender? None other than Crean. That's what the previous Rudd backers and
some wider anti-Gillard ALP forces were planning. They considered Crean would
be a ''safe pair of hands'' after a budget they expect won't go down too well
with voters. It seems cooler heads have
prevailed, probably with the realisation that if Crean couldn't mobilise
numbers behind Rudd, he most likely wouldn't be able to muster up a majority
for himself. At least voting Australians now have another choice, thanks to
Queensland's billionaire mining magnate Clive Palmer, who declared on Friday he
wanted to be Australia's next PM. But then said he didn't. Chances are he
won't. (Chris Johnson, The Sun Herald, April 28, 2013)
More than 90 per cent of school professionals now encounter ''helicopter
parents'' in their work.
In response, many school principals are introducing policies to help
manage over-involved parents.
The formal guidelines outline appropriate times to contact teachers and
principals, how long they should expect to wait for a response, access to
classrooms, and how to make an appointment with a teacher.
Some schools are also giving teachers ''how to land a helicopter parent''
training, while others hold workshops for new parents to educate them about the
appropriate level of involvement in their child's education.
''You need a formal, 'whole of school' practice around how to deal with
[helicopter parents],'' Australian Primary Principals Association president
Norm Hart said. ''It's perfectly appropriate for schools to set these
guidelines. Most of the time, parents respond pretty well to clear
guidelines.'' The pressure is
particularly acute for novices. A report by the Australian Council for
Educational Research found the majority of graduate teachers surveyed felt
underprepared to deal with parents when they started working. NSW Secondary Principals' Council president Lila
Mularczyk said it was ''in the best interests'' of schools and parents to have
set protocols for their interactions, particularly since the advent of email,
mobile and texting. ''Parents who actively want to contribute to their child's
education need to understand what is the best way to do that,'' Ms Mularczyk,
the principal of Merrylands High, said.
Australian Secondary Schools Principals Association president Sheree
Vertigan said schools want parents to be engaged in their child's education but
not to the extent that they send text messages to their children in the middle
of the day. ''It's frustrating when kids are sitting in class, suddenly their
mobile phone goes off, and it's a parent dropping off their sandwich at the
front desk who wants to meet them,'' she said. ''As young adults, these kids
need to learn how to take care of themselves.''
Clinical pyschologist Judith Locke, who is researching a PhD on
helicopter parenting, said it was often good for schools to wait a while to
respond to parental concerns. ''Often the child is completely over the issue
while the parent is still holding on to the concern … Parents will ring
demanding to speak to the principal about a minor thing. Schools have to stop that,
otherwise principals will be dealing with that all day.''
The backlash against helicopter parenting has also spawned a new style of
parent - the drone, who watches their children from afar rather than hover over
every move. But ''the parent you never see is just as much a problem as the
parent you see too often'', Mr Hart said. ''Usually both parents are working,
they're both committed to more than nine to three, they haven't got a lot of
time to be in school with the child.''
Expect to
wait 24 hours for a response to an email.
If the matter is urgent, ring the school office.
Don’t call or text your child’s mobile during class time.
Don’t call or text your child’s teacher directly.
Make an appointment to discuss an issue with a teacher, don’t accost them at
the start or end of the school day.
Leave the classroom when the first bell rings.
Don’t discuss your concerns with administration staff. (Cosima Marriner, The Sun-Herald, April 28, 2013)
International
VETERANS of European communism always
have a store of jokes about that hateful old hag of an ideology.
Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland's erudite, impressive, young Foreign Minister,
is no exception. I remark to him that communism as an ideology failed both in
theory and in practice. He replies: "We had a joke. Why were Marxists not
scientists? Because if they had been scientists they would have tried their
experiments on rats first." And then: "What is communism? The longest
road from capitalism to capitalism."
Sikorski is something of a Polish phenomenon. His family found refuge in
England when he was young and he studied at Oxford and wrote for The Spectator.
Later he worked for a US think tank before returning to democratic Poland and
becoming a government minister. He is married to the renowned US chronicler of
communism, Anne Applebaum. I meet him in the Polish consulate in Sydney as he
makes an official visit to Australia and New Zealand.
Sikorski is one of the brilliant men of Europe, touted at times as a NATO
secretary-general or for other high office within the EU, of which he is an
ardent supporter. He has all kinds of ideas for Europe's future, and for
Poland's. It is important to remember
that Poland, a nation of 38 million, is a European success story. Since the
global financial crisis, its economy has grown, cumulatively, by a whopping 19
per cent, whereas the eurozone average growth in that time is zero. But more of
that later. I can't resist asking Sikorski about Poland's emergence from
decades of communist rule. How did it manage to avoid the bitter internal
polarisations that have characterised many other ex-communist nations?
"It's like all post-revolutionary societies," he says, "some
people feel the culprits of the old regime were not punished enough. But on the
whole, the negotiated exit from communism was successful. Today, Poland is an
example that others seem to want to learn from. Our speciality is the
technology of transition."
Sikorski lists some of the distinctive features of his country's
situation that helped it exit communism peacefully, with a functioning society
intact. "The presence of the pope (the Pole, John Paul II) in the equation
was useful," he says. "The Polish Catholic Church on the whole
supported our return to the community of free nations. Then there was the
enterprising spirit of the people. And the Polish diaspora was a factor in
maintaining the sense of us as a Western nation." Former communists are active in Polish
politics, some of them in leading positions in democratic parties and in the
media. Does that indicate that communism had some degree of popular backing?
"Communism had some social support in the 1940s and 50s because the
pre-war elites discredited themselves by losing the war so thoroughly," he
says. The industrial quality of state violence and death under communism also
produced a social base for it, partly by wiping out the alternative social
base. Sikorski says: "Both Hitler and Stalin subjected Poland to ethnic
cleansing. Stalinism in Poland meant a social revolution. There were new people
who owed everything to communism. But economic failure destroyed its
legitimacy." So how does he compare the two great evils of the 20th
century, communism and Nazism, both of which wrought terrible harm to Poland?
"Communism was responsible for more corpses, not because it was
worse but because it ruled for longer. There were similarities between the two,
in the way they dehumanised their enemies. The technologies were similar. In
Poland, both ideologies claimed their harvest of sorrow." Poles believe,
Sikorski says, that they had something to do with bringing the Cold War to an
end. Certainly, at the time of the fall of communism a number of Poles became
the best known people on the planet, particularly John Paul II and Lech Walesa,
the trade unionist who defied the Kremlin and its Polish stooges. Does the national image forged at that time
help Poland today? "I think we're known as a people that loves freedom.
It's a useful image for some time. Of course, in the future we'd like to be
known for our businessmen, our scientists, our sportsmen." Like any good
Pole, Sikorski is happy to talk about the past - proudly reminding me that in
the 17th century Poland prevented the unification of Europe under the banner of
Islam. But really he is much more interested in the future.
Poland has had the best performing economy in Europe over the past few
years. Poland is outside the eurozone, still with its own currency. Therefore,
is Poland a pretty overwhelming argument for staying outside the common
currency, keeping a distance from over-arching EU institutions? Sikorski
doesn't think so. He is a big European. Somewhat counter-intuitively (if not
downright eccentrically), Sikorski thinks the solution to the European crisis
is more Europe, not less. After all, he points out, the second best-performing
economy in Europe over that time is Slovenia, and it's a member of the
eurozone. He has some other ready stats. If you combine government, corporate
and private debt, Britain, which is outside the eurozone, has Europe's highest
level of debt. And, as Spain showed, private debt can contribute to a crisis as
much as government debt. The crisis is all about debt, he says, and it started
in the US, which has a higher debt level than the European average. "I think European institutions are at
the heart of the solutions. The crisis exploded before Europe was
institutionally equipped to deal with it. So we've had to manage the crisis and
develop the institutions simultaneously," Sikorski says. "We're
almost there. We have a banking union; a mechanism for winding up insolvent
banks; peer review of each others' budgets." He accepts that being outside
the eurozone has allowed Poland some useful economic flexibility. It
experienced a 30 per cent devaluation in 2009 and this was helpful. But, he
says, "the sources of Poland's success are much deeper than that".
Warsaw undertook the necessary economic reforms before the crisis,
liberalising its economy, imposing a 60 per cent debt ceiling. Now Europe is
forcing other countries to make these same adjustments, he says. Greece is
sacking civil servants, which is long overdue. It is one-quarter Poland's size
and has twice as many civil servants.
But surely, I suggest, Greece was enabled to put off the day of reckoning
by the access it got to cheap debt because of the German dominance of the
European economy. One of Sikorski's disarming traits is his reasonableness. He
is happy to acknowledge evidence which runs counter to his ideas: "It's
true, they (Greece) hitched on to German credibility. That would have been the
time to carry out reforms painlessly." A rather unpleasant parallel
suggests itself to me here. A country with a small population gets a big income
windfall from an external source - in Greece's case German credibility
generating cheap debt, in some other country's case a massive rise in commodity
export prices - and then that country spends all the windfall, gives itself
benefits it can't sustain and squibs the necessary reforms.
Sound familiar?
Back to Poland. Sikorski believes the country will join the eurozone in a
few years' time, when the currency area is more stable. He is a bit of a hawk
on defence: "Being on the border concentrates the mind." He wants Europe to act more cohesively in
security and trade to get the benefits of scale, especially when dealing with
Asia.
He is a bit worried by political trends in Russia, and describes Poland's
relations with Moscow as "pragmatic but brittle". Despite being an
ultra-European he is still profoundly pro-US, citing Poland's contributions in
Iraq and Afghanistan, made alongside Australia, as evidence of that
friendship. He has only one complaint about
Australia. We don't recognise Polish driver's licences. (Greg Sheridan, The Australian, May 04, 2013)
WASHINGTON — The United States, which is trying to bring Syrian rebels
and the Syrian government to the negotiating table, is now increasingly worried
that Russia plans to sell
a sophisticated air defense system to Syria, American
officials said Wednesday. Russia has a
long history of selling arms to the Syrians and has a naval base in the
country. But the delivery of the Russian S-300 missile batteries would
represent a major qualitative advancement in Syria’s air defenses. The system
is regarded as highly effective and would limit the ability of the United
States and other nations to operate over Syrian airspace or impose a no-fly
zone. It is also able to track and fire
missiles at multiple targets, including aircraft and some missiles.
“There are concerns
that this might happen,” said a senior United States official who spoke on the
condition of anonymity, referring to the possible delivery of the S-300. A
Western intelligence service has also warned that the Russians may soon send
S-300 air defense batteries to Syria, said another American official who asked
not to be identified because he was discussing intelligence reports. News of the possible Russian sale, which was
first reported online by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday evening, came
less than a day after Secretary of State John Kerry sought to enlist Russia’s help in facilitating a political transition
that would supplant President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Russia and Iran have
supported Mr. Assad politically and have provided military support — support
that American officials say has fortified Mr. Assad’s determination to hang on
to power.
American officials
had been concerned that Russia might sell S-300 air defense batteries to Iran.
But after the United States and Israel raised alarms, the weapons were not
provided to the Iranians. While Syria’s air defenses are formidable,
Israel has successfully carried out three airstrikes to stop the suspected
transfer of advanced weapons from Syria to Hezbollah. In carrying out its
attacks, Israeli warplanes flew over neighboring Lebanon and fired
air-to-ground weapons at their targets, American officials said. The possible S-300 sale comes as the United
States and its allies are struggling to find a way to end the fighting in
Syria, which has killed more than 70,000.
The White House
announced Wednesday that Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain planned to
meet with President Obama next Monday in Washington. One subject they will take up will be Syria,
the White House noted in a statement.
British and French officials have said that they hope to modify or do
away with the European Union ban on arms sales to Syria, which has precluded
Western European nations from providing weapons to the Syrian opposition. That
embargo is scheduled to expire at the end of May. The Obama administration is
also weighing expanding the modest level of nonlethal aid it is giving to the
armed Syrian rebels.
Still, while the
United States and its allies are seeking to bolster the Syrian opposition,
American officials have said that only a negotiated political transition holds
the promise of building an inclusive and stable Syria if Mr. Assad is deposed. To that end, the Americans have sought
Russia’s cooperation. Before his meeting with Mr. Putin on Tuesday, Mr. Kerry
said that he hoped the two sides would find “common ground” on Syria. He made
no mention of Russia’s arms sales to Syria. (Michael R. Gordon, International Herald Tribune, May 8,
2013)
Syria Already Has Advanced Russian Missiles
Advanced Russian missile launchers that Israel was trying to prevent from
falling into Syrian hands have already been transferred to President Bashar
al-Assad’s regime, the London-based Arabic-language Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper reported Tuesday. The
report was published as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu took off to Russia to
convince President Vladimir Putin not to sell advanced Russian missile
launchers to Syria.
According to the Al-Quds
Al-Arabi report, 200 launchers for advanced anti-aircraft S-300
missiles are already in Syrian hands, and Syrian experts have been fully
trained to use the launchers and no longer need Russian supervision. The
report, cited by JNS,
was attributed to a Syrian military official.
Israel fears that Syrian possession of the S-300 system, which is able to
intercept drones and cruise missiles, will make future aerial offensives by the Jewish state more
difficult, in addition to the possibility of Russian weaponry being obtained by
the Hizbullah terror group. “Anyone who provides weaponry to terror
organizations is siding with terror,” Tourism Minister Uzi Landau said Monday,
according to JNS.
He accused Russia of destabilizing the Middle East by selling weapons to Syria.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Israel had
warned the United States that Russia plans to sell these advanced weapons to Syria, and that
Netanyahu spoke with U.S. President Barack Obama to make him aware of the deal.
Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, subsequently said his country is
not planning to supply Syria
with any weapons beyond the current contracts that are nearing completion.
Following their
meeting Tuesday, Netanyahu and Putin spoke
to the press, but Netanyahu did
not indicate whether he succeeded in convincing Putin to halt arms supplies to
Syria or whether the two leaders reached any firm agreements. Speaking to
reporters, Netanyahu stressed that his country's task was to "defend its
citizens."
"Together we
are trying to find ways to strengthen stability and security, we have a
remarkable opportunity to directly speak with each other," the Israeli
premier was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies. Water and Energy
Minister Silvan Shalom said on Monday that Netanyahu
was "fully determined" to halt sales by Russia of advanced missiles to
Syria. "Such a sale to Syria would
alter the balance of forces in the region and these weapons could fall into the
hands of Hizbullah," Shalom said. (Elad Benari, IsraelNationalNews.com, May 14, 2013)
·(1)
Legislators
in the United States are pressing President Barack Obama to act against the
Syrian regime for its suspected use of chemical weapons. [But] US President Barack Obama, [is]
hesitant to acknowledge Syria's use of chemical weapons as a war crime. Mr
Obama said that the intelligence must be corroborated, while reiterating that
confirmation would be a ''game-changer'' for the US.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has accused the
Syrian regime of a ''war crime'' as evidence emerged of two more gas attacks
that have poisoned another 105 people.
Asked about reports that President Bashar al-Assad's forces had used
chemical weapons, Mr Cameron said: ''What I see does look very much like a war
crime is being committed in our world, at this time, by the Syrian government.''
The latest incidents took place on Thursday in the
southern town of Daraya, according to the Syrian Support Group (SSG), a
Washington-based organisation representing the Free Syrian Army. The regime's
forces fired two "chemical-filled" rockets which released a poisonous
gas affecting 105 people. Demands in
Congress have ranged from Republican senator John McCain's push to establish a
no-fly zone and provide weapons to Syria's opposition, to Democratic senator
Dianne Feinstein's call to take the matter to the United Nations. Debate over Syria was given new impetus by
the administration's disclosure on Thursday that intelligence agencies had
assessed with ''varying degrees of confidence'' that Mr Assad's regime had used
chemical munitions on a small scale in two instances.
Mr Obama said on Friday: ''There are a range of
questions around how, when, where these weapons may have been used. We have to
make these assessments deliberately, but I think all of us - not just in the
United States, but around the world - recognise how we cannot stand by and
permit the systematic use of weapons like chemical weapons on civilian
populations.'' In the Syrian
government's first response to the findings, Information Minister Omran
al-Zoubi said: ''the fabricated and false'' allegations ''do not have any
credibility'', reported the Sana news agency. The regime has said chemical
weapons have been used by ''terrorists'', its blanket description for the
opposition. Mr Obama has never said what
action he would take if Syria crossed what he's called a ''red line'' against
the use of toxic agents. Mr McCain, of
Arizona, renewed what he called a two-year effort to persuade the
administration ''to provide a safe area for the opposition to operate, to
establish a no-fly zone and provide weapons to people in the resistance whom we
trust''. Representative Tom Rooney of Florida, a Republican member of the House
intelligence committee, disagreed and echoed the administration's concern that
funneling arms into the volatile region may backfire. ''The easy thing would be
to help the rebels, but the reality of the situation is'' that many of them are
''the people we have been fighting for the last 10 years,'' he said, referring
to groups of Islamic extremists associated with al-Qaeda. ''We should be very
careful how we proceed.''
For Mr Obama, the challenge remains what to do if the
administration comes to the conclusion that his ''red line'' has been
crossed. ''He doesn't want to get
involved in another war in the Middle East,'' said Richard Murphy, a former US
ambassador to Syria and adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute. ''The
question is, when you set a red line, do you stand behind it?'' (David Lerman, Roger Runningen, The Sun-Herald, April 28, 2013)
Putin warns against moves that could
'shake' Syria
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu landed in Sochi, Russia on Tuesday and met with
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday
warned against any moves that would further destabilise the situation in Syria,
speaking after talks with visiting Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.
"In
this crucial period it is especially important to avoid any moves that can
shake the situation," Putin was quoted as saying by news agencies, days
after Israeli forces launched air strikes against regime targets in Syria.
Netanyahu
had been expected to warn Putin against delivering advanced S-300 missiles to
Syria which would severely complicate any future air attacks against the regime
of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Netanyahu
in his public comments did not indicate whether he succeeded in convincing
Putin to halt arms supplies to Syria or whether the two leaders reached any
firm agreements. Speaking to reporters,
Netanyahu stressed that his country's task was to "defend its
citizens." "Together we are trying to find ways to strengthen
stability and security, we have a remarkable opportunity to directly speak with
each other," the Israeli premier was quoted as saying by Russian news
agencies.
Russia
has refused to halt arms supplies to the Damascus regime, saying it has to
honour contracts it concluded before the war.
(Uzi Baruch, IsraelNationalNews.com,
May 14, 2013)
PEACE envoy Lakhdar Brahimi says ahead of US-Russia talks on Syria that
President Bashar al-Assad's new plan for his embattled country is "more
sectarian, more one-sided" than previous initiatives. He spoke as the first major prisoner swap in the 21-month conflict took
place, with rebels freeing 48 Iranians in exchange for more than 2000 regime
detainees in a drawn-out deal with Damascus reportedly brokered by Turkey,
Qatar and Iran. UN and Arab League envoy Brahimi was giving his first public
reaction to a three-step plan announced by Assad on Sunday.
"What has been
said this time is not really different and it is perhaps even more sectarian,
more one-sided," Brahimi told the BBC. "What you need is reaching out
and recognising that there is a problem, a very, very serious problems between
Syrians, and that Syrians have got to talk to one another to solve it," he
said.
Assad's plan for a
"political solution" in Syria was swiftly rejected by the opposition
and Western nations as being detached from reality. The plan offered a dialogue with the
opposition to end the conflict - but only with elements he deemed acceptable,
not rebel-affiliated groups he termed "killers" and
"terrorists" led by foreigners.
Referring to the
so-called Arab Spring that has swept the region since late 2010, Brahimi said:
"Now people want to have a say in how they are governed. They want to take
hold of their own future."
"In Syria in
particular, what people are saying is that one family ruling for 40 years is a
little bit too long."
The stinging
comments came ahead of talks in Geneva on Friday between Brahimi and US and
Russian officials.
"The trilateral
meeting between (Russian Deputy Foreign Minister) Mikhail Bogdanov, (US
Undersecretary of State) William Burns, and Lakhdar Brahimi has been planned
for January 11 in Geneva," Bogdanov told the Interfax news agency. Wednesday's developments came with no respite
from the fighting, which in nearly 22 months of conflict has claimed some
60,000 lives, according to UN figures. Four children from the same family were
among as many as 10 civilians killed in a pre-dawn air strike near the central
city of Homs, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. In
the northwest, jihadist fighters seized parts of a large military airport after
a weeks-long siege, the watchdog said, giving Wednesday's provisional death
toll as at least 36.
In an unprecedented
development, a prisoner swap involving 48 Iranian men abducted by rebels in
Damascus in early August and 2130 prisoners of Syrian and other nationalities
ended on Wednesday, according to several sources.
The Iranians, described
by Tehran as "pilgrims" and by the rebels as captured Revolutionary
Guards members supporting Syrian forces, looked visibly exhausted, with some
weeping, an AFP correspondent reported. A rebel spokesman and Iranian officials
said the prisoner swap, arranged through mediation by Turkey and Qatar, was the
biggest to occur in Syria's conflict. Iran's foreign ministry praised the
efforts "by our friend and brother Syria and the assistance of Qatar and
Turkey in freeing the pilgrims." Turkish aid group the Humanitarian Relief
Foundation (IHH) said it spearheaded the swap of the Iranians for 2139
prisoners of Assad's regime, mostly Syrians but also a few foreigners including
Turks. Meanwhile, a core Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Council, urged
the umbrella opposition Syrian National Coalition, recognised by the West as
the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, to form an interim
government. A Council document obtained
by AFP proposed the temporary administration be set up to run "liberated
territories", and to push for Assad's removal and the dissolution of all
regime security forces except the police. It called on the Coalition to
"dismiss the army's top commanders and dissolve both the Fourth Division
and the Republican Guard." The feared Fourth Division is led by Assad's
brother Maher, and charged with ensuring security in Damascus. (AFP/The
Australian, Jan. 10, 2013)
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bombs have killed at least 43 people and wounded 100 in a Turkish town near the
Syrian border, in an attack Ankara blamed on pro-Damascus groups. The bombings were the deadliest in
Turkey, a key supporter of the Syrian opposition, since the conflict started
more than two years ago. Rescuers were hunting for possible survivors buried
underneath the rubble of buildings destroyed by the blasts in Reyhanli, one of
the main Turkish hubs for Syrian refugees and rebels. Over a dozen ambulances and
several air ambulances rushed to the scene to tend to the victims, NTV
television said, adding that the town hall had suffered major damage.
A number of cars were also completely
wrecked in the attacks which caused a power cut in the area around Reyhanli,
according to local media. Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay said the blasts
had killed at least 43. Several of the 100 wounded were in critical condition.
“The people and the organisation who carried out this attack have been
identified,” Interior Minister Muammer Guler told national TRT television.
“We have established that they are
linked to groups supporting the Syrian regime and its intelligence services,”
he said. Turkey distanced itself from its erstwhile ally soon after Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad started cracking down on pro-democracy protests in
2011. Ankara has since become a rear base for the Syrian rebellion and Damascus
has already been blamed for a string of attacks on Turkish soil.Mr Atalay said
that the perpetrators of Saturday's attacks did not appear to have crossed into
Turkey from Syria but were already in the country. Mr Guler said the regional
governor had been sent to Reyhanli “to put the necessary security measures in
place.”
The attack sowed panic in Reyhanli, a
town of about 60,000 people, leading to tensions between youths and Syrian
refugees and forcing police to fire into the air to disperse the crowd. Turkish
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, on a visit to Berlin, said it was “not a
coincidence” that these bombings occurred as international diplomatic efforts
to solve the Syrian crisis were intensifying. “It is not a coincidence that
this should happen in a period where there is an acceleration of efforts on
Syria in the whole world,” he told reporters.
“Nothing will go unanswered,” added
Mr Davutoglu, vowing the culprits would be brought to justice.
The United States and Russia, one of
the few remaining supporters of Assad's regime, pledged this week to relaunch
efforts to solve the conflict, which the United Nations estimates has killed
70,000 people since March 2011.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu will soon visit Russia for talks with President Vladimir Putin,
officials said earlier Saturday, amid a flurry of diplomatic activity. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
who earlier this month branded Assad a “butcher”, is due to meet US President
Barack Obama in Washington on Thursday. The West swiftly denounced the
attacks. French President Francois
Hollande condemned them “in the strongest possible terms” while UN leader Ban
Ki-moon said the perpetrators must be “brought to justice.”
US Secretary of State John Kerry also
condemned the “awful news” and said it struck “an especially personal note for
all of us given how closely we work in partnership with Turkey, and how many
times Turkey's been a vital interlocutor at the centre of my work as secretary
of state these last three months.” Meanwhile, the Syrian opposition National
Coalition said the attacks were designed to drive a wedge between Turks and
Syrians.
“The Coalition sees these heinous
terrorist acts as an attempt to take revenge on the Turkish people and punish
them for their honourable support of the Syrian people (...)” The bombings were “a desperate and failed
attempt to sow discord”, the opposition said in a statement. Reyhanli lies in southern Turkey near the
Cilvegozu crossing opposite Syria's rebel-controlled Bab al-Hawa border post,
the busiest crossing between the two countries.
The border area has witnessed a
number of deadly attacks as the conflict in Syria spills over into Turkey,
whose government has become one of its harshest critics. In February, a car bomb attack at Cilvegozu
which Turkey blamed on Syrian intelligence agents killed 17 people and wounded
30. Earlier this month, one police
officer was killed and six other people wounded when Syrians trying to cross
into Turkey opened fire in a border buffer zone.
Saturday's attack came as Turkey
ramped up its rhetoric against Assad, with Erdogan accusing the regime in
Damascus of deploying chemical weapons, crossing a “red line” set by Obama.
“It is clear the regime has used
chemical weapons and missiles,” he told NBC News on Thursday, without
elaborating but urging the United States to take more action against
Syria. (AFP, May 12, 2013)
Israel Will Strike Iran 's
Subterranean Nuclear Sites
An Israeli strike on Iran's sites is inevitable. However, timing and
opportunity do matter. A careful analysis of both. Israel is facing an existential threat far
greater than anyone could have ever imagined and difficult to ignore. On the
contrary, it would even be foolish to assume that Israelis and Jews living overseas are safer -
when Iran becomes a nuclear capable state.
An overwhelming majority of Israelis believe that the Iranian nuclear threat constitutes an
existential threat to the State of Israel; and the price Israel would have to
pay for living under the shadow of Iran's nuclear warheads is higher than the
price it would pay for attacking Iran's nuclear capability. Israel's cruel dilemma is an open ended
question of bombing or not bombing Iran. A critical decision to risk
indeterminate war with Iran will be a momentous challenge for Israel- and yet,
it will have a durable impact towards the preservation of
geopolitical-strategic balance of power in the restive Middle East.
In any military
conflict, however, timing and opportunity do matter. Indeed, an inevitable
Israeli airstrike against Iran's subterranean nuclear facilities may be a very
complex operation- but Israel's high tech military advantage could level the
playing field and determine once and for all, the fate of its enemies, who
would reel in disbelief. Consequently,
plausible deniability and nuclear ambiguity have served Israel's decisive
deterrence so far against Iran and its proxies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria,
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
It is interesting to
note that Israel's first layer of defense, the Iron Dome, has successfully
intercepted short-range rockets from Gaza during Operation Pillar of
Defense, but the David Sling and Arrow, specifically designed
with Iran’s Shahab missiles in mind, has never been tested in real-life
combat. In general, an Israeli Air Force
(IAF) strike on Iran's underground nuclear facilities from Natanz to Fordow, in
particular, might require the most lethal combination of sophisticated
precision-guided bunker-buster weapons (GBU-27 and GBU-28) that can only be carried on B-2
Spirit stealth bombers. In large
measure, Israel already possesses these weapons, built either on their own or
sold to it by the U.S.
But, it is unclear
how Israel would deliver the GBUs maximum payload short of B-2s. Furthermore, Israel's possession of Jericho III intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBM), that can reach New York and Tokyo, are capable of striking Iran's
above-ground targets. The high speed of the ICBM makes it practically
invincible for interception and will free up IDF aircrafts to focus on hard
targets. In absolute terms, Israel could
use tactical nukes- but the IDF might opt to use the much vaunted precision
guided GBU-31s which have the same warhead as Israel’s existing GBU-28s (the BLU-122 warhead)- to augment the IAF’s
existing capabilities.
Of course, it is not
surprising, or beyond the realm of impossibilities, that Israel might deploy a
simultaneous, knockout combination of cyber offensive weapons and electromagnetic pulse
(EMP) attacks.
In the event Russia
might have surreptitiously supplied Iran with the SA-12 or S-300 air defense systems, the attrition
rate of an Israeli air strike could be significant. But now, a respected
Washington think tank (CSIS) has said that low-radioactive yield
"tactical" nuclear warheads would be one way for the Israelis to
destroy Iranian uranium enrichment plants in remote, dug-in
fortifications. Given the
difficulty its jets would face in reaching Iran for anything more than a
one-off sortie - ballistic missiles or submarine-launched cruise missiles could serve for Israeli
tactical nuclear strikes without interference from Iranian air defenses.
"Preemptive
nuclear strikes are foreign to the national doctrine":
Israeli leaders do
not comment on this capability other than to underscore its deterrent role. A
veteran Israeli defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said
preemptive nuclear strikes were foreign to the national doctrine: "Such weapons exist so as
not to be used."
Neither the public
nor the media ought to deal with the operational issues that are
connected to a military action. Having said that, the mainstream media is
actually rife with speculation about the United States -- which, like Israel,
has not ruled out military force to deny Iran atomic arms, and could itself
resort to tactical nuclear strikes.
"We are not bluffing," has become the familiar
refrain from both countries specifically as a warning to Iran. Under no
circumstances will Israel agree to a nuclear-armed Iran. Unfortunately, the U.S.-Iran secret nuclear deal to recognize Iran as a "threshold-power",
as long as it does not manufacture atomic weapons is inherently a flawed
logic. As a result of a possible
military dimension to Iran's nuclear program, Iran has forfeited its right to unrestricted access to
civil nuclear technology. Moreover, nuclear weapons have become a symbol of
Iran's national pride and therefore, there is no ironclad guarantee that Iran
will not pursue nuclear weapons.
The possibility that
there is still time for diplomatic sanctions to succeed is just a morbid dream
and an illusion of the imprudent Obama administration. Let us make this categorically clear to Iran:
The U.S. and Israel
share a united front against Iran, and the U.S. commitment to defending its
longtime ally in the Middle East remains unbreakable. For the most part, the
U.S. has a 60-year commitment to Israeli security, and
if Israel’s population centers were hit, the U.S. could feel obligated to come
to Israel’s defense.
The importance of
the recent most complex and carefully orchestrated $10 billion arms deal to maintain Israel's military edge
cannot be overemphasized - a clear signal that Iran could face a military
strike unless it abandoned its suspect nuclear program. Although Iran's genocidal rhetoric is
unmistakably clear, Israel senses bluffing in Iran’s threats of
retaliation. Come to think about it- a
fanatical radical Islamist theocracy bent on taking over the world for Islam,
and "wiping Israel off the map", by itself deserves to be sent back to the Stone
Age.
Now the moment of
truth has come to a close: Iran has enough enriched uranium to build five
atomic bombs and probably is in possession of at least one primitive
nuclear device—a "dirty bomb.”
What’s really
interesting here is Washington's response to U.S. intelligence indicating that the "red
line"- Syria's use of chemical weapons (sarin) and the transfer of its
stockpiles to a terrorist group under the guidance of Iran's Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Al-Quds - has been passed is very troublesome.
In light of these
developments, Iran's direct involvement in all the conflicts in Syria and the
botched terrorist attacks in different parts in the world are a ruse
designed to divert attention from its illicit nuclear program.
Finally, there is no
question that under the Obama White House's incompetent foreign policy, Iran
has become the greatest purveyor of
global terrorism and now is a de facto nuclear state, which via proxies has violated
every convention of warfare- is a “casus belli” for Israeli military action.
The bottom line here
is quite simple: in a few years, Israel's existence would
be worthless, if it didn't make a historic decision to confront Iran's
atomic ambitions. The truth, however cruel, is also revealing: Israel must
always adopt the war footing required to prevail over the unimaginable perils
and catastrophic consequences of a nuclear Iran. (Joe Tuzara, IsraelNationalNews.com, April 26, 2013)
Netanyahu: Conflict
is Over Israel’s Existence, Not Land
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority
is not over land, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Wednesday, speaking in
a meeting with senior officials in the Foreign Ministry.
The conflict, he said, is over Israel’s very existence. In proof, he pointed to
the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, which included the forced removal of
thousands of Jewish residents of the area.
Israel got rocket attacks in exchange, he said.
The Palestinian Authority does not wish to recognize
Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people, he continued. However, he
said, Israel remains willing to restart negotiations with no preconditions.
Netanyahu is the acting Foreign Minister
until a verdict is reached in the case of Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu’s choice
for Foreign Minister, who faces corruption charges. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has stated that the
PA will not recognize Israel
as the Jewish state. Abbas argues that terming Israel the Jewish state would
effectively mean giving up the Arab demand that millions of descendants
of Arabs who fled pre-state Israel be given the “right of return” to modern
Israel. (IsraelNationalNews.com, May
1, 2013)
In the shifting sands of military history, few
battles have been mythologised as absolutely as the Gallipoli campaign. Its brutal, often hand-to-hand clashes are
almost unrecognisable in today's remote-controlled modern warfare, and its
losses were significant: 8709 Australians died in the failed push to control
the strategic Turkish seaways, along with 2707 New Zealanders, about 21,000
British, about 9800 French and 1358 Indians. Up to 86,000 Turkish soldiers also
died in the campaign, and details of life on the frontline continue to be teased
from a handful of their precious diaries.
In the lead-up to the 2015 centenary of the seven-month long campaign,
Turkish and Australian academics are also sifting through thousands of pages of
Turkish military documents.
Like the diaries, the documents are written in
Ottoman Turkish and Arabic script - Turkey adopted Roman script in 1928 - so
must be painstakingly translated to supplement the historical and
archaeological work that it is hoped will put together the few missing pieces
of the Gallipoli story.
Associate Professor Muhammet Erat from the Canakkale
Onsekiz Mart University near Gallipoli says the military records and documents
lack the human side of the war: ''what they felt, how they suffered, what they
ate, what they didn't eat, these personal details are lacking in the historical
documents,'' he says. ''We want to
uncover those truths and share them with people.'' But amid this renewed search for answers, a
parallel retelling of the Turkish myths of Gallipoli is occurring across this
moderate Islamic country.
At its heart is a reassessment of the role of Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish commander at Gallipoli, founder of the modern,
secular Turkish republic and its first president, says the director of the
Gallipoli Centenary Research Project at Macquarie University, Harvey
Broadbent. ''There definitely seems to
be a move in certain political circles to reduce the role of Ataturk and
increase the motivation of Turks at Gallipoli … to be fired by their belief in
Islam, to say they looked on it as a kind of holy war,'' Broadbent says. ''This … aligns itself with the rolling back
of Ataturk's secular ideas to reduce the restrictions that he placed on
religion in the state.'' Since the
moderate Islamic Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002 many
secular Turks fear the Ataturk myth is being quietly dismantled.
And with it his role in the Gallipoli campaign is
being retold, Broadbent says.
''Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and … his superior officer
both had a strong, purely military approach to the war, rather than any
extremist or pious religious attitude to motivating the troops,'' he says.
''Ataturk always called on his troops to fight for the motherland rather than
fighting for Allah.'' But recent growth
in Turkish battlefield tourism has occurred hand-in-hand with the significant
Turkish military memorials developing into ''more sacred Islamic spaces'', he
says. At the heart of the resentment
many Islamists feel towards Ataturk is his decision in 1924, soon after he came
to power, to abolish the caliphate and lay the foundations for a more secular society.
The issue of secularism versus religion is a deeply
sensitive one in Turkey, says Muhammet Erat.
An academic who has spent his career studying the
battles on the Gallipoli peninsula, Erat acknowledges ''there may be people who
try to diminish Ataturk's success … but these opinions cannot ever change what
he has achieved''. ''Without Ataturk the
narrative of 1915 would be incomplete, but by only telling it from the
perspective of Ataturk would also be incomplete.'' He notes that the majority of Turkey's
population during World War I was Muslim and that the Sultan Mehmet V, also the
Caliph, declared a jihad or holy war in 1914, calling on all Muslims to help
the Ottoman Empire in its battle against the Allied Forces. Few heeded the
Caliph's call.
His colleague Assistant Professor Azer Banu
Kemaloglu, who is also working on the Gallipoli centenary research project,
says in the past five years there has been a noticeable campaign to ''attempt
to debunk Ataturk's myth'', prompting significant debate across Turkey. ''They say he was an insignificant actor in
the Gallipoli campaign,'' she says.
''Because Ataturk represents the last remnants of the secular nationhood
and they want to move towards an Islamic government, they have to kill this
idea, this myth of Ataturk.''
Yet it is a difficult myth to kill. Described by
historians as having a ''superb grasp of strategy'' Ataturk and his leadership
was seen as decisive in defeating the Allies' plans, ultimately forcing the
withdrawal of Allied troops, including Australians, in December 1915. As well as examining the diaries provided by
veterans' family members, Erat's team will be travelling through the
countryside around Canakkale, where much of the Turkish military contingent was
drawn, collecting oral histories from families.
It is the stories from the mouths of soldiers that
keep the experience of Gallipoli alive, he says.
''When they were in the trenches in 1915 and they
wanted to see if the other side was sleeping, they would put a cap on their
rifle and raise it up - if the Australians were awake they would shoot at it,
if they were asleep they would not,'' Erat says. ''These things do not occur in modern
warfare; the humour, the humanity, that is missing. In modern warfare there is
not even the need for trenches.''
The Gallipoli project led by Harvey Broadbent at
Macquarie University is similarly ambitious, combing the Turkish military
archives in Ankara and the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul to comprehensively
piece together the Turkish side of the campaign. ''We know substantially the Australian
British and French story - there are over 130 publications in English relating
to the Gallipoli campaign throughout the 20th century and the beginning of the
21st century,'' Broadbent says. ''What
is not well covered in English is the Turkish side of the story. ''It is going to provide … sections of the story
of Gallipoli that have been missing, including answers to questions such as why
the August offensive failed and how near it came to success.''
In 1934, Ataturk wrote a moving tribute to Anzacs who
died at Gallipoli, reaching out to his former enemies in a way Kemaloglu says
was much better received in Australia than in Turkey.
''Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their
lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country,'' Ataturk
wrote. ''Therefore rest in peace. There
is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side
by side now here in this country of ours … you, the mothers, who sent their
sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in
our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land. They
have become our sons as well.'' And it is here, on this remote peninsula on
Turkey's Aegean coastline, that so many young Australians lie, the neatly
arranged rows of gravestones punctuated with bright yellow, pink and purple
flowers a poignant reminder of that brutal campaign. (Ruth Pollard, SMH, April 25, 2013)
The People's Liberation Army Air Force plane drifted
past a city and seemed to float, like a leaf, before exploding on a mudflat
where the Shandong Peninsular juts out into the Yellow Sea.
"It was floating, floating, floating, then bang!
It suddenly hit the ground," says a witness on video footage of the
smoking wreckage taken on March 31 that was anonymously uploaded on to the
Chinese version of YouTube.
The plume of black smoke still billowing from the
wreckage 20 minutes after the crash suggests the tanks were full and the
accident occurred not long after take-off, probably from Jinan. Perhaps there had been a fuel blockage on a
wing tank, leading to a weight imbalance that contributed to the Soviet-made
Su-27 20 entering a "flat spin" before descending like a kite to
earth, according to retired and serving air force officers. The presence of what appear to be ejector
seats metres from the wreck suggests the two airmen died because they ejected
too late.
The names of Yu Liang, 33, and Wu Yongming, 36, will
be added to the 1747 inscribed on the Heroes and Martyrs Wall at Beijing's
Chinese Aviation Museum. For military watchers, the more they see inside one of
the world's most secretive air forces, it seems, the less they are impressed.
Pilots are neither trusted nor properly trained. Drills are regimented, centrally
controlled and divorced from realistic combat conditions.
The PLA has nearly as many aircraft as the US but
only a fraction of the peace-time accident rate, suggesting pilots are not
spending sufficient time in the air or training under pressure.
While Chinese military enthusiasts saw the Shandong
crash as an embarrassing setback, professionals saw it as a sign the PLA Air
Force might be starting to take the risks required to develop human
''software'' that can match its expensive hardware to compete with the force's
American, Taiwanese or Japanese counterparts. "They've got to take
risks," says Robert Rubel, a graduate of the US Navy's Top Gun Academy and
now dean of the centre for naval warfare studies at the US Naval War College.
"I've lost control of every airplane I've ever tried to fly."
In the Chinese version of Top Gun, the
equivalent of "Maverick" is a hot shot, risk-taking wing commander
who arrives to drag the PLA Air Force into the 21st century. The characters in
the 2010 film Skyfighters wear sunglasses and chase female instructors
on motorbikes along airstrips. The main difference from the US original is that
the red team are the good guys, shooting at the blue. The moral of the film is that in the PLA's
new "scientific" environment, pilots will be rewarded for showing
initiative, flying under combat-like pressure and taking risks, even if they
scratch the paintwork. The hero,
Commander Yue, has the Tom Cruise character's appetite for high-octane adventure
but is otherwise free of his preternatural ego. His ''scientific outlook'' is
benchmarked against international best practice and juxtaposed against his
vanquished deputy, who prefers to quote aphorisms about controlling remote
armies from a tent like Mao did before 1949 at the Red Army base camp of
Xibaipo.
Skyfighters
aims to challenge deep conventions in China's risk-averse system, where
decisions are avoided or made high up in the hierarchy. But this film about the PLA breaking from
dysfunctional, committee-driven micro-management is littered with signs that
suggest it may not be possible. The opening scene, in which a pilot escapes
being court-martialled after his Su-27 hits a bird, seems to underscore why
ambitious Chinese pilots may be better off sticking to the ground. Commander Yue cannot wield full authority because
he has to defer to a political commissar, who has no professional knowledge,
and he is constantly second-guessed by a deputy playing on his bureaucratic
home turf. When Commander Yue's J-10 spins out of control attempting Maverick's
"cobra" move - "I'll hit the brakes and he'll fly right by"
- ancient habits of centralised, hierarchical control seem inescapable.
"Check the oil", "watch your altitude", instructs his
deputy commander from the control tower, as if that would help a pilot who
would be clenching his entire body to push blood to his brain and avoid passing
out.
US and Australian commanders are required to delegate
responsibility as far down the chain as possible and pilots are trained to make
their own decisions, veterans say. They
work through endless emergency procedure simulators to internalise key
parameters and make instant decisions. Nothing is hammered into a pilot's head
more deeply than the decision to eject at a set altitude when out of control.
But in the film, Commander Yue obeys myriad petty orders and ignores the only
one that counts. "I believe the plane has a soul," he tells the
military tribunal, explaining why he ignored an order to eject. He receives a
standing ovation. Many of the PLA's organisational weaknesses depicted in Skyfighters
resonate with what professionals observe.
The PLA's most
high-profile challenge is to operate newly revamped Ukrainian aircraft carrier
the Liaoning - with indigenously produced planes fitted with reverse-engineered
Soviet technology - and project military power offshore. Last week Liaoning
captain Zhang Zheng and Rear Admiral Song Xue briefed defence attaches in
Beijing and confirmed an ambition to build bigger carriers. They also admitted to having only 12 trained
pilots for the J-15 fighters they plan to deploy, according to sources who were
present, suggesting it may be decades before Chinese carriers operate
effectively at sea. "They've got to learn to operate on cloudy no-moon
nights, where there is no horizon, and to land on a deck that's pitching 10, 12
feet," says Professor Rubel. Even more crucial, he says, is developing the
systems and culture to learn from mistakes.
The US Navy lost 13,000 aircraft and 9000 air crew in
four decades after World War II, mostly due to accidents not enemy fire, as its
pilots adjusted to the lethal combination of jet engines and aircraft carriers.
The challenge of operating battle groups and jet-powered air wings at sea is
multiplied in a Chinese system where politics trumps professionalism and there
is no transparency or independent institutions to monitor and regulate the
game. Chinese officers admit they have a
long way to go but say the risk tolerance is increasing under new
commander-in-chief Xi Jinping. "Accidents are the price that must be paid
to improve combat capability," said Air Force Senior Colonel Dai Xu.
"This is the price for scientific progress." (John Garnaut, The Sun-Herald, April 28,
2013)
Something is
not adding up... Where's the money?
If you have been
reading The Economist,
Financial Times and
other financial papers, you'll notice an odd conundrum that to me, as a
political economist, does not add up.
On the one hand, we are
told in Western media that capital is increasingly held in the private sector's
coffers. Private companies and firms are sitting on capital and not spending
it. Worried that a rainy day is before them, so we are told, those in the
private sector have not expanded their operations. For some policy makers who
lament this state of affairs, like our Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty,
it is a lost opportunity to see the strong economic growth rates that will help
the West get out of its slump.
The numbers are pretty
staggering too. U.S. firms have $1.8 trillion in their coffers and European
Union firms have $1.5 trillion. In
the emerging market economies, there is plenty of capital but they are obsessed
with calibrating the pace of economic growth with political change. Western policy makers, or simply governments,
are told that they need to keep creating the supportive environment to make
private businesses confident in their long term prospects. But note the kicker
here is that Western governments are not supposed to regulate, over-manage or
dictate. Yes, governments need to remind businesses that that they are pretty,
otherwise they won't go out to the prom, so to speak. If you find this
frustrating, you are not alone and let's create a club.
But, what makes this
more complex to me is that on the other side of the world, in the nebulous East
or emerging market economies, it is governments that have all the capital in
their coffers and hoarding their own capital for the rainy day when, they
believe, Western governments might just mess things up again á la
2007-2008. In most emerging market economies, it is the state or government
that is expected to be the engine of growth, but they are cautious savers and
afraid of global volatility. Plus, they tend to be new at democracy or still on
the path of political liberalization and they fear the demands of their own
publics — who want all the goods and services that a modern, urban society
should offer them — but are also mindful of inflation and the ills of market
distortions.
And what about the rest,
those not in the West and in emerging market economies? They don't have capital
in their coffers, capital on the private market is generally expensive because
of so much global uncertainty. So what is a country to do? The buzz
phrase: public-private partnerships. Yes, donors, international financial
institutions, and governments alike now talk about the need for private and
government capital to create profit-making projects and services for its
people. Truth is, this doesn't work in plenty of industries and sectors where
the private sector can't make the profit off the back of ordinary people: think
sewage systems and roads in the developing world.
So something doesn't add
up to me. Our modern capitalist system has Western governments unable to
tell its teenager what to do — fluid capital can be finicky. In the emerging
market economies, there is plenty of capital but they are obsessed with
calibrating the pace of economic growth with political change. And the rest?
Well they just wish everyone would get along and invest in helping them to meet
the development challenges of the masses. Where's all the money? (Bessma Momani, CIGIonline, org, April 9, 2013)
Austerity, French-style: President Francois Hollande
selling his wine for cash
BRUSSELS, Belgium — Things must be getting tough. In
the midst of the economic crisis, French President Francois Hollande is to sell off 1,200 bottles of wine from the cellars of his
Elysee Palace.
The auction on May
30 and 31 is expected to raise $330,000. Part of the returns will go to
restocking the cellar with more modest wines; the rest will go toward reducing France's budget deficit, currently running
at $35 billion.
Elysee's wine cellar is one of the
most secretive and heavily guarded in the world, with some of its choicest
bottles reserved for dinners with dignitaries from around the world. Bordeaux
and Burgundy wines will feature heavily in the auction. Among the presidential vintages going under
the hammer is a bottle of Petrus 1990 that's expected to go for around $2,900.
At the cheaper end are some bottles selling for less than $20 apiece.
"These are wines that have
featured on the presidential table for dinners and receptions," a
representative of the auction house was quoted telling the business magazine
Challenges. "Some would have been present at the events linked to the
history of the Republic." The
profits put back into government
coffers are meant to serve
as a small symbol that France's leaders are willing to taste austerity.
But they won't drink too deeply from
that cup, since some of the proceeds will go toward purchasing new wine, albeit
younger and cheaper. The president will be more than able to drown his sorrows
at the loss of any favorite tipples — the 1,200 bottles on sale represent just
10 percent of the palace's total reserve.
Hollande is not the first French leader to sell off his stock recently.
In 2006, Mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoe put 5,000 bottles from the city hall
reserves on the block, including a 1986 Romanee-Conti from Burgundy that was
snapped up for $6,600. (Paul Ames and Alexander Besant, Global Post, May 1, 2013)
Health
CRACK this riddle... What am I? The
more of me you have, the less you weigh. The older you get, the quicker I
disappear. Men don't have as
much of me as women do. Until recently, scientists didn't think adults had any
of me at all and believed I could only be found in rodents and newborn
babies. The answer is: brown fat, a
beneficial part of our bodies that researchers are now unlocking some of the
mysteries of. While most body fat -
white fat - can be harmful, researchers believe brown fat may hold a key to
fighting obesity in the future.
What is brown fat?
Dr Paul Lee, an endocrinologist at
the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, who is now continuing his
research at the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC, explains:
"Think of white fat as an energy storehouse and brown fat as a generator.
Brown fat burns fat, rather than storing it. As it burns fat, it turns this
energy into heat to keep us warm."
Brown fat is present in newborn
babies to help them maintain body heat, but scientists believed that it
disappeared after infancy. However, new imaging technology has revealed that
people actually retain varying levels of brown fat in adulthood - usually
around the neck, shoulders, spine and adrenal glands.
More fat the better
Lee's research has found that people
with higher reserves of brown fat are usually slimmer, have a lower body mass
index and a healthier blood glucose level. "It looks as if people who are
overweight have less brown fat," he says.
"Now we're looking into whether
having less brown fat means burning less fat in general and thus putting on
weight. Or is it perhaps because a person is overweight and has the layer of
fat that provides sufficient insulation that their brown fat atrophies because
there's no longer the need for it?" While 50 grams of white fat stores
around 300 kilocalories of energy - potentially leading to weight gain - the
same amount of brown fat burns 300 kilocalories a day, which is why it has a
lot more health benefits.
Activating brown fat
Scientists at Boston's Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute have found that exercise may convert some white fat into brown
by increasing the level of the hormone irisin.
It appears to "activate" the genes that transform one type of
fat into another. These researchers are now developing an irisin-based drug to
aid weight loss and also improve blood glucose levels, reducing the risk of
diabetes. Professor Peter Clifton, head
of nutrition at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, agrees
that working out increases brown fat efficiency.
"If you exercise, you can
activate brown fat, although we don't yet know how much training you have to
do. That said, regular exercise and increasing muscle helps the effectiveness
of brown fat," he says.
Kickstart in the cold
Staying cool also seems to stimulate
brown fat. In a study at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, a group of men
were placed in a cool room - chilled but not cold enough to make them shiver -
and their metabolic rates increased by 80 per cent as their brown fat kicked
into action. "Studies have shown
that even exposure to mild cold - 18ºC or 19ºC - will activate brown fat,"
Lee adds. "One hypothesis is that
obesity is reaching epidemic proportions because we're eating more and are less
active, but we are also no longer exposed to the cold as much. Everywhere is so
thermally regulated that we're not allowing brown fat to grow as a response to
feeling chilly."
The fat of the future
As we learn more about the nature of
brown fat, its potential medical benefits become increasingly apparent, too.
Lee and his team at the Garvan Institute have shown that brown fat can be
cultured from adult stem cells. This raises the possibility that it could
eventually be grown outside the body and then transplanted into humans.
Alternatively, the production of brown fat may eventually be stimulated with
drugs.
"We know almost all humans have
some brown fat. Some have more, some have less, but it's there," Dr Lee
says. "If we can get the conditions right, we can potentially stimulate
the growth of it in humans. Or we could harvest the human brown fat cells, grow
them in a laboratory, then put them back into the body to increase the amount.
Knowing brown fat exists may help us
discover if there are additional measures we can use to help people enjoy a
more healthy weight." (Sarah Marinos,
The Telegraph, May 11, 2013)
As the Australian Senate
inquiry into air quality proceeds in Canberra, research from the US has
established a link between exposure to traffic pollution and increased risk of
birth defects. The study, published online in The American Journal of
Epidemiology, found that mothers living in areas with the highest levels of
traffic pollution were almost twice as likely to give birth to a child with a neural
tube defect (related to the brain and spinal cord) as are mothers living in
areas with the lowest concentrations. The study's authors say further research
is needed. (Lissa Christopher, April 19,
2013)
"URGENT"
action is needed to reduce women's exposure to cancer-causing chemicals, a
charity says.
Breast Cancer UK says there is
"compelling" evidence that Bisphenol A (BPA) could be contributing to
the rapid increase in the number of women being diagnosed with the
disease. Every year in England there are
nearly 42,000 new cases of breast cancer and incidence rates have increased by
90 per cent since 1971, the charity said.
In a new report, it said that low
dose exposure to the chemical, which mimics human hormones and is routinely
used in a variety of consumer products including tin cans, plastic food
packaging, water bottles and lunch boxes, has been linked to breast cancer and
other diseases. In Australia and
elsewhere, BPA is commonly used in the lining of some food and beverage
packaging. Small amounts of the chemical can migrate into food and beverages
from containers and packaging. Food Standards Australia
and New Zealand have acknowledged that some studies have raised potential concerns that
BPA may cause multiple health problems but that "the overwhelming weight of
scientific opinion is that there is no health or safety issue at the levels people are exposed
to". Breast Cancer UK is calling for the hormone-disrupting chemical to be
banned from all food and drinks packaging.
"The European
Food Safety Authority... and the UK's Food Standards Agency claim that BPA is
safe, based on their assertion that our exposure to BPA is allegedly low and
that humans rapidly eliminate it from the body," the Breast Cancer UK
report said. "In reality, it
remains unclear exactly how much BPA we as humans are exposed to on a daily
basis. Tests reveal that our daily exposure could be as much as eight times
more than the so-called 'safe' limit.
"In addition to
evidence to suggest that BPA could be a causative factor in breast cancer,
studies show that it may also be implicated in other health problems such as
infertility, obesity, prostate cancer, brain tumours, diabetes, heart disease
and neurological and behavioural disorders. "Urgent action is needed to reduce
human exposure to BPA."
Lynn Ladbrook,
Breast Cancer UK campaigns manager said the government "can no longer
sweep this sort of overwhelming evidence under the carpet." "It must
acknowledge that our routine exposure to chemicals, like BPA, is a key part of
the cancer prevention puzzle, one that is currently missing from its cancer and
public health strategies. "We must redress this gap if we are to begin to
help protect the health of future generations." (AAP, May
14, 2013)
Whingeing workmates and fed-up friends might be
making you sick, reveal researchers who say depression could be a contagious
illness transmitted through social networks.
A literature review by Australian psychiatrists has
found mental health can be affected not only by the negative mood of someone's
immediate friends and family, but by friends of friends he or she had never
met. The paper, in this month's Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, suggests repeated exposure to
depressed people might have an ''emotional contagion'' effect similar to how
diseases are spread. In examining
several research papers, including an analysis of a large-scale American study
of health and mood changes in social networks over 32 years they found
depression and loneliness could be contagious.
Researchers say the findings could change how depression is treated,
with doctors perhaps prescribing patients ''pleasant activity'' with friends who
make them feel good.
Doctors might also be able to trace friends and
family members of depressed patients to identify those at risk and offer mental
health support to improve morale.
''Understanding who your friends are, how positive an
influence they are in your life, what are the factors that need to be better
managed, and how to navigate your friendship group would all be part of the
therapy,'' said lead author Tarun Bastiampillai of the University of Adelaide.
''If you're having a stressful time at work with one of your colleagues, the issue
for the psychiatrist or the psychologist is how to help you manage that
relationship,'' Dr Bastiampillai said. ''You might discuss that work is really
bad, I'm stressed, I don't like my work or my colleagues, and if you keep on
talking about that repeatedly it can contribute to negative thinking about work
and can translate potentially … to a more pervasive depressive state.'' However, clinical psychiatrist Michael
Baigent, a beyondblue board member, said it was highly unlikely someone could
be ''talked into'' depression, and cautioned against over-emphasising the
social contagion effect. ''It's a normal
human experience to be affected by the moods of other people from time to time
but there's a difference between clinical depression and a transitory short-term
state of thinking,'' Professor Baigent said. ''I don't think I've ever seen
someone develop depression by being around someone who is depressed, otherwise
you would have doctors and others who treat people every day at high risk.'' He said being around depressed people was not
always a negative and that people in mental health support groups could
benefit.
Dr Bastiampillai said, conversely, a positive
workplace, home life or friendship group could also have a contagion effect,
leading to clusters of happiness within social networks. He conceded that one possible explanation was
the ''birds of a feather stick together'' theory, in which people with similar
personalities gravitated towards each other, and that further research was
needed to explore the phenomenon. (Jill
Stark, The Sunday Age, April 21, 2013)
Greg Savoie has had depression for almost two
decades. Who you know and how much time you spend with them is an important
part of managing the condition, he says.
''If you're with people who unfortunately happen to have it too, then
it's likely to bring you down and bring them down. I was more one to isolate
myself for a long time and that would worsen it.'' He is not convinced the people around you
could cause depression but said he noticed the way he interacted with others affected
his levels of depression. ''I had … more
friends who might have been depressed or had a negative outlook on life. But I
think it was sort of a compatibility, you know, 'you see things the same way I
do', which makes me feel a bit better and that I'm OK.'' His behaviour changed when he spent time with
positive friends, but ''there's always that thought on some level that you're
not like them and you wish you could improve and be more like that''. ''Each time I would spend time with [positive
people] then my behaviour would improve, but it wouldn't necessarily stay,'' he
said. (Sarah-Jane Collins, The Sun-Herald, April 21, 2013)
·(1)
Bras do nothing to prevent breasts sagging, according
to a French study of 330 women. In fact, breasts normally left to run free
tended to be firmer than those bound in a bra, the researchers, from Besancon
University, found. Lead researcher Professor Jean-Denis Rouillon, a sports
scientist who has been studying bosoms and bras for the best part of 16 years,
reckons breasts become "dependent" on the support provided by a bra
and so the nearby musculature deteriorates. "Medically, physiologically
and anatomically, breasts gain no benefit from being denied gravity,"
Rouillon says. Telegraph, London
Australians spent $14.5 billion on takeaway food last
year according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, up 3.7 per cent from
2011. Obesity is an epidemic affecting one out of every four people in the
country. Along with the proliferation of
junk food outlets on major intersections and in every shopping centre food
court have sprung up businesses that deal with their consequences, such as
medical offices and dentists. Increasingly they are being joined by businesses
that strive to prevent people having to go the doctor in the first place, such
as fitness centres, active apparel stores and healthy food restaurants. Collectively, these businesses – the
preventive and the curative – are set to change the face of strips and smaller
shopping centres forever. It's in the fitness centre industry particularly
where some important new trends are emerging. If what is happening in America
is anything to go by, Australia may be on the cusp of a mini-revolution in the
fitness industry, featuring new ways of exercising and new kinds of health
clubs. One of the biggest trends now sweeping the US fitness industry is
'spinning.' This is not an idea that came from Shane Warne or Spiderman, but
rather a new, high-tech enhancement on stationary biking. In a spinning class,
riders work out side by side for 45 minutes to an hour on sophisticated bikes
in an ambience more usually associated with a night club. Lights are low, the
music is amped up, and instead of a performer on a stage there is an instructor
on a lead bike barking out motivational instructions.
One of the leading chains in the spinning class craze
is Flywheel, which has studios in 10 US states and Dubai. At the front of the
class is a large screen called a 'torqboard', a kind of scoreboard that
displays how each biker is going relative to the others. (You can use a
pseudonym of course if you're the shy type.) Flywheel is also a retailer. It
sells a range of post- workout apparel brands in its studios and is in the
throes of launching e-commerce capabilities.
One of Flywheel's competitors is Soulcycle, whose
45-minute class includes weight training while the customer pedals so the whole
body gets a workout. The 'weights' are in the form of resistance bands attached
to a sliding track above the bike. Soulcycle claims the workout will "tone
obliques, shoulders, triceps, back and chest while maintaining fat-burn cardio
levels." Ouch. Meanwhile, Sync Studio, an expanding North Carolina
spinning operator, creatively manages to combine high-tempo spinning classes
with yoga sessions. And for those who may find plain vanilla spinning classes
too conventional, there now also exists the option of ‘aquaspinning’ – yes, that’s
right, where you pedal like crazy underwater. Spinning is only one dimension of
the new fitness craze.
The first generation of fitness clubs used to be
fairly homogeneous. They either had good equipment or older equipment. They
were bigger or they were smaller. Now, just as there are a number of different
market positions for a fashion or food retailer, so it is with fitness centres.
For example, Equinox in Los Angeles occupies approximately 10,000 square metres
and costs a hefty $210 per month to be a member. This entitles the member to an
olympic-sized pool, state-of-the-art equipment, a lounge, restaurant,
sundeck with cabanas and the opportunity to work out with celebrity trainers.
Not to mention valet parking, carwashing and spa services.
Australia is fertile territory for this new
generation of fitness centres. Despite its good climate and relatively low
ambient pollution levels there are many people who prefer the trappings of a
good indoor workout with high-tech self-monitoring equipment. Along with vegan
restaurants, massage studios, spa salons and health clinics, these temples of
the body will enrich the country’s main streets and shopping centres. And
hopefully get the obesity rate down at the same time. (Michael Baker, SMH, April 24, 2013)
Study Ties Autism to Creases in
Placenta
After most pregnancies, the placenta is thrown out, having
done its job of nourishing and supporting the developing baby. Dr. Harvey J.
Kliman, a research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine, said he became
fascinated with placentas and noticed that inclusions often occurred with
births involving problematic outcomes, usually genetic disorders. But a new study
raises the possibility that analyzing the placenta after birth may provide
clues to a child’s risk for developing autism. The study, which
analyzed placentas from 217 births, found that in families at high genetic risk
for having an autistic child, placentas were significantly more likely to have
abnormal folds and creases.
“It’s
quite stark,” said Dr. Cheryl K. Walker, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the
Mind Institute at the University of California, Davis, and a co-author of the
study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry. “Placentas from babies
at risk for autism, clearly there’s something quite different about them.” Researchers will not know until at least
next year how many of the children, who are between 2 and 5, whose placentas
were studied will be found to have autism. Experts said, however, that if
researchers find that children with autism had more placental folds, called
trophoblast inclusions, visible after birth, the condition could become an
early indicator or biomarker for babies at high risk for the disorder. “It would be really exciting to have a real
biomarker and especially one that you can get at birth,” said Dr. Tara Wenger,
a researcher at the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia, who was not involved in the study. The research potentially marks a new
frontier, not only for autism, but also for the significance of the placenta,
long considered an after-birth afterthought. Now, only 10 percent to 15 percent
of placentas are analyzed, usually after pregnancy complications or a
newborn’s death.
Dr.
Harvey J. Kliman, a research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine and lead
author of the study, said the placenta had typically been given such little
respect in the medical community that wanting to study it was considered
equivalent to someone in the Navy wanting to scrub ships’ toilets with a
toothbrush. But he became fascinated with placentas and noticed that inclusions
often occurred with births involving problematic outcomes, usually genetic
disorders. He also noticed that “the
more trophoblast inclusions you have, the more severe the abnormality.” In
2006, Dr. Kliman and colleagues published research involving 13 children with
autism, finding that their placentas were three times as likely to have
inclusions. The new study began when Dr. Kliman, looking for more placentas,
contacted the Mind Institute, which is conducting an extensive study, called
Marbles, examining potential causes of autism.
“This person came out of the woodwork and said, ‘I want to study
trophoblastic inclusions,’ ” Dr. Walker recalled. “Now I’m fairly
intelligent and have been an obstetrician for years and I had never heard of
them.”
Dr.
Walker said she concluded that while “this sounds like a very smart person with
a very intriguing hypothesis, I don’t know him and I don’t know how much I
trust him.” So she sent him Milky Way bar-size sections of 217 placentas and
let him think they all came from babies considered at high risk for autism
because an older sibling had the disorder. Only after Dr. Kliman had counted
each placenta’s inclusions did she tell him that only 117 placentas came from
at-risk babies; the other 100 came from babies with low autism risk. She
reasoned that if Dr. Kliman found that “they all show a lot of inclusions, then
maybe he’s a bit overzealous” in trying to link inclusions to autism. But the
results, she said, were “astonishing.” More than two-thirds of the low-risk
placentas had no inclusions, and none had more than two. But 77 high-risk
placentas had inclusions, 48 of them had two or more, including 16 with between
5 and 15 inclusions. Dr. Walker said that typically between 2 percent and 7
percent of at-risk babies develop autism, and 20 percent to 25 percent have
either autism or another developmental delay. She said she is seeing some
autism and non-autism diagnoses among the 117 at-risk children in the study,
but does not yet know how those cases match with placental inclusions. Dr. Jonathan L. Hecht, associate professor of
pathology at Harvard Medical School, said the study was intriguing and
“probably true if it finds an association between these trophoblast inclusions
and autism.” But he said that inclusions were the placenta’s way of responding
to many kinds of stress, so they might turn out not to be specific enough to
predict autism. Dr. Kliman calls
inclusions a “check-engine light, a marker of: something’s wrong, but I don’t
know what it is.” That’s how Chris Mann
Sullivan sees it, too. Dr. Sullivan, a behavioral analyst in Morrisville, N.C.,
was not in the study, but sent her placenta to Dr. Kliman after her daughter
Dania, now 3, was born. He found five inclusions. Dr. Sullivan began intensive
one-on-one therapy with Dania, who has not been given a diagnosis of autism,
but has some relatively mild difficulties.
“What would have happened if I did absolutely nothing, I’m not sure,”
Dr. Sullivan said. “I think it’s a great way for parents to say, ‘O.K., we have
some risk factors; we’re not going to ignore it.’ ” (Pam Belluck, New York Times, April 25, 2013)
How
Exercise Can Jog Memory
It’s well established that exercise
substantially changes the human brain, affecting both thinking and emotions.
But a sophisticated, multifaceted new study suggests that the effects may be
more nuanced than many scientists previously believed. Whether you gain all of
the potential cognitive and mood benefits from exercise may depend on when and
how often you work out, as well as on the genetic makeup of your brain. For the experiment, published last month in
Neuroscience,
researchers in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Dartmouth
College in Hanover, N.H., recruited 54 adults, ages 18 to 36, from the college
and the surrounding community. The volunteers were healthy but generally
sedentary; none exercised regularly. During their first visit to the lab, they
completed a series of questionnaires about their health and mood, including how
anxious they were both at that moment and in general. They also gave blood for genetic testing.
Earlier studies had shown that exercise can increase levels of a protein called
brain-derived neurotropic factor, or BDNF, which is thought to play a role in
the positive effects of exercise on thinking. But some people produce less BDNF
after exercise than others because they have a variation in the gene that
controls BDNF production, though it’s unknown whether they derive less
cognitive benefit from exercise as a result. So the scientists wanted to
determine each volunteer’s BDNF gene status. Then the group submitted to a
memory test, consisting of pictures of objects flashed across a computer
screen. Soon after, another set of pictures appeared, and the volunteers were
asked to note, with keystrokes, whether they’d seen each particular image
before.
This task involves a different part
of the brain from the one most often focused on in studies of exercise and
memory, says David Bucci, an associate professor of psychology and brain
science at Dartmouth, who oversaw the study. Other experiments typically
examine the effect of exercise on the hippocampus, the brain’s primary memory
center, he says, but the object-recognition task involves activity in the
perirhinal cortex, a portion of the brain essential to remembering particular
things or objects and whether they happen to be new in your experience. Without
a healthy perirhinal cortex, you might recall where you’ve put your car keys (a
hippocampal memory task), but not what car keys are. Finally, after completing the tests, the
volunteers were randomly assigned to exercise or not during the next four
weeks. Half began a supervised program of walking or jogging four times a week
for at least 30 minutes. The other half remained sedentary. After a month, the
volunteers returned to the lab for retesting. But first, some exercised. Half
of the exercising group walked or jogged before the testing; half did not.
Ditto for the sedentary group: Half exercised that day for the first time since
the start of the study; the rest did not.
The earlier tests of memory and mood were repeated. The results were, in
certain aspects, a surprise. As expected, many of the volunteers who’d been
exercising for the past month significantly improved their scores on the memory
and mood tests. But not all of them did. In general, those volunteers who had
exercised for the past month and
who worked out on the day of retesting performed the best on the memory exam.
They also tended to report less anxiety than other volunteers.
Those who had exercised during the
preceding month but not on the day of testing generally did better on the
memory test than those who had been sedentary, but did not perform nearly as well
as those who had worked out that morning.
Interestingly, while exercising before the test didn’t improve the
memory scores of those who’d remained sedentary for the past month, it did
increase their self-reported anxiety levels. They were more jittery than they
had been on the first lab visit. Perhaps most intriguing, though, was what the
researchers discovered when they compared the volunteers’ BDNF gene variants
and their scores on the memory test. They found that those with the variant
that blunts BDNF production after exercise — a fairly common variation,
existing in about 30 percent of people of European Caucasian heritage — did not
improve their memories, even if they exercised regularly. (No consumer test
exists to check for the variant.) What
all of this means for people who are hoping that exercise will improve their
minds is unclear, Dr. Bucci says, but it does suggest that the interplay of
physical activity and brainpower is more complex than we have perhaps yet
acknowledged. Some people’s ability to recall objects, for instance, “may
respond less robustly” to exercise than other people’s, he says, if their
genetic makeup doesn’t promote the release of BDNF. But the overall message of
this study and of ongoing research in his lab, Dr. Bucci adds, is that exercise
generally enhances the ability to remember. The people who did improve their
memory test scores, he points out, were invariably those who’d exercised
throughout the previous month and again the morning of the testing, suggesting
a powerful cumulative effect from the exercise sessions, he says. More
generally, Dr. Bucci says, there are many types of memory involving many
different areas within the brain, and few seem unaffected by regular, moderate
exercise, although the effects may be inconsistent from person to person. “The current data strongly suggests that
people should be physically active” if they wish to enjoy a sturdy, unporous
memory in the long term, Dr. Bucci says. Walk or jog regularly, in other words,
and most of us can expect to continue recognizing our keys as keys. (Gretchen
Reynolds, New York Times, May
30, 2012)
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In June 2009, The Atlantic published a cover story on the Grant Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of human
development. The project, which began in
1938, has followed 268 Harvard undergraduate men for 75 years, measuring an astonishing
range of psychological, anthropological, and physical traits—from personality
type to IQ to drinking habits to family relationships to “hanging length of his
scrotum”—in an effort to determine what factors contribute most strongly to
human flourishing. Recently, George Vaillant, who directed the study for more
than three decades, published Triumphs of Experience, a summation of the
insights the study has yielded. Among them: “Alcoholism is a disorder of
great destructive power.” Alcoholism was the main cause of
divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives; it was strongly correlated
with neurosis and depression (which tended to follow alcohol abuse, rather than
precede it); and—together with associated cigarette smoking—it was the single greatest
contributor to their early morbidity and death. Above a certain level,
intelligence doesn’t matter.
There was no significant difference
in maximum income earned by men with IQs in the 110–115 range and men with IQs
higher than 150. Aging
liberals have more sex. Political ideology had no bearing on
life satisfaction—but the most-conservative men ceased sexual relations at an
average age of 68, while the most-liberal men had active sex lives into their
80s. “I have consulted urologists about this,” Vaillant writes. “They have no
idea why it might be so.”
But the factor Vaillant returns to
most insistently is the powerful correlation between the warmth of your
relationships and your health and happiness in old age. After The Atlantic’s 2009 article
was published, critics questioned the strength of this correlation. Vaillant
revisited the data he had been studying since the 1960s for his book, an
experience that further convinced him that what matters most in life are
relationships. For instance, the 58 men
who scored highest on measurements of “warm relationships” earned an average of
$141,000 a year more at their peak salaries (usually between ages 55 and 60)
than the 31 men who scored lowest; the former were also three times more likely
to have achieved professional success worthy of inclusion in Who’s Who. And, in a conclusion that surely would have
pleased Freud, the findings suggest that the
warmth of your relationship with Mommy matters long into adulthood.
Specifically:
* Men who had “warm” childhood
relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87,000 more a year than
men whose mothers were uncaring.
* Men who had poor childhood
relationships with their mothers were much more likely to develop dementia when
old.
* Late in their professional
lives, the men’s boyhood relationships with their mothers—but not with their
fathers—were associated with effectiveness at work.
* On the other hand, warm
childhood relations with fathers correlated with lower rates of adult anxiety,
greater enjoyment of vacations, and increased “life satisfaction” at age
75—whereas the warmth of childhood relationships with mothers had no
significant bearing on life satisfaction at 75.
Vaillant’s key takeaway, in his own words: “The seventy-five years and
twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points … to a
straightforward five-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’ ”
(Scott
Stossel, The Atlantic, April
25, 2013)
Dance for
good health
Dancing is a
great way to stay healthy and feel fantastic. Source: body and soul
DANCING is a feel-good way to improve your fitness,
whatever style you choose. Given the
unique combination of physical exercise, social interaction and mental
concentration - all set to music - it's no wonder it has been found to help
relieve stress, increase energy and improve strength and muscle tone. Research
into the benefits of dancing is starting to mount up - so choose your favourite
style and see the changes for yourself.
+ Tango This sensual and fast-moving dance from
Buenos Aires, Argentina, is set to energetic, repetitive music and the male
partner takes the lead around the floor.
* Body benefits:
"The tango is a low dance - your knees are constantly bent so
you're getting a great workout in your legs and core," says Chris Dempsey,
manager of Arthur Murray Dance School in Sydney. "But the
short, staccato movements that teach control, balance and body awareness are
unique to tango."
* The proof: Canadian researchers
studied two elderly groups: one took weekly Argentine tango classes and the
other group walked. The tango group showed improvement in balance, posture and
motor coordination, as well as performing significantly better at
multi-tasking. And it seems the feel-good factor is genuine. A recent Australian National University study
revealed tango's effect on mood disorders. It found reduced feelings of
depression and insomnia that lasted for months after the study had finished.
+ Ballroom (general) There are enough different types of ballroom
dancing to suit every personality - the waltz is singled out below for its own
particular benefits.
* Body benefits: "Ballroom
gives you a great all-over cardio workout, where you use your own body weight,
similar to what you'd get from an intensive Pilates class," Dempsey
says. "You spend a lot of time
bending low and using your legs to push up onto your toes. So it's an
especially good workout for legs and buttocks."
* The proof: Dr Joe Verghese, a
neurologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, conducted a
study on 469 men and women. Over five years he studied ways of staying active
to reduce the risk of dementia and found ballroom dancing to be the most
effective physical activity. The main
reasons Verghese gave were that the "requirements of ballroom dancing, such
as remembering the steps, moving in precise time to the music and adapting to
the movements of one's partner are mentally demanding exercises".?
+ Waltz It may look easy, but the waltz is not
a cinch to master. During the American waltz, you transfer weight from one foot
to another about 90 times a minute. And the Viennese waltz is twice as fast,
one of the most difficult to master, Dempsey says.
* Body benefits: "I use the
waltz with beginners to teach control - there's a lot of spinning and partner
work - and to improve posture," Dempsey says. Apparently it takes a lot of
hard work to learn to look that effortless.
"Ladies aren't 'resting' their arms on their partners' - they're
holding them," he says. This means strong, lean arms and shoulders.
"The waltz is also great for all-over body and brain work, including
memory."
* The proof: A study presented at
the American Heart Association researched 110 heart failure patients and found
that dancing the waltz three times a week for eight weeks improved
cardiopulmonary (heart and lung) function as effectively as spending the same
amount of time on a treadmill or bicycle.
+ Salsa It's flirtatious, fast and a fusion of
dance styles originating from the Caribbean and Latin and North America. Salsa
can be danced solo, but it's mostly done in couples.
* Body benefits: "Like most
dances, the salsa works your core, toning abdominals and [promoting] a
stronger, healthier lower back," Dempsey says. "But in the salsa,
you're also shaking your hips fast. So you don't just get flat abs, you get boxer's
abs. "You need to be aware of how
you're holding yourself while dancing the salsa," he says.
"You lean forward and there are a lot of spins, which require you to
have great posture and coordination. If you don't, you'll fall over."
* The proof: Salsa is a real
source of happy endorphins, according to a study from the University of Derby
in the UK. Moderately depressed volunteers who took lessons for nine weeks
reported a significant boost to their mood by the end. Matt Birks, the
university's senior lecturer in mental health, says the change in mood may have
been further enhanced by "social interaction, shared experience,
concentrating on learning a new skill and the confidence this can bring".
+ Ballet Romantic and blissfully elegant to
watch, yet technical and difficult to perform as a professional, ballet has
become a lot more accessible recently. The choreographed moves that were once only
found in ballet schools and on the stage are now a hit in gyms and yoga studios
around the country.
* Body benefits: "Ballet practice
improves flexibility and muscle strength and tone; it has the advantage of
working the entire body," says ballet teacher Eve Lawson, from the
Australian Ballet. "In particular, it strengthens abdominal and core
muscles and improves posture. "It can also be an outlet, helping to
relieve stress and anxiety," she says.
In addition to sweating out toxins, there is a "decreased risk of
high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease and bone
loss".
* The proof: A study from the UK
compared dancers from the Royal Ballet with top British swimmers, including
Olympians. They found the ballet dancers scored higher than the swimmers in
seven out of 10 areas of overall fitness.
(Kris Franken, The Sunday
Telegraph, April 20, 2013)
Six big health questions answered
Health choices: is butter or margarine better for you? Source: body and
soul. IS red wine really better than
white? And should you steam or boil your vegies? Charmaine Yabsley finds out
which choice is best.
1. MARGARINE OR BUTTER?
Verdict: Margarine
"While we don't need spreads on our breads, margarine is the
healthiest option as it is a blend of sunflower, canola and olive oils. If you
must use a spread, choose a low-fat, low-salt margarine," says dietitian
Milena Katz. "Unlike in the UK and the US, our margarine is actually quite
good, as it is low in trans fats and salt, so it doesn't have too many negative
effects on our health."
Saturated fats are bad for the heart, so buy a premium margarine as the
cheap options have more trans fats. "More expensive margarine has added
plant sterols which help to lower cholesterol levels," Katz says. For
those who use butter because they think it's natural, it's time to re-evaluate
the sandwich strategy. "Butter is still processed," Katz says.
"There are no extra nutrients in butter, either, compared to margarine. In
fact, margarine has added vitamin D, which, as a nation, we're deficient
in." Low levels of vitamin D have been linked to cancers, brittle bone
diseases and general ill health.
2. TAP WATER OF VITAMIN WATER?
Verdict: Tap water
"Don't waste your money on vitamin water," Katz says.
"It's full of sugar - around seven teaspoons per bottle - and the amount
of vitamins in them are so low it won't have any impact. It's really no
different to drinking cola." So, stick to your tap water for free
nutritional benefits. "Ideally, use a filter, although it's not strictly
necessary," Katz says.
3. SUPPLEMENTS OR FRESH FRUIT AND VEG?
Verdict: Five veg a day
Dietitian Tara Diversi, author of The Good Enough Diet (Wiley) says:
"Vitamins will never replace the nutritional benefits you receive from
fresh fruit and vegetables. They contain dietary fibre, which is rich in
probiotics. This improves your gut bacteria, so you will better absorb the
minerals in the food." Diversi says that while vitamins and supplements
have their place, it is important not to "use them as a replacement or as
an insurance against ill health".
Be aware that a healthy lifestyle and waistline is not just about
following the five-a-day rule. "Having at least five servings of fruit and
vegetables is great, but you should focus on eating as many vegetables as you
can before going onto your fruit portions," Diversi says. "It's also
a good idea to avoid starchy vegetables, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes or
pumpkin if you're watching your weight."
Finally, are frozen vegetables an acceptable option or should you always
opt for fresh? "Frozen produce is just as good as fresh - the important
thing is that you're consistently eating vegetables," Diversi says.
4. VEGETARIAN OR CARNIVORE?
Verdict: A combination
"A balance between the two is ideal," Diversi says. "If
you eat too much meat there are a lot of consequences to your health. However,
many vegetarians don't eat a balanced diet, either - some opt for lollies and
white rice for a quick energy hit."
For an ideal eating plan, follow these simple rules: "Choose your
lean meat, add a carbohydrate and choose some non-starchy vegetables,"
Diversi says. "If you're vegetarian then you simply must eat legumes and
lentils, which are full of protein." The fibre in lentils and legumes can
make it difficult to absorb iron, so eat citrus fruits, add vinegary dressings
to your salads and eat other acidic ingredients to help keep your energy levels
up.
"If you're planning on becoming a vegetarian, see a dietitian to
ensure you're doing it right and avoid risks of bowel cancer and digestion
problems," Diversi says.
5. RED WINE OR WHITE WINE?
Verdict: Red wine
A glass of cold white wine may hit the spot, but for health reasons you
are better off uncorking a bottle of red. "Red wine contains resveratrol,
which is found in the skin of the grapes. White wine doesn't contain
this," Katz says.
"Resveratrol, along with antioxidants in red wine, are believed to
help heart health."
Resveratrol has been linked to preventing diabetes, cancers, prostate
disease and Alzheimer's. To ensure you're getting the benefits of the
resveratrol, sip your wine slowly and remember that two glasses a day is more
than plenty. "We should all have at least two alcohol-free days every
week, too," Katz says.
6. STEAM OR BOIL?
Verdict: Steam
"Don't overcook vegetables," Diversi warns. "When steaming
veg, keep them a little underdone so you retain most of the vitamins." And
if you are cooking your vegies in the microwave, Diversi says, "Use very
little water, if any. Then use whatever liquid has collected at the bottom of
the bowl as a sauce to pour over your meal. That liquid contains all the
nutrients."
> PMS pop quiz
How well do you understand hormonal changes?
1. Which of these spices may help ease the symptoms of PMS?
a) Cloves b) Saffron c) Oregano d) Cinnamon
2. Which of the following can make PMS worse?
a) Stress b) The pill c) Exercise
d) Chocolate
3. You may be able to reduce cramping by eliminating which of the
substances below from your diet?
a) Paracetamol b) Caffeine c) Sugar d) Artificial sweeteners
4. One of the following minerals has been shown to reduce the effects of
PMS:
a) Calcium b) Magnesium c) Aluminium d) Zinc
5. In which age group are you most likely to experience moderate to
severe PMS?
a) 15-20 years old b) 21-25 years old c) 26-30 years old d) 30 years old
and over
Answers: 1 (b); 2 (a); 3 (d); 4 (a); 5 (d). (Belinda Fletcher, The Telegraph, May 04,
2013)
Bra Dependency “Makes Breasts Sag”
Breasts gain no benefit from bras and women would do better to go
without, according to French research.
Professor Jean-Denis Rouillon of Besancon University has spent 15 years
studying the breast movement of 330 women and now claims that bras are a “false
necessity”. What is more, he says that
women would be better off being subjected to the gravity than constantly
wearing a bra.
Rouillon also claimed that breasts become “dependent” on bra support, so
the supporting muscle is under-used and degrades more quickly as a result.
Interestingly, several of the participants in the study reported an easing of
lower back pain once they stopped wearing a bra. (bodyandsoul.com,
May 5, 2013)
EVERYONE
knows a lucky so-and-so who hates the gym, eats junk food and drinks wine every
night, yet somehow maintains an enviably tiny and firm figure. But some experts are warning that, in fact, there really is no such thing
as a free lunch — because regardless of what your body looks like, your face
will tell the truth about your bad habits. ‘You can tell a lot about someone’s
lifestyle from their face, including what their diet is like and how much they
smoke or drink,’ says dermatologist Dr Tabi Leslie. Alcohol seems to be one of the worst
offenders for the face. Dr Michael Prager, a cosmetic surgeon, says he is
treating increasing numbers of women whose faces have become podgy, pallid and
wrinkly because of their nightly wine habit.
‘They often say to me: “My mother looked so well at my age, I don’t
understand why I look so much older.” I tell them it’s probably because their
mother didn’t drink so much,’ he says. But that’s not the only lifestyle habit
that could be damaging your looks — stress, over-exercising, and even becoming
vegetarian have an impact, as we reveal here . . .
FACE SHAPE
THIN AND GAUNT
Culprits:
Over-exercising, yo-yo dieting. Although exercise is crucial for healthy body and skin, too much
can leave us with hollow, saggy cheeks, says Dr Aamer Khan, medical director of
the Harley Street Skin Clinic. ‘It’s
known as the runner’s face but any excessive cardiovascular exercise that
raises the heart rate will do it — cyclists have the same look. ‘Initially when you start running, the face
goes red as the blood vessels widen to get oxygen flowing round the body. ‘But
after 15 minutes, as the muscles start to require more oxygen, the blood starts
to be diverted away from the face, meaning the fat pads in the cheeks are
deprived of oxygen and start to die off slowly.
‘If you run excessively, you’ll have
a great heart and lungs, but you’ll lose the plumpness in the cheeks, and look
emaciated.’ Varying your workouts with different types of exercise, such as
weight-training or yoga, will help prevent this. Ditching cigarettes will also
have an effect, he adds, as toxins in cigarettes also attack the blood supply
to the fat pads in the cheeks, exacerbating the narrowed face. And avoid faddy crash diets, as these can take
their toll on your looks, warns dermatologist Dr Nick Lowe of the Cranley
Clinic. ‘Yo-yo dieters regularly lose weight on the face then quickly put it
back on. This rapid fluctuation in weight causes the skin to stretch and lose
elasticity — so you start to have excess skin and jowls.’
PUDGY AND SAGGY
Culprits:
Alcohol, lack of exercise.
Cosmetic surgeon Dr Prager says alcohol ‘stresses the body, causing you to
produce the hormone cortisol’. This hormone causes more fat to collect around
the face, as well as triggering water retention around the cheeks, leaving a
‘bloated-looking face’. Furthermore,
alcohol is also known to overstimulate the parotid — or salivary — glands,
which sit on either side where the neck meets the jaw, adds Dr Khan. ‘Excessive
drinking causes these glands to become bigger which gives that chubby, jowly
look. If you stop drinking or cut down, you’ll soon notice an
improvement.’ Alcohol is 50 per cent
sugar, and there’s growing evidence that a diet high in sugar can age the skin
by a process called glycolisation. Here, molecules produced when sugar is
broken down slow the production of collagen and elastin fibres, the building
blocks of skin. ‘The face becomes saggy
and loses elasticity, facial muscle and shape in general so it looks podgy,’
says Dr Prager. ‘Between 20 and 30 you can get away with murder, but if you
carry on drinking like that, by your 40th birthday the damage will be
done.’
Regular exercise is also essential
for keeping the skin on the face healthy and youthful. In 2010, researchers at the University of St
Andrews released images of three people showing what they would look like in 20
years’ time if they did no exercise — inactive people were more at risk of
sagging, loose skin on the neck and fattening in the forehead and eye area.
Exercise keeps blood circulating to the skin, maintaining collagen production.
SKIN
WRINKLES
Culprit:
Not wearing sun block. You can tell what’s caused a wrinkle just by
looking at it, says Chris Griffiths, professor of dermatology and an expert on
ageing. ‘Fine, crepey wrinkles occur with age, but coarse, deeper wrinkles tend
to be from the sun.’ Dr Aamer Khan adds
that lines and ridges under the eyes tend to be a sign of too much time spent
in the sun. ‘The whole face will be hit, but the hair will protect the
forehead, so generally it’s the areas under the eyes that are most affected.
‘The skin is thinner here, too, and so more vulnerable to wrinkling.’
PALLID COMPLEXION
Culprits:
Not eating your greens, being overweight. In March last year,
researchers at the University of St Andrews published research showing that
eating just three portions of fruit and vegetables a day can give skin a
natural glow akin to a suntan within weeks. Ross Whitehead, research fellow at
the university, who led the study, explains: ‘Fruit and vegetables contain
pigments called carotenoids, which give carrots their orange colour, for
example, and tomatoes their red colour. When we eat them, these pigments get
deposited on the skin, creating a glow.’
He adds that an overweight person may have to consume more fruit and
vegetables in order to get the glow. Carotenoid pigments are fat-soluble,
meaning they are absorbed by fat in the body.
‘The more fat a person has under the
skin, the more the visibility of these pigments might be obscured.’
Meanwhile, a natural flush to the cheeks can also indicate cardiovascular
fitness, adds Whitehead. ‘Oxygenated
blood has a redder tinge to it than deoxygenated blood, so someone who
exercises and has a strong heart will have a permanent redness to their cheeks.
So a pale complexion might indicate someone who doesn’t do a lot of exercise.’
DARK RINGS ON THE NECK
Culprits:
Sugary food. Discoloured, brownish-grey patches on the
neck can be a warning sign for Type 2 diabetes, a condition linked to a diet
high in sugars and carbohydrates. Known
as acanthosis nigricans, the patches suggest high levels of the hormone insulin,
involved in breaking down sugar in the body. They can start small, but if the
underlying cause is not treated, may spread to take over the whole neck. ‘It’s
very much a feature of obesity and diabetes, and tends to appear on the armpits
and sometimes the neck,’ says diabetes expert Dr David Price.
‘It suggests the insulin is not
working very well, so the body is having to produce a lot more of it. Losing
weight is the best treatment for this.’'
FLUSHED SKIN
Culprits:
Caffeine, lack of sunlight.
Dr Aamer Khan says drinking too much coffee can dehydrate the skin, giving it a
red and parched appearance. ‘If you drink more than three cups a day, for each
one you need to drink an extra glass of water to counter the effects,’ he
advises. Low levels of vitamin D, formed
in the body when sunlight hits the skin, can also cause redness in the face, adds
Dr Khan. This is because the vitamin is vital for the creation of new skin
cells, so a deficiency can lead to flaky, red skin. Around one in ten of the population is
thought to suffer with some degree of rosacea, a chronic skin condition that
starts with flushing in the face and can progress to permanent redness, spots
and blood vessels in the skin becoming visible.
Rosacea can run in families, but the condition is triggered or made
worse by alcohol, coffee and spicy food, says dermatologist Dr Tabi Leslie.
‘Alcohol and caffeine seem to dilate the blood vessels, which can aggravate the
rash on the face.’
SPOTS
Culprits:
Dairy foods and Atkins-style diets. It’s now widely recognised that acne is genetic rather than lifestyle
related. However, there is increasing evidence that in some cases excess dairy
intake or high-calorie diets may be a contributory factor to the severity of
the condition,’ says Dr Leslie. The reasons are unclear, but some experts
suggest that the compound insulin growth factor-1, which is found in milk (and
is also naturally occuring in humans), might be to blame. Dr Khan adds that Atkins-style diets that
promote high protein and low carbohydrate intake may trigger acne, too.
‘Protein contains certain amino acids which encourage production of hormones
such as testosterone which can cause acne,’ he says. A diet high in omega-3
(found in oily fish such as salmon or mackerel), fresh fruit and vegetables is
thought to be the best way to prevent or reduce acne. Omega-3s have been shown
to control the production of sebum — the oil produced naturally by the skin
that can cause acne.
MOUTH
CRACKS AT SIDE OF MOUTH
Culprit:
Not eating your greens. Cracks in the corner of the mouth —
angular stomatitis — can be a sign of vitamin B deficiency, says dermatologist
Dr Leslie. Vitamin B has anti-inflammatory properties and too little is linked
to redness and cracking. ‘You may also have a thickened tongue. Meanwhile, a
vitamin C deficiency can result in sore, cracked lips.’ Dr Leslie adds that both these vitamins are
found in many fruit and vegetables, with vitamin B particularly high in peas
and wholegrains and vitamin C high in oranges and peppers.
SHRINKING TEETH
Culprits:
Stress, fatty and spicy foods. ‘A person’s dental age can be
quite distinct from their chronological age,’ says dentist Dr Ben Atkins. Stress can cause people to grind their teeth
at night or clench in the day, which can reduce the length of the teeth, he
explains. ‘Often people don’t realise they’re doing it. I see people who’ve
lost 50 to 80 per cent of their teeth because of this, causing the actual face
height to shrink in size, too.’ Mouth
guards can be worn at night, but Dr Atkins says clearly it’s also vital to work
out the cause of your anxiety. Excess stomach acid from a fatty diet or
drinking too much alcohol can also wear away the teeth, he adds. ‘Eating lots
of high-fat and spicy foods like curry means you’ll produce more acid, and if
you suffer reflux, where there is a weakness in the valve between the gullet
and the stomach, the acid can splash up the gullet into the mouth and damage
the teeth. ‘You’ll see your teeth shrinking in size and may notice the back
surfaces of your teeth feel very smooth.’
PALE, RECEDING GUMS
Culprits:
Cigarettes. Tooth decay is usually linked to sugary
snacks, but gum disease is more strongly linked to smoking, says Dr
Atkins. ‘The damage to the blood supply
in the gums from smoking may cause them to recede, and they can also start to
look pale and leathery — in the same way a fish does when you smoke it. That’s
essentially what you’re doing to your mouth when you smoke a cigarette.’
WATERY EYES
Culprits:
Too much screen time, lack of sleep. Watery eyes are usually,
surprisingly, a tell-tale sign that you actually have dry eyes — this is
because the tear glands react by overproducing tears, says Shamina Asif, from
the College of Optometrists. Often this
is caused by spending too much time at a computer. ‘When you’re concentrating
on a screen you’re less likely to blink, and it’s blinking that generates tears
and lubricates the eyes,’ she says.
‘This is why a lack of sleep also contributes to dryness — during sleep
your eyes repair themselves and produce tears.’ Constant blinking and watery
eyes are the most common symptoms, she says.
‘If you suffer from dry eyes, make
sure you take regular screen breaks, and consciously remember to blink
regularly,’ she says. ‘And drink plenty of water to keep hydrated.’
DARK CIRCLES
Culprits:
Vegetarian diet, lack of sleep. A lack of iron — anaemia — may be
to blame for dark circles under your eyes, suggests Dr Aamer Khan. This problem
can be common in vegetarians, as meat is a major source of the nutrient. ‘Iron is needed for the turnover of tissue,
so a deficiency slows down the creation of new skin and can cause the face to
look pale and dark under the eyes.’ Furthermore, Dr Khan adds that tiredness
can cause blood vessels in the skin to dilate.
The skin under the eyes is particularly thin, meaning that the blueish
tinge of these blood vessels will be seen more acutely (the skin makes blood in
vessels appear blue, although it is actually red), adding to the dark circles.
RINGS
AROUND THE IRIS AND LUMPS ON THE EYELID
Culprits:
Fatty diet. White rings in the iris, known as arcus
senilis, and yellow plaques or lumps around the eyelids, known as xanthelasma,
can both be signs of high cholesterol, often linked to a diet rich in high-fat
foods. The excess cholesterol is
deposited around the eye because it has a rich blood supply. ‘Studies have shown that people with arcus
senilis and xanthelasma have a higher risk of developing heart disease,’ says
Ms Asif.
She recommends seeing your GP for a
check if you are worried about your cholesterol levels.
PEARL ON YOUR EYEBALL
Culprits:
Not wearing sunglasses, surfing. Not shielding your eyes in bright sunlight can leave you at raised risk
of a condition called pinguecula. This causes a whitish-yellow ‘pearly’ lesion
or blister on the eyeball, that’s usually just next to the iris on the side
closest to the nose. It may remain small
or grow large enough to interfere with vision. If it starts to extend over the
iris, and becomes triangular-shaped, this is known as a pterygium. These
growths, also known as Surfer’s eye — due to the fact they are more common in
people who spend a lot of time in the sun — can sometimes interfere with
vision. ‘Both pinguecula and pterygiums are pretty common — I see around two
patients a day with this,’ says Shamina Asif. ‘UV light is one of the main risk
factors, so it’s important to wear sunglasses to stop it from getting worse or
preventing it from occurring in the first place.’ The condition tends to be slow-growing, and
does not usually require treatment, but if it starts to cause irritation,
lubricating eyedrops or a short course of steroid eyedrops can help. If it interferes with vision, it can be
surgically removed under local anaesthetic.
(Chloe Lambert, Daily
Mai, May 14, 2013)
Religion
There
has never been any doubt that Trinity Church is wealthy. But the extent of its
wealth has long been a mystery; guessed at by many, known by few. Now, however,
after a lawsuit filed by a disenchanted parishioner, the church has offered an
estimate of the value of its assets: more than $2 billion.
The
Episcopal parish, known as Trinity Wall Street, traces its holdings to a gift
of 215 acres of prime Manhattan farmland donated in 1705 by Queen Anne of
England. Since then, the church has parlayed that gift into a rich portfolio of
office buildings, stock investments and, soon, mixed-use residential
development. The parish’s good fortune has become an issue in the historic
congregation, which has been racked by infighting in recent years over whether
the church should be spending more money to help the poor and spread the faith,
in New York and around the world. Differences over the parish’s mission and
direction last year led nearly half the 22-member vestry — an august collection
of corporate executives and philanthropists — to resign or be pushed out, after
at least seven of them asked, unsuccessfully, that the rector himself step
down. Over the years, the church has sold or given away much of the original
215 acres from Queen Anne, but it has 14 acres, including 5.5 million square
feet of commercial real estate. It
reported $158 million in real estate revenue for 2011, the majority of which
went toward maintaining and supporting its real estate operations, the
financial statement indicates. Of the $38 million left for the church’s
operating budget, some $4 million was spent on communications, $3 million on
philanthropic grant spending and $2.5 million on the church’s music program,
church officials said. Nearly $6 million went to maintain Trinity’s historic
properties, including the main church building, which was built in 1846; St.
Paul’s Chapel; and several cemeteries, where luminaries including Alexander
Hamilton and Edward I. Koch are buried. The remainder went into the church’s
equity investment portfolio. Critics
argue that the church could have a higher profile as a beacon of charity and
Episcopal belief. “I felt that the church was being too corporate and wasn’t
acting on its values,” said Jeremy C. Bates, the congregant who filed the
lawsuit and a former leader of the church’s Congregational Council.
But not all parishioners agree.
“Given the resources, I think they do exactly what they should be doing,” said
Susan V. Berresford, a current member of the vestry and the former head of the
Ford Foundation. “This, I think, is a first-class philanthropic operation and
one that is using its resources very wisely.”
The vast majority of the parish’s property is in Hudson Square, a
commercial neighborhood next to the Manhattan entrance to the Holland Tunnel.
These days, the area’s hulking prewar industrial buildings, designed for use by
printing companies, are increasingly occupied by creative and technology
companies, with restaurants and galleries on the street level.
“The Trinity Church properties are
now among the most valuable in all of New York City, because they are sitting
on the edge of the hottest neighborhoods in the city — SoHo, TriBeCa and
Greenwich Village,” said Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy and
planning at New York University. “Trinity has been either very wise or very
prudent, but they have let the market mature around them, and now they are
ready to take advantage of it.” The church, which calls itself “one of the
largest landowners in Manhattan,” has also been building an equity investment
portfolio that was worth about $160 million in 2011. And the value of Trinity’s
real estate holdings is expected to grow because rezoning of much of the
church’s land will allow up to 3,200 new residential units, with the first
large project planned for Duarte Square on Canal Street. “The legacy of Queen Anne is that Trinity
Church is going to prosper in the 21st century,” Mr. Moss said. “Who says that
the empire doesn’t live on?”
Mr. Bates, who says he wants the
church to be more accountable to its members, argues in his lawsuit that the
parish vestry, which acts largely as Trinity’s board of directors, is being
elected contrary to the terms of the church’s original 1697 charter. Mr. Bates claims that each vestry candidate
must receive a majority of parishioners’ votes to be elected. The church says
that even one “yes” vote is enough if the candidate is uncontested; all the
seats are uncontested. The parish has asked for the suit, filed in State
Supreme Court in Manhattan, to be dismissed. The dispute over spending and
governance is, in part, a dispute over the leadership of the Rev. James H.
Cooper, who has been the church’s rector since
2004. “You have diminished Trinity
Church, and you have created a glaring atmosphere of deceit,” wrote one
longtime vestry member, Lorraine LaHuta, in her 2012 resignation letter.
The vestry resignations last year
caused a minor media splash, as did Trinity’s tumultuous relationship with the Occupy Wall Street
protests in 2011. Trinity gave refuge and bathroom space to protesters at a
community center, Charlotte’s Place, but then stood by as protesters were arrested
for trespassing on the part of Duarte Square owned by the church. The protesters were furious, and camped out outside Trinity for months.
Mr. Cooper, 68, weathered the storms, and this year
helped select a new vestry more supportive of his leadership. But he also
announced in February that he was planning to resign in 2015 — a decision he
called unrelated to the recent turmoil. He said he believed the rezoning, which
could turn Trinity’s holdings into a more vibrant neighborhood, would be
remembered as one of the major accomplishments of Trinity during his time as
rector.
The church agreed with one complaint in the lawsuit:
Mr. Bates’s assertion that he should be entitled to see the church’s financial
statement. The 2011 statement was released to the public in March; the 2012
statement is due out in May. Trinity has
released other estimates of its wealth over its 315-year history, but none
recently. From 1909 to 1939, parishioners could find bare-bones annual statements at their pews;
before that, the last disclosures beyond the vestry were in 1814. “Trinity is moving more and more toward a
transparent, modern system of governance, though not without bumps and bruises
and pain,” said Mr. Cooper, adding that he supported the disclosure.
Some details are not included on the form, church officials said, like
Mr. Cooper’s $475,000 annual salary — which rises to a total compensation of
$1.3 million when his pension and the estimated cost of his residence in a $5.5
million, church-owned SoHo town house are added. For at least some of the
defecting vestrymen — who complained Mr. Cooper was circumventing them in decision-making,
subverting a review of his leadership and de-emphasizing religious education
and philanthropy while obsessing about reconstructing the
church’s administrative headquarters at 74 Trinity Place — those numbers
rankle.
Mr.
Cooper said he believed the church had the right balance between ministry,
charity and its real estate business.
“Of course I do, and so does the current vestry,” he said, adding that
the goal of nurturing Trinity’s property holdings is to increase the future
operating budget for philanthropy and church operations.
The
church’s annual grants, some of which go to support parishes in Africa,
remained stable during the recent recession, he added, and were now at $3.2
million, their highest level since 1991. In addition, he said nearly all of
Trinity’s spending — from its free concerts to its open doors to hosting
millions of tourists a year — was a “gift to the city.” Mr. Cooper seemed tired as he sat surrounded
by portraits of former rectors in a church office. “I’m a strong believer that
leadership has seasons, and my season is in the eighth or ninth inning of the
game,” he said. (Sharon Otterman, New York
Times, April 24, 2013)
How do you atone for something terrible, like the Inquisition? Joseph
Ratzinger attempted to do just that for the Roman Catholic Church during a
grandiose display of Vatican penance — the Day of Pardon on March 12, 2000, a
ritual presided over by Pope John Paul II and meant to purify two millenniums
of church history. In the presence of a wooden crucifix that had survived every
siege of Rome since the 15th century, high-ranking Cardinals and bishops stood
up to confess to sins against indigenous peoples, women, Jews, cultural
minorities and other Christians and religions. Ratzinger was the appropriate
choice to represent the fearsome Holy Office of the Inquisition: the German
Cardinal was, at the time, head of its historical successor, the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith. When his turn came, Ratzinger, the church's
premier theologian, intoned a short prayer that said "that even men of the
church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in
keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth."
If you detect ambivalence in those words, you are on the road to
understanding the difficulty Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — faces in
leading the Catholic Church to properly atone for another stain on its history:
the decades of cases of child abuse by priests and cover-ups by their bishops.
And while a well-placed Cardinal has publicly speculated that Benedict will
deliver a mea culpa in early June, the words of that apology — if that is what
it proves to be — will be severely limited by theology, history and the very
person and office of the Pope. It is unlikely to satisfy the many members of
Benedict's flock who want a very modern kind of accountability, not just
mealymouthed declarations buttressed by arcane religious philosophy.
"Someone once told me that if the church survived the Inquisition, it can
survive this," says Olan Horne, 50, an American victim of priestly abuse.
"But these are different times. And right now, the modern world is
wrapping its head around the Catholic Church in a major way." The crisis
facing the church is deeply complicated by the fact that in 1980, as Archbishop
of Munich, the future Benedict XVI appears to have mismanaged the assignment of
an accused pedophile priest under his charge. That revelation — and questions
about Ratzinger's subsequent oversight of cases as a top Vatican official — has
been the trigger in turning a rolling series of national scandals into an epic
and existential test for the universal church, its leader and its faithful
alike. It has blunted Benedict's ambitious enterprise of re-evangelizing
Europe, the old Christendom. Over the past two months, the Pope has led the
Holy See's shift from silence and denial to calls to face the enemies from
within the church. What is still missing, however, is any mention of the Holy
Father's alleged role in the scandal. Can the Pope, the living embodiment of
the ancient Gospel and absolute spiritual leader of the world's 1.2 billion
Catholics, publicly atone for his sins and yet preserve the theological
impregnability of the papacy?
Without alluding to the crisis, Benedict told his May 26 audience in St.
Peter's Square that "not even the Pope can do what he wants. On the
contrary, the Pope is the guardian of obedience to Christ, to his Word."
Benedict now seems to understand the stakes. But Alberto Melloni, a
church historian at the University of Modena, says other power brokers in the
Vatican think the church can just ride out the storm. "They don't realize
the deep bitterness among the faithful, the isolation of the clergy. We can't
predict where this is going to wind up." Speaking to TIME, a senior
Vatican official foresees immense consequences for the entire church.
"History comes down to certain key episodes," he says. "We're
facing one of those moments now."
At the Heart of the Darkness
In the end, the test is not about doctrine or dogma, not even about the wording
of mea culpas and the resignation or prosecution of prelates. It is, rather,
about the voices of children finally crying out, long after their childhood.
Listen to Bernie McDaid's story and you will know why St. Peter's trembles.
"He grabbed me, tickling and wrestling like I did with my dad, and I
thought at first it was fun," McDaid, who grew up in Salem, Mass., says of
a parish priest. "But then something changed ... He started grabbing my
genitals. I felt him rubbing against me from behind ... I was so scared. I knew
this was so wrong. I looked out the window. I started praying." That would
happen again and again over three years. McDaid's devout mother was delighted
whenever the priest arrived to pick up her son, just 11 when the abuse started,
to join other boys on trips to the beach. But, recalls McDaid, now 54,
"the last boy out of the car was the one who would get molested." He
finally spoke to his dad, who then took him to a priest from the next town to
report what had happened. "We waited for months. Then there was a rotation
of priests. He left, but they made it look like a natural progression. They
celebrated him with cake and ice cream." The boy was left in silence and
with his secret shame. The priest, Father Joseph Birmingham, went on to abuse
boys in three other parishes in the Boston area before he died in 1989
"There's a belief system," says McDaid today, "that the
priest and the bishop and the Pope himself would always be right. The people
gave them the power because it was supposed to be a force for good. It was the
power of God." Now, he goes on, "people are gasping for breath ...
They don't know where to put their faith." He stops and asks, knowing
there is yet no answer, "What do I do when I pray?"
The Gospel of St. Mark prescribes a fate for those who harm children:
"And whoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it
is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast
into the sea." But the outrage embodied in those words has been absent in
much of the church's response to crimes committed by its priests. For years,
offending clerics were, at most, banished to silence and distant monasteries or
to therapy or sometimes defrocked for what in civilian cases would have earned
the guilty long prison terms.
Today the Vatican appears to be advising bishops in places from India to
Italy to quickly remand new cases to civilian authorities. But how can it
remedy past injustices? A mea culpa — literally, an acceptance of personal
guilt — would be a start, and Benedict has a draft to work from: the letter he
wrote to Catholics in Ireland on March 19 in the wake of sex scandals that have
debilitated the church there. "You have suffered grievously and I am truly
sorry," Benedict wrote. "I know that nothing can undo the wrong you
have endured. Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated. Many
of you found that, when you were courageous enough to speak of what happened to
you, no one would listen ... It is understandable that you find it hard to
forgive or be reconciled with the Church. In her name, I openly express the
shame and remorse that we all feel."
The words are moving, and for some Catholics, it may be enough to hear
the Pope express remorse this way. But Benedict has also talked of penance. In
the language of the church, the sacrament of penance involves confession and
then a priestly absolution of the sinner. But what kind of penance would a Pope
with fingerprints on the controversy have to perform? There lies an intricate
theological problem.
As the crisis grew in March and went on into April, many in the Vatican
worried about the effect it would have on the papal magisterium — the historic,
cumulative and majestic authority of the Pope to teach and preach the will of
God. Vatican officials are concerned that a mea culpa would diminish the
magisterium, which has been integral to the papacy's ability to project power
in the world throughout its history, from the humiliation of the Holy Roman
Emperor Henry IV at Canossa in the 11th century to the humbling of Soviet power
in Poland in the 20th. It plays a key role in the doctrine of papal
infallibility, which declares that the Pope is never in error when he issues
teachings ex cathedra — that is, elucidating dogma from the throne of St.
Peter. It is tied up in the traditional prerogatives of that Apostle, to whom
was given the power "to bind and loose" in heaven and on earth — in
rough terms, the church's ability to open the gates of heaven to you or damn
you to hell because it will always be holier than thou.
A truly successful mea culpa and penance for the abuse scandal must
preserve the magisterium while dealing with these facts: Ratzinger, both in his
role as the local bishop in Munich from 1977 to 1981 and as the overseer of
universal doctrine in Rome, was very much part of a system that had badly
underestimated and in some cases enabled the rot of clergy abuse that spread
through the church in the past half-century. An effective mea culpa must
assuage the faithful but still be couched in such a way that the shortcomings
of the prepapal administrative record of Ratzinger are admitted and atoned for
separately from the deeds of Benedict XVI, the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman
Catholic Church. In that regard, the letter to the Irish faithful, while a
model, has limited utility. The Pope was merely apologizing for errors
committed by the hierarchy of Ireland, not for anything he or, indeed, the Holy
See may have done, much less the mystical entity called the Church, the bride
of Christ. Presented with the scenario of a personal apology by the human
embodiment of the church, a well-placed Vatican official sighed as he weighed
the theological and historical implications. "It's dangerous," he said.
"It's dangerous."
When the Church Is a State
"In the end, the only sad thing is that sometimes these cases took
time," a Vatican insider says, describing the fact that most of the
incidents of sexual abuse are decades old. But that prompts a question: Why
didn't the church simply report to the civil authorities the crimes its priests
were suspected of committing?
Church officials defensively point out that almost all the alleged crimes
at the heart of the current crisis were part of a social milieu in which child
sexual abuse was rarely prosecuted, if discussed at all. But nowhere was there
a more systemic tendency to cover up the shame and scandal than in Catholic
parishes and orphanages entrusted with the care of the young — which showed no
compunction about avoiding the civil authorities altogether. Even now, with the
Vatican pressing bishops to turn in errant priests, some cling to the old
ethos. In early April, the eccentric Archbishop Dadeus Grings of Porto Alegre,
Brazil, told the newspaper O Globo that priestly abuse was a matter of
internal church discipline, not something to report to the police. "For
the church to go and accuse its own sons would be a little strange,"
Grings, 73, reportedly said.
That mind-set has been deeply ingrained by history. The church is
hard-wired with extraterritorial prerogatives that go back more than a
millennium. The Catholic Church believes it is Christ's representative on
earth, with all the sinlessness and omnipotent authority of its Saviour. The
statesmen of the church have always known that to preserve that authority, the
realm of the Popes could not simply be an otherworldly City of God. It also had
to be an earthly power, if not equipped with military divisions (which it once
possessed) then at least wielding the clout of secular government. The church
must be a state.
That became more imperative as the secular authority of the papal states
in Italy was stripped away by French and Spanish monarchs, Napoleon and
Garibaldi, Mussolini and Hitler. The historian Melloni points out that the
papacy was able to take advantage of its weakened condition to buttress support
among the faithful by resorting to vittimismo, playing the victim and
blaming others for preying on the church. "This actually had the effect of
raising the devotion to the Pope," he says. That was the legacy of the
32-year reign of Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, Pope Pius IX, who stage-managed
the First Vatican Council into approving infallibility in 1869 with a suspect
majority of bishops. In obedience to its divinely absolute monarch, the Vatican
bureaucracy, the Roman Curia, became even more centralized and domineering. So
even as the Pope lost his divisions, the empire of Christ based in Rome
constructed a government to rival the civil institutions in countries where its
clergy served the faithful. Churches and cathedrals became the embassies of God
and his vicar, the Pope, in the secular world. In this system, any suspicion involving
misbehavior by priests or nuns would instinctively be reported up the church's
chain of command rather than to — heaven forbid — the district attorney's
office. The overriding goal that trickled down to parishes was maintaining a
cynical secrecy: avoiding scandal and preserving the good name of the church at
any expense — a propensity made worse by the fact that the Curia was run by men
versed in courtly skulduggery. In the cases of pedophilia, that meant the knee-jerk
priorities were church and clergy, not the welfare of children.
As Cardinal Ratzinger, the Pope knew how to operate in the byzantine
climate of the Italian-speaking Curia almost as soon as he arrived in Rome in
1981, according to a Vatican source who professes loyalty to the Pope. With
Pope John Paul II uninterested in administration and often away from headquarters,
Ratzinger became one of a handful of Cardinals vying for influence over the way
the church was managed. He developed a reputation for decisive and principled
action in his immediate purview of doctrine, though he was less transparent
when it came to troublesome and embarrassing reports of sexual misbehavior by
priests and bishops. But, says a longtime Vatican observer, Ratzinger
"knew the place well and saw a lot of long knives." He appears to
have chosen his battles carefully.
In 1995 he managed to force the removal of Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër as
the Archbishop of Vienna, but, according to the New York Times, he did
not fight to set up a fact-finding commission to investigate Groër's alleged
molestation of young boys after it was blocked by John Paul II's personal
secretary, Stanislaw Dziwisz (now Archbishop of Krakow) and the powerful
Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano (now dean of the College of
Cardinals). Ratzinger, however, did get to see his student and friend Christoph
Schönborn succeed Groër as Archbishop of Vienna. Though efficient, Ratzinger could also be
shortsighted. In one case, he seemed more determined to preserve the church's
dwindling clerical resources than to seek justice. In a case detailed in April
by the Associated Press, a child-molester priest had requested to be defrocked,
and the local bishop in Oakland, Calif., repeatedly sent letters to Ratzinger's
office in Rome to try to have the procedure finalized. Not only did the case
move slowly, but a 1985 letter signed by the Cardinal cautioned the bishop
"to consider the good of the Universal Church" and cited "the young
age" of the priest in delaying the defrocking.
Benedict XVI has his defenders, however, those who believe it is an
injustice that he should be dragged into the center of the scandal. Even before
ascending to the papacy, Ratzinger had helped police the crisis while most of
his colleagues in Rome were still trying to sweep the allegations under the
rug. Indeed, Ratzinger's policies, particularly after his office was assigned
to oversee the most grievous cases in 2001, may have contributed to the decline
in new incidents of clerical sex abuse. Just before his election as Pope, the
Cardinal preached on Good Friday in 2005 of the need to eliminate the
"filth" within the church's ranks. Once on the throne, Benedict
swiftly banished to a monastery and a life of penance the satyr-like Rev.
Marcial Maciel Degollado, the aging but influential founder of the Legionaries
of Christ in Mexico, who had long been shielded by other top Curia officials,
including John Paul II, from repeated accusations of sexual abuse. Most
memorably, during a 2008 trip to the U.S., Benedict met five victims of clergy
sex abuse in an unprecedented and unannounced encounter, without any press, at
the Holy See's embassy in Washington. It was the most powerful pastoral gesture
of Benedict's papacy — one he would repeat during a subsequent trip to
Australia and in Malta this past April.
But in March 2010, German journalists revealed a record that complicates
the Pope's reputation. In Munich in 1980, then Archbishop Ratzinger had personally
authorized the transfer of an abusive priest, Peter Hullermann, from another
part of Germany to his own archdiocese, ostensibly for therapy. But just days
after his arrival, the priest was allowed to serve among the flock. Hullermann
would be convicted of subsequent sexual assaults in 1986. The Vatican insists
that, like other Archbishops, Ratzinger wasn't responsible for the parish
assignments of priests, even those with a history of abusing children. A rising
star, Ratzinger — a brilliant religious philosopher — had been put on an
administrative track and was on the verge of his 1981 reassignment to Rome to
work in the Curia. But defending the Pope by pointing out that he was following
the standard operating procedures of the day or that he was not focused on his
oversight duties no longer cuts it for most Catholics. "The impression it
leaves is that these things simply weren't very important to the bishops and
Cardinals," says Melloni. "To say he didn't know is not a defense;
it's the problem."
Ratzinger's reputation for being a man of detail makes it hard to fathom
that he knew nothing about Hullermann's return to active ministry. The Pope has
yet to address this period of his career explicitly. But if he is to satisfy
victims and their families, he will have to do so one day. That Benedict is
personally touched by the crisis "doesn't surprise me at all," says abuse
victim Horne, who met with the Pope in Washington in 2008. "He's complicit
in this, as is two-thirds of the hierarchy." Horne is asking for a full
accounting of past abuse, accompanied by new church rules for monitoring and
responding to future cases, with victims given a central role in the process.
He insists, however, that he and most other victims have no interest in
bringing down either the Pope or the church. "We are looking for a moral
response," he says.
What Can Benedict Do?
The Pope does not give interviews. His opinions must often be excavated from
sermons, prayers and other carefully scripted declarations. So this year, on
Palm Sunday, Vaticanologists could only assume that Benedict had formed his
perspective on the scandal all the world was talking about when, in the Italian
he speaks with a Bavarian accent, he delivered a homily advising Christians to
be courageous and not be intimidated by the "chiacchiericcio"
— petty gossip — "of dominant opinions." Yet throughout the week that followed, the
holiest of the Christian calendar, you could see the crisis etched on his face.
Some in the Vatican called it sorrow, like unto Jesus' sorrow on the Cross.
Benedict appeared worn and gloomy even when framed by the glories of St.
Peter's Basilica and the liturgies that typically infuse him with vigor. After
Easter, when there was no end to the stories of the sexual abuse of children at
the hands of priests and how the incidents were covered up, the old guard in
the Vatican ramped up vittimismo, blaming the media, atheists,
homosexuals and moneygrubbing lawyers for exploiting the crisis. But that did
little to buy sympathy or change the dominant opinion that Benedict's papacy
was permanently damaged.
Since then, extraordinary measures have been taken — swift maneuvering
for a 2,000-year-old organization led by a shy if determined 83-year-old
theologian. In mid-April, Benedict held the reportedly teary-eyed, closed-door
meeting with sex-abuse victims in Malta; at about the same time came a sped-up
housecleaning, with the Pope accepting the resignations of several bishops —
one for sex abuse, others for mishandling such cases. The Holy See also
announced that the Legionaries of Christ was now under direct Vatican control.
High-ranking members of the hierarchy spoke to journalists about the anguish
they felt over the scandals. Then, on
May 11, on his way to the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal, the Pope
answered previously submitted questions from the press on his plane. Though he
spoke in the primly ecclesiastical style of Pontiffs, it was clear what he was
talking about: "The greatest persecution of the church doesn't come from
the enemies on the outside but is born from the sin within the church," he
said, adding that "the church, therefore, has the profound need to learn
penance again, to accept purification." And while forgiving sins may be a
Christian imperative, Benedict said, "forgiveness does not replace
justice."
That cry for justice was a sign that something was changing in Rome. It
was not the only one. Just before the Fatima trip, a frisson went through the
Vatican when Archbishop Schönborn of Vienna used an off-the-record meeting with
reporters to criticize Cardinal Sodano, 82, a rare showdown between two
powerful "princes of the church." In the published remarks, which
Schönborn, 65, has not repudiated, the Austrian Archbishop took the former
Vatican Secretary of State to task for his blame-the-outsiders defense of the
church as well as for his role in the Groër case. With Schönborn's remarks
coming just before the Pope's on the plane to Portugal, some Vatican watchers saw
backstage melodrama: Was Schönborn serving as a stand-in for the Pope and
singling out who was to blame for the sin within the church? If Sodano and
other powerful players in Rome see the sequence of events as an orchestrated
attempt to present Ratzinger as the lone Cardinal trying to combat sex abuse
within an otherwise uncaring Vatican hierarchy, they are unlikely to accept it
without challenge. "Bollente," says a Vatican insider, using
the Italian word for "red hot" to describe the Sodano-Schönborn contretemps.
As if to cap the period of dramatic moves by the papacy, a purportedly
impromptu crowd of 150,000 people, organized by Catholic lay groups, showed up
to cheer the Pope in St. Peter's Square the Sunday after his return from
Portugal.
But is Benedict really about to embark on a shake-up of the entrenched
hierarchy that covered up the sex-abuse cases for decades? Or is this just a
more effective public relations strategy?
The concepts of penance and justice involve answering to God or man or
both. Who will the Pope answer to? In the past, Ratzinger appeared to be
ambivalent about papal atonement. The spectacular Day of Pardon in 2000 was
John Paul II's idea, and Ratzinger, then a Cardinal, had to go along as a good
soldier. The official presentation of the ritual — a document almost certainly
approved by Ratzinger — tried to play it both ways: "The confession of
sins made by the Pope is addressed to God, who alone can forgive sins, but it
is also made before men, from whom the responsibilities of Christians cannot be
hidden." So far, so penitential. But Benedict's latest words during the
trip to Fatima seem to hedge how far he is willing to expose the institution he
runs to liability: he assigned wrongdoing not to the church but to its
servants.
It's a critical point. The consequences of sin are subject to divine
salvation, but the consequences of crime lie within the purview of human judges
and entail courts of law, prison, public humiliation and the loss of property.
That may not matter when the crimes are deep in the past and the victims dead.
But the current pedophilia scandal involves people who are still living — and
who are demanding redress. "For a church that is famous for moving slowly,
they've been moving pretty fast lately," says McDaid, the abuse victim
from Massachusetts. But, he says, that's because "these people are in
fear. They should be in fear. This isn't going to go away just with
words." What words might Benedict
say next? Several well-placed Vatican officials have floated the idea that the
Pope may deliver a mea culpa at a convention that starts on June 9 in Rome,
marking the end of the church's Year of the Priest. "Expectations are
again building up for the Pope to say something that will somehow resolve
everything," says a Vatican source. But the Pope seems to have no such
plan in mind. "It has backed him into a corner," says the source,
speaking of the speculation that a mea culpa is coming. "It is clear that
people at the Vatican are not singing from the same hymnbook." And there's
a problem with the occasion too. "Tens of thousands of good, holy priests
who are trying to do their best are coming to Rome," says the source.
"If the message is about sex abuse, it's like saying, In the end, this is
your fault.' If he wants to bring together the bishops of the world for a mea
culpa, that might make more sense."
As for challenging the Curia, a Benedict loyalist in the Vatican doubts
that the aging Pope can take on the established powers of the church at this
stage of his papacy. Moreover, to seek accountability for the culture of
cover-up means undermining the legacy of his great friend and hero John Paul
II, under whose watch much of the crisis occurred and whose papacy quite
consciously chose to ignore the clamor of abuse victims until it exploded into
a public scandal in 2002. The Polish Pontiff is on the fast track to sainthood.
Says a Vatican insider: "When John Paul II is canonized, it will be
despite his abysmal record as administrator of the church."
Even if Benedict forces the Curia to be more forthcoming, he will not
have caught up with many believers. Though their church is still run top-down,
Catholics now carry the expectations of a kind of faithful citizenry rather
than an obedient flock. Plans are afoot for thousands of abuse victims and
their loved ones to travel to Rome in October for a "Reformation Day"
to pressure the Vatican to act. McDaid, who met Benedict in Washington in 2008,
is one of the prime organizers of the march on St. Peter's, and he envisions a
massive democracy movement to transform Rome. "It's the people's
church," he says. "We have to take it back." McDaid talks about
priests and nuns who are raising travel money for "victims who can't rub
two nickels together to get to Rome. This is way bigger than [Martin Luther's]
Reformation."
Reforming the Church
The word reformation is a sensitive one for Catholics, raising the
specter of one of the church's great historical challenges. But it has faced
down danger before. Ratzinger once cited the legendary Cardinal-diplomat Ercole
Consalvi, who, when told that Napoleon was out to destroy the Catholic Church,
exclaimed, "He will never succeed. We have not managed to do it
ourselves." This crisis may yet be the catalyst for change.
Can the church really change? Father Thomas Whelan, a professor of
theology at Dublin's Milltown Institute, points out that "this very
centralized church [tightly managed out of Rome] has only really been the case
since the end of the 19th century." Now the pedophile-priest scandal has
struck a massive blow against ecclesiastical autocracy. If the church doesn't
clean house, the consequences will be dire. The scandals in deeply Catholic
Ireland have led to a massive emptying of churches. Controversies in Germany,
Austria and other parts of Europe have had a similar effect. "This memory
[of sexual abuse] will now be forever encased in history," says Whelan.
"In Ireland, at least, theology can't ever be the same without mentioning
it — not just the abuse but how it was handled by the church."
For some liberals, the crisis over sex abuse is a chance to argue old
questions of dogma and discipline once again: for example, to address the
necessity of celibacy in the priesthood and the church's vision of sex, to
expand the role of women and to define the status of Catholic homosexuals.
Others say the authority of the bishops — and the Pope — must now be shared
with the faithful. Conservatives, for their part, see this crisis as an
opportunity to double down on their criticism of the sexual profligacy of
modern culture and re-emphasize the core of what they believe are the
traditional and biblical essentials of Catholicism, even if that means ejecting
and rejecting fellow Catholics who can no longer subject themselves to full
obedience to the teachings of the church and its fathers. Increasingly, those
conservative Catholics are found outside the church's traditional home in
Europe, among Africans, Asians and Latin Americans who are proud to be embraced
by a 2,000-year-old institution. That shift in the core of the faithful — even
without any ideological change — will bring about a metamorphosis in the Roman
nature of the Catholic Church.
One vision for the future echoes from the past. A conservative website is
circulating a prophecy uttered by a 42-year-old Catholic theologian in 1969,
amid the turmoil of that year of radicalism and barricades. The priest
envisioned a post-imperial papacy, shorn of wealth and pretenses of earthly
power. "From today's crisis, a church will emerge tomorrow that will have
lost a great deal," he said on German radio. "She will be small and,
to a large extent, will have to start from the beginning. She will no longer be
able to fill many of the buildings created in her period of great splendor.
Because of the smaller number of her followers, she will lose many of her
privileges in society. Contrary to what has happened until now, she will
present herself much more as a community of volunteers ... As a small
community, she will demand much more from the initiative of each of her members
and she will certainly also acknowledge new forms of ministry and will raise up
to the priesthood proven Christians who have other jobs ... It will make her
poor and a church of the little people ... All this will require time. The
process will be slow and painful." The theologian was Joseph Ratzinger.
And his vision from 40 years ago may now unfold in ways he could never have
imagined. (Howard Chua-Eoan and Jeff Israely, Time, Thursday,
May 27, 2010)
It’s a good problem to have, but it’s
still a problem for three men who have reportedly been deported from Saudi
Arabia for being “too handsome.” The men
were visiting Saudi Arabia from the United Arab Emirates to attend the annual Jenadrivah
Heritage & Cultural Festival in Riyadh. They were apparently
minding their own business when members of Saudi Arabia’s religious police
entered the pavilion and forcibly removed them from the festival. Their
offense? They were considered “too
handsome” to stay for fear that women would find them irresistible,
according to the
Arabic-language newspaper Elaph.
“A festival
official said the three Emiratis were taken out on the grounds they are too
handsome and that the Commission [for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of
Vice] members feared female visitors could fall for them,” Elaph reported this week,
as quoted on the website Arabian
Business. The Emirati men were subsequently deported to Abu Dhabi.
In Saudi Arabia women are largely prohibited from interacting with unrelated
males.
After the incident,
the U.A.E. released an official statement indicating that the religious police
may have been on high alert because of the unplanned (and, we assume,
unnerving) presence of an unnamed female artist. It’s unclear whether the men were evicted in
relation to that incident. (Melissa Locker, Time, April 17, 2013
Israeli Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein has advised all government
ministers to immediately end gender segregation in public spaces, issuing
guidelines that would change many aspects of life, from buses to burials,
healthcare to radio airwaves. Mr
Weinstein called on public agencies ‘‘to act fast, efficiently and
decisively’’, saying ‘‘behaviour aimed at preventing women from receiving
public services with equal conditions’’ should be subject to criminal
prosecution. While the advisory itself
is not binding, regulations and legislation are widely expected in
the coming weeks, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed general
opposition to segregation.
Legal battles over the treatment of women in Israel’s public sphere have
contributed to mounting tension for several years, particularly over a
requirement that women sit in the back on bus routes through ultra-Orthodox
neighbourhoods. It is part of a larger struggle over identity between the
growing ultra-Orthodox minority and the rest of Israel, as Mr Netanyahu’s new
government moves to end widespread exemptions from the army for yeshiva
students; integrate them into the workforce; cut back subsidies on which their
large families rely; and overhaul the curriculum in their schools.
‘‘It’s a very important message saying we will not let religious
extremism take over,’’ said Ronit Hed, director of Shatil, a coalition of
groups that fights segregation. ‘‘Once the religious law takes over the
democracy, that’s where we’re in danger.’’ Mr Weinstein’s statement said all
seats on all buses must be open to everyone; that women must be allowed to
deliver eulogies; that seating at public ceremonies must be mixed; and that
signs advising women to dress modestly cannot be posted on streets.
Yedidia Stern, vice-president of the Israel Democracy Institute, said most
Israelis would welcome the changes, and that ultra-Orthodox politicians, who
were shut out of Netanyahu’s coalition government, had little chance of
stopping them.
But Mr Stern
worried that the new rules could fuel the flames. ‘‘From their point of view,
this is a huge attack against their style of life.’’ (Jodi
Rudoren, New York Times/SMH, May 10,
2013)