In Him

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. Act 17:28

Monday, November 17, 2008

Beast System Update 5

The Blood Beast of Babylon Takes Another Step Forward
from WashingtonPost.com

Global Deals in Works On Eve of G-20 Summit
Body to monitor world banking among proposals
Nations are close to adopting a series of measures aimed at combating a global recession and laying the groundwork for a broad reconstruction of the international financial system, as world leaders arrive in Washington for a major economic summit this weekend.
Among the most notable measures would be a new body to supervise the regulation of global financial institutions . . . .
The United States, European countries, Japan and major developing nations are also close to a deal to create an "early warning system" to detect weaknesses in the global financial system before they reach epic proportions . . . .
Some officials have advocated beefing up the Financial Stability Forum, a little-known body in Switzerland. Created in the wake of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, the organization has no dedicated budget and only a handful of staff members. But it remains the only global body that periodically brings together regulators, as well as finance ministers and central bankers from leading countries, making it a juicy target for expanding its mission.

One major obstacle to such a plan: The forum is largely viewed as a club of rich nations, with almost no representation from the emerging giants such as China and Brazil, countries that most diplomats now agree must have a larger say in any remake of the financial system. Several of those countries, however, are now in talks to join the organization, according to diplomatic sources in Europe and Latin America.

The new college of supervisors, an idea that faced initial resistance from Washington when it was proposed by British officials months ago, would have its seat at the Financial Stability Forum. International regulators could compare notes on bank liquidity and risk, coordinating regulation of major global financial institutions.

"You have a big multinational financial institution operating in seven or eight economies around the world, then you gather together the supervisors from each of those, and you have them take a look at the company's activities around the globe so that you don't get this fragmented picture of a business's operations," said a senior British government official. For more than a year, the forum has functioned as a repository for reports that have warned of the dangers to the financial system posed by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, as well as by the securities and derivatives tied to them. Officials believe the forum, along with the IMF, could now play a key part of in the creation of a financial early warning system. [emphasis added]
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Saturday, November 15, 2008

Beast System Update 4

NewScientist Tech

Voice recognition software reads your brain waves

18:00 13 November 2008 byFlora Graham

Mind-reading software developed in the Netherlands can decipher the sounds being spoken to a person, and even who is saying them, from scans of the listener's brain.

To train the software, neuroscientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of 7 people while they listened to three different speakers saying simple vowel sounds.

The team found that each speaker and each sound created a distinctive "neural fingerprint" in a listener's auditory cortex, the brain region that deals with hearing.
[MORE]

Monday, November 10, 2008

A Question of Religion

from TCSDaily.com

Some years ago I was asked a question that has haunted me. It came during a telephone conversation I had with a young man whose Internet book club has selected one of my books to read. The young man wanted to find out more about me, and he began asking what I thought about various subjects. Finally, hesitantly, he said, "Would you mind if I asked you a very personal question?" How personal, I wondered briefly, but gave my consent anyway. His question was, "Are you for or against religion?"

I have lost a clear recollection of my reply, but I recall being shocked at the radical and remorseless either/or with which I had been confronted: Either a person is for religion, or a person is against it.

Suppose I had answered by saying that I was for religion. Would this imply that I approved and admired the blood-thirsty rites involved in the worship of the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochti? On the other hand, what if I had said that I was against religion. Would I thereby commit myself to condemning the ethical teachings expressed by the prophets of ancient Israel, with their stern injunction to protect the weak and defend the downtrodden? To me it was obvious that certain religions have been ghastly, like those religions that required the sacrifice of young children, while it was equally obvious that other religions have lifted human beings out of the squalor and brutality of mere animal existence.

Take the case of those fundamentalist Protestants in the small French village of Le Chambon who, at great risk to their own lives, opened their hearts and homes to French Jews who were being hunted down by the Nazis—an astonishing story movingly told by Philip P. Hallie in his book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. The villagers' Huguenot religion gave them the strength of will to resist the temptation to do nothing when doing nothing would have been far easier and far less dangerous to their own survival. It made them perform heroic actions and yet it also made them see these actions as their simple duty. They saved Jews, as they put it, because "it was the right thing to do."

In reflecting on the miracle of La Chambon, it would be possible to argue that a village of highly ethical atheists might have acted in the same way the Huguenots did. Certainly they would have recognized that saving the Jews was the right thing to do; but the intellectual apprehension that we have an ethical duty to risk our own lives for the sake of others is not always accompanied by the visceral courage required to take this risk. There must have been millions of decent Frenchmen who were horrified that the Nazis were rounding up Jews, and thousands who would have been willing to offer them sanctuary if the risk of getting caught had not been so great and so terrible. In the abstract, these other Frenchmen shared the same ethics as the villagers of La Chambon, but their ethical principles could not convince them to endanger themselves and their own families. In the face of despotism, mere decency is not enough. There must also be courage.
...
The villagers of La Chambon were collectively committed to carrying out the highest Biblical ideal, even if it meant their personal extinction. They were prepared to defy a despotism far more hideous than that of the European middle ages. They remind us that the simplistic "for or against" approach to religion inevitably obscures the startling differences between the various religions of mankind, between those religions that demand human sacrifice to appease a blood-thirsty god, and those that have inspired self-sacrifice in the name of a better world.
[Full Articl]

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

God is not slack in His judgement.

"The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing that I'd do." -- Senator Barack Obama, speaking to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, July 17, 2007

"For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered perverseness."
Isaiah 59:3

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Beast System Update 3

WORLD GOVERNMENT IS NOT COMING ... IT'S HERE (Joan Veon)
. . . Over the past fourteen years, I have written extensively about a global currency, global tax, global stock exchange, global central bank, and world government. I have stated on many occasions that world government is not coming, it is here. In order to bring in world government, it will have to be through crisis - continuing, constant crises. The solution will be world government, total integration of all the countries of the world.

The remaining piece that needs to be put in place is for the United States to adopt a global regulatory system to merge our banking, insurance, and stock market and commodity industries to that of the other countries of the world
. . . .

As part of a two step process to change the financial and economic landscape of America and Americans, the Treasury Blueprint saw the first step confirmed: the bailout of Wall Street to the tune of $700 billion with an additional $300 billion in sweeteners, giving lawmakers the ability to face their constituents as victors. However, the reality is that America has neither the $300 billion nor the $700 billion. At every turn, the amount of money that we owe the Federal Reserve rises. [Emphasis added; I hope everyone realizes since President Kennedy was assassinated for issuing Constitutional money, all US$ have come from the Fed at interest to the US Government, all 14 Trillion dollars in circulation. The current current trillion dollar bail out and proposed trillion dollar spending increase all comes with double interest from the Federal Reserve, our privtely held national bank.] Add the interest to the debt and America is reduced to pauper status.
. . . .
To give us an understanding of what is behind the Blueprint plan, I would like to refer to the very brave and honest senator from Alabama, Senator Richard Shelby [see lengthy quote on source website] . . . .

The rocking and rolling has only begun. We are in the final stages of a move into world government . . . .

In order to finalize the Blueprint, which I have heard will come before a new Congress in January, what will it take to traumatize the new legislators? Will the powers that be decide on a Banking Holiday in the spirit of 1933? Will they cause a total bank collapse by demanding sound banks to down grade their solid loans, as has recently occurred when the Comptroller of the Currency did a bank audit? Or will they simply change our currency to adjust our debt load?
. . . .
The days ahead will try our very souls . . . The day the banks close, whether for a day or week, is the day Americans will really wake up to the cold hard facts that the world has changed and individual nation-states are no longer. [emphasis added]
Source:     newswithviews.com (10-6-08) 
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Beast System Update 2

Bigger databases
increase risks, says watchdog
(UK)

The proliferation of ever larger centralised databases is
increasing the risk of people's personal data being lost or
abused, the government's official privacy watchdog claims today.
The warning from the information commissioner, Richard Thomas,
comes as he discloses that reported data losses have soared in
the past year . . . The new figures show that the
information commissioner has recently launched investigations
into 30 of the most serious cases. The 277 breaches include 80
reported by the private sector, 75 within the [National Health
Service] and other health bodies, 28 reported by central
government, 26 by local authorities and 47 by the rest of the
public sector . . . The information commissioner says
that data losses have already led to fake credit card
transactions, witnesses at risk of physical harm or
intimidation, offenders at risk from vigilantes, falsified land
registry records and mortgage fraud: "Addresses of service
personnel, police and prison officers and battered women have
also been exposed. Sometimes lives may be at risk." 
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Beast System Update

Parents to be fingerprinted by nursery schools (UK)
Parents are to be fingerprinted when they pick their children up from nursery school
Up to 50 nurseries and playgroups have already signed up for the new security measures, thought to be the first time parents have been targetted in this way. Civil libertarians have branded the decision a "huge over-reaction". The new entry system requires people who collect their children to place their finger on a scanner, to make sure that only nominated individuals can get through secure entrances.  MORE