As religiosity has declined, social ills have abounded.
Michael J. Knowles
“Jesus
said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth
and believeth in me shall never die.”
(John 11:25-26)
I
Am The Resurrection
Dear Friends,
Greetings! We are sure all of you are aware of the recent fire in Notre Dame Cathedral
in France. So significant is this event that several journalist have referred to as “France having lost its soul.
One writer compared the Notre Dame fire of a greater magnitude and importance than if St. Pauls Cathedral, Westminster Abby, and The Tower of London were all destroyed at the same time.
This leads us to wonder what this portends to the future. Could this mark the end of the Church Age and the times of the Gentiles Jesus mentioned in Luke 21?
In December 2018 we published a paper titled “Until The Times Of the Gentiles”, Which you can read here. We will see.
Have a great Easter on what so far is the most important and greatest event in the history of the human race, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
God bless!
MailOnline
I walked through the gutted cathedral… then the crucifix shone from what remained of the altar, a symbol of defiance in the gloom: ROBERT HARDMAN is among first witnesses inside ravaged Notre Dame
EXCLUSIVE from inside Notre Dame cathedral: Daily Mail's Hardman is first reporter to see charred remains
He describes a scene of devastation, with sparks still cascading from gaping holes in the building's roof
But the crucifix still stands on what remains of the altar, a gleaming symbol of defiance amongst the gloom
By ROBERT HARDMAN FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 02:04, 16 April 2019 | UPDATED: 09:10, 16 April 2019
Smoke is seen around the altar inside Notre Dame Cathedral on Monday evening. Miraculously the cross and altar have managed to survive the inferno
NPR
How Notre Dame, 'Vast Symphony In Stone,' Weaves Its Way Through Parisian History
Andrew Lapin
April 16, 2019
The cathedral Notre Dame de Paris, seen in 2013, is over 850 years old. The foundation stone was laid in 1163 by Pope Alexander III. John van Hasselt/Corbis via Getty Images
***
FOX NEWS
Woman claims she could see ‘silhouette of Jesus’ in Notre Dame fire
By Caleb Parke
April 17, 2019
Woman claims she could see ‘silhouette of Jesus’ in Notre Dame fire
A woman is claiming she could see a ‘silhouette of Jesus Christ’ in the Notre Dame fire.
As Christians around the world observe Holy Week and focus their attention on Christ, one mother from Scotland said she could "see Jesus" in the fire that engulfed the Notre Dame Cathedral Monday evening in a post on social media.
"I may be letting my mind play tricks on me here, folks take a close look at this picture and what do you see," Lesley Rowan, 38, wrote.
Louise Blair commented: "Looks like a figure of Jesus, or am I tripping?"
Dom Disanto added: "I can see it pretty clear, gown and all."
Rowan said she hopes it will "bring comfort to people in Paris and all over the world at this sad time."
The Notre Dame Cathedral caught on fire a little after closing time Monday evening, one day after Palm Sunday during Holy Week. The Catholic church burned for over 13 hours as onlookers posted videos and photos of the fire and smoke billowing from the Gothic cathedral. Dramatic footage showed Notre Dame's spire collapsing, but many relics were saved and no one was harmed during the catastrophic blaze.
French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to rebuild what was destroyed within the next five years.
NEWSWARS
Fmr. Notre Dame Chief Architect: Ancient Oak Doesn’t Burn Like That
Expert casts doubt on official narrative
By Dan Lyman Thursday, April 18, 2019
A former chief architect and general inspector of French historical monuments has cast doubts on the official narrative that the Notre Dame fire was likely an electrical short that set the iconic cathedral ablaze.
Benjamin Mouton, who served as Chief Architect of Historic Monuments in France and oversaw restoration work of Notre Dame until 2013, says that it is highly unlikely an electrical short circuit took place, and that it would take an extraordinary effort to ignite the ancient oak of the cathedral.
“So, you’re telling us that this type of timber doesn’t burn like that?” Mouton was asked by an LCI host.
“Oak that is 800-years-old is very hard – try to burn it,” Mouton said. “Old oak, it is not easy at all. You would need a lot of kindling to succeed… It stupefies me.”
Asked to present an explanation for how the blaze spread so quickly and with such strength, Mouton asserted that there were no additional precautions that could have been taken to ensure such a “quick” incineration could be prevented.
“In the Nineties, we updated all the electrical wiring of Notre Dame,” Mouton said. “So there is no possibility of a short circuit. We updated to conform with the contemporary norms, even going very far – all the detection and protection systems against fire in the cathedral.”
Mouton also revealed that there are two watchmen on duty around the clock who monitor for any chance of fire, adding that the technical and security measures taken to protect monuments like Notre Dame are unprecedented.
More than a billion euros have been pledged to restore Notre Dame, which President Emmanuel Macron claims will be executed within five years.
***
***
DAILYWIRE
God Help Us: Atheism Becomes Largest Religion In U.S.
As religiosity has declined, social ills have abounded.
Michael J. Knowles
For the first time in history, atheists constitute the largest religious group in America. According to the General Social Survey, the number of Americans who have no religion has increased 266% over the past three decades and now account for 23.1% of the population, just barely edging out Catholics and Evangelicals as the nation’s dominant faith. Mainline Protestant churches have suffered the greatest collapse, declining 62.5% since 1982 and now comprising just 10.8% of the U.S. population.
As religiosity has declined, social ills have abounded. Nearly one in five American adults suffers from anxiety disorders, which now constitute the most common mental illness in the country. One in six Americans takes antidepressant drugs, a 65% surge over just 15 years. The problem is particularly acute among younger Americans. While depression diagnoses have increased 33% since 2013, that number is up 47% among Millennials and 63% among teenagers. Coincidentally, suicide rates among American teenagers have increased by 70% since 2006. American life expectancy declined again last year, as Americans continue to drug and kill themselves at record rates.
Social scientists have long since established the link between religiosity and life satisfaction. As social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky observes, people who attend religious services several times each week are nearly twice as likely as those who worship less than once a month to describe themselves as “very happy.” Such psychologists simply state the obvious: the belief that God loves you and that you will live with him in eternity offers greater consolation than the view of death as a dirt nap that stiffens you into worm food.
Religious people are also significantly more likely to engage in happy-making behaviors, such as getting and staying married. A study released in 2017 affirmed what countless others had already shown: married couples report higher life satisfaction than their single, divorced, and widowed neighbors. That satisfaction tends to last beyond the honeymoon and well into old age.
The misery epidemic threatens not merely American households but also our halls of power. The late Andrew Breitbart observed that politics is downstream of culture, and culture in turn is downstream of religion. “Cult” and “culture” are etymologically related, and a culture is defined by what it worships. A materialistic culture worships wealth; a licentious culture worships sex; a godly culture worships God. But “our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people,” as John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts militia in 1798. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
A miserable politics awaits us when the irreligious rot flows downstream. Who but God can help us now?
TheScientist
Bioethicists Concerned over Japan’s Chimera Embryo Regulations
Many researchers see the move to relax the rules as a welcome change, yet some are worried the revisions don’t take public concerns enough into consideration.
Apr 4, 2019
KATARINA ZIMMER
Japanese regulators have effectively given the green light to research involving human-animal chimera embryos, which are created by implanting human pluripotent stem cells into animals in early development. The revised guidelines, issued in early March, lift a previous requirement to terminate such embryos after 14 days.
The revisions now pave the way for Japanese scientists to study how to grow human organs in animals as an alternative to organ transplantation, and to produce better models to study human development and disease.
However, they also raise some ethical concerns, as a group of Japanese bioethicists at the Kyoto University note in a letter published today (April 4) in Cell Stem Cell. For instance, the guidelines would allow researchers to create chimeras with human cells populating animal brains—something that concerns the Japanese public. They also don’t explicitly prohibit chimera embryos made from human and nonhuman primate cells, which could take experiments into ethically uncharted territory.
“It’s good that they now allow people to do human-animal [chimera embryos] with species like pigs and sheep,” remarks Sean Wu, a developmental biologist at Stanford University’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Creating human-primate chimeras at this stage may be a step too far, he adds. “There’s just too many things we don’t know about when you try to chimerize two species that are so close to each other, like humans with nonhuman primates.”
Invasive research on great apes isn’t allowed in Japan, notes Misao Fujita, a professor of bioethics at Kyoto University and a coauthor of the new letter. But scientists could theoretically produce chimeras made from human and monkey cells, as long as they can justify there’s “sufficient scientific rationale” for the research, according to the paper. Some US scientists have recently argued that human-primate chimeras could serve as better models of neurological and psychiatric disease than current monkey models. Japanese researchers may someday follow suit, Fujita and her colleagues warn.
It’s the public sentiment towards such research that concerns Fujita and her colleagues, who recently conducted a survey on the matter. They found that the Japanese tend to support the general idea of creating human-animal chimeric embryos with human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). However, they’re worried about the prospect of human cells contributing to animal brains, or in germ cells that lead to progeny—much more so than if they were only present in heart, blood, or liver tissue.
“The biggest concerns, based on our surveys, is [the] concern that animals could become ‘humanized,’” writes Fujita to The Scientist in an email. “It seems people are concerned that the boundary between humans and animals could become blurred.”
This is an issue that Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology considered when drafting the guidelines. But in the end, they “concluded that there is technically zero risk of producing a new organism mixing human and animal elements under the research,” a ministry official told the AFP-Jijinews agency in March. The revised guidelines don’t allow fertilization of human-animal chimeras with human gametes. However, they neither explicitly allow nor prohibit human-primate chimeric embryos, which could be used to produce models with humanized brains—an ambiguity that concerns Fujita. She and her colleagues recommend that the government undertake public ethical debates before researchers pursue projects that involve chimeric animals with humanized brains or human gametes.
For many, the idea of chimeric animals with humanized brains raises a number of scientific and ethical questions, explains Laura Cabrera, an assistant professor in neuroethics at Michigan State University. How many human-derived cells does it take for a model organism to develop human-like behaviors or cognitive abilities? How early on in development do they have to be added for that to happen? And if it does, what will the implications be? Could this give them a similar kind of moral status as humans? “I definitely agree that more ethical debates with the public should be conducted,” she says. If not, this could diminish public trust in science, she cautions: “There’s always a possibility to have backlash from the public, and that’s something that scientists don’t want.”
The revisions appear to be a welcome change for those scientists researching how to grow human organs in animals for the purposes of transplantation. On the same day the new guidelines were issued, stem cell pioneer Hiromitsu Nakauchi’s laboratory at the University of Tokyo announced plans for a research project aiming to grow a human pancreas inside a pig, according to Jiji Press. His team had previously succeeded in generating a rat pancreas from a mouse, and growing a pancreas from one species of pig from an embryo of another pig species. Such procedures typically involve the blastocyst complementation technique, whereby stem cells are implanted into a blastocyst that is modified such that it can’t produce the organ in question. The stem cells are added from another organism to populate the empty niche and grow the desired organ. For the new research in Japan, Nakauchi’s team will first have to apply for approval by the university’s ethics committee as well as the Japanese government’s special committee for research ethics.
Previously, Nakauchi had been doing most of his research at Stanford University in the US, largely because of Japan’s restrictions on chimera research, Wu says. In the US, there isn’t any federal legislation overseeing human-animal chimera research. Although the National Institutes of Health placed a moratorium on the practice in 2015, and hasn’t issued any new guidelines since, human-animal chimera research has been funded by other agencies, such as CIRM, the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine.
Beyond creating organs for transplantation, human-animal chimera models are valuable for biologists studying human development generally, notes Wu, who coauthored a letter to Science in 2015 opposing the moratorium. “Our argument was really about being able to have this model or system to study early-stage development that we would never have the [opportunity to do with] the human embryo,” he says.
Putting a human cell into an animal embryo allows researchers to observe it go through the very first stages of development. Understanding which mutations disrupt that process may help investigate why certain miscarriages occur, he says. “By not allowing people to do this kind of complementation, then you essentially don’t give any way for people to study how that process is occurring, and potentially trying to figure out what is the biology and what would be useful for helping these people with fertility issues.”
It will probably be a long time before human-animal chimeras are widely used, notes Wu. It’s an extremely costly procedure, and also technically very challenging. For instance, the Salk Institute’s Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte showed in 2017 that human pluripotent stem cells could engraft into pig and cattle blastocysts, but the proportion of cells that do is very low. “Very few labs around the world are likely actually able to do things like this,” says Wu.
(“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.” Romans 1:22-23)
***
YAHOO! NEWS
'They're in our heads': TV series tackles big-tech nightmare
Fiachra GIBBONS
April 12, 2019
Powell's show is set in the near future when we can share emotions, thoughts and what we see with our eyes on a social network embedded in our brains
Powell's show is set in the near future when we can share emotions, thoughts and what we see with our eyes on a social network embedded in our brains (AFP Photo/JOEL SAGET)
Cannes (France) (AFP) - Channing Powell, the creator of the hit horror television series "The Walking Dead", is not someone who is easily spooked.
But Powell is scared, "terrified actually" of what big tech might be up to.
And critics were too after watching her spine-chilling new series, "The Feed", premiere in Cannes this week.
The Amazon show is set in the near future when we can share emotions, thoughts and what we see with our eyes on a social network embedded in our brains.
If that sounds as far fetched as the post-apocalyptic zombies of "The Walking Dead", Powell has news for you.
"Elon Musk and Facebook are already trying to develop the technology portrayed in the show," she told AFP at the Canneseries festival in the French Riviera resort.
The Tesla boss and sometime Twitter warrior "is developing a neuro lace (computer) that covers the entire brain that you would control with thought," Powell said.
"Facebook has been working on something similar in some place called 'Building 8' where it has all its secret projects."
Both are very quiet about what precisely they are doing, said Powell.
- Chips controlled by thought -
However, "people at MIT have already created something you can attach to your ear that is controlled by thought.
"It can tell you the time and how much groceries are when you walk through the aisles of a supermarket," she added.
"The Feed" -- which will screen later this year -- is based on Nick Clark Windo's 2018 novel of the same name.
Told from inside the fabulously wealthy family who invented "The Feed" and now effectively control the world, the story doesn't end well.
Given what we have learned about the harvesting and misuse of personal data from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and how Google can seem to predict our needs before we search for it on our smartphone, that should not be too surprising.
"We have seen dystopian shows before but never like this," Powell insisted, who cast British actor David Thewlis as the tech guru patriarch of the seemingly well-meaning clan.
"It was a very realistic portrayal of what happens when we let technology control us -- and we are heading in that direction.
"We cannot let go of our iPhones, we need to check Instagram every hour or minute. The notion that you would put something inside your head is really frightening to me," the 39-year-old said.
- 'Terrifying' -
But it is where tech companies are going, she insisted, the next logical step from Google's smart glasses.
Powell said workers in some companies in Belgium and Sweden already have chips implanted in their bodies.
"What is happening around us right now is so scary. When somebody like Elon Musk (a radical libertarian) -- who is inside this -- is telling the government, 'You need to regulate us, and stop us from doing what we are doing', that is terrifying. Because he knows way more than we know," she said.
Paranoia about new technology is nothing new, Powell admitted, dating back beyond the Industrial Revolution.
But what we are living through now, and with little or no regulation to hold tech companies back, is of a different order, she argued.
"Technology has brought us so much.... but there are also these negative undertones to it. Facebook is watching you and selling your information. They own Instagram and WhatsApp, and (Amazon's) Alexa is in every room of your house. Siri can pop up on your phone when you didn't even call her. You cannot ignore that side of it."
Set in England, "The Feed" has British actor Guy Burnet play Thewlis' psychologist son and Nina Toussaint-White his daughter-in-law.
Burnet told AFP that the series' vision of the near future "was far from crazy... and it is amazing it hasn't been done before" when you see Beijing's plans for its social credit system.
From next year all Chinese citizens will be ranked and either punished or rewarded according to their "social credit" score.
"I think we're not on the precipice, we may have already passed it," the actor warned.
In "The Feed", a handful of people control the code on which the world relies, and it is they, said Powell, who get to decide what the public need to know.
"Which is effectively where we are now" in the real world too, the writer warned.
THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
Kushner: Trump peace plan to be unveiled in June
April 17, 2019
US President Donald Trump’s special adviser Jared Kushner says that the administration’s long-awaited Middle East peace plan will be unveiled in mid-June.
Speaking to a group of ambassadors at the Blair House in Washington, Trump’s son-in-law says the White House will wait until after the holy month of Ramadan, which begins on May 4 and ends on June 5, to introduce the initiative.
HARRETZ
Jordan Spurns U.S. Proposal to Mediate in Temple Mount Crisis With Israel
Americans can't function as go-between on matters concerning Jerusalem in the wake of embassy move, Jordanians say
Nir Hasson
April 3, 2019
The Jordanian government has rejected an American proposal to mediate between Jordan and Israel in an effort to resolve the crisis over the Bab al-Rahma structure on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
***
WIN
Israeli sovereignty in Judea, Samaria won’t hurt Trump peace plan, says Pompeo
April 13, 2019
When asked whether Netanyahu’s pledge to “annex” Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria would harm the prospects for Trump’s “deal of the century,” Pompeo replied, “I don’t.”
By World Israel News Staff
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN interviewer Jake Tapper on Friday that the U.S.’ new Middle East peace plan would not be negatively impacted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign pledge to declare Israeli sovereignty over Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
“Do you have any concerns about the comments Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was just reelected, made right before he was reelected vowing to annex [Judea and Samaria]?” asked Tapper, adding, “Do you think that might hurt the pursuit of peace, the two-state solution proposal that Jared Kushner and others, including you, have been working so hard on?”
“I don’t,” responded Pompeo.
“I think that the vision that we’ll lay out is going to represent a significant change from the model that’s been used”,” he added.
Elaborating on the U.S. historical approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Pompeo explained “[W]e’ve had a lot of ideas for 40 years; they did not deliver peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Our mission set is to put forward a vision. Ultimately, the Israelis and the Palestinian people will have to make this – resolve this for themselves.”
Pompeo expressed hope that the Trump administration’s “new,” “unique” ideas “to reframe and reshape what’s been an intractable problem that multiple administrations have grappled with” would result in “a better life for the Israelis without this conflict” and “a better life for the Palestinian people.”
***
PRESSTV
EU rejects Israeli claim to Golan, other occupied territory
April 17, 2019
European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini (Photo by Reuters)
The European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini has once again expressed the 28-nation bloc’s disapproval of the Israeli regime’s claim of “sovereignty” to Syria’s Golan Heights and other Tel Aviv-occupied territories.
Speaking at the plenary session of the European Parliament in the French city of Strasbourg on Tuesday, Mogherini stressed that the EU’s position on the status of Golan “has not changed.”
“The EU has a very simple and clear position,” she said. “The EU does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over any of the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967, in line with international law and with UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 497. And this also applies to the Golan Heights.”
The EU’s top diplomat also noted that she had already issued a declaration on behalf of all the 28 member states and clarified their stance on the Golan Heights.
Additionally, she said, the five EU member states of the UN Security Council – including the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and Poland – had expressed the bloc’s common position on Golan in a joint stake-out.
Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the closing stages of its 1967 Six-Day War with Arab countries, which also saw the regime occupy the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem al-Quds and the Gaza Strip.
Tel Aviv unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 in a move not recognized internationally.
Syria has repeatedly reaffirmed its sovereignty over the Golan Heights, saying the territory must be completely restored to its control.
On March 25, US President Donald Trump signed a decree recognizing Israeli “sovereignty” over the occupied Golan at the start of a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington.
Trump’s controversial policy shift came over a year after the hawkish US president recognized Jerusalem al-Quds as the “capital” of Israel and transferred Washington’s embassy from Tel Aviv to the occupied Palestinian city.
Emboldened by Trump’s highly anti-Palestine agenda, Netanyahu has talked of plans to annex the occupied Palestinian region of the West Bank.
Illegal settlement activities
Elsewhere in her speech, Mogherini complained that Israel’s settlement construction activities in the occupied Palestinian lands were eroding any prospect of a two-state solution.
After a recent announcement by Israel to build 4,600 new settler units, the EU emphasized that it considered “all settlement activity illegal under international law, and that settlements erode the viability of the two-state solution,” she said.
“And in fact, the two-state solution is not only fading away. It is being dismantled piece by piece,” she added, warning that abandoning the solution would bring greater chaos, not only to the occupied territories but also to the entire Middle East.
Israel has over the past months stepped up its settlement construction activities in the occupied lands in defiance of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334.
About 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built illegally since the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian lands.
PRESSTV
Mainstream Jewish groups urge Trump to curb Israel's West Bank annexation
April 12, 2019
US President Donald Trump, right, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, March 25, 2019. (Photo by AFP)
Nine Jewish groups have urged US President Donald Trump to curb the annexation by the Tel Aviv regime of the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian territory sought by his close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an unprecedented letter written to Trump, the Jewish groups, which included five associated with the Reform and Conservative movements, said, “We respectfully request that you affirm long-standing bipartisan consensus that the two-state solution is the essential path to an Israel existing alongside a future state of Palestine in peace and security.”
It also urged Trump to “declare that the United States will not support any Israeli proposals to annex the West Bank, in whole or in part.”
A few days before Israel’s April 9 election, Netanyahu said he would not shy away from expanding Israel’s illegal annexations to cover the West Bank, a land currently accommodated by settlers which Israeli regime occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
Washington has already recognized Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights.
The Jewish groups warned that the “electoral pledge” will lead to “greater conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, severely undermine, if not entirely eradicate, the successful security coordination” between the Israeli regime and the Palestinian Authority.
The letter, in which mainstream Jewish groups are asking a US president to take steps to restrain an Israeli prime minister, is reportedly unusual, if not unprecedented.
The document, which was released early Friday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, also warned that the pledge will “galvanize efforts such as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that are intended to isolate and delegitimize Israel.”
The Jewish groups noted that Netanyahu’s decision would “create intense divisions” in the US and would undermine support for Israel.
The warning, which comes from the leadership of the two largest religious streams in the US, with a combined membership that would constitute an overwhelming majority of synagogue-going Jewish Americans, is seen as so important.
A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Netanyahu’s comments, which many believe have been made to change the tide in his favor in the election that he won, would not affect the illegal nature of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Some 400,000 settlers currently live there.
“Any measures and any announcements will not change the facts. Settlements are illegal and they will be removed,” said Nabil Abu Rdainah.
PRESSTV
US ‘most warlike nation in history’: Ex-US President Jimmy Carter
April 15, 2019
Former US President Jimmy Carter says President Donald Trump has spoken with him about China because the current US leader was worried that Beijing overtaking the US economically, saying America’s endless wars may lead to China superseding the US.
Carter, 94, said Trump called him on Saturday as he spoke during his regular Sunday School lesson at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.
He told the congregation that Trump feared China's growing economic strength and suggested the president was right to be concerned.
Some experts say China could overtake the US as the world’s largest economy by 2030 if current growth trends continue.
The former Democratic president said China was getting ahead of the US because Washington has been at war with other countries for most of its history.
Carter—who normalized diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing in 1979—suggested that China’s rapid growth had been facilitated by government investment and helped by peace.
“Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody?” Carter asked. “None. And we have stayed at war.”
He said the US has only enjoyed 16 years of peace in its 242-year history, making the country “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” Carter said. This is, he said, because of Washington’s tendency to force other nations to “adopt our American principles.”
Carter said that China, in contrast to the US, had made massive economic progress for maintaining peace. “How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?” he asked.
The US has “wasted, I think, $3 trillion” on military spending. “It’s more than you can imagine. China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”
“And I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure you’d probably have $2 trillion leftover. We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong,” Carter told the congregation.
Carter served as the 39th US president from 1977 to 1981. The former president has been particularly critical of the nation's direction under Trump’s leadership.
Carter was also a tool of the imperialists: Scholar
Commenting on Carter’s remarks, Professor Dennis Etler said,“Although Jimmy Carter is considered one of the more reasonable US presidents he was still a tool of the imperialists running the show.”
“He supported the Shah and alienated whole Iranian nation in doing so, still to this day. And talk about wars, he got the US involved in Afghanistan supporting the Mujahedeen and laid the groundwork for all the wars that followed, so it's a bit much for him to decry the trillions of dollars wasted as a result, not to mention the millions of those killed, maimed, traumatized and sent into exile,” added Etler, an American political analyst who has a decades-long interest in international affairs.
“No, Carter cannot absolve himself of the guilt he deserves,” Etler told Press TV.
“At least when it comes to China he speaks the truth, if not the whole truth. He knows that China poses no threat to the US that is not of America's own making,” the analyst noted.
***
Zero Hedge
Salvini Is Positioning Italy For Confrontation
by Tyler Durden
Sat, 04/13/2019 - 08:10
Authored by Tom Luongo via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Italy’s Matteo Salvini is riding high right now. Having weathered a couple of cheap legal moves to derail his assault on the European Parliament this May, Salvini is working to galvanize Euroskepticism across the continent into a viable political force.
He’s got his work cut out for himself.
But, he has at least two major allies. Marine Le Pen of the National Rally in France and Viktor Orban, the leader of Hungary. Salvini and Le Pen met last week to announce they would be campaigning together for the European elections as well as a major summit in Milan soon.
This is only the beginning, however.
I’ve been saying for over a year now that Salvini needs to be the person who lays the foundation for a wholesale revolt against the European Union and Italy’s participation in the euro.
His Lega party have skyrocketed in the polls, reversing the dynamic between it and coalition partner Five Star Movement. It’s a coalition that is of the kind which frightens the political establishment in Europe because it isn’t formed on the traditional left-right false divide.
It is a populist one united on the common cause of overthrowing the corrupt, corporatist system which most western governments are fronts for.
And since coming to power last year there have been multiple attempts to drive wedges between these supposedly strange bedfellows. All of them have failed. And part of the reason for that has been the surging popularity of Lega and Salvini.
Having survived to this point and scared the EU a few times with Trump-like ‘big asks’ on the budget and immigration reform, Salvini and his partner in populism Luigi Di Maio are looking towards the EP elections as a first major test of their government.
And being able to bring together groups from all over Europe to agree on a common platform to challenge the French/German axis of power would put them in a good position in the second half of 2019 to push things farther, especially as it pertains to Italy’s insane fiscal situation.
I realized early on that Salvini was two things. He was both a radical who was also methodical. He’s not flaming out in a blaze of glory here. He’s building his case against the EU slowly, allowing history to come to him.
He’s stayed far away from the Brexit debacle, even though he knows he has the power to stop the betrayal of the vote and force the divorce. But rather than do that it’s better to let the process play itself out and reveal the ugly truth of it all while he takes notes and reloads for the next attack on the EU.
If Euroskeptics outperform the current polling which has them at around 30-32% of the seats and Salvini can rally them under one banner to become the biggest party in the EP, then that would send the right kind of message back home to Italy.
There is something big brewing between Salvini and Di Maio. First, they sign up with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, whose second major summit is later this month. This angered both Trump and Angela Merkel.
All in a day’s work.
But the bigger news, in my mind, is the Italian parliament is pushing to repatriate the nation’s gold reserves from the Bank of Italy. Two laws are under consideration:
One law would instruct the central bank’s owners, most of them private banks, to sell their shares to the Italian Treasury at prices from the 1930s.
The other law would declare the Italian people to be the owners of the Bank of Italy’s reserve of 2451.8 metric tons of gold, worth around $102 billion at current prices.
The Bank of Italy is mostly owed by Italian commercial banks who are now both insolvent and at risk of EU banking rules. This puts them at risk of seeing depositors bailed-in and the banks forcibly restructured overnight by the European Central Bank.
Don’t believe me? Go back and look at what happened to Banco Popular of Spain in 2017. It was sold off to Santander for $1 after the ECB declared it non-viable. It wiped out the shareholders over a weekend and life went on as if nothing had happened.
But it did happen and that did nothing to reassure investors that there is even a hope in hell of getting your investment back out of a European bank if that’s how the ECB can act. In some ways, why do you think it’s going to be so difficult for Deutsche Bank to raise the necessary capital ($6 to $10 billion) to merge with equally-insolvent Commerzbank?
If you had a choice between Deutsche and J.P. Morgan Chase at this point what would you do? US banking system may be corrupt but it isn’t stupid enough to toss aside the one thing that ensures safe-haven foreign capital flows, that investors come first.
I may not like Chase, but I’m putting my money on it over Deutsche any day of the week and especially not on a Sunday evening while Mario Draghi is on the scene.
If those Italian banks are dealt with similarly by the ECB as Banco Popular we could easily see their ownership transferred to their creditors and, by extension, the ownership of the Bank of Italy right along with it.
Talk about undermining national sovereignty!
And what’s the only thing of value on the Bank of Italy’s balance sheet? The gold.
Salvini and Di Maio’s government urging the Bank of Italy to sell the gold back to the government at 1930’s prices is a way to ensure that Italy’s gold reserves stay unencumbered and available to back any new version of the lira if things get to that point.
Like Brexit negotiations the nuclear option, clean divorce, must be a credible threat, i.e. a No-Deal Brexit and unilateral withdrawal from the euro.
This threat by the Italians has been simmering for a while and every time it comes up the talking points from the regime press are the same. It threatens the independence of the central bank. The gold could be sold to pay for populist spending programs. Blah blah blah.
No, the real threat is with the Italian gold owned by the Italian people the Italian government could start all over again with a new currency.
And that is what this is all about.
So, first, Salvini goes into the European Parliament with a solid voting bloc to disrupt proceedings and further undermine Angela Merkel’s powerbase. Second, he and Di Maio take that success back to Rome and use that to engage real EU reform of the financial system.
And if they don’t get what they want, if Merkel holds fast to her policy of Germany strip-mining of Europe via austerity, then they go on the offensive with 2410 tonnes of gold in their back pocket. This will be an easy sell as the European economy implodes further.
It’s not like Germany is in a position to drive a strong bargain with its economy rapidly plunging towards recession.
Any small shock at this point will cause a massive run on European assets. We’ve just seen a enormous move into safe-haven assets in the past month.
The European bond markets are ripe for a sharp reversal on any catalyst.
To pull all off their ‘revolution’ in the EP, however, Salvini and Le Pen will likely have to play nice with Poland on Russia, not pushing for sanctions relief just yet. To unite Euroskeptics over the next seven weeks will be difficult. But, Salvini has shown flexibility to this point with his own coalition.
What makes you think he’s not capable of bringing Poland on side?
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The Verge
Stratolaunch’s rocket-launching plane took off early Saturday morning and safely landed two hours later
By Sean O'Kane and Chris Welch
April 13, 2019
Photo: Stratolaunch Systems
The world’s largest airplane took flight for the first time ever on Saturday morning. Built by rocket launch company Stratolaunch, the 500,000-pound plane with a 385-foot wingspan lifted off shortly after 10AM ET from Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California. It was a critical first test flight for the aircraft, designed to launch rockets into orbit from the air. The inaugural flight lasted for 150 minutes, according to the company, after which the plane safely landed.
The dual-fuselage Stratolaunch is designed to fly to an altitude of 35,000 feet, where it can drop rockets that ignite their engines and boost themselves into orbit around the planet. There is no rocket on this particular flight. But the company has already signed at least one customer, Northrop Grumman, which plans to use Stratolaunch to send its Pegasus XL rocket into space.
“It was an emotional moment for me, personally, to watch this majestic bird take flight,” said Stratolaunch CEO Jean Floyd. The aircraft performed as expected, reaching a maximum speed of 175 miles per hour and a peak altitude of 15,000 feet.
“The flight itself was smooth, which is exactly what you want a first flight to be,” said test pilot Evan Thomas. During the first phase of the flight, Stratolaunch tested the airplane’s handling qualities. “It flew very much like we had simulated and like we predicted,” he said. According to Stratolaunch, the plane’s systems “ran like a watch” and that the aircraft landed “on the mark” after a few low passes.
Today’s flight comes just three months after Stratolaunch laid off “more than 50” employeesand canceled efforts to develop its own rockets. Originally, the company had planned to build a whole suite of rockets, including a spaceplane. The change in plans was reportedly sparked by the death of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who started Stratolaunch in 2011.
Allen’s name came up frequently during today’s press call “Without a doubt, he would have been exceptionally proud to see his aircraft take flight,” said Floyd. “Even though he wasn’t there today, I did whisper a ‘thank you.’’
Stratolaunch did not take questions during the press call and made no mention of what comes next for the aircraft.
The road to today’s launch involved a number of incremental tests over the last few years, including the initial rollout and an engine test in 2017, and a number of taxis down the runway in Mojave at various speeds.
With reporting from Loren Grush
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Fox News
This bullet-scarred Bible ‘saved the life’ of a World War I soldier
By James Rogers
October 30, 2018
A Bible marked with bullet holes from a German machine gun helped save the life of a British World War I soldier, his daughter has explained.
The Bible belonged to Private Leslie Friston, a nurse with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Sky News reports. Blinded and suffering from respiratory problems following a gas attack in 1917, the then 23-year-old soldier was recovering in a makeshift hospital bed when a German plane machine-gunned the building. The bullets passed through the building’s tin roof and two hit his Bible, which was on Friston’s bedside table.
“He said the Bible saved his life as it took the brunt of the attack," said his daughter, Ena Thompson.
The Bible offers a glimpse into the war at a time when people across the globe are preparing to commemorate the end of the devastating conflict. November 11 marks the centenary of the Armistice agreement that brought the Great War to an end.
Friston survived the war and brought the Bible home with him, Sky News adds. The soldier regained his eyesight and ran a grocery store in southwest London, ultimately passing away in 1958 at the age of 64.
"He was incredibly lucky and I think he knew this as he kept the Bible with him for the rest of his life," Thompson added.
The soldier’s daughter was speaking as part of a fundraising appeal organized by military veterans’ organization The Royal British Legion. The annual Poppy Appeal supports the Armed Forces community.
Almost 1.7 million British troops were wounded during World War I and over 700,000 were killed, according to British War Office data. Around 6 million British troops were mobilized in the conflict. In total, the war resulted in the deaths of 13 million military personnel and left 21 million more wounded, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. World War I is among the deadliest wars in modern history.
Other soldiers’ Bibles have also been thrust into the spotlight in recent years. In 2016, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia purchased an extremely rare Bible from the Battle of Bunker Hill. The King James Bible, which is on display in the Museum, is inscribed by American soldier Francis Merrifield, who thanks God for sparing his life in the bloody 1775 battle.
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Until
next week...keep on believing.
Almondtree Productions
“He
is not here: for he is risen, as he said.”
(Matthew 28:6)