“There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”
(Matthew 24:2)
Not One Stone Upon Another

Dear Friends,

As we mentioned last week we are going to be reposting some of the essays of the past several years. This week we will begin with “The Coming Temple” on which the video, “The Coming Temple” was based.
One of the tragic consequences, that we did not bring out in either the essay or the video, is the false belief that the “Western Wall” is the last remaining wall of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. This would imply that Jesus' prediction in Matthew twenty-four is a false prophecy.

“And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to [him] for to shew him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” Matthew 24:1-2

If Matthew 24:1-2 is a false prophecy this would exclude any possibility of Jesus (Yeshua) being the messiah, not only of the gentiles but of the Jews as well. This puts a spiritual wall of seperation between the Jewish people and the possibility of salvation through their Jewish messiah, Yeshua.

Jesus said:

“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” John 14:6

Jesus said to the religious leaders of his day:

“But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in [yourselves,] neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.” Matthew 23:13

And Paul said:

“For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition [between us.” Ephesians 2:14

Next week we are hoping to post “Children Of Disobedience”.

***

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The Coming Temple

NY Times

Expect 2018 to Be More Sane? Sorry, It’s Not Going to Happen

Farhad Manjoo NY Times Jan. 3, 2018

Happy new year to you and yours, of course, but I’m going to have to put a halt to the festivities and play Frowning Farhad for a minute: You’re fooling yourself if you think 2018 is going to be any different, sanity- or anxiety-wise, from the roller coaster of the year just concluded.

Sure, as in any year, a lot of good things could happen in 2018, and perhaps lots of bad things will happen, too. (How’s that for a prediction?) But there is a deeper and more unsettling certainty about the ride upon which we’ve all just embarked: A lot of probably very crazy things will happen in 2018.

Get ready for even more events that don’t follow the rational course, and narratives that appear unmoored from the laws of politics, business and science. The background sensation of uncertainty that has pervaded much of the last two years isn’t going to abate. Just the opposite. Strap in.

Just a few years ago, there was a dawning sense that technology would give us a peek around the corner. Thanks to reams of information–sensors and surveillance everywhere, and computing capacity to make sense of it all–it looked as if we were entering a “Minority Report”-type world, where much of the future could be foretold in our numbers. Google could predict flu trends, election-stats nerds could predict political outcomes, and predictive policing algorithms were going to give us a handle on crime.

Yet what has happened is rather quite different. Instead of revealing unseen order and predictability in the world, technology has unleashed a cascade of forces that have made the world more volatile–and thus made the future hazier and more open to out-of-the-blue results.

Some of this isn’t news. In 2016 and 2017, the world began to appreciate how smartphones and social networks can upend what we once considered the natural order. Tech has helped undercut the power of incumbent institutions–governments, political parties, the media, the patriarchy–and it has created a new class of geopolitical actors whose presence and ricocheting power we’re all still getting used to: trolls, terrorists, conspiracy theorists, social-media activists, hackers and cyptocurrency bugs, among others.

These dynamics aided many of the biggest and most surprising stories in the last couple of years–Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the emergent resistance movement against him, the #MeToo avalanche, the decline of Uber, the rise of Bitcoin.

Yet even as a barrage of surprising stories plays out, many of us have yet to come to grips with the permanence of this chaos. People seem to have a latent, hopeful sense that things are going to calm down, that we’re on the cusp of a more normal news cycle. I suspect that’s wrong. Chaos is the new normal; the apprehension you feel every time you get a notification on your phone–the fear that you don’t know what fresh horror it could bring–isn’t an overreaction but an adaptation. Thanks to phones and Facebook, anything really could happen tomorrow.

“I will tell you that as someone who does this professionally, my job has become a lot harder in the last few years,” said Amy Webb, a futurist who runs the Future Today Institute, a firm that helps big companies think about the possibilities of tomorrow.

“There are just a lot more variables in play,” Ms. Webb said. “Think about how a single tweet from Donald Trump can have all these strange reverberations across the world. You can almost apply chaos theory to Donald Trump’s Twitter account.”

One of the touchstone ideas of chaos theory, which is the study of dynamic systems, is the “butterfly effect”–the idea that small changes in initial conditions can lead to huge differences in outcomes, like how a butterfly flapping its wings in Peru can cause a hurricane in Houston.

Nowadays, because we’re hyperconnected, we see butterfly effects everywhere. A single confessional blog post by Susan Fowler, a former employee of the ride-hailing company Uber, led to a swirling online campaign that eventually brought down Travis Kalanick, Uber’s once indomitable chief executive–an outcome that, as far as I can tell, not a single observer of Uber predicted would happen long before it did.

But it’s not just that one-off stories cause huge cascades; it’s that in a connected world, there are now so many one-off stories capable of setting off cascades, and no one knows which ones will hit.

Note how Mr. Trump was not brought down by the series of sexual harassment claims against him during the presidential campaign–and yet just a few months later, claims against a host of other powerful men spiraled into a culture-shaping movement that has upended many parts of the economy.

To continue the butterfly-effect analogy: “It used to be that there were a trillion butterflies each in their own weather system, but we have now connected all those butterflies into one planetary weather system–and you never know which one is going to have some kind of autocatalytic effect, and which one isn’t,” said Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation, an organization that aims to promote a long-term outlook on the world.

As if all that weren’t enough, there’s another complication to fold into the chaos: Technology isn’t stopping. The pace of technological change is in many cases too fast for anyone of us to comprehend or get used to; as a result, just as the world seems to get its head around one new force unleashed by tech, another comes along to discombobulate our efforts to respond to it.

For example, in the past year and a half, social networks have tried several ways to tamp down the misinformation flowing online. Their efforts have been fitful at best, but already they risk being outdated. Soon artificial intelligence and augmented reality software will make it trivially easy to create not just text-based misinformation but entirely fake audio and video, too.

Last year, researchers at the University of Washington used A.I. to scan through footage of Barack Obama speaking, giving them a way to put just about any words into the former president’s mouth.

In the run-up to the 2018 election, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks have vowed to take on the kinds of misinformation and trolling that ran amok in 2016. But what if social media is hit with a wave of explosive, realistic-looking viral videos whose authenticity can’t be confirmed? It’s highly unlikely that the social networks, the news media or the political class will know how to respond to such a situation.

Mr. Rose pointed out that in the long span of human history, periods of turbulence aren’t unusual; technological change often prompts social and political instability and unpredictability. What is unusual now is that many of us aren’t used to this sort of chaos.

“I’m 39, about to turn 40, and people like me who came of age in America in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we got used to a fairly predictable world,” said Nate Silver, the founder of the data-news site FiveThirtyEight, whose uncannily accurate forecast of the 2012 presidential election while at The New York Times set off wide interest in data-based journalistic predictions.

“So I do think people are now realizing the world is less predictable than we thought it was,” Mr. Silver said. “But in some ways that’s a return to normal.”

RELEVANT

“My personal feeling is the teachings of Christ are more relevant now than they’ve ever been.”

If you have even a surface-level knowledge of comedian, actor, writer and all- around provocateur Russell Brand, this is a shocking statement.

Though in recent years he’s become more and more vocal about social justice issues, for much of his career, Brand has been known for his uniquely raunchy brand of shock comedy (This is the guy who once brought his drug dealer to work with him when he was an MTV VJ.).

He continues: “When stripped of the cultural inflection of the time when it was first written and is variously being translated, there is an undeniable truth.”

Yes, Russell Brand, that Russell Brand, believes the world needs Jesus’ message now more than ever. It’s something he thinks a lot about.

Brand feels the world is profoundly broken. Technology, pop culture and social media have accelerated the worst impulses of human nature, and, in his view, never has there been a time in history that humanity has more desperately needed the message of Jesus.

“There’s a famous quote: ‘Every man who knocks on a brothel door, he’s looking for God,’” he says. “Crack houses and these dens of suffering and illicit activity, they’re all people trying to feel good, trying to feel connected. People are trying to escape. People are trying to get out of their own heads. To me, this is a spiritual impetus.”

This is at the core of why he believes the message of Jesus Christ is so important right now: Humanity is (metaphorically), knocking on a brothel door, in that they are looking for fulfillment in things that will only leave them empty. And because instant, but quickly fleeting, gratification is always at our fingertips—Amazon Prime, Instagram likes, pornography, text messages and other modern trappings—we have become addicted.

And addiction is something Brand knows a lot about.

In his new book, Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions, Brand not only further delves into his own struggles with addictions to drugs, sex, alcohol, food and fame, but also how he’s found a pathway to healing.

Recently, this journey has taken a surprising turn.

Brand now feels the answer to breaking out of this vicious cycle—not just as an individual struggling to get clean from drugs, but as a culture—is a spiritual one. It’s one he thinks can be found in Jesus.

A CHARACTER WE ALL KNOW

For many Americans, their first introduction to the comedy stylings of Russell Brand was the 2008 hit comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. In the film—and subsequent spinoff Get Him to the Greek—Brand plays a famous, constantly philosophizing British rock star known for dating a famous American celebrity and going sober after years of drug-fueled antics. In other words, there’s a lot of similarities to the real-life Brand, who was famously married to pop star Katy Perry for about two years in 2009.

But before becoming an American movie star, Brand was a well-known celebrity in the U.K., famous for his controversial stand-up comedy, being an MTV VJ, serving as the host of the reality show Big Brother’s Big Mouth, hosting his own radio and TV talk shows and acting in various popular series.

He was also known for struggling with drug addiction, often in extremely public fashion. He’d become a fixture of British tabloids, and in his darkest moments, would even cut himself.

In the years since Brand has gotten clean, he has written openly about his troubled upbringing and becoming addicted to alcohol, hard drugs and sex. Fifteen years ago, he decided something in his life needed to change.

Already having been arrested a dozen times for drug-related incidents, Brand was caught shooting up heroin in the bathroom during an office Christmas party by his agent, who knew that Brand’s life was now legitimately at risk.

After an intervention orchestrated by his agent, Brand embraced recovery—not just as a means of getting clean, but as a way of seeing the world. The experience radically changed him, and he’s since become an advocate for what’s known as the 12-step program, an addiction recovery method based largely on Christian principles that is centered on a reliance on a higher power, self-reflection and forgiveness.

The program transformed Brand’s life. And in the years since he discovered it, Brand began to see everything through the lens of the 12 steps.

“I’ve been in recovery from drugs and alcohol for 14 and a half years,” he explains. “The longer I’ve been clean from drugs and alcohol, the more I’ve noticed that [our] own addiction—and perhaps addiction in general—is affecting our behavior in ways that we wouldn’t previously have assumed.”

A SOBER VIEW OF THINGS

The 12-step program takes time, because ultimately, it isn’t about changing behavior, it’s about changing oneself. The first three steps are based on the ability to recognize the depths of our own circumstances and to begin to understand how we can free ourselves from them.

“We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable,” as he paraphrases the 12-steps in the book. “We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” Brand explains the steps in more modern—more profane—terms, essentially, getting “unfed up.”

The program caused him to think about the powerlessness people have over their addictions if they refuse to recognize the depths of their own brokenness—even if the addictions aren’t drugs or substances.

“Everything we do can be colored by this unconscious belief that we can make ourselves feel better with external stuff, be it behavior or chemicals,” he says. “So what I’ve kind of come across mentally is that either we are working an unconscious program or a conscious program. So if we’re not consciously running a program, we’re running on the unconscious program of our past and of our culture. That’s what I wanted to understand an alternative to.”

Essentially, Brand believes that instant-gratification culture has led to a culture of addicts, and the 12 steps—which include things like “humbly [asking] God to remove our shortcomings,” “making a list of all persons we had harmed and [being] willing to make amends to them all” and “… [seeking] to improve our conscious contact with God as we [have] understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out—can help free people.”

However, when he was first introduced to the program—by an atheist, ironically—he had one problem: all of the religious talk.

He was known as a bohemian cultural figure with a taste for dirty jokes, and the whole “God” thing didn’t seem natural. So, instead of becoming traditionally “religious,” he changed how he thought about religion.

“My understanding of what religion means altered,” he explains. “Because when I think about the aim, the purpose of religion, I think it becomes—when you put aside the social institutions that spring up around religions in all their strains and various forms of strands—I believe that the purpose of religion is love and connection, to feel connected to one another and to feel at ease with who we are … a kind of oneness, a kind of wholeness. So, as I began to understand that, this sort of superficial language of religion seemed less relevant.”

It took a while, but after stripping away the “superficial language of religion,” Brand decided to connect with the higher power at the root of the 12 steps. Brand became fascinated with spirituality as a way of escaping the pull of physical vices, and his struggles with addiction—and their root causes—framed his way of viewing faith.

“My route to spirituality comes through addiction, so it comes from desperation and fear and this sort of defeat, destruction, annihilation of self in a very humiliating way, I suppose,” he explains. “So, I had no choice but to embrace spiritual life, but now I am grateful for this. It makes sense of my life.”

Brand realized that cultivating a spiritual life could help free himself from the strongholds of addictions by treating the root causes of the pain he’d attempted to dull with drugs. And being raised in the U.K.—a traditionally Christian country—he turned to the Christianity. He began implementing spiritual practices every day.

“Because I come from a Christian culture, a lot of the language of prayer that I use is Christian,” he explains. “I say the Lord’s Prayer every day. I try to connect to what those words mean. I connect to what the Father means. I connect to what wholeness means to me. I think about the relationship between forgiveness and being forgiven and the impossibility of redemption until you are willing to forgive and let go.”

The practice of embracing spirituality, prayer and digging into the teachings of Christ has helped keep him on the path to personal recovery. But while discovering his own unique spiritual path, he also uncovered a message that could be the key to transforming culture.

RECOVERING THE WORLD

Brand says reciting the Lord’s Prayer made him start thinking about what Jesus really meant by the words. One phrase in particular began to jump out at him: “Thy kingdom come … on Earth as it is in Heaven.” What does that idea mean for a world crippled by addiction to superficial fulfillment?

“I think continually about what Christ meant by the afterlife,” he explains. “And for me, it’s that when you are disavowed of the illusion that the material will fulfill you, you enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the Earth.”

He references Jesus’ command to the rich young ruler in Matthew 19 who asks, “What good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” Brand says, referencing Christ’s response, “Give away all your possessions and follow me—that’s a pretty radical thing.”

Brand says the reason why this idea is so radical is because it strikes at the core of the values so many people secretly hold: that money and materialism can cure our unhappiness. “I think the reason that the economic arguments Christ offered are not promoted is because they are deeply at odds with the way we live,” he explains.

Instead of focusing on unhealthy patterns centered on self-fulfillment, the message of the Gospel offers an alternative: caring for others and helping those in need.

“I’ve seen in many formats now—because I’ve played out the same pattern many times—the attachment to physical things, physical behaviors or people, will never make me happy,” he explains. “But service of others and values that are certainly found in Christianity will make me feel peace or make me feel happy. It’s a lesson that’s very hard to learn.”

The reason he says the lesson is hard to learn is because even when people are free from drugs and alcohol, there’s always the pull of a society focused on self-gratification instead of selflessness. That struggle—consistently questioning our attachment to material things instead of eternal ones—is the tension of a journey to actual recovery.

“I question what would happen,” he says. “‘Russell, if you had the strength of character to give up everything and just live in the service of love? Would you?’ I sort of rationalize why I don’t do that. I don’t have to. I can’t. I’ve got a wife and a child and live in a capitalistic society and would just be vulnerable and exposed and torn up by reality. But no, of course, the spiritual perspective is, ‘No, you would be carried there by grace.’”

Brand frequently interjects that he’s “not a theologian,” and, at times, has trouble remembering specific Scripture references or using typical “Christian” language. But after studying religions and writings from across the philosophical spectrum, the teachings of Jesus have helped him understand modern cultural addictions—and how to free ourselves from them—in much deeper ways.

One of these ways is, in his words, seeking “Christ consciousness”—a concept that Paul refers to as, and many Christians would call, achieving “the mind of Christ.” Essentially, becoming more Christ-like ourselves.

“If Christ consciousness is not accessible to us, then what is the point of the story of Jesus, you know?” he asks rhetorically. “He’s just a sort of a scriptural rock star, just an icon. Unless Christ is right here, right now, in your heart, in your consciousness, then what is Christ?”

To Brand, this is key to not only changing a person struggling with addictions, but also to recovering a culture. It must be a spiritual change; a change of values.

“I do think a spiritual and transcendent change is required for people to be free from addiction,” he says. “And by spiritual change, I mean the transition from one’s life being predicated on self-fulfillment to a life predicated on service, which for me is a moment-to-moment struggle.”

Fifteen years ago, Brand embraced sobriety and started a journey to learn about why he sought relief through drugs, sex, alcohol and fame. Today, he sees a world that suffers from the same addictions on a cultural level.

And after exploring faith, the teachings of Jesus have led to a revelation: The Kingdom of God can be ushered in on Earth, but only if we free ourselves from all of the trappings that distract us from it—the same ones Jesus Himself warned us about.

For Brand, attempting to do that is what recovery is all about. It may seem like a difficult task, but perhaps his most profound revelation is that it is not something that should be attempted alone. A higher power is here to help.

When asked about taking the first step to recovery, Brand, a man who has thought about recovery every day for more than a decade, offers this advice for those wanting to get clean spiritually and physically: “Admit you have a problem. Believe it’s possible to change, and ask Him for help. Invite Him in … Capital H’s, of course.”

Of course.

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RABBI DANIEL LAPIN

A Rabbi’s Warning to Christians

December 28, 2017

I am certainly not a Winston Churchill. I am not even a Jean Francois Revel. I am having enough trouble just trying to be a Lapin. But I am issuing a very serious warning about a problem with deep consequences, just as they did. It is a warning about the earliest stages of what could become a cataract of disasters if not resisted now.

During the 1930s, Winston Churchill desperately tried to persuade the English people and their government to see that Hitler meant to end their way of life. The British ignored Churchill, which gave Hitler nearly 10 years to build up his military forces. It wasn’t until Hitler actually drew blood that the British realized they had a war on their hands. It turned out to be a far longer and more destructive war than it needed to be had Churchill’s early warning been heeded.

In 1983, a brave French writer, Jean-Francois Revel, wrote a book called How Democracies Perish. In this remarkable volume, he described how communism’s aim is world conquest. For decades he had been trying to warn of communism’s very real threat. Yet in January 1982, a high State Department official said: “We Americans are not solving problems, we are the problem.” (Some things never change.) A good portion of the planet fell to communism, which brought misery and death to millions because we failed to recognize in time that others meant to harm us.

Heaven knows there was enough warning during the 1980s of the intention of part of the Islamic world to take yet another crack at world domination. Yet instead of seeing each deadly assault on our interests around the world as a test of our resolve, we ignored it. We failed the test and lost 3,000 Americans in two unforgettable hours.

I am not going to argue that what is happening now is on the same scale as the examples I cite above, but a serious war is being waged against a group of Americans. I am certain that if we lose this war, the consequences for American civilization will be dire.

Phase one of this war I describe is a propaganda blitzkrieg that is eerily reminiscent of how effectively the Goebbels propaganda machine softened up the German people for what was to come.

There is no better term than propaganda blitzkrieg to describe what has been unleashed against Christian conservatives recently.

Consider the long list of anti-Christian books that have been published in the past few years. Here are just a few samples of more than 50 similar titles, all from mainstream publishers:

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Piety & Politics: The Right-wing Assault on Religious Freedom

Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism

Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America

Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right

What is truly alarming is that there are more of these books for sale at your local large book store warning against the perils of fervent Christianity than those warning against the perils of fervent Islam. Does anyone seriously think America is more seriously jeopardized by Christian conservatives than by Islamic zealots? I fear that many Americans believe just that in the same way that many pre-World War II Western intellectuals considered Churchill a bigger threat to peace than Hitler.

Some may say that today’s proliferation of anti-Christian print propaganda is nothing to become worried about. To them I ask two questions:

First, would you be so sanguine if the target of this loathsome library were Blacks or Jews? Just try changing the titles in some of the books I mention above to reflect racism or anti-Semitism instead of rampant anti-Christianism and you’ll see what I mean.

Second, major movements that changed the way Americans felt and acted came about through books, often only one book. Think of Rachel Carson’s 1962 error-filled Silent Springthat resulted in the pointless banning of the insecticide DDT and many unnecessary deaths. Other books that caused upheavals in our nation were Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, many of Ayn Rand’s books and of course Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

No, I would advise you not to underestimate the power of books to alter the behavior of the American public, and I fear for an America that has been influenced to detest Christianity by this hate-filled catalog.

It is not just books but popular entertainment also that beams the most lurid anti-Christian propaganda into the hearts and minds of viewers. One need only think of who the real targets of the comedic movie Borat are. The brilliant Jewish moviemaker Sacha Baron Cohen, as his title character, using borderline dishonest wiles, lures some innocent but unsophisticated country folk, obviously Christians, to join him in his outrageously anti-Semitic antics. Cohen then triumphantly claims to have exposed anti-Semitism. In fact, he has revealed nothing other than the latent anti-Christianism of America’s social, economic and academic secular elites. Many other movies and television productions echo this shameless anti-Christian bigotry in the name of entertainment. Interestingly enough, their courage attacking Christian beliefs is never displayed by similarly irreverent and insulting assaults on Islam.

Even the recent PBS documentary, “Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence,” managed to do more attacking Christianity than defending Judaism.

Richard Dawkins, an Oxford University professor, is one of the generals in the anti-Christian army of the secular left. American academia treats him with reverence and hangs on his every word when he insists that “religious myths ought not to be tolerated.”

For those with a slightly more tolerant outlook, he asks, “It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children?” He suggests that the state should intervene to protect children from their parents’ religious beliefs. Needless to say, he means Christian beliefs, of course. Muslim beliefs add to England’s charmingly diverse cultural landscape.

The war is against those who regard the Bible to be God’s revelation to humanity and the Ten Commandments to be His set of rules for all time. Phase one in this war is to make Christianity, well, sort of socially unacceptable. Something only foolish, poor and ugly people could turn to.

We have seen how a carefully constructed campaign pretty much made it socially unacceptable to drink and drive. For years, there had been stringent laws against drunk driving. They achieved little. In the end, the practice was all but eliminated by groups allied with Mothers Against Drunk Driving and their effective ways of changing the way Americans thought about it.

We have seen how a carefully constructed campaign has pretty much made it socially unacceptable to smoke. In the face of a relentless campaign (dare one call it propaganda?), Americans became docile and forfeited the right to make their own decisions. Nobody was willing to stand up to the no-smoking tyrants. Nobody even asked whether health was sufficient grounds for freedom to be reduced. Now, entire cities and even states have banned smoking, not only in public places but even in privately owned restaurants.

Tyranny comes when citizens are seduced into trading freedom for the promise of safety and security.

Considerably more intellectual energy is being pumped into the propaganda campaign against Christianity than was ever delivered to the anti-smoking or anti-drunk-driving campaigns. Fervent zealots of secularism are flinging themselves into this anti-Christian war with enormous fanaticism.

If they succeed, Christianity will be driven underground, and its benign influence on the character of America will be lost. In its place we shall see a sinister secularism that menaces Bible believers of all faiths. Once the voice of the Bible has been silenced, the war on Western Civilization can begin and we shall see a long night of barbarism descend on the West.

Without a vibrant and vital Christianity, America is doomed, and without America, the West is doomed.

Which is why I, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, devoted to Jewish survival, the Torah and Israel am so terrified of American Christianity caving in.

Many of us Jews are ready to stand with you. But you must lead. You must replace your timidity with nerve and your diffidence with daring and determination. You are under attack. Now is the time to resist it. Defense will be far harder down the road if we ignore the danger signals now.

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BBC

Israel: African migrants told to leave or face imprisonment

January 2, 2018

The migrants claim they are seeking asylum from persecution, although Israel views them as economic migrants

The Israeli government has issued a notice for thousands of African migrants to leave the country or face imprisonment.

The migrants will be given up to $3,500 (£2,600) for leaving within the next 90 days.

They will be given the option of going to their home country or third countries.

If they do not leave, the Israeli authorities have threatened that they will start jailing them from April.

The Israeli government says their return will be humane and "voluntary".

The order exempts children, elderly people, and victims of slavery and human trafficking.

A spokesperson for Israel's Population and Immigration Authority told the BBC there were currently 38,000 "infiltrators" in Israel, of whom just 1,420 were being held in detention facilities.

Israel uses the term "infiltrators" to describe people who did not enter the country through an official border crossing.

Many of the migrants - who are mostly from Eritrea and Sudan - say they came to Israel to seek asylum after fleeing persecution and conflict, but the authorities regard them as economic migrants.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that an unchecked influx of African migrants could threaten Israel's Jewish character.

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BREAKINGISRAELNEWS

Double Wonder: Hanukkah Miracle Recreated and Temple Incense Burned for First Time in 2,000 Years
ByAdam Eliyahu Berkowitz

December 21, 2017

“Take my prayer as an offering of incense, my upraised hands as an evening sacrifice.” Psalms 141:2 (The Israel Bible™)

Kohanim lighting the menorah and the incense in a Temple reenactment (Phtot courtesy Mordechai Persoff)
A scene straight from the Temple of Solomon was recreated on Tuesday evening when Kohanim lit the menorah, but even more wondrous than this sight was the fragrance that accompanied the event: for the first time in 2,000 years, incense was burned in the Biblically prescribed manner.

The Temple reenactment took place in the Gan Tekuma park adjacent to the Jewish Quarter inside of Jerusalem’s old city walls at 5:00 PM, just after sunset. The Kohanim (Jewish men of priestly descent) were dressed in priestly garments as described in the Bible.

A Hanukkah miracle was recreated on Tuesday night. The lighting of the Hanukkah menorah for eight days is based on the story of how, after defeating the Romans, the Maccabees conducted an exhaustive search of the Temple to find oil with which to begin lighting the Temple Menorah. They eventually found a single jug of oil, its purity ensured by the unbroken seal of the High Priest on its lid.

To replicate this aspect of the Temple described in the Hanukkah story, a special jug was made to hold the menorah oil. It was marked with a seal that had been created with the name of Rabbi Baruch Kahane, who has been educating other priests and acting in the role of the High Priest in many of the Temple reenactments.

This Temple reenactment was marked by a special event: for the first time ever, the Kohanim recreated the burning of the incense on the small golden altar as it was performed in the Temple.

“He shall put the incense on the fire before Hashem, so that the cloud from the incense screens the cover that is over [the Aron of] the Pact, lest he die.” Leviticus 16:13

The incense was prepared with one of the eleven Biblically mandated ingredients missing since it is forbidden to burn the actual incense outside of the Temple. Mordechai Persoff, head of Midrasha L’Ad Hamikdash and one of the organizers of the event, described the fragrance.

“The smell was very nice, something I have never before experienced,” Persoff told Breaking Israel News, quoting the Prophet Ezekiel who linked the incense with the return of the Jews to Israel.

“When I bring you out from the peoples and gather you from the lands in which you are scattered, I will accept you as a pleasing odor; and I will be sanctified through you in the sight of the nations.” Ezekiel 20:41

“The smell was sweet and pleasant, but the most surprising thing about the incense was the quantity of smoke it produced,” Persoff said. “The event was outdoors, so the smoke dissipated rather quickly. But when it was burned inside the Temple, it must have entirely filled the building.”

Only about one hundred spectators attended the event due to minimal advance advertising. Rabbi Hillel Weiss, the spokesman for the nascent Sanhedrin and one of the organizers of the event, was nonplussed by the small turnout.

“These reenactments are essential if the Third Temple is to be built,” Rabbi Weiss told Breaking Israel News. “Every time we perform these mitzvot (Torah commandments) we learn something new and practical about how they are done.”

‘Also, there is so much interest from people who were not able to attend, Israelis and from overseas,” Rabbi Weiss added. “This spiritual awakening is necessary for the Temple to be a House of Prayer for All Nations.”

The proceedings were led by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, founder of the Temple Institute and a member of the nascent Sanhedrin.

The event was the product of a long process. Last month, olive oil was prepared in the Biblically prescribed manner.

“Command B’nei Yisrael to bring you clear oil of beaten olives for lighting, for kindling lamps regularly.” Leviticus 24:2

Each olive was smashed with a hammer and placed in a basket and hung for several days to allow the oil to drip out. This also required implementing measures to ensure ritual purity as well.

Also, as part of the ongoing effort to bring the Third Temple, experts met at Bar Ilan University last month to perform an in-depth practical study of the Temple Oil, investigating which olives were best, which methods conformed to Jewish law, and many other aspects necessary to recreate this aspect of the Temple service.

***

WND

U.N. BRINGS BACK IMAGE OF 3RD PAGAN GOD

Restoration of goddess of 'extra-marital relations' follows images of Athena, arch of Baal

BOB UNRUH

January 3, 2018

Experts in Israel are expressing concern that the United Nations’ goal is warping toward the promotion of idolatry after word was released that the organization is playing a key role in the image of a third pagan god – the goddess of “extra-marital relations.”

Then it was the re-creation of a statue of the goddess Athena which once stood in Palmyra.

U.N. officials, and funding, have been insiders on each of those projects.

Joe Kovacs, author of “Shocked By The Bible 2,” says the whole sad spectacle is part of an old story.

“The promotion of pagan gods is certainly nothing new, and it again shows we’re all living in what I call ‘Opposite World,'” he explained. “It’s a world where most people do the very opposite action of what God has instructed. Our Creator tells us to have no other gods but Him, but folks do the opposite, honoring false gods.

“The Bible says Solomon, one of the wisest men who ever lived, built shrines to pagan gods such as Molech, a pagan god to whom people would burn their children alive in fires. It’s just sickening. Even God-fearing Christians today don’t realize they’re doing the very opposite of God’s instructions when they decorate trees with silver and gold and stand them up in their homes and churches every December. God personally says in the tenth chapter of Jeremiah not to do that precise heathen custom, and yet people have been tricked into decorating trees with all sorts of silver tinsel, gold garland and hanging ornaments, and they have no scriptural basis for it. For those interested in eternal life, we need to wake up and start obeying the instructions of our Maker, and stop all this pagan worthlessness.”
Temple of Baal, Palmyra, Syria, prior to its destruction by ISIS

Now Breaking Israel News confirms a third project is nearing completion, and it again has a theme of pagan gods, a point that has experts concerned.

BIN reported, “A UNESCO-funded project reproduced a statue of a lion, the third project of its kind the organization has supported, leading at least one rabbi to conclude that the real goal of the political organization is to promote an agenda that has always stood as Israel’s nemesis: idolatry.”

The report explains the third project is the Lion of al-Lat, an 11-foot-tall statue that was in the temple of “pre-Islamic goddess al-Lat in Palmyra, Syria,” which was damaged by ISIS.

The 15-ton statue later was moved to the National Museum of Damascus for reconstruction.

The report explains, “Part of the reconstruction of the lion statue was performed using high-intensity laser projection equipment adapted for large-scale 3-D printing in stone by the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) in Oxford. Much of the Lion project was underwritten by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) through its Heritage Emergency Fund and by the European Union.”

There are several trains of thought regarding al-Lat.

“It has been conjectured that al-Lat was the pre-Islamic consort of the Arabian god Allah. Another theory is that al-Lat was used as a title for the goddesses Asherah and Athirat. It is believed al-Lat was the continuation of the earlier Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar Inanna; the goddess of sex and, in particular, extra-marital relations,” BIN said.

Rabbi Daniel Assur, of the Sanhedrin, which recently was reassembled in Israel, told BIN of the alarming sequence of events.

“The entire mission of the organization is to blur the differences between the nations in order to bring them all under one roof and one authority in a New World Order,” he said. “The truth is, as the Bible says, there are 70 distinct nations. The U.N. believes they can create nations out of thin air. Once they do that, they can say that there are many gods, even ones you can create by 3-D printing.”

He pointed out the U.N.’s long-standing and dominant anti-Israel bias. After all, it has voted to condemn the state of Israel more than all of the human rights offenders around the globe combined.

“Because Israel stands as proof of what a nation is and the concept of one God, the U.N. has a vendetta against Israel and is irrationally biased against us,” Rabbi Assur explained to BIN.

“They have a messianic vision of a unified government that will fix the world without God and without the Torah. This has always been the goal of idolatry, beginning with Egypt and continuing with the attempts of Rome and Greece to spread paganism across the world. Now we are seeing its modern manifestation.”

He warned, “The New World Order promotes that everything is one, genders are all the same, there are no borders between nations. They believe everything is one, except God.”

It was in December when it was learned the United Arab Emirates, the Italian mission to the United Nations and the Institute for Digital Archeology had re-created a statue of Athena.

She was also known as “Athena Promachos,” a war goddess, and the re-created statue features her holding a spear. The exhibit, titled “The Spirit In the Stone,” was being hosted at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

The globalist organizations earlier honored the reconstructed “Arch of Baal,” which was taken on a world tour, including being placed outside the G7 meeting of the world’s industrialized nations.

“Most people today don’t realize how much of a hold ancient pagan beliefs, practices and images still have on their lives,” said Joseph Farah, author of “The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians and the End of the Age.” “In fact, pagan values and traditions have never left us. Even Jews and Christians are impacted by them. And they are not innocent because the gods of paganism are actually demons, according to the Bible. It’s not something to be played with.

“The question confronting us right now is: Why would the United Nations be involved in resurrecting these occult images and icons of the past? Do they not understand what this represents – the false gods of child sacrifice and all kinds of abominations and perversions?”

Messianic rabbi Jonathan Cahn, best known for his New York Times bestseller “The Harbinger,”earlier explained he believes this strange revival in the promotion of pagan gods has deep theological significance.

He noted Athena was associated with the Semitic mother goddess Asherah, whose shrines God commands to be destroyed in Deuteronomy 12. Cahn also claimed the goddess was sometimes merged with Ashtoreth, the consort of Baal in some traditions. Thus, there is a relationship between the new statue being displayed at the U.N. and the sinister arch which was displayed all over the world

“The reappearance of the gods is an amazing phenomenon,” he said. “Not long ago, the image of the Hindu god of destruction, Kali, appeared on the Empire State building. Then the Arch of the Temple of the god Baal was built in New York City. Recently, a massive idol of the god Shiva was displayed on the Washington Mall along with that of a seven-headed dragon. And now the idol of Athena appears in the United Nations.

“The mystery of ‘The Paradigm’ and ‘The Harbinger’ is that what transpired in the last days of ancient Israel before its judgment is now manifesting before our eyes. We are replaying an ancient judgment cycle. One of the manifestations that took place in ancient Israel before its destruction was the appearance throughout the land of the gods, their idols, their altars, their images. That the images of the gods are now manifesting throughout America is an ominous sign. We are replaying the judgment drama.

“When Israel turned away from God, it turned to false gods and idols. So when a nation that has once known God turns away from Him, it always turns to other gods. It may not call them gods or idols, but the reality is the same. America was founded on the word of God. And inasmuch as it followed the ways of God, it has been blessed above any other nation in the modern world. But inasmuch as it has turned from its God and His ways, it has turned to other gods and idols. And unless it turns back, unless it sees revival, it will progress to judgment.”

WND also recently reported that an event called the Catharsis on the Mall featured elements of devil worship on the National Mall in Washington.

There appeared representations of “Lord Shiva Natarja,” a Hindu god appearing as a dragon and representing Satan.

***

PRESSTV

Chelsea Clinton denies ties to Satanism

January 4, 2017

Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former US President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, has denied her ties to Satanism, after congratulating a satanic organization on the New Year.

“Oh goodness gracious. We can be civil, cheerful, respectful to & friends with people who don’t share our religious beliefs. Sometimes, we even marry them. I’m a Methodist & my husband is Jewish,” she tweeted Wednesday, in an attempt to quash the rumors following her bizarre conversation with the so-called Church of Satan a day earlier.

The unexpected exchange started when Clinton and actor Christine Teigen were in the middle of a discussion about a seemingly fake twitter account that posted foul tweets on behalf of the famous restaurant chain Hooters.

“In 2017, Church of Satan & I were put on a few threads together. In 2018, it’s...@Hooters. What a time to be alive Chrissy!” Clinton wrote.

The Satanist organization, which claims it has “defined Satanism,” picked up the tweet and responded by saying, “The never ending excitement here is never ending.”

“It’s been so long! Happy New Year!” Clinton said in a new tweet addressed to the Church of Satan. The organization responded in kind, wishing the former first daughter “a great 2018!”

The exchange set the social media on fire, prompting Chelsea to issue a statement and defend her move.

Last year, amid debates over confederate statues in the US, Canadian author Mark Steyn blasted Chelsea Clinton for comparing keeping statues erected of Confederates and slaveowners to a Christian church featuring a Lucifer statue.

"If the Confederacy is Satanic, the Church of Satan is the Democratic Party," Steyn fired back.

Allegations about the Clinton family’s ties to Satanism have been around for some time now.

President Donald Trump’s supporters made similar claims against Hillary Clinton during the buildup to the 2016 presidential face-off between the two candidates.

***

SPUTNIK

Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps: Riot of Year Failed

03.01.2018

TEHRAN (Sputnik) - Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari announced on Wednesday that the riot of the year was over without any success for protesters.

"I announce that the riot of 1396 [year according to Iranian calendar] has failed… The number of protesters was small and it did not exceed 15,000 people across Iran," Jafari said as quoted by the IRGC information portal.

Jafari also accused Washington, Tel Aviv and Riyadh of ordering militants of the Daesh terrorist group (outlawed in Russia) to penetrate into Iranian territory "with the aim of subversion."

This position echoes Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's statement made on January 1, in which he stated that the unrest had been provoked by a mix of existing internal problems and foreign influence.

Jafari's statement was made in wake of US President Donald Trump's promise of Washington's support "at the appropriate time" for Iranians protesting against President Hassan Rouhani's government, made earlier in the day.

The anti-government protests, the largest in nearly a decade and praised by some leaders, have been raging in Iran since December 28, as a response to a surge in fuel and food prices, as well as high rates of unemployment, inflation and air pollution. Several major cities in Iran, including Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, and Rasht, have been hit with protests.

The social unrest has thus far claimed the lives of at least 20 people and resulted in 450 people being detained.

NEWSTARGET

Science madness unleashed as scientists create chimera embryos that are part animal and part human

Friday, June 03, 2016 by Greg White

A small group of scientists across the United States are attempting to create embryos that are part human and part animal, otherwise known as chimeras.

Chimera is a term for a mythical Greek creature consisting of part lion, part goat and part snake. In modern times, the term has been used to describe a single organism composed of cells from different zygotes.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) cut funding for this type of research, at least temporarily, last September. NIH officials said they need to review the science and ethical implications behind this technology before moving forward.

Mixing species

The experiments involve inserting human stem cells into burgeoning embryos from other species, thereby spawning chimeras. In actuality, researchers have been creating human chimeras, at least in part, for years. For instance, scientists already study rats with human tumors to better understand cancer.

What makes the recent research unique is that it would involve in the insertion of human stem cells into the embryos of non-human animals during the early stages of embryonic development.

“The special issue here with stem cells is that those types of human cells are so powerful and so elastic that there’s great worry about the degree to which the animals could become humanized,” explained Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University, in an article for NPR.

The motivation behind the research is to produce chimeras that could pave way for new treatment options for human diseases. For instance, scientists could use the technology to develop more efficient animal models while studying diseases in a lab.

Ethical considerations

Nevertheless, embryonic chimeras are a contentious issue, which provoke a host of biological and moral concerns. According to Francoise Baylis, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, creating creatures that are part human and part animal is wrong because it, “would introduce inexorable moral confusion in our existing relationships with nonhuman animals, and in our future relationships with part-human hybrids and chimeras.”

The reason that chimeras are such a controversial topic is because we treat humans differently than we treat nonhuman animals. Although we too are part of the web of nature and ought to act accordingly, what makes humans unique is that we are moral agents. Whenever a lion catches and eats a gazelle, it doesn’t murder the gazelle, it kills the gazelle. By creating creatures that are part human and part nonhuman, however, the moral dividing line between the two species is blurred.

Another issue with chimeras is that human cells could wind up in the brains of animals. The chimeras could become too human-like, possibly possessing human mental capabilities. Although the likelihood of an animal acquiring consciousness on par with people is low, it is a possibility that cannot be swept under the rug.

“We are not near the island of Dr. Moreau, but science moves fast,” NIH ethicist David Resnik said at a meeting in Maryland. “The specter of an intelligent mouse stuck in a laboratory somewhere screaming, ‘I want to get out’ would be very troubling to people,” he added.

Sources include:

NPR.org
TechnologyReview.com
NPR.org
TheNode.com
NCRegister.com
Science.NaturalNews.com

(“The sons of men in those days took from the cattle of the earth, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and taught the mixture of animals of one species with the other, in order therewith to provoke the Lord; and God saw the whole earth and it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon earth, all men and all animals.” Jashur 4:18)

We were asked to give our reaction to the above video. Following is our response.

We've been following this and actually put part of this video up on People of the Keys awhile back.

I am sure you remember when David broached this subject years ago when he talked about how delicate electronic equipment can be subject to demon possession.

We have also published articles which indicated the NSA was behind the development of writing the code involved with the creation of Bitcoin.

It has also been noted many times over the years that what the public knows concerning technology is fifty years behind what has actually been developed by dark science carried out by organizations such as DARPA.

You have probably seen the 1988 story by "The Economist" stating that in thirty years time, 2018, there would be a new crypto currency called the "Phoenix" which would rise from the ashes of a global currency collapse.

There has to be more to Hanson Robotics then meets the eye. We don't believe a private company could develop a project like Sophia without backing from deep state operatives and a Satanic influence. You can visualize A.I. research and development working together with CERN research and development plus the myriad or other such as organizations, i.e. transhumanism, genome editing research, project blue beam, etc. will bring about the image of the beast.

We are reminded of what we read about the research and development of the atomic bomb in the early 1940's. There were many sub groups of scientists, if memory serves us correctly, over one hundred, and only a very very few individuals knew that the projected outcome was to produce a nuclear bomb. If we remember correctly even Albert Einstein said if he knew what he was working in aid of he would have become a plumber.

In fact Robert Oppenheimer, who has been credited with overseeing the development of the atomic bomb project, is quoted as saying at the first detonation of an atomic bomb: "“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." It is, perhaps, the most well-known line from the Bhagavad-Gita." This, as you know is a reference to the Hindu god Shiva the destroyer. Shiva is of course, as most know, the God that stands outside CERN headquarters located near Geneva Switzerland.

Things are now moving at an incredible speed. As the old saying goes, "it won't be long now".

It is of course very obvious how this could help fulfill Revelation 13.

God bless and keep us all,

Robert

"And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast...the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy."

Zero Hedge

"Everyone Is Affected": Why The Implications Of The Intel "Bug" Are Staggering

by Tyler Durden

01.04.2018

Earlier today, we reported that according to a press reports, Intel's computer chips were affected by a bug that makes them vulnerable to hacking. Specifically, The Register said the bug lets some software gain access to parts of a computer’s memory that are set aside to protect things like passwords, and making matters worse, all computers with Intel chips from the past 10 years appear to be affected. The news, which sent Intel's stock tumbling, was later confirmed by the company.

In a statement issued on Monday afternoon, Intel said it was working with chipmakers including Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and ARM Holdings, and operating system makers to develop an industrywide approach to resolving the issue that may affect a wide variety of products, adding that it has begun providing software to help mitigate the potential exploits. Computer slowdowns depend on the task being performed and for the average user “should not be significant and will be mitigated over time" the company promised despite much skepticism to the contrary.

As Bloomberg helpfully puts it, Intel's microprocessors "are the fundamental building block of the internet, corporate networks and PCs" and while Intel has added to its designs over the years trying to make computers less vulnerable to attack, arguing that hardware security is typically tougher to crack than software, there now appears to be a fundamental flaw in the design.

In a vain attempt to mitigate the damage, Intel claimed that the “flaw” was not unique to its products.

“Intel and other technology companies have been made aware of new security research describing software analysis methods that, when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed,” the Santa Clara, California-based company said. “Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data.”

The extent of the vulnerability is huge

As Bloomberg writes, "the vulnerability may have consequences beyond just computers, and is not the result of a design or testing error." Here's how the bug "works":

All modern microprocessors, including those that run smartphones, are built to essentially guess what functions they’re likely to be asked to run next. By queuing up possible executions in advance, they’re able to crunch data and run software much faster.

The problem in this case is that this predictive loading of instructions allows access to data that’s normally cordoned off securely, Intel Vice President Stephen Smith said on a conference call. That means, in theory, that malicious code could find a way to access information that would otherwise be out of reach, such as passwords.

Security vulnerability aside, the fix may be just as bad: it would result in a significant slowdown of the CPU, and the resultant machine.

Because the exploit takes advantage of a technology intended to accelerate the performance of the processors, the fix slows them, said the person. In devices with the current generation of Intel chips, the impact will be small, but it will be more significant on older processors. Microsoft is still looking at the impact on the speed of cloud services and how it will compensate paying customers, the person said.

"The techniques used to accelerate processors are common to the industry,” said Ian Batten, a computer science lecturer at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. who specializes in computer security. The fix being proposed will definitely result in slower operating times, but reports of slowdowns of 25 percent to 30 percent are “worst case” scenarios.

Intel's troubles will likely spread far beyond just the company: Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told CNBC that a researcher at Google made Intel aware of the issue “a couple of months ago.”

Google identified the researcher as Jann Horn, and said it has updated its own systems and products with protections from this kind of attack. Some customers of Android devices, Google laptops and its cloud services still need to take steps to patch security holes, the internet giant said.

“Our process is, if we know the process is difficult to go in and exploit, and we can come up with a fix, we think we’re better off to get the fix in place,” Krzanich said, explaining how the company responded to the issue.

On the call, Intel’s Smith said the company sees no significant threat to its business from the vulnerability.

“I wouldn’t expect any change in acceptance of our products,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect any concrete financial impact that we would see going forward.”

In response to the bug, Microsoft on Wednesday released a security update for its Windows 10 operating system and older versions of the product to protect users of devices with chips from Intel, ARM and AMD. The software maker has also started applying the patches to its cloud services where servers also are affected by the issue.

Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices, whose stock surged on news of Intel's misfortune, said “there is near zero risk” to its processors because of differences in the way they are designed and built. "To be clear, the security research team identified three variants targeting speculative execution. The threat and the response to the three variants differ by microprocessor company, and AMD is not susceptible to all three variants," the company said in a statement.

And then there are the questions about revenue and lost profit.

Quoted by Bloomberg, Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that providers of computing over the internet will have to upgrade software to work around the potential vulnerability, which will require additional lines of code, computing power and energy to perform the same functions while maintaining security.

“When you’re running billions of servers, a 5 percent hit is huge,” he said.

At the same time, cloud providers will likely have to throttle back the pace of new customers accessing their data centers while they take servers down to fix the problem, and there could be a price spike for servers as demand surges, Gillett said.

*

There is another take, and according to this one the implications to both Intel and the entire CPU industry could be dire. What follows is the transcription of the Monday afternoon tweetstorm by Nicole Perlroth - cybersecurity reporter at the NYT - according to whom today's "bug" is "not an Intel problem but an entire chipmaker design problem that affects virtually all processors on the market." In fact, according to the cybersecurity expert, one aspect of the bug is extremely troubling simply because there is no fix. Here is the full explanation.

• 1. Apparently I don't know how to thread, so here goes my second attempt at blasting you with critical news on this "Intel Chip problem" which is not an Intel problem but an entire chipmaker design problem that affects virtually all processors on the market.

• 2. Christmas didn't come for the computer security industry this year. A critical design flaw in virtually all microprocessors allows attackers to dump the entire memory contents off of a machine/mobile device/PC/cloud server etc.

• 3. Our story on the motherlode of all vulnerabilities just posted here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/business/computer-flaws.html. More will be post soon.

• 4. We're dealing with two serious threats. The first is isolated to #IntelChips, has been dubbed Meltdown, and affects virtually all Intel microprocessors. The patch, called KAISER, will slow performance speeds of processors by as much as 30 percent.

• 5. The second issue is a fundamental flaw in processor design approach, dubbed Spectre, which is more difficult to exploit, but affects virtually ALL PROCESSORS ON THE MARKET (Note here: Intel stock went down today but Spectre affects AMD and ARM too), and has NO FIX.

• 6. Spectre will require a complete re-architecture of the way processors are designed and the threats posed will be with us for an entire hardware lifecycle, likely the next decade.

• 7. The basic issue is the age old security dilemma: Speed vs Security. For the past decade, processors were designed to gain every performance advantage. In the process, chipmakers failed to ask basic questions about whether their design was secure. (Narrator: They were not)

• 8. Meltdown and Spectre show that it is possible for attackers to exploit these design flaws to access the entire memory contents of a machine. The most visceral attack scenario is an attacker who rents 5 minutes of time from an Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud server and steals...

• 9. Data from other customers renting space on that same Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud server, then marches onto another cloud server to repeat the attack, stealing untold volumes of data (SSL keys, passwords, logins, files etc) in the process.

• 10. Basically, the motherlode. Meltdown can be exploited by any script kiddie with attack code. Spectre is harder to exploit, but nearly impossible to fix, short of shipping out new processors/hardware. The economic implications are not clear, but these are serious threats and

• 11. Chipmakers like Intel will have to do a full recall-- unclear if there's even manufacturing capacity for this-- OR customers will have to wait for secure processors to reach the market, and do their own risk analysis as to whether they need to swap out all affected hardware.

• 12. Intel is not surprisingly trying to downplay the threat of these attacks, but proof-of-concept attacks are already popping up online today, and the timeline for a full rollout of the patch is not clear. And that's just for the Meltdown threat. Spectre affects AMD and ARM too.

• 13. But judging by stock moves today (Intel down, AMD up), investors didn't know that, taken together, Spectre and Meltdown affect all modern microprocessors.

• 14. Meltdown and Spectre affect most chipmakers including those from AMD, ARM, and Intel, and all the devices and operating systems running them (GOOG, AMZN, MSFT, APPL etc).

• 15. The flaws were originally discovered last June by a researcher at Google Project Zero (shout out @ Jann Horn) and then separately by Paul Kocher and a crew of highly impressive researchers at Rambus and academic institutions. Originally public disclosure was set for next week

• 16. But news of Meltdown started to leak out (shout out @TheRegister) yesterday, so the disclosure was moved up a week to right now. The problem with this rushed timeline is that we don't necessarily know when to expect Meltdown patches from tech cos.

• 7. Google says its systems have been updated to defend against Meltdown security.googleblog.com/2018/01/todays…. Microsoft issued an emergency update today. Amazon said it protected AWS customers running Amazon's tailored Linux version, and would roll out the MSFT patch for other customers 2day

If the above is remotely true, the semi-space which has surged in recent week alongside the broad tech sector meltup, will have a very tough time in the coming weeks.

Natural News

No electronics in the bedroom: Any device closer than arm’s length can cause cancer, infertility, and other health concerns, health officials warn

Thursday, January 04, 2018 by: Russel Davis

(Natural News) The California Department of Health issued guidelines highlighting the health risks associated with cell phone radiation exposure, and encouraging the general public to minimize their exposure to it. The statewide guidelines came after certain cities such as Berkeley and San Francisco released local warnings that their citizens should make some distance between their mobile phones and their bodies.

Health experts explained that cell phones transmit information using low frequency radio signals that may expose users to unhealthy radiation. The risk of exposure may be exacerbated when users stream or download large files, experts said. The guidelines stressed on mounting evidence that cell phone radiation may increase the odds of developing cancer, attention and mental health disorders and reproductive health issues.

“The French have tested the phones the way they are used and RF [radiofrequency] exposure exceeds the French standards by four more times, and apply that to the U.S. standards, it’s even much more than that — about seven times [the recommended levels]…[Multiple studies] show that men who keep phones in their pockets the longest have the lowest sperm count, with most damage,” Dr. Devra Davis of the Environmental Health Trust told Daily Mail online.

The scientists added that while the radiofrequency energy that cell phones use to transmit information is at the bottom of the radiation totem poll, the frequency and close-range use of mobile phones are enough factors to raise health risks. According to Dr. Davis, even large cell phone manufacturers like Apple include an RF exposure notice on their iPhone’s settings and provide advice on how users could reduce their exposure.

“Keeping a phone directly on the body has never been a good idea. Most people are not aware that there is a clear warning to keep the phone off the body embedded in the phone. Many people keep their phones in their pockets for hours a day, esp[ecially] in the summer [when] thinner exposures will be far greater. The advice is welcome, and long overdue,” Dr. Davis added.

Ways to cut back on cell phone radiation exposure

The guidelines included a few steps in order to reduce a user’s radiation exposure. These steps include:

• Using a speakerphone or head set when talking to avoid direct head exposure

• Sending text messages instead of talking on the phone

• Keeping the device away from the head or the body when streaming or downloading large files

• Reducing cell phone use when signal is weak as the device tends to send out more RF energy to connect with cell towers

• Avoiding cell phone use when inside a moving vehicle as the device transmits more RF energy to maintain connection

• Downloading large files first before streaming or listening

• Putting the device on airplane mode before watching or playing the large files that were downloaded

• Keeping the cell phone several feet away from the bed when sleeping to reduce exposure risk

• Taking off the headset when not in use as the accessory produces low levels of RF energy

“We recognize that there are a lot of people in the general public that have some concerns about their cellphones and whether using a cell phone is safe. When you sleep, you keep the cell phone at least an arm’s length away from your body. And also, not carrying your cell phone in your pocket, having it either in your purse or not carrying it with you,” Dr. Karen Smith of the California Department of Public Health concluded in a CBS News report.

Be on the loop with the latest news on cell phone radiation with EMF.news.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

CBSNews.com

CDPH.ca.gov [PDF]

***

Washington Post

Modern life too much for you? Maybe a tiny box in the woods is the cure.

By Lavanya Ramanathan, December 28, 2017

To commune with ourselves, we must trek two hours to Stanardsville, a town on the edge of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains whose population has stairstepped down over the years to 384 people, a country store and this wooded plot, which, before 20 tiny houses arrived this fall, was an RV campground called Heavenly Acres.

The heavenly part is debatable. On the second official day of winter, the tract is a colorless bog, surrounded by tall, barren trees and covered with a blanket of dead leaves. But this, promises Getaway–a start-up that offers these rental not-cabins and this not-camping not far from major cities–is where we may rejuvenate our very souls.

As our car crunches up the gravel driveway, we pass a charcoal-gray box on wheels. A sign proclaims it “Lenore.” It is a carbon copy of Lillian, Hank, Felix and Shirley, which is the tiny house we have been assigned, we learn in a succinct text from the company that also feeds us an entry code.

But Lenore sends the first ripple of excitement through the car. Tinys have a way of doing that.

In Getaway’s soft, wooded marketing photos, tinys such as Lenore are imbued with symbolism. Inside, couples slice avocados together. A multiethnic gaggle of cool kids in beanies convenes at a fire pit. Young women plant themselves in large picture windows overlooking the forest with hardcover books you can only assume are by Zadie Smith or Audre Lorde. In one image, a woman simply contorts herself in a display of yogic bliss.

The savvy emphasis on escape and disconnectedness and repose has resonated among the millennials Getaway aims to reach. In each of its markets, outside New York, Boston and Washington, Getaway’s houses are booked solid on weekends, and in early 2017, the company, founded by two Harvard graduates, raised $15 million in venture capital funding, which suggests that a tiny house campground may soon be coming to a forest near you.

Despite its name, Getaway does not sell the sort of wild weekend vacation you might experience in Cancun or the food-focused travels you might have in Portugal.

Instead, it presents a dire vision of urban life, and then offers itself as the antidote. It evokes the Japanese practice of forest bathing, and disconnection, and a little curative isolation. It encourages you to use your tiny, at the rate of just over $160 a night, to finish your novel–because you obviously never have time to work on it otherwise–and insists that you remove yourself from a list of stressors conveniently noted in a Getaway pamphlet. These include: work, email, texts and competition.

We punch in the code and crack open Shirley like a safe and begin to poke around. I plop down on the large, soft platform bed. (“Memory foam?” I announce giddily.) I pore over the copious literature, which informs guests, among other things, that the absence of mirrors is intentional. Because only monsters think about their pores when they’re supposed to be out here like Henry David Thoreau. (Need a reminder? There’s a copy of “Walden” on the bookshelf.)

We scan the kitchen, which comes with two plates, two mugs, a pan and not a single wine glass. And we encounter the wooden box where you really, really, really should lock away your cellphone, source of so much pain and FOMO.

But just in case you can’t part with it, they’ve conveniently provided absolutely no WiFi.

“Idiot,” you think. “This is called camping.”

Not exactly. Now, in tiny houses that no one will acknowledge are honestly just what we used to call cabins, it’s called “escaping.”

Just what are we running from?

For the suburban families that have made “Tiny House Hunters” an HGTV hit, tiny houses are an alternate reality, an incredible stretch of the imagination.

“How could anyone live with so little?” is the obvious question.

Having only recently moved up from a series of 350-square-foot tiny houses called studio apartments, I know what it’s like to live with no doors.

So I can’t dismiss the popular fascination with tiny houses–little wooden temples to minimalism that on average clock in at just over 200 square feet and can be had for about $50,000–as a misguided fad. Adorable wooden cottages on wheels have exploded in popularity not because people wanted to downsize, but because they were downsized.

We struggle “our whole lives to work hard enough so we can relax,” says Amy Turnbull, president of the American Tiny House Association, a relatively recent creation (founded in 2015) with 400 members nationwide. “What has changed is that millennials and the housing crisis of 2008 have shown us we ain’t got time for that. Security is a myth. Housing is beyond the reach of many. We have student loan debt. So, what’s the point?”

It’s no wonder that the tiny house, off the grid in fact and in spirit, appeals.

“Initially people were like, that’s so cute, I want one,” Turnbull says. But the tiny house movement has been mired in municipal wrangling and shunned by communities that won’t abide what ultimately are temporary homes. In many areas, they are illegal, she says.

And so “you can’t live in them full time,” Turnbull says with some exasperation. “That’s the problem.”

But Getaway, and other tiny house rentals, such as Caravan in Portland, Ore., or Austin’s Tiny Homes Hotel, can give you a taste of the tiny-house life.

In an early marketing video, one of Getaway’s founders spoke of tiny houses as yet another millennial reaction to their parents’ whole lives. “The form is wrong, the function is wrong,” chief executive Jon Staff intoned as a camera panned over beige dream homes in some nameless suburbia.

Millennials have been blamed for the death of really important American institutions, like paper napkins and J. Crew and promiscuity.

But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if it’s the American institutions that are secretly killing millennials, or at least filling them with an existential dread that quietly eats away at their insides like acid reflux?

“You can make a case that millennials are stressed out. They feel stressed out by their phones,” says Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist who studies generational differences and is the author of “Generation Me.”

“Technology just feels so demanding, all the time,” Twenge says. “And as people have spent more time interacting with digital media, they spend less time interacting with each other face-to-face.”

If their parents’ little boxes are another institution that has to go, maybe, Getaway seems to posit, the answer is a littler box. Maybe the answer is in “Walden.”

“The irony here is that what Thoreau did was move to Walden Pond to get away from society. Arguably, life in a village at that time and life at Walden Pond wasn’t that different,” Twenge notes. “Compare that to life with a phone in modern times.”

It’s ridiculous, but I expect to feel some instant woodsiness that never materializes. Even though I play Bon Iver on the Bluetooth radio, and then take the provided torch outside to our fire pit and sprinkle the (provided) firestarter over the (provided) logs, and light our first campfire and make some (provided) s’mores.

Instead, we sit outside and poke at our baby fire, which is as formidable as a burning candle, and drink wine until it begins to rain.

Later, I sleep like the dead.

***

Natural Blaze

Turmeric: Is There A Big Pharma-Media Conspiracy Against This Herb?

By Jon Yaneff, CNP

December 29, 2017

Everywhere you go, turmeric is there. It’s in your food, fused into your latte or tea, part of your skin-healing facemask. And some people even juice the stuff! What’s more, doctors are treating everything from Alzheimer’s disease to cancer with it. Whether used whole or in supplement form, there is seemingly nothing it can’t do.

Turmeric, also known as Curcuma longa, is the Swiss army knife of the herb kingdom. This legendary spice has been used in Chinese and Indian folk medicine for over 5,000 years.

Is Turmeric as Effective as Conventional Drugs?

Turmeric is such an icon in the culinary and natural medicinal worlds that it often reminds me of a superhero. Today, 10,000-plus studies reference the powerful effects of turmeric and curcumin (its most active ingredient) in the treatment or prevention of several horrific diseases. A growing number of researchers have even concluded that this spice compares favorably with various conventional drugs, including antidepressants, anti-inflammatories, and even chemotherapy drugs.

Turmeric and the powerful polyphenol curcumin have been fighting crime (I mean disease) for millennia with much success. At the same time, the super villain Big Pharma (aka the pharmaceutical industry) will do whatever it takes to stand in its way. After all, nothing bothers Big Pharma more than natural, side effect-free solutions that work as well as or better than the pharmaceutical drugs they offer.

Media Attacks Turmeric, but Should You Believe Them?

The mainstream media appears to be the ally of drug companies. Exaggerated, embellished, and possibly fabricated headlines regularly make bad guys out of natural remedies that evidence suggests protect and heal us.

For instance, a Forbes headline read: “Everybody Needs To Stop With This Turmeric Molecule.” Another publication stated: “Forget What You’ve Heard: Turmeric Seems To Have Zero Medicinal Properties.” The job of these attention-grabbing titles is to warn scientists and consumers that curcumin, and likely turmeric itself, is a “waste of money and time.”

Where is all this coming from? The basis for this attack stems from a paper published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry in January. The perspective review stated that no double-blind, placebo-controlled, human trials (randomized control trials; RCTs) of curcumin have been successful. As a result, news outlets reported that curcumin doesn’t do anything for your health at all.

That’s an over-simplistic conclusion to come to. You see, the media and some scientists will ignore anything that isn’t a RCT. In other words, the first-hand experiences of success using turmeric are deemed as “anecdotal claims.” And thought of as completely worthless. Also discarded are the thousands of animal (in vivo) and cell (in vitro) studies that illustrate the therapeutic properties of turmeric and curcumin.

The basis for such ignorance is seemingly political, since researchers cannot prove that turmeric, or specifically curcumin, is useful as a drug. Conventional drug development studies run clinical tests on particular compounds, like curcumin. Chemists will favor a reductionist approach with chemicals—and how they interact with the body—while overlooking the fact that herbs have other properties.

The problem with this is that when you isolate a single constituent from a herb or whole food, it behaves more like a chemical and less like a natural food. Basically, extracting curcumin changes the functional properties of turmeric. Therefore, it is unfair to say that, since you have not found the healing powers of curcumin (in certain studies), the healing power of turmeric doesn’t exist. This is a flaw within medicinal chemistry, where the object of the study no longer is seen as a living thing.

Don’t Believe the Anti-Turmeric Hype

Overall, turmeric is much more than curcumin. Its hundreds of components all must work together to benefit a person’s health. While Big Pharma wants to create synthetic curcumin analogs that can be patented, bad curcumin research fails to show positive results experienced by traditional cultures that use natural turmeric.

And, although the media didn’t mention this part, the researchers suggested that future studies take a more holistic approach into account for its chemically diverse elements. They may synergistically add to its potential health benefits.

So, as turmeric gains popularity, the media will continue to discourage you from it. Should one study with an agenda negate the thousands of positive studies that support the beneficial power of this remarkable spice?

Sources:
Ji, S., “Forbes Leads Media Attack Against Turmeric Health Benefits,” GreenMedInfo, February 2, 2017; http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/forbes-leads-media-attack-against-turmerics-health-benefits, last accessed July 13, 2017.
Ji, S., “800 Reasons Turmeric Threatens Big Pharma,” GreenMedInfo, July 4, 2016; http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/800-reasons-turmeric-threatens-big-pharma, last accessed July 13, 2017.
Lemonick, S., “Everybody Needs To Stop With This Turmeric Molecule,” Forbes, January 19, 2017;https://www.forbes.com/sites/samlemonick/2017/01/19/everybody-needs-to-quit-it-with-this-turmeric-molecule/#47a97b9a79ff, last accessed July 13, 2017.
“Contrary to decades of hype, curcumin alone is unlikely to boost health,” ACS, January 11, 2017;https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2017/acs-presspac-january-11-2017/contrary-to-decades-of-hype-curcumin-alone-is-unlikely-to-boost-health.html, last accessed July 13, 2017.
Rathi, A., “Forget what you’ve heard: Turmeric seems to have zero medicinal properties,” QUARTZ, January 12, 2017; https://qz.com/883829/a-large-scientific-review-study-shows-that-curcumin-in-turmeric-has-no-medicinal-properties/, last accessed July 13, 2017.
MacMillan, A., “Turmeric May Not Be a Miracle Spice After All,” TIME, January 12, 2017; http://time.com/4633558/turmeric-curcumin-inflammation-spice/, last accessed July 13, 2017.
Ji, S., “Science Confirms Turmeric As Effective As 14 Drugs,” GreenMedInfo, May 13, 2013; http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/science-confirms-turmeric-effective-14-drugs, last accessed July 13, 2017.

***

MailOnline

Woman, 67, who battled blood cancer for five years 'recovers after treating it with TURMERIC' in the first recorded case of its kind

• Dieneke Ferguson, 67, had given up on gruelling treatments and chemotherapy

• With her myeloma spreading she began taking 8g of curcumin a day

• The cancer stabilised in what doctors say was the first case of its kind

By BEN SPENCER, MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 00:06, 3 January 2018 | UPDATED: 15:23, 3 January 2018

A woman who battled blood cancer for years with out success finally halted the disease with turmeric, it has been reported.

Dieneke Ferguson is now living a normal life after giving up on grueling treatments that failed to stop it.

Doctors say her case is the first recorded instance in which a patient has recovered by using the spice after stopping conventional medical treatments.

With her myeloma spreading rapidly after three rounds of chemotherapy and four stem cell transplants, the 67-year-old began taking 8g of curcumin a day – one of the main compounds in turmeric.

Dieneke Ferguson had been diagnosed with the blood cancer myeloma in 2007 and had undergone three rounds of chemotherapy as well as four stem cell transplants

The cancer, which has an average survival of just over five years, was causing increasing back pain and she had already had a second relapse.

But it stabilised after Mrs Ferguson, from north London, came across the remedy on the internet in 2011 and decided to try it as a last resort.

The tablets are expensive – £50 for ten days – but as kitchen turmeric contains just 2 per cent curcumin it would be impossible to eat enough to get the same dose.

Mrs Ferguson, who was first diagnosed in 2007, continues to take curcumin without further treatment and her cancer cell count is negligible.

Her doctors, from Barts Health NHS Trust in London, wrote in the British Medical Journal Case Reports: ‘To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report in which curcumin has demonstrated an objective response in progressive disease in the absence of conventional treatment.’

The experts, led by Dr Abbas Zaidi, said some myeloma patients took dietary supplements alongside conventional treatment but ‘few, if any, use dietary supplementation as an alternative to standard antimyeloma therapy’.

But they added: ‘In the absence of further antimyeloma treatment the patient plateaued and has remained stable for the past five years with good quality of life.’

Since the turn of the century, more than 50 studies have tested curcumin – the pigment in turmeric that gives it that bright yellow colour.

They suggest the spice can protect against several cancers, as well as Alzheimer’s, heart disease and depression.

It has also been shown to help speed recovery after surgery and effectively treat arthritis.

But although it is widely used in Eastern medicine, and has been studied for its anti-inflammatory and antiseptic effects, curcumin is not widely prescribed because it has never been tested in large-scale trials.

The doctors wrote that the ‘biological activity of curcumin is indeed remarkable’, including its ‘anti-proliferative effects in a wide variety of tumour cells’.

But Professor Jamie Cavenagh, one of the authors of the paper, stressed it may not work for all patients. He said: ‘A lot of my patients take curcumin at different stages of their treatment. I don’t object to it.

‘Dieneke’s is the best response I have observed and it is clear-cut because we had stopped all other treatment.’

Mrs Ferguson, who runs Hidden Art, a not-for-profit business helping artists market their work, is frustrated doctors cannot recommend the spice and wants more research carried out.

She said: ‘I hope my story will lead to more people finding out about the amazing health benefits of curcumin.’

Myeloma affects some 5,500 people in the UK every year, killing nearly 3,000.

***

Until next week...keep on believing.
Almondtree Productions

“And Esaias was in the middle court, and the word of the Lord came to him, saying, Turn back, and thou shalt say to Ezekias the ruler of my people, Thus saith the Lord God of thy father David, I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will heal thee: on the third day thou shalt go up to the house of the Lord. And I will add to thy days fifteen years; and I will deliver thee and this city out of the hand of the king of the Assyrians, and I will defend this city for my own sake, and for my servant’s David sake. And he said, Let them take a cake of figs, and lay it upon the ulcer, and he shall be well. And Ezekias said to Esaias, What is the sign that the Lord will heal me, and I shall go up to the house of the Lord on the third day? And Esaias said, This is the sign from the Lord, that the Lord will perform the word which he has spoken, the shadow of the dial shall advance ten degrees: or if it should go back ten degrees this would also be the sign. And Ezekias said, It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees.” nay, but let the shadow return ten degrees backward on the dial. And Esaias the prophet cried to the Lord: and the shadow returned back ten degrees on the dial.” (ll Kings 4-11)

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