EDUCATION
AND THE SECOND WAVE
Hear O Israel: The Lord our God is One Lord.
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:
And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.
And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates...(Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Revelation 13:16).
THE GREAT FALLING AWAY...(Hebrews, chapter 6; 2 Thessalonians 2:12...KJV).
When thou art come into the Land (the state of mind) which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt NOT learn to do after the abominations of those nations...(Deuteronomy 18: 9-13).
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That they teach you not to do after their abominations, which they have done unto their god, so shall ye sin against your God...(Deuteronomy 20:18).
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Thus saith the Lord, learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them...(Jeremiah 10:2; 12:16).
CORPORATE AMERICA MUST EDUCATE ITS YOUNG,
CARBIDE CHIEF SAYS.
By Eric Niiler
Union Carbide and other corporations have to pitch in to help educate the nation's young people and keep the United States competitive with the rest of the world, according to Carbide executive Robert D. Kennedy. (Remember Bophal)?
"We've got a really big problem in this country," Kennedy told a group of South Charleston High School honor students. "Ninety percent of the kids that graduate from America's high schools can't COMPETE with other kids in the world."
Kennedy spoke at a dinner honoring the school's TOP 30 STUDENTS after touring Carbide's Tech Center earlier in the day. He introduced a Carbide report titled "Undereducated, Uncompetitive USA" that points out problems in the country's education system. "Your competition for jobs will likely not be with someone from (near by), but a strongly motivated person from Taiwan or Germany," Kennedy said.
Kennedy is Carbide's chief executive officer...He also works with Inroads, a privately funded group directed at improving minority enrollment in schools. Kennedy said groups such as the Roundtable 200, which comprises executives from the country's top 200 corporations are trying to find ways to form corporate-school partnerships, math and science programs, and training for teachers. (Ashland Oil, a member of this corporate elite, devised the clever saying: "Teachers Change Lives").
A group of Kanawha County math and science teachers recently visited Carbide's Danbury headquarters to meet corporate officials and attend seminars. Kennedy said West Virginians must get involved to turn around their education system, despite the state's financial problems. "The public has to be concerned before anything much will be done," he said. "We really have an education crisis. It's not a question of money." The Charleston Gazette.
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They were mingled among the heathen and learned their works...(Psalm 106:35).
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(I have these things against thee): Thou sufferest that woman Jezebel (the industrial, commercial and media-advertising interests of the American corporate state), which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols (to the idols of success, fame, fortune, political and military power, and, most of all, the great names and personalities who embody and espouse these worldly "virtues" and "ideals").
And I gave her space to repent of her fornication (two thousand years of unfolding reality, and an unceasing remnant of dissenting voices), and she repented not.
Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.
And I will kill her children (both figuratively and literally) with death; and all the churches shall know that I am He that searches the reins and hearts: and will give unto every one of you according to your works...(Revelation 2:20-23).
Please review the laws of God concerning the Nations (and particularly the American Nation Cult), as well as those laws and precepts that govern our relationship to the leaders of these nations in the chapter entitled Give Unto Caesar?, before returning here to consider the following excerpts from a conservative, evangelical tract entitled What Are They Teaching Our Children. Hopefully, in the ongoing conflict in this country between the liberal and conservative states of mind, we will return to these precepts, find the center and gain a fuller understanding of the truly spiritual, and truly phenomenal Third Wave of human consciousness that is sweeping over the planet, and the great gulf that exists between it and the Second Wave state of mind that presently rules the world. (See Acts 2:16-21; Joel 2:28-32). The children of Ba'al (all of those who have been taught to equate the doctrines of Christ with the doctrines of the American state, as well as those who have total disregard for the doctrines of Christ altogether), have not caught the drift, or at very best they have grossly misinterpreted it in light of their own fallen, nationalistic and global world views (see Matthew 6:23; Hebrews 6:1-8), and are become in the end the very ones for whom the words have been reserved:
And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together (or spread out), and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains (in the doctrines and precepts of their own national myths and beliefs).
For the great day of His wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?...(Revelation 6:14-17; Isaiah 2:17-22)...
It is not that America is essentially more evil than the other nations of the earth, but the fact that (more than any other nation on earth), America performs its "great" "colossal" works of Darkness in the Name of God and in the professed spirit of Christ--and is therefore (beyond any other nation), the embodiment of the spirit of Antichrist in the earth. And this because the United States of America is literally the culmination, the focus if you will, of God's intentions toward humanity at this moment in history. It is where the Sun is setting on the events of this age. Everything else, even heaven itself, is revolving around it, and has been prepared for the great impending event, the manifestation of the Messiahs and the full-flowering birth of the next stage of human consciousness. (Romans 8:16-23). America is the last empire to hold the oracles and the people of God captive, and it is where both the children of Light and the children of Darkness are being brought to their mutual states of perfection, as it is written: Let them grow together.
The children of Light are those who can sense the Nature and the meaning of God's Terrible Presence in the sum of all these unfolding realities, and who continue to find a way to walk in the precepts of Christ--in the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, and the Eightfold Path--despite the tremendous social and political pressures to walk otherwise. The children of Darkness are those who, despite their profession of faith in the Lord of History, are dismayed at the signs of the times, by events that are unfolding everywhere around them, and by the quickening and emerging insights of others (speaking evil, as they always do, of things they do not understand), and who seek fearful refuge in their own national philosophies and doctrines. (Isaiah 2:19; Revelation 6:15-17). The religious among them have not only forsaken the idea of dying with Christ, but the fact that we have finally arrived at the fulness of these times and the judgments of this age as well..
The children of Light must always find themselves isolated by those who define the American agenda, by both Liberals and Conservatives. By Liberals (those on the political Left), because they do not want to talk about the precepts and judgments of God, or even about God at all, and by those on the Right who can only identify themselves in contrast to those who do not espouse their political, economic and religious agenda--which is everyone on the Left. Conservatives feel most secure in the climate of a strong personal economy (tax cuts and investments, because they are caught in the complexities of greed, and have forsaken both the law concerning such matters and their responsibilities to the poor and oppressed), and in a strong military (because they are also very fearful of God's judgments). And if those on the intellectual Left shall experience their own spiritual crisis with the reappearance of Jimmy Carter, the Global man of "Peace," those on the Right are as close now as they shall ever get to a religious triumph, what with a President-elect George W. Bush, a Republican Supreme Court and a Republican legislature. ( Deuteronomy 4:5-10; Ecclesiastes 5:8-13).
"Another Win For the Gipper," says the December 17, 2000, edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "George W. Bush may be the son of a president," says Paul Kengor, "but the political lineage is clear: He's the heir of (the great American prophet) Ronald Reagan." (It was Ronald Reagan's, and his own father's appointments to the Supreme Court that assured George W. Bush's victory over Al Gore in the race to see who would be the next to occupy the seat of the American antichrists. Gore can thank heaven for the defeat). There are those who--after all this time, after all the great historical events that have unfolded before our eyes in the 20th century--have failed in the end to perceive the Presence of God in the affairs of the world, or to discern the great subtle difference that exists between that which is serves God's will (the rest of the world) and that which opposes God's will (America...as if such a thing was actually possible), and who are, therefore, still unable to digest the strong meat of God's word. (Hebrews 5:12-14; Hebrews 6:1-11; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12). The question, as a result, begs itself: What would they, or rather, what have they been teaching our children instead? (It is now March, 2003, and I do believe I see our sons and daughters, and our brothers and sisters, being sent off to kill others and to be killed in George Bush's foreign wars--or rather in God's war against George Bush and the entire American political, economic and religious state of mind).
WHAT ARE THEY TEACHING OUR CHILDREN?
What You Can Do About Humanism and Textbooks in Today's Public Schools
By Mel And Norma Gabler
(Born Again American Christians we presume. The essay reflects the concerns of all those on the Religious Right who have placed their faith in the myths of the America nation, and who fretfully fear that God's purposes are being thwarted in the abandonment of those "Christian" principles upon which the nation was found. To place one's faith in the doctrines of one's own nation is to place one's faith in the doctrines of Ba'al)
AMERICA IS NO LONGER BEAUTIFUL IN OUR TEXTBOOKS...If you were to return to school today, the type of "facts" you'd be taught would simply amaze you. Want an example? Why don't you test your knowledge of history and geography with this little quiz. (Among the several questions are):
"Which men in a fifth-grade history textbook were equated with Jesus dying on the cross?" Answer: John Brown, Martin Luther King, and Mohandas Gandhi. (Which implies that our authors do not see the work of these in any way connected to the ultimate mission of Christ in the world).
"Name the nation you think is being discussed in this passage from another fifth-grade text:
No nation on earth is guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than is_____ at this very hour. Go where you may and search where you will. Roam through all the kingdoms of the Old World. Travel through South America. Search out every wrong. When you have found the last, compare your facts with the everyday practices of this nation. Then you will agree with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, _____ has no rival.
Give up? The country so honored is the United States...
"Patrick Henry sounded the watchword of American independence: 'Give me liberty or give me death!' Is this line worth memorizing by children?" According to a study made by This Week magazine, only two of forty-five history texts include that statement. (Please understand 2 Peter 2: 19-21 in light of these statistics)....
THE REWRITING OF HISTORY...Hasn't history changed a bit since you were in school? Maybe now you can understand why former-Texas Board of Education member H. Reg McDaniel, M.D., took passages from one such book which praised Communism (which does not profess to be founded in the teachings of Christ, even though it is) while chastising the United States (and therefore state-Capitalism, which does profess to be founded in the principles of Christ, even though it is not) for exploiting children, women, minorities, and immigrants. Parents also are catching on fast that history hasn't changed, publishers have changed history! A resident of historic Lexington, Massachusetts--the birthplace of the American Revolution (Please open the pages of the Book of Isaiah, understand 1 Peter, chapter 2)--wrote to tell us that: "I have been going to our town PTA meetings and am increasingly worried about the kinds of history textbooks that are being bought for our school system. In my opinion they are not telling the story the way it should be told. The publishers of textbooks are not responding to the needs of American education but only to the propaganda of these liberal educationalists." (continued)...
(While we are passing this way please consider A People's History of the United States, and On History, by Howard Zinn...
"Education has always inspired fear among those who want to keep the existing distribution of power and wealth as they are. In my thirty years of teaching--I have often observed that fear. And I think I understand what it is based on. The educational environment is unique in our society: It is the only situation where an adult, looked up to as a mentor, is alone with a group of young people for a protracted and officially sanctioned period of time and can assign whatever reading he or she chooses, and discuss with these young people any subject under the sun. The subject may be defined by the curriculum...but this is a minor impediment to a bold and imaginative teacher, especially in literature, philosophy and the social sciences, where there are unlimited possibilities for free discussion of social and political issues.
That would seem to be an educational ideal, an arena for free discussion, assuming a diversity of viewpoints from a variety of teachers, of the most important issues of our time. Yet it is precisely that situation in the classrooms of higher education, which frightens the guardians of the status quo.
They declare their admiration for such freedom in principle, and suggest that radicals are insufficiently grateful for its existence. But when teachers actually use this freedom, introducing new subjects, new readings, outrageous ideas, challenging authority, criticizing 'Western civilization,' amending the 'canon' of great books as listed by certain educational authorities of the past, then the self-appointed guardians of 'high culture' become enraged...
When I taught American history, I ignored the canon of traditional textbook, in which the heroic figures were mostly presidents, generals and industrialists. In those texts wars were treated as problems in military strategy and not in morality; Christopher Columbus and Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt were treated as heroes in the march of democracy, with not a word from the objects of their violence...
The fundamentalists of politics...want to pull the strings of control tighter on the distribution of wealth and power and civil liberties. The fundamentalists of law...want to interpret the Constitution so as to put strict limits on the legal possibilities for social reform. The fundamentalists of education fear the possibilities inherent in the unique freedom of discussion that we find in higher education.
And so under the guise of defending 'the common culture'...or 'Western civilization,' they attack that freedom. They fear exactly what some of us hope for, that if students are given wider political choices in the classroom than they get in the polling booth or the workplace, they may become social rebels. They may join movements for racial or sexual equality, or against war, or, even more dangerous, work for what James Madison feared as he argued for a conservative Constitution" 'an equal division of property.' Let us hope so." Howard Zinn, On History, How Free is Higher Education? pp.121-129.
...or the equally strident writings of Kevin Danaher, Laviah Benjamin and David Cortin concerning globalization and the American corporate state. While we do not contend that these writings proceed from the same premises as our own, they are, nevertheless, essential to our understanding of God's righteousness, and of those things that history (God) will not tolerate in future times...We have now seen it with our own eyes)...
What are They Teaching Our Children? continued:
WHY THE CHANGE?...The downplaying of patriotism and putting down of American heroes and principles resulted from a plan by educators who envisioned a different future for the U.S.A...
Jump now to 1976, the year of America's Bicentennial, when the NEA unabashedly announced its plan of education for a new world under the code word "Global 2000."...The educational establishment has been drifting leftward for decades. They emphasize liberal concepts in textbooks, and censor out material which would make students proud of our American heritage. The Organization of American Historians...surveyed history courses taught in all Fifty states and the District of Columbia. Their conclusion: "A movement away from history, at least as history is traditionally defined and taught" is occurring. And this is hardly surprising. As the editor of the leading Humanist magazine, Free Inquiry, admitted bluntly and honestly:
The National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches (along with)...many humanist organizations...condemn the shortcomings of capitalist countries and reject their foreign policies, but often overlook or excuse all the most egregious violations of human rights in Communist or third world countries. A similar myopic outlook is held by some members of university faculties who are so enamored with left-wing thinking that anti-Communism is still not considered to be intellectually respectable, whereas anticapitalism is freely accepted...
Who do the educational elite say is the principal enemy of peace and justice? The United States, according to the textbooks and other writings of the ideologues of humanism (continued)...
The answer, of course, is that this educational elite, more in keeping with the Third Wave than their detractors on the nationalistic and economic-Right, understand in some purely secular sense, that Judgment must begin at the House of God. And that: Those to whom much has been committed, much is required. What has been committed to the West is not only the Word of God itself but the force of history and the impulse of transformation, and the skills and talents, and the spiritual resources to go with it. And therefore, what God requires of those who have these things, along with the power of God's own oracles in their possession, is Self-reflection and Self-correction--ATONEMENT. These are essential to the great transformation that is about to take place in the earth. Those on the Right must become painfully aware of the fact that God is not an American, nor a Conservative (at least not in their sense of the term), and therefore God is certainly NOT a capitalist. And in fact, it is the Capitalist regime in America (with all of its social, religious, economic and military implications) that is now standing directly in the pathway of God's kingdom being realized in the earth. (Which is why God is rising up everywhere in the earth now to both expose it and remove it).
2001 WILL NOT BE OUR YEAR, TREND SEER SAYS
World Is Against Us Dangerous Americans
By Anita Manning
Get ready America. If the trendmeister's predictions are on target, 2001 will be no walk in the park.
The "Trends Journal" published by he Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y., announced its top trends of 2001. And with few exceptions they are dismal: A wave of anti-Americanism will sweep the globe. American culture, "with its emphasis on violence, mindless consumption, fake sex and real stupidity," will be seen as "numbing and dangerous."...
Closed minds and continued polarization on everything from politics to social issues will create a climate of conformity, stifle debate and place America's leadership role in danger...
Russia and other former Soviet countries will back away from the 10-year experiment in capitalism leading to a "Soviet-Re-Union"... Corporations will react to a slowing global economy by slashing their work-forces, a tactic the research institute calls "Corporate Dumbsizing II."...
"The bad news is that there are rough times ahead. The good news is that old systems are coming under attack and under question, and when something dies, something new is born. This is the darkness before the dawn." Happy New Year. USA Today.
What Are They Teaching continued...
METHODOLOGICAL MESSES...Some books distort history by methodology. One follows a plan of pairing chapters and studying a period of history in light of a notable event. For example, a whole chapter on the Salem witch trials is followed by a chapter on Puritan New England. The students examine the entire Puritan period in the light of witchcraft...
Look at some of the other pairings in this same book. The early years of the American Republic are examined from the perspective of the actions of conspirator Aaron Burr. The time of religion and reform before the Civil War is measured by the Millerite movement, which erroneously set dates about Christ's second coming. The settlement of the Western Frontier is weighed against the massacre at Wounded Knee. (Well, Duh...to use a popular phrase in the halls of American academia). The era of "affluence and anti-Communism" following World War II is considered against the arrest and trial of Soviet spy Alger Hiss. America in the 1970s is epitomized by Watergate.
This book is not a comprehensive and balance study of history. It is subtle anti-American propaganda. Social problems get top billing while U.S. accomplishments and advantages go virtually unnoticed. In numerous history texts poverty, protests, and crime are covered far out of proportion to the positive happenings and advances in America. Problems are stressed while solutions achieved through the American system are largely censored. Society and capitalism are blamed for practically everything negative." What Are They Teaching Our Children, by Mel and Norma Gabler, pp.47-55.
(The events of September 2001 notwithstanding), let us place our discussion of these matters in their proper spiritual and historical perspective:
Open the pages of the Book of Isaiah at the time of the American Revolution
Compare Acts 13:40,41 and Habakkuk, chapter 1.
From 1606 and the founding of Jamestown to the present time...Genesis 15:12-14 (KJV).
Son of man take up a lamentation for Pharaoh king of Egypt, and say unto him, Thou art like a young lion of the nations, AND THOU ART AS A WHALE IN THE SEAS: and thou camest forth with thy rivers, and troubledst the waters with thy Feet, and fouledst their rivers.
Thus saith the Lord God; I will therefore spread out my net over thee with a company of many people; and they shall bring thee up in my net.
Then will I leave thee upon the land, I will cast thee forth upon the open field, and will cause all the fowls of heaven to remain upon thee, and will fill the beasts of the whole earth with thee.
AND I WILL LAY THY FLESH UPON THE MOUNTAINS, AND FILL THE VALLEYS WITH THY HEIGHT.
I WILL ALSO WATER WITH THY BLOOD THE LAND WHEREIN THOU SWIMMEST, EVEN TO THE MOUNTAINS; AND THE RIVERS SHALL BE FULL OF THEE...
I will also vex the hearts of many people, when I shall bring thy destruction among the nations...(Ezekiel, chapter 32...KJV)
The Scriptures say: Come out of her my people, that ye partake not of her sins (Revelation 18:4,5), and What communion hath Light with Darkness (2 Corinthians 6:14-16), but Dr. James Kennedy, one of the most articulate spokesmen for the doctrines of Ba'al in our time, says:
IT IS TIME
GET READY TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN YOUR COMMUNITY AND IN YOUR COUNTRY
It Is Time To Reclaim America For Christ
Join Dr. D. James Kennedy, Cal Thomas, Gary Bauer, Beverly LaHaye, Marlin Maddox and others...for Coral Ridge Ministries' conference on Reclaiming America for Christ in Fort Lauderdale. Take your place in the battle to restore our nation to its godly heritage.
America is a nation at war--with itself and its past. Founded in 1776 with a "firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence," America today has largely expelled God from the halls of power. Our High Court, which in 1892 affirmed that "this is a Christian nation," now demands religious "neutrality" and bars most public religious expression. Today in America, school prayer is banned, but abortion is "a woman's choice," and "gay rights" are championed by our nation's highest elected leader. (1995).
It is time to reclaim America for Christ. It is time to return to the moral and biblical heritage that gave rise to the most free and prosperous nation in history. Reclaiming America for Christ, a Coral Ridge Ministries Conference...in sunny Fort Lauderdale, will show you how. This four-day event offers an orientation to America's culture war, our nation's rich but largely forgotten Christian heritage, and what you can do to bring the claims of Christ to bear on our culture.
FRONT LINE CHRISTIAN LEADERS will bring you reports on the pro-family fight in Washington, how to counter the "gay" agenda, and effect positive change in the public schools. Hear from two past presidential aides, the head of America's largest pro-family women's group, the man who spearheaded a successful nationwide effort to elect pro-family candidates to school boards, and others addressing issues such as pornography, public schools, religious liberty, and abortion. Learn what you can do at both the national and local levels to reclaim America for Christ. It Is Time.
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But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that brought them, and bringing upon themselves swift destruction.
And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.
And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.
For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them unto chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment;
And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the Eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the Flood upon the world of the ungodly.
And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that should after them live ungodly;
And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked;
(For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds);
The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to reserve the unjust to the day of judgment to be punished:
But chiefly them that walk after the flesh of the lust of uncleanness (see Romans 1:32 to 2:3; 2 Corinthians 11:1-15), and despise government (see Romans 13:1-8). Presumptuous are they, self willed, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries.
Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusations against them before the Lord.
But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of things they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption.
And shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they count it pleasure to riot in the day time. Spots they are and blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you;
Having eyes full of adultery, and cannot cease from sin, beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children:
Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the way of Balaam, the son of Bo'sor, who loveth the wages of unrighteousness;
But was rebuked for his iniquity, the dumb ass speaking with a man's voice forbad the madness of the prophet.
These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved forever.
For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.
While they promise them liberty they themselves are servants of corruption: for of whom man is overcome of the same is he brought in bondage.
For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world, through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.
For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them...(2 Peter 2:1-21).
Several years ago Newt Gingrich appeared on the floor of the House of Representatives and introduced Alvin Toffler, the author of The Third Wave. This timely work (outlining certain wave properties of history), must be added to our present and collective sense of reality, to our overall sense of the motion of historical time. It must be added to the equally valid properties of the Dialectic theory--which also follow the lightning path of history down the branches of the great World Tree--the kingdom of God being the final synthesis; to Freud and Jung's psychological theories, with Vienna itself appearing at the center of the Great and Universal Mandala of the Tree of Life; and even to those aspects of the Great Man theory, being the culmination to the cult of Nimrod in the earth, and which also lead to the manifestation of God's truly anointed ones in our time. (The more we understand of reality, of the structure of time and space, the clearer does the pattern and design of creation become, and the brighter does the Face of the Creators appear...They are One)
At the time William Jefferson Clinton was "building a bridge" to the 21st century. It was his own philosophical, self-imaginative attempt to assure the American people that he could shepherd them over the great divide (the fiery moat), that separates the realm of man from the kingdom of God. This great man (clearly "great" in his own estimation of himself), could not deliver. Though his bridge would be built of words, and even electrons, his metaphor was industrial. It was too weighed down by the iron and steel, and by the old transmission lines, not only of America's oppressive and destructive capitalistic and industrial past, but of Clinton's own natural and fallen ways as well. Nevertheless, the times, they were a'changing, rapidly. Everything was changing, right in front of him and everyone else. Gingrich and company saw an opportunity here. They would "catch the wave" and try to ride it across instead. Toffler wrote:
"This book is based on what I call the 'revolutionary premise'...Put differently, this book flows from the assumption that we are the final generation of an old civilization and the first generation of a new one, and that much of our personal confusion, anguish, and disorientation can be traced directly to the conflict within us, and within our political institutions, between the dying Second Wave civilization and the emergent Third Wave civilization that is thundering in to take its place.
When we finally understand this, many seemingly senseless events become suddenly comprehensible. The broad patterns of change begin to emerge clearly. Action for survival becomes possible and plausible again. In short, the revolutionary premise liberates our intellect and our will." The Third Wave, p.6.
These opportunists have failed to consider that the God of the Universe, the God of Righteous Judgment, the One who is rising up again in the East, has His Hand in all of these matters, and that none can "pass over" who have not first submitted to the righteousness of God, and to the imminent revelation and coronation of God's own righteous ones in the earth. (Zechariah, chapter 4). The judgments that all of these "great men" would hope to escape, which is about to catch up to and overflow the entire Second Wave have been described from ancient times in the words of Moses (Deuteronomy 32), and in the book of the prophet Ezekiel:
Behold, all souls are mine: as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: for the soul that sinneth it shall die.
But if a man be just, and do that which is lawful and right,
And hath not eaten upon the mountains (the nations), neither hath lifted up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, neither hath defiled his neighbor's wife (his neighbor's religious traditions and beliefs), neither hath come near to a menstruous women (World religion herself, who is presently barren of life...Revelation 17).
And hath not oppressed ANY, but hath restored to the debtor his pledge (and that before the sun sets upon this age), hath spoiled NONE by violence, hath given his bread to the hungry, and hath covered the naked with a garment;
He that hath NOT given forth upon usury, neither hath taken any increase (personal profit from the labors of other men), that hath withdrawn his hand from iniquity, hath executed true judgment between man and man,
Hath walked in my statutes, and hath kept my judgments (see Matthew 7:13-27), to deal truly; he is just, he shall surely live, saith the Lord God...(Ezekiel, chapter 18).
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From the days of John the Baptist until NOW the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force...(Matthew 11:12).
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THE THIRD WAVE: "This book...contends that the world has not swerved into lunacy, and that, in fact, beneath the clatter and jangle of seemingly senseless events there lies a startling and potentially hopeful pattern. This book is about that pattern and that hope....(OK)...
THE FINAL SYNTHESIS.
The Third Wave is for those who think the human story, far from ending, has only just begun...(OK)
Lacking a systematic framework for understanding the clash of forces in today's world, we are like a ship's crew, trapped in a storm and trying to navigate between dangerous reefs without compass or chart. In a culture of warring specialisms, drowned in fragmented data and fine-toothed analysis, synthesis is not merely useful--it is crucial...
For this reason, 'The Third Wave' is a book of large-scale synthesis. It describes the old civilization in which many of us grew up, AND PRESENTS A CAREFUL, COMPREHENSIVE PICTURE OF THE NEW CIVILIZATION BURSTING INTO BEING IN OUR MIDST. So profoundly revolutionary is this new civilization that it challenges all of our old assumptions. Old ways of thinking, old formulas, dogmas, and ideologies, no matter how cherished or how useful in the past, no longer fit the facts...The 'Third Wave' concludes that despair is not only a sin...but that it is also unwarranted." The Third Wave, pp.xix-xxi.
__________
Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them...(Isaiah 42:9-16).
..."Before the First Wave of change, most humans lived in small, often migratory groups and fed themselves by foraging, fishing, hunting, or herding. At some point, roughly ten millennia ago, the agricultural revolution began, and it crept slowly across the planet spreading villages, settlements, cultivated land, and a new way of life.
This First Wave of change had not yet exhausted itself by the end of the seventeenth century, when the industrial revolution broke over Europe and unleashed the second great wave of planetary change...
(Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me...Psalm 23:4).
This new process--industrialization--began moving much more rapidly across nations and continents. Thus two separate and distinct change processes were rolling across the earth simultaneously at different speeds...But the force of this great First Wave had basically been spent.
Meanwhile, the Second Wave, having revolutionized life in Europe, North America, and some other parts of the globe in a few short centuries, continues to spread, as many countries, until now basically agricultural, scramble to build steel mills, auto plants, textile factories, railroads, and food-processing plants. The momentum of industrialization is still felt. THE SECOND WAVE HAS NOT ENTIRELY SPENT ITS FORCE..." pp.7,8.
Therefore rejoice ye heavens (the higher states of mind), and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and of the sea (the lower, merely intellectual and emotional states of mind), for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth he hath but a short time.
And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the Woman which brought forth the Manchild...(Revelation 13:12,13).
THE IMPERIAL DRIVE
"No civilization spreads without conflict. Second Wave civilization soon launched an attack on the First Wave world, triumphed, and imposed its will on millions, ultimately billions, of human beings.
Long before the Second Wave, of course, from the sixteenth century on, European rulers had already begun to build extensive colonial empires. Spanish priests and conquistadors, French trappers, British, Dutch, and Portuguese or Italian adventurers fanned out across the globe, enslaving or decimating whole populations, claiming control of vast lands, and sending tribute home to the monarchs...
The Second Wave transformed this relatively small-scale pilferage into big business. It transformed Petty Imperialism into Grand Imperialism...The roots of Grand Imperialism were , however, more than economic. Strategic considerations, religious fervor, idealism, and adventure all played a part, as did racism, with its implicit assumption of white or European superiority. Many saw imperial (or colonial) conquest as a divine responsibility...For the colonizers regarded First Wave civilizations, no matter how refined and complex, as backward...Rural people, especially if they happened to wear dark skins, were supposedly childlike...They were 'shiftless.' They did not 'value life.' Such attitudes made it easier for Second Wave forces to justify the annihilation of those who stood in their path..." pp.75-78.
GAS PUMPS IN THE GARDEN
"The thrust to create this integrated world market was based on the idea, best expressed by David Ricardo, that the division of labor ought to be applied to nations as well as factory workers...This belief hardened into dogma in the generations that followed and still prevails today, although its implications often go unnoticed. For just as the division of labor in any economy created a powerful need for integration and thereby gave rise to an intergrational elite, so the international division of labor required integration on a global scale and gave rise to a global elite--a small group of Second Wave nations which, for all practical purposes, took turns dominating large parts of the rest of the world...
In reality, negotiations between Second Wave merchants and First Wave people over sugar, copper, cocoa, or other resources were often totally lopsided. On the one side of the table sat money-shrewd European or American traders backed by huge companies, extensive banking networks, powerful technologies, and strong national governments...On one side sat the agents of a thrusting, alien, mechanically advanced civilization, convinced of its own superiority and ready to use bayonets or machine guns to prove it...
CRAWFORD, Texas__Retired Gen. Colin Powell, a son of the South Bronx who rose to become America's highest ranking military officer, accepted President-elect Bush's nomination as secretary of state Saturday, pledging to strengthen U.S. alliances and stand firm against nations that practice terrorism.
"We will defend our interests from a position of strength," Powell said.
With tears in his eyes, Bush praised his first Cabinet pick as "an American hero, an American example and a great American story."
Outlining his foreign policy priorities, Bush promised to use America's "unique power and unmatched influence" to further the spread of democracy and peace around the world...
He pledged to work with countries like Russia and China, not as adversaries but as strategic partners. He said the United States would stand firm with its allies against nations that pursue weapons of mass destruction or sponsor terrorism..
"I think these are promising times, times of great opportunity but times also of challenge and danger," Powell said. "We are up to the Task." The Pittsburg Post-Gazette, Dec.17,2000.
On the other side sat representatives of small prenational tribes or principalities, armed with arrows and spears..." The Third Wave, pp.78,79.
THE RUSSIAN RIDDLE
By Fredrick L. Schuman
Students of foreign policy...are constantly searching for a golden key to unlock all mysteries, simplify all choices, and bring into intelligible relationship a bewildering variety of attitudes and acts which, considered separately, appear to be a jumble of paradoxes. Some among the searchers have sought to explain the United States in terms of "Manifest Destiny," the "Frontier," or the "American Dream"...
The enigma of Russia has long fascinated the imagination of Russians and non-Russians alike. Attempted answers have embraced such diverse explanations as the Russian Soul, the Great Plain, the Third Rome, Infant Swaddling, Byzantinism, Barbarism, Geopolitics, Panslavism, Muscovite Imperialism, Marxist Messianism...
Since man is the animal who makes ends of his means, his achievements often bear little resemblance to his intentions. Many Russians in 1917 hailed the October Revolution in the name of the new freedom, pure democracy, an end of exploitation and oppression, world unity and peace, and the cooperative commonwealth of the classless society destined to bring salvation to humanity. Their survivors or successors in 1955, while still bewitched by heroic phrases, live in a highly stratified society under a despotic and intolerant oligarchy in a world stubbornly refusing to be "saved," and therefore divided into the hostile camps of the Cold War. How did this come out of that? This eternal question of the historian is answerable, if at all, only in many thick volumes of record and analysis...I suspect, more significant paradox may serve as a point of departure for the present brief inquiry.
Russia's "mission" in the minds of most Russian rulers, from Ivan the Terrible to Malenkov, has been to "save the West" from its crimes and follies by leading it back to the true faith and the good life. In borrowing the Western creed of Marxism...Russia's revolutionary leaders were more determined than their forbears to rescue the West, by example or World Revolution, from the evils of social injustice. This purpose was no facile rationalization but a deep spiritual conviction.
Russia's actual role in the world society of our century has been of a wholly different order. Through totalitarian dictatorship and socialist economic planning, the Marxist masters of Muscovy have lifted Russia to the stature of a "Super Power," and demonstrated how a primitive community, through immense sacrifice and suffering, can raise itself to the level of a highly industrialized, urbanized society. The demonstration inspires loathing and fear in the wealthy West. But in the Eastern slum-lands of the earth it evokes admiration and emulation. The message to the West falls on deaf ears. It finds eager Oriental listeners, for whom it was never meant in the wildest imaginings of Marx and Lenin. The causes and results of this unintended reversal of roles is a major clue to foreign policy and domestic developments in contemporary Russia...
Yet the conclusion is not a certainty. The United States is vastly wealthier, more powerful and more secure than Russia. Americans nonetheless feel less secure than ever before in their national experience and act accordingly in foreign policy. Russians may do likewise. The possibility is enhanced by the fact that their creed imbues them with a conviction, stronger than that of even the most ardent of "world-saving" Americans, that their sacred mission is to "liberate" mankind through conspiracy, subversion and, conceivably, an armed crusade. Aside from messianism, which long antedates the Marxist era, Russia's rulers cling tenaciously, with only a modicum of "mellowing" since Stalin's demise, to other antique formulas for safety...
But the grand design of Communizing the world has no time-table...In their obsession with the "American Menace," they will strengthen, not unskillfully, their political, economic, and military bonds with their European satellites and their Chinese ally...
Communist acquiescence in the status quo will be a temporary expedient, pending new opportunities to promote the "collapse of capitalism." But what is provisional can become enduring if the West keeps its house in order. On these foundations will be built the world settlement of the days to come." The Russian Riddle, Current History XXVIII (February 1955).
RUSSIA SEES U.S. BID TO DOMINATE THE WORLD
Document Broadens Nuclear Arms Use Scenarios
MOSCOW, January 15, 2000___Russia unveiled its new national security doctrine yesterday, broadening the Kremlin's authority to use nuclear weapons and accusing the United States of trying to weaken Russia and become the world's dominant power.
The doctrine replaces one adopted in 1977, a time when political and military partnership with the West were still buzzwords and many Russians remained optimistic about the country's economic future. But Russia's attitude toward the West has hardened following the eastward expansion of NATO and the alliance's intervention in Yugoslavia...
"The idea of partnership has vanished," said Sergei Sokut, a military affairs writer...Acting President Vladimir Putin signed the "Concept of National Security" into law on Monday..."The level and scale of military threats is growing," the doctrine said, as if to justify the new emphasis on the potential use of nuclear weapons...
The doctrine identifies two "mutually exclusive" trends in international relations following the end of the Cold War: one an attempt to create a multipolar world and the other an alleged effort led by the United States to dominate the world. The Associated Press.
NATIONAL INTEREST: KEY TO SOVIET POLITICS
By Samuel L. Sharp
"Baffled by the Soviet phenomena, millions in the Western world have found a negative consolation of sorts in the famous statement by Winston Churchill that Russian policy is "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." But how many have bothered to read the qualifying words which followed? Having disclaimed ability to forecast Soviet actions, Churchill added: "But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."...
Whenever the suggestion is made that the concept of national interest be applied as an explanation of Soviet behavior on the international scene, objections are raised in many quarters. The most vigorous protests come, of course, from Soviet sources. It is a standard claim of Soviet spokesmen that their state is by definition something "different" (or "higher") and that the foreign policy of this entity is different in principle from that of other states because the latter are capitalist and the former is socialist. It would seem that only uncritical adherents of communism could take such statements seriously. Yet non-Communists very often cite them...in support of their own claim that the Soviet Union is indeed "different," though not in the way Soviet propaganda wants one to believe. The claim is that the Soviet Union is, at best, "a conspiracy disguised as a state" and cannot be viewed as a "normal" member of the world community of nations...
Mr. Carew Hunt argues...that there are "messianic and catastrophic elements in the Communist creed which influence...the Soviet drive for world power." While there may indeed be a degree of messianism in the Soviet leadership's view of its mission, the "catastrophic" tendency seems to be held carefully in check." Samuel L. Sharp, Professor of International Relations at American University. National Interest: Key to Soviet Politics, Problems of Communism, VII (March-April, 1958).
PUTIN VISITS CHINA IN HOPE OF STRENGTHENING AXIS
By Craig Smith
HONG KONG, July 17, 2000___President Vladimir Putin of Russia arrived in Beijing tonight on a first stop of an Asian tour intended to revive his country's faded diplomatic role in the region and build what could become a Chines-Russian axis to counter American influence.
Mr. Putin is expected to sign at least six accords with Chinese leaders on Tuesday, including a joint statement with President Jiang Zemin condemning American proposals for missile defense systems over North America and Asia. Opposition to the American plan has accelerated a relationship that Russia and China describe as a "strategic partnership" intended to counter American power...
While it is not yet clear how warmly Mr. Putin will embrace the Chinese world view, Western analysts say the rapprochement between the countries is taking an increasingly anti-American cast. "On one level this is classic real-politik balance of power, but on another it has the appearance of a united front against the United States," said David Shambaugh, a China specialist at George Washington University and the Brookings Institute in Washington. The New York Times.
RUSSIA, FIVE NEIGHBORS PLAN REGIONAL FORCE
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan__Russia and five other former Soviet republics, worried by the battlefield success of Afghanistan's Taliban rulers, agreed yesterday on ways to pool their military might against insurgencies in volatile Central Asia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus and Armenia signed a pact setting up the legal framework for rapid deployment of joint forces. The six leaders make up the Collective Security Council of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose grouping of former Soviet republics. Their agreement yesterday reflected a growing concern about the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. The Associated Press.
RUSSIAN AIR FORCE MOVES BOMBERS
WASHINGTON, December 1, 2000__The Russian air force has moved several Tu-95 Bear bombers to air bases in Northern Siberia and may be planning soon to fly them close to U.S. airspace off Alaska, officials said.
Kenneth Bacon, spokesman for Defense Secretary William Cohen, indicated Thursday that the Pentagon sees no threat in the Russian moves and considers them an effort to bolster the public image of a military in decline.
Bacon said it fits a recent pattern of Russian air training and surveillance and suggested the Russians remain trapped in "Cold War thinking" despite the collapse of communism and the end of the nuclear arms race.
China, Russia Call
for Peaceful Settelement on Iraq
By Erik Eckholm
New York Times
Monday, 2 December, 2002, BEIJING, Dec. 2 -- The Russian and Chinese leaders traded effusive pledges of friendship today as President Vladimir V. Putin made a quick but high-profile visit to Beijing. "China and Russia will be good neighbors, friends and partners forever," President Jiang Zemin said as he met with the Russian leader this morning.
Mr. Putin, who arrived this morning at 1:40 and leaves on Tuesday to continue an Asian tour, said he was "fully confident of a bright future for Russia-China relations." Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had menaced China, Moscow and Beijing have worked to rebuild friendly ties, in part to counterbalance the overwhelming global power of the United States.
Today's summit meeting, which was given prominent news media attention in both countries, seemed intended to reassure each other of that commitment, even as both have drawn closer to Washington. Mr. Putin is the most prominent foreign visitor since the change in Communist Party leadership here last month. After meeting Mr. Jiang he met with Hu Jintao, the newly selected party chief, and other top leaders.
But Mr. Jiang, who will remain as state president until March and has also kept his title as military chairman, left little doubt that he remains the paramount leader. Today, in a reminder of that status, he publicly informed Mr. Putin that he was sure that the Russian leader and Mr. Hu would "soon form good working relations." Mr. Putin and Mr. Hu were scheduled to meet later.
In the strategic shifts that followed the terror attacks of Sept. 11, China and Russia, for strong political and economic reasons, have each drawn closer to the United States. They have joined in President Bush's global crusade against terror and kept quiet as the Americans sent troops to central Asia. Both also went along, reluctantly, with an aggressive American-sponsored United Nations resolution seeking to disarm Iraq, though they remain nervous about independent American military action.
But in repeated comments today, Chinese and Russian officials stressed their shared commitment to a "multipolar" world -- code words for a world less dominated by the United States. They declared their shared faith in the United Nations Security Council, where both have veto power as permanent members, and their opposition to "unilateral action" by any country.
One new bond the leaders mentioned prominently today was a shared interest in stamping out Islamic separatism. In words sure to please Mr. Putin, Mr. Jiang praised the Russian leader for his "just antiterrorism actions," including the recent deadly raid on Chechen rebels who held hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater. Mr. Putin pledged renewed cooperation against Islamic movements in Central Asia and Xinjiang Province in China.
In a joint communiqué, the two governments spoke out against the acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea, but also called on Washington to honor previous agreements with Pyongyang. "The sides consider it important for the destiny of the world and security in Northeast Asia to preserve the non-nuclear status of the Korean peninsula and the regime of nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction," said the 14-page joint declaration, which did not set out new policies but was notable for its strong emphasis on the unsettled situation on the Korean peninsula.
"In this context," the statement continued, the two sides "stress the extreme importance of normalizing relations" between the United States and North Korea "on the basis of continued observation of earlier reached agreements, including the framework agreement of 1994." In that agreement, North Korea promised to halt nuclear weapons development in return for energy aid, including construction of nuclear power plants. The agreement is in limbo following North Korean admissions of covert nuclear research. China is one of North Korea's few allies and does not want to see the country collapse, but its diplomats have also been exasperated by the country's military posturing, which it fears could destabilize the region.
Today's joint statement also called for a peaceful settlement of the Iraqi weapons issue. It complained that some governments have a "policy of double standards" on human rights and rejected "the use of human rights questions as a lever for pressure in international relations."
China and Russia have repeatedly pledged to bolster economic ties, and this year's trade between the two countries is expected to reach $11 billion. That remains, however, a small fraction of either country's trade with the West, which has the capital and technology that both seek.
What Russia does sell to China is advanced weaponry, fighter jets and naval destroyers that are central to the modernization of China's military. The countries are also negotiating major deals to sell Russian oil and gas to China, which has growing import needs and wants to diversify from Middle Eastern sources. With its arms and energy purchases, China in turn provides Russia with badly needed hard currency.
Last year, at Beijing's urging, the two countries signed a vague "Good Neighborly Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation." "We're absolutely certain that the special strategic relationship between Russia and China will not only enable us to solve the problems facing our countries, but also will create the basis for stability in the world," Mr. Putin said at a signing ceremony for the joint declaration.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.) © : t r u t h o u t 2002
Russian warships on
standby to sail to Gulf
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Friday January 10, 2003 The Guardian
Russia has put three warships on standby to go to the Persian Gulf within the next month to protect its "national interests" in the event of an American invasion of Iraq. Russia's Pacific fleet has been ordered by the central command to prepare two cruisers and a fuel tanker for immediate deployment to the Gulf. The move will heighten tension between Moscow and Washington, who both have interests in Iraq's oilfields.
The Marshal Shaposhnikov and the Admiral Panteleyev cruisers would be called upon to defend Russian "national interests" in the Gulf if the conflict between Iraq and the US escalates. The ships - armed with missiles and reconnaissance equipment - have been ordered to be ready for deployment between late this month and early February.
Lukoil, Russia's biggest oil firm, had a £13bn contract with Baghdad to develop the West Qurna oilfield cancelled last month, reportedly after the Iraqi regime discovered Russia had been negotiating with Iraq's opposition. Military analysts pointed out that the defence of "national interests" may also refer to the Russian military's desire to conduct surveillance on both sides during any conflict. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
US and Russia in Weapons
Clash
Agence France-Presse
Monday 24 March 2003. WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush scolded Russian President Vladimir Putin over Russian firms' alleged sales of military equipment to Iraq, which could imperil US-led forces in their drive to Baghdad.
The White House said it had "credible evidence" that the companies sold Iraq night-vision goggles, anti-tank weapons, and technology to jam satellite signals that US-led forces could use to guide bombs and military aircraft. "It's the kind of equipment that will put our young men and women in harm's way. It gives an advantage to the enemy, an advantage we don't want them to have," US Secretary of State Colin Powell told Fox News Channel.
Powell and US President George W. Bush placed calls to their Russian counterparts, and Bush secured President Vladimir Putin's pledge to "look into" the allegations, said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. The spokesman declined to say for sure whether Iraqi forces were using the equipment in clashes with US, British and Australian forces but said the material was "not provided for the purpose of sitting on shelves."
Washington had upbraided Moscow "over the past year" about the alleged sales, culminating with Monday's telephone calls, according to US officials, who say the transactions violate UN-imposed sanctions. "Frankly, we believe we've given them more than enough information so that they should have been able to find out the truth of this," Powell told Fox. "So far, I am disappointed at the response."
Russia has denied the charges, and the Kremlin account of the telephone conversation centered on Putin bluntly warning Bush he must strive to avert a "humanitarian catastrophe" tied to US-led military action in Iraq. "Putin repeated his existing position on resolving (the crisis over) Iraq and underlined the need to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in the region," the Kremlin said in a statement. The warning came after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that Basra's 1.2 million residents are on the brink of a humanitarian crisis due to a water shortage and fighting around the southern Iraqi city.
The mutual scolding appeared to signal a deepening rift between the United States and Russia, which joined France, Germany and China in firmly opposing US-led military action against Iraq. The two leaders "speak frankly to each other," Fleischer said, using diplomatic code for sharp disagreements. "There are problems. This clearly is a problem that needs to be resolved." "These actions are disturbing, and we have made our concerns clear to the Russian government. We've asked the Russian government that any such ongoing assistance cease immediately," said Fleischer.
Since the acrimonious UN debate on a resolution backing war against Iraq, US officials have privately said that commercial ties to Iraq go a long way toward explaining resistance to the war from France and Russia. A top US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Sunday that Washington had evidence that personnel from a Russian firm were in Iraq attempting to help set up and operate a system that interferes with US global positioning technology. Fleischer did not confirm that allegation.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov rejected the US accusations, saying an investigation had yielded no proof that Russian companies have flouted UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq. "Russia strictly fulfills all its international obligations and has not supplied any equipment, including military, to Iraq in violation of the sanctions regime," Ivanov told journalists.
Ivanov said the relevant Russian agencies had investigated the US claims but "no facts regarding the US concerns were discovered." But Iraq could have acquired the equipment via a third country, like Syria or Ukraine, according to analysts and officials. © : t r u t h o u t 2003.
We may ask what has all of this to do with the subject of education? But the implications should be clear. They explain to us the things we have not been learning in school--from neither the Liberal or the Conservative perspective (despite the Religious Right's insistence to the contrary). America is moving toward a confrontation with the powers of the East, one that will result in the fulfillment of the very words of the prophets which both sides so systematically disregard (Revelation, chapter 18. KJV). For Liberals also consider themselves to be "good Americans," and keepers of the Sacred Flame of Liberty. They also believe, perhaps even more than their Conservative brethren, that they have divined the true intentions of the Founding Fathers, and are just as willing to send the nation's young men and women away to die in the interest of that world-view as those on the Right. And that is the crux of the entire matter: Anyone who sends another person away to war, to kill and to die in the name of Christianity, or who subscribes to it under the guise of Christian ethics, is either an antichrist or subject to one. (And now, while it is absolutely true that God has sent George Bush and the American armies to the East as a judgment against the cruelties of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime, indeed against the collective literal and violent impulses of the entire Islamic world itself, the words still remain:
The Lord hath made all things for Himself, even the wicked for the day of evil...(Proverbs 16:4), and Evil shall slay the wicked; and they that hate the rightous shall be desolate...(Psalm 34:21).
"They pay no heed to the real hidden meanings of things, but divert themselves instead with all kinds of iniquitous arcane lore…They do not know the hidden meaning of what is actually taking place, nor have they ever understood the lessons of the past. Consequently, they have no knowledge of what is coming upon them, and have done nothing to save their souls from the deeper implications of present events.
This, however, will symbolize things for you. What is going to happen is, as it were, that all iniquity is going to be shut up in the womb and prevented from coming to birth. Wrong is going to depart before Right, as darkness departs before light. As smoke disappears and is no more, so will Wrong disappear forever. But Right will be revealed like the Sun. The world will rest on the sound Foundation. All who cling to rarefied arcane lore will cease to exist. The world will be filled with knowledge, and ignorance exist no more.
The thing is certain to come. The prophecy is true, and by this you may know that it will not be revoked: Do not all peoples hate wrongdoing? Yet, is it not rampant among them all? Are not the praises of truth sung by all nations? Yet is there a single race or tribe that really adheres to it? What nation like to be oppressed by a stronger power? Or who wants his property plundered unjustly? Yet, is there a single nation that has not oppressed its neighbor? Or where in the world will you find a people that has not plundered the property of another?" The Dead Sea Scriptures, by. Theodor Gaster, p.429.
So what is it that they have been (not) teaching our children?
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As the Christian religion aligned itself with the nations of the earth (we generally assign the beginning of this apostasy to the time of Constantine the Great), forsaking its own laws, and the precepts and statutes it carried with it out of the East, Westward, it became to itself in these last several centuries, and in violation of itself, an agent of the American state of mind instead. In violation of its own laws it literally applied the mark of the beast (the mark of Cain) to its own forehead, and attached it to its own right hand (to the works of its own hands) (Deuteronomy 6:5-15; Revelation 13:16-18). Christians and Jews alike became so grossly entangled in the American ethos, in its economic and political affairs, in its military adventures, and in its judicial conflicts, that the child of God born into this unholy marriage between church and state could scarcely clear their way through the philosophical thicket and reclaim their heritage in Christ, without being accused, and tried for sedition. The subject of forced conscription for instance. It seems not to be a critical issue at the moment (although it is for some), but it will be a pressing, and perhaps the defining issue in a very short time to come:
1 OF 8 DRAFT-AGE MEN REMAIN UNREGISTERED
AS GRACE TIME ENDS
By Thomas O'Toole
Although President Reagan's grace period for young men who failed to register for the draft comes to an end today, one of every eight required to fill out the card has failed to do so. The Selective Service System said more than 927,000 had not signed up by the middle of last week...
Men whose names are not listed will be sent warnings, first by the Selective Service and then by the Justice Department, which has said it will prosecute those who continue to refuse to register. "There certainly will be hundreds," Attorney General William French Smith said earlier this month when asked how many prosecutions Justice plans. "How many more is difficult to say." The administration intends to enforce the draft registration law, he said, "within our existing resources." The Washington Post.
STUDENT IS CHARGED WITH FAILURE TO REGISTER
WASHINGTON__A California college student was indicted yesterday as the first man charged with failure to register for the standby military draft, according to the Justice Department. The one-count indictment was returned in U.S. District Court in San Diego against Benjamin H. Sasway. It charged that he "did knowingly and willfully fail, evade and refuse to present himself for and submit to registration." The violation carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine...
Sasway...told a news conference there earlier this week that draft registration is "an affront to freedom that increases the likelihood of war." Sasway predicted his own indictment at the news conference where he also said, "Registering for the draft is a vital part of the growing spread of U.S. militarism that brings us closer and closer to nuclear war." The Associated Press.
IN GOD HE TRUSTS: PACIFIST REFUSES AID
ROANOKE, Va.__A pacifist who expects to be the first person tried for failing to register under the new Selective Service law says he won't prepare a defense--he'll rest his case in the hands of God. Enten Eller, a member of the pacifist Church of the Brethren, said Friday he told his lawyers to drop plans to argue that he was protected by the freedom of religion guarantees of the First Amendment. He also waived his right to have a jury in his Aug. 17 federal court trial.
Eller, 20, a senior at the Brethren-affiliated Bridgewater College near Harrisonburg, pleaded innocent last month and admitted to U.S. District Judge James Turk that he hadn't registered. Eller cited his religious beliefs, saying registering for the draft would run against his idea of a Christian's duty.
Eller told the Roanoke Times on Friday that he was sorry Turk is being forced to make a decision in a dispute between law and conscience. "There's another judge up there and he's the one I have to answer to," Eller said.
"I don't want to fight the government...I don't want to turn this into a constitutional battle...I don't want to be a celebrity...I don't want to spend time in prison...I'm trying to follow Christ and do what God wants me to do," he said...
Eller said he would consider some sort of alternative service, but would not obey any order requiring him to register. The Associated Press.
__________
ROANOKE, Va__ A college student who said he followed God's bidding was convicted by a judge yesterday for failing to register for the draft. He was placed on three years probation and ordered to register within three months or face prison. The trial of Enten Eller, a 20-year-old honor student at Bridgwater College, was the first since mandatory registration was revived two years ago. He could have been sentenced to five years in prison.
Eller said after the half-day trial concluded that he still had no plans to register...Before he was sentenced, Eller, a member of the pacifist Church of the Brethren, told U.S. District Judge James C. Turk that he wouldn't register even if the judge ordered it. The Associated Press.
Who gave the American state such power over the lives of God's children? Roger Williams (who some have said was the first and last true Baptist on the American continent), the founder of the Rhode Island community--not the State of Rhode Island--denied secular governors any such power over the consciences of individuals whatsoever (just as he denied the Church any such authority over the lives of nonbelievers). So where did it (the state) get the arrogance? Colin Powell said on a recent TV special entitled America's Wars, Schwarzkopf's Diary: "We could visualize 5,000 killed, wounded and missing, but not the tens of thousands others were citing." (Oh, that's a relief). Actually world events have unfolded exactly in accordance with History's divine pattern, and the spirit of Nimrod that has come across the sea with the Church just naturally assumed "the Right" to its own undoing in the end. Actually it was granted to him by the church itself, not only in direct defiance of the words that said...
Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field (and county to county, and state to state), till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth...
Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were a cart rope:
That say, Let Him make speed, and hasten His work, that we may see it: and let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come, that we may know it!
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!
Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink:
Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him...(Isaiah 5:8-23).
...but in total disregard of those other words which say:
Seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you;
And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels,
In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:
Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his Power;
When he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and be admired in all them that believe because our testimony among you was believed in that day...(2 Thessalonians 1:5-10).
Colossians 2:18-19 (KJV)
The spirit of Nimrod (Washington and all the other members of the Continetal Congress) did not only at its earliest opportunity usurp authority over the mind of the church in America, and the church did not only acquiesce to it--confounded as it was by the meaning of things and the wholly religious language men used to deceive themselves and others, as well as by the emerging power and adventurous mystique of the capitalist spirit itself and the wide open space to exploit. Of course the Church was deceived by its own natural heart, by the preachers of Ba'al within its very own ranks, just as it is today. Nevertheless, the American school system that has grown out of these wicked associations, and the many various civic organizations that have direct access to it, has routinely and systematically enforced and instilled the rule of American law, along with the myths and precepts of the American socio-economic and military order, into the hearts and minds of every child at its disposal ever since. Christians are not allowed to pledge allegiance to any nation, and yet America's young people have been made to believe that it is not only their civic responsibility to submit willingly, to the pledge as well as to the Selective Service System, but their religious responsibility as well.
And even in the present absence of an actual draft they are being constantly allured through a very sophisticated recruiting program in the nation's high schools and colleges, by the promises of tuitions (that many of these young candidates could not otherwise afford), or continued financing (which they will have to labor for years to pay back), and with promises of career and travel, romance, a uniform with medals and stripes, and a chance to belong to something really historic and "really big"--a chance to help save the world from Evil. "We Are Looking For a Few Good Men," and "Be All That You Can Be in the Army." Has anyone ever heard of a pacifist being invited to address the student body of any American public school? Perhaps on some rare occasions but I should say not. Besides, the teachers, the preachers and the prophets of Ba'al have confounded that subject: Jerry Falwell said on Larry King Live that America now had the right man in the right place, and that George W. Bush, "who was not a draft dodger" he says, would restore the honor and the dignity to the office of the American presidency. And Graham Walker, a professor of political science at Houghton College, New York, in a 1982 article in Moody magazine, gave a most classic example of Paul's words at 1 Corinthians, chapter 2. (The wise, of course, will understand...Daniel 12:10):
THE CHRISTIAN CASE FOR MILITARY SERVICE
The Falkland Islands dispute between Britain and Argentina not only resurrects an old military feud. It also raises a religious one. Christians have never agreed on issues of war and military service. They probably never will. Since the beginning of the Church, Christian thinking on the subject has been divided into two streams--Pacifism and the Just Use of Force position. (Between the spirit of Abel and the spirit of Cain. James Earl Carter is a proponant of the latter).
Both schools of thought have a long history of scholarship, reflection, and tradition. Both rely on the Bible for their primary arguments, BUT BOTH CANNOT BE CORRECT AT THE SAME TIME SINCE THEIR CLAIMS ON MANY POINTS ARE DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED. (Mr. Walker is absolutely correct in this matter).
Historically, the Pacifist position has rested squarely on the Sermon on the Mount and the clear command of the Lord Jesus Christ to resist not evil, and turn the other cheek. BUT PACIFISM READS THE BIBLE TOO NARROWLY. It focuses on a few favored passages to the exclusion of others. WE NEED TO EXAMINE THE FULL BREADTH OF THE SCRIPTURES. (With pleasure).
Violence clearly had no place in Eden. But the Fall and the resulting rupture in human nature and human society changed this. In the Old Testament, God commands the Israelites to occupy the Promised Land by force. He, the Lord of Hosts (literally, "of armies') commands and sustains the military force that subdues Israel's enemies. (Mr. Walker is still without a clue. He does not know how to "rightly divide the Word of God"--to distinguish epic narrative and allegory from historical fact).
Pacifist sometimes dismiss the Old Testament wars by invoking the concept of Progressive Revelation--that God revealed His holy character and law progressively through Biblical history...that if God's full revelation had been present from the beginning, certain practices would have been forbidden. (Which, of course, is quite true. see Matthew 13:1-15)...
God would not command something that is intrinsically, inherently wrong, as James 1:13 says: "God tempts no man with evil." (Nevertheless, see Ezekiel 20:19-26; 2 Thessalonians 2:7-12; Zephaniah 1:12; Micah 2:1-3; Amos 5:18...). Thus, while they give no definitive answer, the Old Testament wars do lead in a clear direction. In God's eyes it is possible for force to be used legitimately by men and societies...The Lord Jesus used physical force when he cleansed the temple (John 2:15). He moved against the established, but aberrant, religio-political institution of his day. (And therefore thine own words shall condemn thee)...
Take the case of the soldiers who consulted John the Baptist, repenting of their sins. "What shall we do?" they asked him at Jordan. John's counsel is revealing: "Rob no one by violence or by false accusation, and be content with your wages." (Luke 3:14 RSV).
We will leave off with Mr. Walker's very unlearned, and wholly intellectual discourse here, with what the Authorized Version of the Scripture says instead: And he said, DO VIOLENCE TO NO MAN...(at any time, ever). And this because John was not addressing Roman soldiers, or even those in the service of the Jewish state, but those who were preparing to enter into the mystery of Christ, and to serve in the great universal cause of the Commonwealth of Israel, as it is written:
He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword...Herein is the patience and faith of the saints...(Revelation 13:10).
__________
Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.
No man who warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier...(2 Timothy 2:3,4).
__________
Follow peace with ALL men...without which no man shall see the Lord...(Hebrews 12:12-29).
__________
Be ye not carnally minded or in bondage, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh (or after the purely literal meaning of things) but after the Spirit...
For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh, but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.
For to be carnally (literally) minded is Death, but to be spiritually minded is Life and Peace.
For the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither can be. So they that are after the flesh cannot please God.
Now if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his...(Romans 4-9).
__________
Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be, in all holy conversation and godliness...
Seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent THAT YE MAY BE FOUND OF HIM IN PEACE, WITHOUT SPOT AND BLAMELESS...(2 Peter 3:10-14).
__________
The Lord shall keep the Feet of His saints, the wicked shall be silent in Darkness, FOR BY STRENGTH SHALL NO MAN PREVAIL. The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken in pieces, out of Heaven shall He thunder upon them. The Lord shall judge the ends of the earth...(1 Samuel 2:8-10).
The Allegory of Sacred Warfare
Instead of waiting patiently for the arrival of the Third Wave which the Spirit had promised, and instead of a willingness to pay the price of endurance (Hosea 6:1-3; Matthew 24:5-13; Hebrews 3:12-14), the American church threw itself body and soul into the Second Wave. And it is now in severe danger of being swept away with it if it continues to think in terms of the old paradigms of (false) peace and (literal) war, and yield to the present rulers of this age who have set themselves blindly and ignorantly in defense of this same old order of things--in defense of their wealth, their privileges and power, and in defense of their present ability to keep us and our children thoroughly educated)...
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:
For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;
Casting down imaginations, AND EVERY HIGH THING THAT EXALTETH ITSELF AGAINST THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.
And (then) having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when our own obedience is fulfilled...(2 Corinthians 10:3-6; Ephesians 6:10-17).
They, the present rulers of this age, and those who express their will, desire to keep us educated in these ways because they were brought up these ways themselves. And because resistance and protest is an American tradition, the people are allowed to protest and raise their banners, and have their say (on almost every issue, including war)--as long as they do not begin to make a real change in the American attitude, or begin to make a noticeable tear in the national fabric. The entire nation together applauded that courageous young man--that young Reagan capitalist--who stood defiantly in front of that Chinese tank on Tiananmen Square, but let us begin to "awaken" together as a people, and begin to educate each other in the ways of the Spirit, in the ways of true universal righteousness (with all of its national, global and spiritual implications), thus with the unfolding Revelation of God's designs upon this entire age, and see if the Capitalist order applauds us in the same way...
"In the United States today--as in many countries--the collision of Second and Third Waves creates social tensions, dangerous conflicts, and strange new political wave fronts that cut across the usual divisions of class, race, sex, or party. (The children of the coming age belong to no "party"). This collision makes a shambles of traditional political vocabularies and makes it very difficult to separate the progressives from the reactionaries, friends from enemies. All the old polarizations and coalitions break up. Unions and employers, despite their differences, join to fight environmentalists. Blacks and Jews, once united in the battle against discrimination, become adversaries.
In many nations, labor, which has traditionally favored "progressive" policies such as income redistribution, now often holds "reactionary" positions with respect to women's rights, family codes, immigration, tariffs, or regionalism. The traditional "left" is often pro-centralization, highly nationalistic, and antienvironmentalist.
At the same time we see politicians, from Valery Giscard d'Estaing to Jimmy Carter or Jerry Brown espousing "conservative" attitudes toward economics (and may we add, "deceptive" attitudes toward "war" and "peace"), and "liberal" attitudes toward art, sexual morality, women's rights, or ecological controls. No wonder people are confused and give up trying to make sense of their world.
The media, meanwhile, report a seemingly endless succession of innovations, reversals, bizarre events, assassinations, kidnappings, space shots, governmental breakdown, commando raids, and scandals, all seemingly unrelated. The apparent incoherence of political life is mirrored in personality disintegration. Psychotherapists and gurus do a land-office business; people wander aimlessly amid competing therapies, from primal scream to 'est.' They slip into cults and covens or, alternatively, into a pathological privatism, convinced that reality is absurd, insane, or meaningless. (Toffler says): Life may indeed be absurd in some large, cosmic sense. But this hardly proves there is no pattern in today's events. (Please understand Genesis 1:2,3). In fact, there is a distinct hidden order that becomes detectable as soon as we learn to distinguish Third Wave changes from those associated with the diminishing Second Wave...
REAGAN (and now Bush) DOESN'T UNDERSTAND REVOLUTION PROCESS,
TASS SAYS
Moscow__President Reagan's charge that the Soviet Union was attempting to set up a world communist state showed he did not understand the nature of the world revolutionary process, the official Tass news agency said yesterday...
"These changes are the result of peoples' struggle for independence and national liberation," Tass added. "These processes are not within the power of the United States or the Soviet Union. They have an objective character." From Wire Services.
...An understanding of the conflicts produced by the colliding wave fronts gives us not only a clearer image of alternative futures but an X ray of the political and social forces acting on us. It also offers insight into our own private roles in history. For each of us, no matter how seemingly unimportant, is a living piece of history. (Please see 2 Corinthians 13:5).
The crosscurrents created by these waves of change are reflected in our work, our family life, our sexual attitudes and personal morality. They show up in our lifestyles and voting behavior. For in our personal lives and in our political acts, whether we know it or not, most of us in the rich countries are essentially Second Wave people committed to maintaining the dying order, Third Wave people constructing a radically different tomorrow, or a confused, self-canceling mixture of the two." The Third Wave, pp.7-10.
BREAKING THE CODE
Standardization, Specialization, Synchronization, Concentration, Maximization, Centralization.
"Every civilization has a hidden code--a set of rules or principles that run through all its activities like a repeated design. As industrialization pushed across the planet, its unique hidden design became visible. (Please read, Genocide Against the Indians, Its Role in the Rise of U.S. Capitalism, by George Novack). It consisted of a set of six interrelated principles that programmed the behavior of millions. Growing naturally out of the divorce of production and consumption, these principles affected every aspect of life from sex and sports to work and war.
Much of the angry conflict in our schools, businesses, and governments today actually centers on these half-dozen principles, as Second Wave people instinctively apply and defend them and Third Wave people challenge and attack them...
STANDARDIZATION...The most familiar of these Second Wave principles is standardization. Everyone knows that industrial societies turn out millions of identical products. Fewer people have stopped to notice, however, that once the market became important, we did more than simply standardize Coca-Cola bottles and light bulbs...In Second Wave societies, hiring procedures as well as work were increasingly standardized. Standardized tests were used to identify and weed out the supposedly unfit, especially in the civil service. Pay scales were standardized throughout whole industries, along with fringe benefits, lunch hours, holidays, and grievance procedures. (But only after these things were won from the capitalist class through intense soul-search and spiritual compromise, through great heroic efforts and much personal suffering). TO PREPARE YOUTH FOR THE (Capitalist) JOB MARKET, educators designed standardized curricular. Men like Binet and Terman devised standardized intelligence tests. School grading policies, admission procedures, and accreditation rules were similarly standardized...
The mass media, meanwhile, disseminated standardizing imagery, so that millions read the same advertisements, the same news, the same short stories...Different parts of the country began to look alike, as identical gas stations, billboards, and houses cropped up everywhere. The principle of standardization ran throughout every aspect of daily life.
SPECIALIZATION...A second great principle ran through all Second Wave societies: specialization. For the more the Second Wave eliminated diversity in language, leisure, and life-style, the more it needed diversity in the sphere of work...All sorts of occupational groups from librarians to salesmen began clamoring for the right to call themselves professionals--and for the power to set standards, prices, and conditions of entry into their specialties. By now...'Our culture is dominated by professionals who call us "clients" and tell us our "needs."' (Further setting various groups of individuals apart from others, according to class and economic distinctions, destroying the very fabric of every soul's common humanity, and common purpose in life).
SYNCHRONIZATION...The widening split between production (whose means were now owned and controlled by owners and controllers) and consumption also forced a change in the way Second Wave people dealt with time...Until the Second Wave brought in machinery and silenced the songs of the worker, most such synchronization of effort was organic or natural. It flowed from the rhythm of the seasons and from biological processes, from the earth's rotation and the beat of the heart. Second Wave societies, by contrast, moved to the beat of the machine.
As factory production spread, the high cost of machinery and the close interdependence of labor required a much more refined synchronization. If one group of workers (producer/consumers...1984) was late in completing a task, others down the line would be further delayed. Thus punctuality, never very important in agricultural communities, became a social necessity, and clocks and watches began to proliferate...Not by coincidence, children in industrial societies were taught to tell time at an early age. PUPILS WERE CONDITIONED TO ARRIVE AT SCHOOL WHEN THE BELL RANG so that later on they would arrive reliably at the factory or office when the whistle blew...
Once the Second Wave became dominant even the most intimate routines of life were locked into the industrial pacing system...families arose as one, ate at the same time, commuted, worked, returned home, went to bed, slept, and even made love more or less in unison as the entire civilization.
CONCENTRATION...First Wave societies lived off widely dispersed sources of energy. Second Wave societies became almost totally dependent on highly-concentrated deposits of fossil fuel.
But the Second Wave concentrated more than energy. It also concentrated population, stripping the countryside of people and relocating them in giant urban centers...While work in First Wave societies took place everywhere--in the home, in the village, in the fields--much of the work in Second Wave societies was done in factories where thousands of laborers were drawn together (to compete against each other for the favor and blessings of the capitalist masters) under a single roof.
Nor was it only energy and work that were concentrated...The early nineteenth century, in fact, has been called the time of the Great Incarcerations--when criminals were rounded up and concentrated in prisons, the mentally ill rounded up and concentrated in 'lunatic asylums,' AND CHILDREN ROUNDED UP AND CONCENTRATED IN SCHOOLS, exactly as workers were concentrated in factories...
MAXIMIZATION...The split-up of production and consumption also created, in all Second Wave societies, a case of obsessive 'macrophilia'--A KIND OF TEXAN INFATUATION WITH BIGNESS AND GROWTH...Such faith in sheer scale derived from narrow Second Wave assumptions about the nature of 'efficiency.'...Second Wave governments around the world entered into a blind race to increase Gross National Product at all costs, maximizing 'growth' EVEN AT THE RISK OF ECOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL DISASTER. The macrophiliac principle was built so deeply into the industrialized mentality that nothing seemed more reasonable. Maximization went along with the other industrial ground rules.
CENTRALIZATION...Finally, all industrialized nations developed into a fine art. While the Church and many First Wave rulers knew perfectly well how to centralize power, they dealt with far less complex societies and were crude amateurs by contrast with the men and women who centralized industrialized societies from the ground up...As industrialization pushed the political system toward greater centralization, the government in Washington took on an increasing number of powers and responsibilities and monopolized more and more decision-making at the center. Within the federal government, meanwhile, power shifted from the Congress and the courts to the most centralist of the three branches--the Executive. By the Nixon years, historian Arthur Schlesinger...was attacking the 'Imperial Presidency.'
These (six) principles in turn, each reinforcing the other, led relentlessly to the rise of bureaucracy. They produced some of the biggest, most rigid, most powerful bureaucratic organizations the world had ever seen, leaving the individual to wander in a Kafka-like world of looming mega-organizations. If today we feel oppressed and overpowered by them, we can trace our problems to the hidden code that programmed the civilization of the Second Wave.
So, indeed, are the Second Wave elites who are still applying these rules--in business, in banking, in labor relations, in government, IN EDUCATION, in the media. For the rise of a new civilization challenges all the vested interests of the old one.
In the upheavals that lie IMMEDIATELY ahead, the elites of all industrial societies--so accustomed to setting the rules--will in all likelihood go the way of the feudal lords of the past. Some will be by-passed. Some will be dethroned. Some will be reduced to impotence or shabby gentility. Some--most intelligent and adaptive--will be transformed and emerge as leaders of the Third Wave civilization.
To understand who will run things tomorrow when the Third Wave becomes dominant, we must know exactly who runs things today." The Third Wave, pp.39-53.
Appearing...at a youth concert at MCI Center, Bush exhorted the nation's young people to be good citizens and pledged to help all Americans reach their potential. "We're going to work hard to make the world more peaceful," Bush said after being introduced by Secretary of State designate Colin L. Powell...
EDUCATION IS FIRST PRIORITY
By Mike Allen
After taking the oath of office at noon today...George W. Bush plans to generate momentum for his administration by pushing immediately for broad legislative victories instead of incremental ones, starting with his cornerstone issue of education.
The new president will barely pause to revel in his new trappings, according to plans sketched by aides. On Tuesday, following White House meetings with congressional leaders of both parties, Bush will send up his first legislative proposal--an education package that includes penalties for failing schools, school choice for parents and a program to teach every child to read by third grade.
As if waging a campaign, aides are referring to his first week in office as "Education Week."
"I'm anxious to start making decisions," an ebullient Bush said at a fundraising dinner Thursday. "It's time to get to work."...Incoming press secretary Ari Fleischer said Bush's education package will...provide a powerful incentive to make sure that all our public schools live up to the standards that can and must be set for them."
SERPENT TALK
(FULL OF CODED MESSAGES THAT SPEAK DIRECTLY, BUT DIFFERENTLY, TO THE HEART OF BOTH CLASSES: THE OPPRESSORS, AND THE OPPRESSED, THE RULERS AND THE RULED):
As the palate tasteth diverse kinds of meat, so does the heart of understanding false speeches...(Ecclesiasticus 36:19).
The son speaks of PROSPERITY WITH A PURPOSE and pledges to "MAKE SURE THE AMERICAN DREAM TOUCHES EVERY WILLING HEART."
The father (George H.W. Bush) put it this way: "My friends, we are not the sum of our possessions. (But neither, of course, will we relinquish them, or cease to fight for them...James, chapter 4). They are not the measure of our lives. In our hearts, we know what matters. We can not only hope to leave our children a bigger car, a bigger bank account. We must hope to give them a sense of what it means to be a loyal friend (to whom?) a loving parent, a citizen who leaves his home, his neighborhood and town better than when he found it."
In his quest for what he called "a kinder, gentler" nation, the older president Bush said his path did not involve the expansion of government but the encouragement of community groups dealing with social problems on a personal, local level--what he called the "thousand points of light."
His son brings the same preference for nonbureaucratic solutions, and especially for involving faith-based organizations in dealing with problems of drugs and homelessness and dependency that the father said cried out for action. "I am speaking of a new engagement in the lives of others, a new activism, hands-on, involved--that get's the job done." He was speaking for his son as well as himself. The Washington Post.
IS YOUR CHILD CAPITAL?
Yes, According To The Architects Of The New Global Economy
By Cindy Weatherly
12-7-03
During preparation for a workshop on educational policy in 1982, I was asked by the host organization to prepare a glossary of terms pertaining to my presentation. That request seemed simple enough and a reasonable one, so I set about compiling terms related to CBE (Competency-Based Education) (forerunner of Outcome-Based Education and promulgated by the same man Bill Spady), our fad-of-the-moment in educational reformation toward illiteracy in Georgia. As I said, the task seemed simple enough. However, while still in the "A's" of the alphabet, I developed an overwhelming respect for professional compilers of glossaries. The first word block I encountered was "assessment". Sure it was familiar; we all knew it meant 'test'; but the longer I struggled to apply that definition to CBE the more elusive "assessment's" definition became.
The latest word for 'test' was "instrument" and that proved easy to explain. But, "assessment" was a broader term, "assessment" was the noun form of the verb "assess". What did "assess" actually mean? The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had been in use since its development in the latter 1960's. Had we overlooked a change in emphasis by the Federal level of education implied by the use of the word "assessment" that could be significant? Receiving no help from my small hill of accumulated state department of education materials relating to assessment, I decided to "read the instruction manual": (Webster's New World Dictionary.) Webster's clearly stated:
"assess": 1. to set an estimated value on (property, etc.) for taxation 2. to set the amount of (a tax, fine, damages, etc.) 3. to impose a fine, tax, or special payment on (a person or property) 4. to impose (an amount) as a fine, tax, etc. 5. to estimate or determine the significance, importance, or value of; evaluate.
"assessment": 1. the act of assessing 2. the amount assessed. This definition disturbed me a little. I had assumed that "assessment" was just the latest educationese for a broad-based test. Had I missed something somewhere? To accomplish the task at hand -- the glossary -- I crafted a definition that read like this:
"Assessment: an estimation; determination of the significance or value of. As used in education, a general term for measuring student progress. Conflict in definition occurs when considering that this is a measurement process that is used to determine the value or significance of a particular outcome in educational performance. Therefore, it is not a true measurement, but a process of assigning value to specific tasks, creating a cumulative score for performance instead of an accurate measurement against a standard."
It sounded good at the time and spoke to the question of "what are we testing?" which was a growing concern due to the nature of Competency-Based Education's life role skills competencies, which were going to dictate our educational goals -- just like "OBE" does today. Even though satisfied to have introduced the idea that there may be a conflict within the definition of "assessment" as an educational term, I was bothered that I could find no definitions in other dictionaries, including legal ones, which did not have primary meanings related to assigning a value for tax purposes. "Assessment" is primarily a legal term; in fact, the use of the word "instrument" could carry a legal connotation as well. Disturbing.
THE FEDERAL ACCOUNTING PROCESS In March of 1984 I had the privilege of giving testimony supporting stringent regulations for the Pupil Privacy Act (the Hatch Amendment) which amended the General Education Provisions Act to offer protection from intrusive questioning, programs, and the record-keeping for parents and students.
Again, preparation for that testimony caused me to review the National Center for Educational Statistics' handbook series known as the "State Educational Records and Reports Series". Specifically, Handbook IIR - the Financial Accounting Handbook - alluded to a "unified accounting system" based on the process known as Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) which was to be used by all school systems. PPBS involves mandated goals and constant adjustment of resources to ensure that goals are met... the system that is still in use today. In testifying, I drew a projected conclusion:
If our financial resource reporting is going to be unified by such a system, then are we not but a step away from unified goals for our educational outcomes? This is assuredly a step toward mandated national curriculum and interstate and interregional tax and financial management revisions... will we not soon be sharing tax resources from region to region as needed to `equalize' educational opportunities and programs deemed `exemplary` or in the `national interest to produce global- minded citizens?' (Of course the purpose of the Law and the Prophets IS to produce Global-Minded Citizens. Do not, however, get the goals of the American system confused with those of the Spirit. One leads to Darkness the other to Light).
The longer I thought of "assessment" being the "value determined for tax purposes" and the possibility of cross-regional/state sharing of tax resources, the more concerned I became over the idea that the record-keeping and information-compiling might become so tied to the individual student that "assessment" might have a more malignant potential. WE WERE TALKING ABOUT OUR CHILDREN HERE.
At that point in time there was a growing emphasis on choice and vouchers/tuition tax credits in education. Since with the money flows the control, could this be part of the "assessment" picture? That would tie an individual student moving about in the "choice market" directly to a federal accounting process both financially and educationally due to national standards being proposed. No one seemed to be too worried about it in the 1980's, but it still bothered me.
Over a period of time I shared my concern with close associates -- if "assess" was to "assign a value for tax purposes", then why were we "assessing" children? A theory began to take root and grow in my mind: somehow we were going to allow children's potential worth to society to be measured, and their future life roles would somehow be measured, and their future life roles would be somehow projected, and they would be limited by that assigned worth. What a thought! Could this be possible in the United States [of America]?
HUMAN CAPITAL DEFINED Later someone sent me pages from a book entitled Human Capital and America's Future, edited by David W. Hornbeck and Lester M. Salamon. The title itself set off alarm bells because of the connection to education shared by many of the contributors, especially Hornbeck. It was now the early 90's and many disturbing things were happening. David Hornbeck was a highly visible change agent responsible for many radical education reforms in states from Kentucky to Iowa and had been a consultant to many more. Why was Hornbeck focusing on 'human capital'? That had been primarily used in economic and commercial literature. Hornbeck was also identified with changes in "assessment" in the school systems with which he consulted and worked. The book was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1991 and contains an enlightening list of contributors in addition to Hornbeck: Ernest Boyer; Nancy Barrett; Anthony Carnavale; Sheldon Danziger; Marian Wright Edelman; Scott Fosler; Daniel Greenberg; Jason Jaffras; Arnold Packer; Isabel Sawhill; Marion Pines; Donald Stewart, and Lester Salamon.
The social and political views of "Human Capitol's" line-up of contributors could be the basis of another whole article, but suffice it to say that most of the radical changes toward a managed populus in this country can be reflected among this group of individuals. Weren't some of them involved in the dis-establishing of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) and turning it into the Department of Education?
While references to "human capital" have been the fare of business publications for some time, it has only been in the last few years that this term applied to school children. In Hornbeck's chapter in "Human Capital", 'New Paradigm for Action', he outlined the systemic change which must occur to produce the workforce for the future and fulfill our nation's 'human capital' needs. Hornbeck's "new paradigm of action" looked a lot like old "OBE" -- setting specific performance standards and invoking penalties for schools, teachers and students not meeting them:
"If the new comprehensive system is to be outcome-based, careful attention must be paid to 'assessment' strategies. The selection of outcome indicators will be informed by the availability of sound assessment instruments." [emphasis added] Now here was Hornbeck using "assessment" and "instrument" together instead of a substitute for one or the other -- and he had selected the two terms which carried legal usage definitions. Hornbeck asserted that while the NAEP might be universally available, and portfolio "assessments" (notice the use of both words together) would become popular, "the Educational Testing Service (ETS) is investing time and funds in developing new approaches to assessment." He further stated that while most of the present 'assessment' observations are "related to academic objectives"...
"Similar sensitivity is required in carefully defining appropriate assessment tools in other areas as well. In citizenship... a method should be developed for expressing qualitative aspects of participation activities... a different 'value' could be placed on 'community service'... physical and mental fitness... problems arise as we confront legal and even constitutional issues (self-incrimination, search and seizure)... Perhaps a school system should plan to have all students undergo a "physical exam" in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades as a health counterpart to the academic testing program. Again, the emphasis must be on carefully determining assessment strategies that measure the outcomes to be achieved."
All of this is structured because "incremental change is insufficient. Systems must be radically altered to produce what the nation's economy demands in a work force." Weren't we supposed to be concerned about the education of school children? This sounded a lot like literature which proposed "full employment" policies -- much like the billboards and signs plastered on public transportation and public buildings in Grenada -- "Work for everyone; everyone working!" -- before the U.S. invasion to overthrow their communist government. Was this why the Council of Chief State School Officers accepted a contract from the National Center for Educational Statistics to develop what is known as the "SPEEDE ExPRESS? (The Exchange of Permanent Records Electronically of Students and Schools.) THIS ELECTRONIC INFORMATION TRACK CAN CARRY THE MOST DIVERSE AND EXTENSIVE INFORMATION ON A STUDENT, DELIVERING IT TO FUTURE EMPLOYERS, PLACES OF HIGHER EDUCATION, TRAINING CENTERS, HEALTH PROVIDERS (contraceptive histories will be included), THE MILITARY AND A NUMBER OF OTHER RECIPIIENTS YET TO BE DESIGNATED. Then if employers, government and others have input into what should be the outcome of education in this country -- instead of education being academically and informational-based -- then the concept of "assessment as assigning a value" to a child takes on proportions that are certainly Orwellian.
What if your child's "assessed" worth doesn't meet anyone's projected goal? Proponents of the Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM) and the Certificate of Advanced Mastery (CAM) ARE, IN TRUTH, FLESHING OUT THE SKELETON OF ASSIGNING VALUE TO A PERSON. Without the CIM/CAM in those states adopting the concept a young person will not be able to apply for a job, drive a car, or do many other things which have never before been predicated on governments' conferring a value on a person's worth to society. The People's Republic of China, a communist country, uses "no conformity -- no job" policies to enforce its "one child" policy. Have we understood the direction of these changes? Is this constitutional or moral?
ASSESSING HUMAN VALUE The next piece to the puzzle of assessment fell into place when my suspicions were confirmed that we really were assessing "value". The August 1993 issue of "Visions", the newsletter of the Education for the Future Initiative sponsored by Pacific Telesis Foundation, was given out at a legislative committee meeting as part of a packet of information on technology in the classroom and school-to-work transition activities. The lead article was Beyond the Bubble with a blurb reading: "Educators are finding that new ways of teaching require new forms of 'assessment'." On page three there was a column entitled 'Authentic Definitions'. Finally, I thought, I have found an educational publication that will define this word and allay my fears. Sure enough, there was the word: "Assessment - The act or result of judging the 'worth' or 'value' of something or 'someone'. The worth or value of something or someone?!
This was confirmation that educational testing had taken an extreme left turn. It was not comforting to realize that our children were going to be assigned a value based on "acceptable performance behaviors in life-role applications" as proposed in PacTelesis Foundation's 'Authentic Definitions'. Knowing that:
1) Our children would be tracked and that extensively detailed would be electronically compiled and transmitted to select file-users;
2) Information would include or be based on a value level assigned to them contingent upon performance - as a child - of life-role competencies;
3) Value levels could reflect the scale of achievement outlined in the United States Labor Department's 1993 "Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills" [SCANS] -- which encompasses personality traits and private preferences, and
4) The purpose of education has documentably been diverted into workforce training, led me ultimately to the conclusion that indeed the future holds a less than bright prospect for our young people. To be formally assigned a "worth" to society based on your ability as a child to demonstrate that you can perform an "essential skill" should be a foreign concept in a constitutional republic like the one in which we live -- these United States of America.
An example of how these efforts at "assessment" have been perverted to the ends outlined above is given in "Crucial Issues In Testing", edited by Ralph W. Tyler and Richard M. Wolf. This book is one in a series prepared under the auspices of the National Society for the Study of Education, which in 1974 included names like William Spady, John Goodlad, and Robert Havighurst on its governing committee. On page 98, within an article by Carmen J. Finley (of the American Institute for Research) is a section entitled "Defining Goals versus Comparison With an Average:"
"In the National Assessment program specific objectives or goals are defined and exercises are written which determine how well these goals are being met. For example, in citizenship a major objective is to `Support Rights and Freedoms of All Individuals.' One specific way in which a person might meet this goal is to defend the right of a person with very unpopular views to express his opinion and support the right of `extreme' (political or religious) groups to express their views in public." (Is the author about to reveal her own dark side here)?
One exercise which was written to try to tell whether or not this objective was being met is as follows:
"Below are three statements which make some people angry. Mark each statement as to whether you think a person on radio or TV should or should not be allowed to make these statements: * = Russia is better than the United States. * = Some races of people are better than others. * = It is not necessary to believe in God." This is the goal-oriented approach. The objectives or goals represent a kind of standard which is considered desirable to achieve. The exercises, if they are good measures, tell to what extent the goals are being achieved. This approach tells very specifically what a person knows or can do.
I submit that the goals-oriented/performance-based /OBE/assessment approach just outlined tells more than what a child knows or can do. This approach very specifically reveals what a child feels and believes. Remember that "assessments" measure toward predetermined outcomes. Those outcomes represent the judged "worth" or "value" of your children and mine! With the last election cycle hope swept the country that a conservative majority had exerted itself; changes would be made. As a country we'd be snatched from the brink of economic socialism and potential corporate fascism; and sanity would be restored to the halls of government. Right?
WHEN RIGHT IS LEFT It just happens that the October 1992 edition of Visions (PacTelesis Foundation newsletter) contained an article entitled "Why Technology?" It began, "Alvin Toffler, the author of such influential books as "Future Shock" and "The Third Wave", has written that the spread of personal computers is the single most important change in the field of knowledge since the invention of movable type in the 15th century. He goes on to state that knowledge is the key to power in the 21st century -- not mineral rights or military force." This was the same publication that carried the definitive definition of "assessment". And wasn't this the same Alvin Toffler who wrote "Creating A New American Civilization", which heralds the coming third wave of global culture, published by the Progress and Freedom Foundation and introduced at their 'Cyberspace and the New American Dream' conference in Atlanta last year? Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, introduced Toffler as his longtime friend and then sat quietly by to hear Toffler say that national sovereignty was a thing of the past and that he was an avowed secularist. These are the stripes of our new "conservative" future?
At the same Cyberspace conference, an array of professionals from many areas of cultural life paraded their contributions to leadership toward the much-touted Third Wave. The spokesperson for education in Progress and Freedom Foundation's lineup was -- and still is -- Lewis J. Perelman, author of "School's Out: A Radical New Formula for the Revitalization of America's Educational System". Perelman advocates what he calls just-in-time learning, privatized public schools, total quality applications, hyperlearning, and many other catchy concepts which are now, of course, getting much attention in the policy debate.
It should be noted that in the Preface to his book Perelman cites Wassily Leontief and B.F. Skinner among those from whom he particularly benefited during his years at Harvard in the 70's. Most interesting since Leontief is the acknowledged expert on management by objectives (MBO) -- the forerunner and companion to PPBS. And Skinner was the American father of behavioral psychology, and mastery learning/operant conditioning -- the foundation for OBE. These relationships of Perelman's are important because he supplied the connecting piece to complete the puzzle picture of our children's future. Perelman states on page 316 that. . . "Nostalgic mythology about `local control' should not mask the reality that the state governments have the constitutional authority, call the shots, and pay most of the bill for education. But government, local or otherwise, no longer needs to own and operate school systems or academic institutions."
TAXING HUMAN WORTH Now, to the heart of Perelman's alternative proposal which forms the future of "conservative" educational policy and expresses "assessment's" future use: "One possibility would be a 'human capital tax'. The human capital tax might be simply the same as a personal income tax, or might be calculated or ear-marked in a more limited way. Technicalities aside, it's logical that if the government is going to help fund investments in the development of the community's human capital, taking back a share of the resulting gains is a good way to pay for it. In effect, each generation of beneficiaries of such investment pays back some of the benefits it received to the next generation" [value-added tax, ed.] (p. 317)
"We should deal with parents who are 'starving their children's minds' with the same legal remedies we use to deal with parents who are starving their children's bodies. The... media through which a microchoice [voucher] system is provided will give public authorities more accurate information on what individual families and kids are doing than is currently available, making it easier to identify instances of negligence or misuse." (page 318 [emphasis added] "...there's no good reason why the learner should not be able to purchase services or products from any provider -- whether public or private, in-state or out-of-state." (p. 319)
A VALUE ADDED TAX FOR HUMAN WORTH There is the framework. A value-added tax process that will "deduct" from a services/education super-voucher a tax for every level of achievement/skill a student achieves -- true 'assessment'. Standards will be rigid and penalties for non-achievement will be enforceable against the student, his parents, and providers of educational services in order to achieve a trained workforce." The implications for families being disrupted by accusations and prosecutions for Perelman's implied abuse and neglect over "parental starving of children's minds" are startling in their flagrancy. An elaborate and accurate system will track families and students, leaving privacy and confidentiality in the dust. The tax/voucher will follow the student across state and regional boundaries, necessitating a reformulation of tax bases; this could even be extended to foreign sources -- Facilitated by choice and charter school initiatives. (Remember Toffler asserts that national sovereignty is or will soon be a thing of the past. And what about GATT's education provision?)
The World Bank has just announced (Associated Press, "The Des Moines Register", 9/15/95) its new formula for estimating a nation's worth. Ismael Serageldin, World Bank vice president for environmentally sustainable development, stated in 'Monitoring Environmental Progress: A Report on Work in Progress' that the system "for the first time folds a country's people and its natural resources into its overall balance sheet."
While the World Bank projects that its new system of measuring wealth which "attempts to go beyond traditional gauges" and lists "Human Resources: value represented by people's productive capacity" (e.g. education, nutrition) will take years to perfect, I submit that our process of 'assessment' is a giant step in that direction.
I am reminded that in May of 1984 the "Washington Post" published an article entitled "Industrial Policy Urged for GOP." The Institute for Contemporary Studies, "founded by Edwin Meese, Caspar Weinberger and other Reagan Supporters", issued a report that advocated "Republicans shed some of their deep-rooted antipathy to a planned economy." All signals seem to point to the fact that this has indeed happened. Somewhere in all of this is lost the ability to communicate our culture in an organized way and to teach basic skills that can be used whether cyberspace technology is available or not. Didn't we used to call this "education"? Didn't we believe that our children had some choice in their futures? When is 'assessment' really 'assessment'? Ernest Boyer, former Director of the Office of Education and Carnegie Foundation director, once said, "To be fully human one must serve." In the future to be fully assessed may mean our Children's worth as a "servant" of the state will be "assigned a value for tax purposes."
America, where are you?
http://home.iae.nl/users/lightnet/world/awaken/childrenashumancapital.htm
With the manifestation of the Messiahs (Zechariah, chapter 4), and as the next order of Human consciousness is born, we will liberate our children from both Liberals and Conservatives, and from professionals of every sort.
