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This week on aBlogtoWatch Weekly, Rick starts the show with a question about Ariel's recent column about luxury watch pricing and its downstream effects. Ariel has much to say about this topic beyond the obvious. Who knew this was a can o' worms? Leave it Ariel to dig up questions in a space that seems well understood. Check your assumptions, people! Ripley and David weigh in from their own experiences as longtime enthusiasts. Rick then pops a photo on the screen of a luxury yacht designed to hold eight people, sinking under the weight of 32 souls. Not sure what this has to do with watches, except those sinking like they have stones in their pockets are likely debating how to save the watches they're wearing. In a similar vein, David presents his favorite marketing pitch — yes, this was an assignment — can you tell these guys get a lot of emails that seem quite random? (Don't miss the bit about the Trump watch error. We Americans love it when Rick rubs our noses in the country's current political administration. "No, I'm laughing WITH you!") The fun continues throughout the hour with a mix of levity and serious watch talk. Tune in!
We Americans think that (the sin of) gluttony is simply eating too much. And we think the results of that speak for themselves in larger bodies and higher fat indexes. But we're missing a LOT of what gluttony is (really all) about. In fact, gluttony can have to do with food rules (those foods are bad and these foods are good), picky eating, and so much more. So if gluttony isn't simply eating too much food, what is it? And why do so many of us turn to food for comfort and help when we're experiencing big (or difficult) emotions?
Trump lies almost every time he opens his mouth. And I stopped saying shame on Trump for lying a long time ago. Now I say shame on his supporters for allowing Trump to lie to them. Trump's lying is on them, not him. And btw, We Americans will never get back a healthy democracy if we don't demand a semblance of truth from the politicians who represent us. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We Americans love us some pizza! So much so, there are statistical surveys about our pizza! Granted, it's from Pizza Hut...but still! PIZZA!! Find out what the survey found & more, like another reason to stay off social media, in STUPID NEWS! #PhilShowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Let us go to the sanctuary of the Lord; let us worship at the footstool of his throne. (Psalm 132:7 NLT) The Bible doesn't tell us much about the boyhood years of Jesus. But it does give us an instance where Mary and Joseph went to Jerusalem for the Passover celebration, and they took twelve-year-old Jesus with them. Then they made the journey back home. In those days, the men and women traveled separately. Joseph thought that Jesus was with Mary. And Mary thought that Jesus was with Joseph. But then they realized they had lost Jesus. So, they frantically made their way back to Jerusalem. They found Him in the temple three days later, where He was speaking with the elders. Jesus said to them, “Didn't you know that I must be in my Father's house?” (Luke 2:49 NLT). Imagine the panicked couple running around town, asking people if they had seen their son. We can become so busy, especially at this time of year, that we don't have time for God. We can be so busy celebrating Christmas that we lose Jesus. We string the lights, trim the tree, and buy the gifts. And during all this busyness, we can forget all about the Lord. We can lose Jesus just like Mary and Joseph did. We Americans are so busy. You could write on our tombstones, “Hurried. Worried. Buried.” We're always rushing about, and that is more evident at Christmas than at any other time of year. Lines are long and tempers are short. We think Christmas will bring us some measure of happiness. But after so much buildup, Christmas can be a letdown. Then there is the mess and cleaning up. Soon the bills start arriving, and reality kicks in. Experts tell us that calls to psychiatrists and emergency rooms increase during this time of year. That is because Christmas can't measure up to its romanticized image. So many of us say, “I would like to make time for God, but I am just so busy. I work too hard and don't have any time in my schedule. I would like to go to church, but there just isn't time for that. I would like to read my Bible, but I just can't find the time.” However, we find time for what is important to us. It seems the only place where there ever was room for Jesus was on a cross where He died for the sins of the world. Ironically, Jesus Himself said, “There is more than enough room in my Father's home” (John 14:2 NLT). We don't have room for Him, but He has many rooms for us. Jesus took His place in a manger so that we could have a home in Heaven. So, let's forget about the clutter and hype and replace it with the Christ of Christmas. Then it will be great. It is not about Christmas presents; it is about His presence in our lives. The message of the season is not “let it snow” or “let us shop.” It is “let us worship.” If we will focus on that, then Christmas will be a blessed time for us. — Listen to the Greg Laurie Podcast Become a Harvest PartnerSupport the show: https://harvest.org/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Crashing Lightening and Rolling Thunder. In 25 parts, edited from the works of FinalStand. Listen and subscribe to the ► Podcast at Connected.. “You will never appreciate having to follow a difficult order until you have to give one.” (Late, late Saturday Night) Had I been alone? There are few perks to a solitary lifestyle. One of the few is the freedom from others; and by that I mean you don't have to decide if you care about people you don't know. You are free. Your emotions are free, your decisions are free and your time is your own. Selfish in the best way. Libra took my keys after we arrived at my apartment building and raced ahead to make sure that Timothy and Odette, if either was awake, would be forewarned. Casper clung to me as she always did. Estere took the lead since I also had to do pack mule duty. Brooke carried the few things that were beyond me. The rain was turning from a drizzle to a downpour. Odette had a friend over; a female acquaintance. Timothy; Timothy was in the middle of a very successful date night. Now I had the joy of being an auditory spectator in my domicile's sexcapades. "Shouldn't she be taken to a clinic, or something?" the friend blurted out. I didn't know her enough to decide if she was nervous, flippant, or secretly cruel. Casper dug in tighter. I had to dump the luggage to deal with her heightened anxiety. Libra, Brooke and Odette picked up the slack while Estere soaked in the ambiance of my dwelling. The look she gave me was one of amusement and intrigue. This was hardly the lair of the one and only Amazon Prince. It was sublime and comfortable. It had a nomadic quality she found familiar. Being in a fortress has its comforts. Being in someone else's fortress is far less comfortable. Estere was quietly accounting for every knife, mallet, or other potentially fatal piece of housewares. Brooke, Libra and Odette were already ordering and organizing my life ; what did they need to get and how would they get it? "So; you are Odette's; friend," the unknown woman stated. Snapping at her was unduly unfair to Odette, who put up with mountains of my insane lifestyle. "Yeah, that's me. Cáel Nyilas; self-made troublemaker," I confessed. "You?" "Delilah," she answered. "What happened to her?" Casper flinched. "Nothing that being reminded about what a wonderful friend she is won't help heal," I cautiously responded. "She is hanging out with me and some friends for the weekend." "Cut it out, Delilah," Odette sighed. "Who are you really, anyway?" Delilah was smooth, I had to give her that. "Odette, what do you mean?" Delilah stood up. "Delilah, or whoever you are, I'm not such a wonderful person that people I've known two days come home with me," Odette lectured. "Now, I kept you here until you could meet Cáel, so why don't you return my courtesy and tell us what's going on?" Odette was keeping Libra and Brooke in my room thus out of play. Timothy climaxed. Good for him. Out in the living room, Delilah made a stutter step. She was frozen by Estere's silenced weapon pointed at her. "You were spotted by a rank amateur," the Hashashin noted. "Who are you with?" "You people are nuts," Delilah flushed with panic. Nice touch, but that panic didn't reach her cold, calculating eyes. "Damn Delilah," Odette shook her head. "You need to watch more television. BBC America has this nice drama called Orphan Black where the exact same thing happened. I knew you were lying to me in twenty minutes. I was nice enough to not bring the Death Squad across the street over to deal with you. They wouldn't have cared whether I was being paranoid or whatever. They would have dragged you out and killed you on general principle. You owe me." "I don't know what's wrong;” Delilah got out. There was a rapid knocking at the door. Shielding Casper behind me, I backed up in that direction. "Last chance," Odette looked at Delilah sternly. "That's the Death Squad." Sure enough, I checked and it was two Amazons in full gear. I opened up and the two edged in around me. "Ishara; status please," the leader asked. "Estere Abed is a diplomat for her Protocol faction, there should be records of Brooke and Libra on file and Odette belongs here. Casper is behind me; special case. That woman," I motioned to Delilah, "is of unknown origin." "Miss, lay down on the floor, on your stomach; arms out to your sides," the leader brought her UP-40 up, aimed at Delilah. "This is insane," Delilah sounded really frantic. Not in the eyes though. "Lie down, or three rounds in the chest," the Amazon team leader related calmly. "Last chance." Delilah decided that she wasn't cut from a fanatic's cloth. She went down like a pro. The two Amazons closed in. I spotted the third of the four woman team at my door, keeping watch. The two inside efficiently bound her hands behind her back and patted her down for weapons; none. "She is in violation of the truce," the leader pointed out. "Should I dispatch her now?" "Wait!" Delilah squawked. "I'm supposed to keep an eye on him and protect him, not hurt him. Fuck, don't kill me for this." "Who are you working for?" Estere came closer. Delilah hesitated so both Estere and the number two Amazon drew their knives. "Fine! Fine. All I have is a name and I'm only supposed to tell him," she pleaded. There was a moment of uncertainty. "She'll tell us," Estere knelt beside Delilah. Now Delilah's panic was real. "Wait," I stated. I motioned Brooke and Libra to move around the crowded room and comfort Casper. "Well," I sighed as I went on my hands and knees beside Delilah's head. The Amazon leader had her hand on the woman's head, pressed tightly to the ground. "Sibeal," Delilah whispered. Mom. "Do you have any way of contacting this person?" I asked. "No. It is not how I work," she said and finally I caught it. The accent. I looked to the leader. "Look at her hands and tell me what you see," I asked the Amazon. I went back to resting on my knees. "Hard; callused from repetitive weapons practice. Short nails. She's very fit," the Team Lead kept up the examination. "I apologize Ishara. She's a soldier." "Let her go," I commanded. The Amazon only paused for a moment before cutting her bonds. Delilah moved cautiously as she moved to a cross-legged position. "You don't have to answer me, but I'd appreciate some honesty. You're English. Would that make you MI-5, or MI-6?" It wasn't as huge a leap as it looked. Who could Mom trust? In this case, a government operative would actually be safer for her and she had to have decades of Illuminati information inside her head. Delilah had one reason to be honest; her mission. "MI-5 is counter-intelligence," Delilah grinned as her British accent came out to play. "M I 6. S I S is foreign intelligence. I'll let you figure it out." "Good enough," I stood then helped her stand as well. "You can stay; starting Monday. I need a break, okay?" Delilah nodded. "Deal. Now do me the courtesy of telling me why I'm here?" she asked. "Love. Deep, abiding love," I looked right into her soul. Crisis averted. Delilah 'agreed' to go with my guardians to 'work things out'. Delilah was curious as to why they called Cáel Nyilas; Ishara. She also congratulated Odette on figuring something was up. Odette told her not to feel bad about it; reference all the psycho bitches that showed up in my life. Brooke headed out to gather some more belongings for herself and Libra because; my vote not even elicited; they were going to hang close to Casper and I for a few more days. Libra and Estere headed out to that authentic Italian pizza joint I'd taken Libra to earlier since my food stockpile was abysmal and the neighborhood was far from safe this late at night. Odette took Casper to my bedroom so that Casper could talk with her parents in Delaware. Timothy and his date emerged from his room. It was Sovann Mean, who I had met before and gotten along with. It took me all of two seconds to figure out what had happened. Sovann had asked Timothy out because Timothy never thought Sovann was interested in him. Sovann was a second generation Cambodian-American and had this stoic demeanor he raised up whenever he was nervous, ensuring Timothy's confusion. "Hey Cáel," Sovann smiled at me. "Still being good?" That was code for me being 'straight'. It still weirded me out a bit; Sovann was a serious weightlifter, like Timothy and I, but a head shorter, so he looked stockier than he really was. When he smiled, his whole face lit up too. It was the Khmer 'twang' that always sounded out of place to me. "We will not discuss the number of women who were here mere moments ago," I joked wearily. "Timothy, I apologize for coming back early; shithead-intervention shut things down in the Hamptons." "No problem, Bro," Timothy came and gave me a man-hug. "With your newfound wealth, we may need to convert the sofa to a sleeper-sofa," Timothy semi-joked. "Oh yeah, and that girl down the hall; when I told her your father died, she baked you some cookies. They're in a tin by the toaster. They really are pretty good, too; walnut and caramel chip." That sounded tasty. I guessed that meant I finally had to meet the women. Sovann came up and fist-bumped me as Timothy went for the refrigerator. The doorbell rang. I wondered who had forgotten what as I swung the door open. Lighting exploded outdoors, our lights flickered and thunder shook the apartment. It was Uncle Carrig. As the old song said 'he looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone'. His eyes wore a harried, feral look. His bellow, as he charged, rolled over me like the amplified heartbeat of a hellish primate. I had no time before he was on me. Down we went. I tried to push him off of me. His suit was soaked with rain and blood, some of it had to be his own. In his right hand he held a dull aluminum cylinder with a metallic suction cup on the bottom. Sovann kicked Uncle Lumpy in the side of the head. Inflicted on a normal man, that would have driven him off me. Lumpy released his hold on my shoulder and backhanded Sovann. The Cambodian went flying in the direction of the sofa despite getting a leg block up. I had a flash of Timothy going for his home deterrent system, aka the crowbar. Odette began yelling. The cylinder was coming down. Carrig's left grabbed my chin, fixing my head in place. I opted to use both my arms to stop his right, and the device, from coming down. I bought a little time. Timothy's blow came down on Lumpy's left shoulder, weakening the hold, but not enough. The device slammed into my forehead. I felt a burning pain as a portion of the flesh beneath the cup was flash-fried away. More pain, then a little pressure and finally nothing. In those seconds before my mind spun out of control, I had the oddest sensation there was something inside my brain. Searing agony; existence lost all meaning and I was gone. (One week later) They say pain in the brain is illusionary. Of all your nerve cells, only a tiny fraction are devoted to pain. The rest do the important work of keeping your body functioning. The brain is on top of it all and it has better things to do that register pain; or so I was told. To be somewhat fair, what I felt wasn't exactly pain. It was the sensation that something was crawling around inside my psyche, doing something. Sharp, tingling jolts shocked my body parts at regular intervals. Painful in their own way, yet not so much I couldn't concentrate. I opened my eyes. The lights in my room had been dimmed, but not enough that I couldn't see the six ladies standing about; doing nothing. I recognized my present lodgings as Havenstone Post-classical Modernism (total lie; I'm not an interior designer). The six ladies turned, looked at me, then closed in slowly. A staring contest was in the offing when two people entered the room from the door at the foot of the bed. It then occurred to me that little sonic indicators on the machinery surrounding me were chirping loudly. One woman was a physician's assistant I knew from an earlier bout at Havenstone Medical. She had performed CPR on me. The other woman; she was the senior-most recruit from my father's graveside service. She looked positively grim. My dry throat requested some water then I attempted to rise. A problem instantly revealed itself. I was strapped down on my bed. The ankles, wrists and a neck/head brace kept my movements to a minimum. There was a side benefit to this imprisonment. That body-wide jolts? My body was wired up to a system that had needles piercing my muscle clusters. Amazons prided themselves on being physically fit and their tolerance for pain. My muscles hadn't atrophied during my; coma and the price was this constant, low-level pain. I still wasn't sure that was the reason I was bound. The PA maneuvered a plastic bottle with a spout to my lips and gave me a brief squirt. A few seconds later I got another and then a third. "Okay," I rasped. "What's going on?" "You have been in an unresponsive state for 7 days, Ishara," the 'senior' told me. "Why are you here?" I coughed. "I mean, why aren't you on the job?" She blinked. "Your life was imperiled so we decided that five of us would be around to monitor you and keep you safe," she answered. "What's with everyone else?" I huffed. The two looked at me. The quiet six were of no help. "Fine, what are you ladies doing here?" I asked the women originally in the room. No answer. "Ishara?" the PA worried. That was when it dawned on me that the two and the six weren't interacting on any level. "How many people are in the room?" I asked my housemate. She paused. "There are three of us, Ishara. You, me and the attendant," she answered. "How many people do you see?" "Well shit," I muttered. Then the first of the six spoke to me. Actually, she mouthed to me. It took me a moment to realize she was giving me her name. The next one started. "Device," I snapped to the 'senior'. As she hesitantly reached for hers, I began rattling off the names. When the sixth one gave me her name, the group dissipated into the ether. "Who are these women?" 'senior' requested. "Find out," I sighed then, "It is important." She nodded. Now that the specters were gone, the mortals began to come in. Right off the bat, I was confirmed in my status as "prisoner". They wouldn't free me when I requested it and they made no attempt to conceal their hostility to my fellow Isharan. The agenda was decided without me; they were going to check me out mentally, then I was off to see Hayden. Why was I imprisoned? My brain was a maelstrom of activity across a broad spectrum of regions and lobes. What had happened? They didn't know. The suction cup had stabilized the tube which was really a firing mechanism. When the device was able to detect and aim for a specific part of my brain, the longitudinal fissure, it shot a rod three-quarters into my cranium. A laser had burned through the skin and skull with surgeon-like precision so a barb of unknown construction could go deep into my brain. Then it 'detonated'. That was one of the problems the medicos of Havenstone were facing. The device had been so badly damaged when it unleashed its energy that they could no longer divine its function. What they did understand was that while my neural network was going super-nova, it wasn't killing me. They leapt on the idea of mind control. That theory sounded pretty lame to me, but I was the one tied down, with one ally in a room full of people bred to mistrust all males. The next approach; was I sane? The PA offered that I was seeing phantasms. 'Wait'. "Go," I directed the senior. "Take care of the business I have given you then tell Buffy and Helena what you've found out. You are wasting your time staying here." She nodded and left. It was more "common sense" rather than any sense of my leadership that made her leave. But that done; I concentrated on the entirety of the message so that it settled upon my soul. I relaxed, shut my eyes and let the world float by. It took them a minute to notice my noncompliance; any positive contribution on my part had slipped so far down in their expectations. "Ishara?" one of the SD chicks inquired. I opened one eye, then shut it. There was nothing to be done. "What is he doing?" that Amazon asked a physician. She, in turn asked me. I took a deep, cleansing breath and continued to ignore them. "There is nothing wrong with him," the physician noted. "He is being childish." That went beyond disrespectful. As a quirk of Amazon society, they had left me my knife strapped to my arm. To take it would have been an insult my tiny house could not have borne; essentially declaring me incompetent. I was heading that way, but not yet. That didn't stop them from deriding me until a lull finally developed. For a moment, I thought I was alone. I was intrigued by the words suddenly aimed my way. "Mr. Nyilas?" an unknown female inquired. I opened an eye. Woman; bad suit; and a badge. What the fuck? I was in Havenstone. "Special Agent Virginia Maddox with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I'd like to ask you a few questions," she began. "Okay," I cleared my throat, "as long as we are clear I am one misstep away from invoking my Miranda Rights." She worked that one over for a second. "Do you know why your uncle attacked you?" "Honestly, I'm curious as to why I'm still alive," I tried to shrug. "Carrig and I never got along, if you consider when I first met him we fought and the second time he stabbed me in the forehead," I explained. "How long did you and your uncle fight; the second time?" she asked. "Um; six second," I guessed. "How is Lumpy doing, anyway?" "Lumpy?" "Uncle Carrig." "He's dead." "Seriously; fuck. What killed him?" "We are working that out. He was beaten, stabbed; by three different blades, shot 67 times by five different firearms, only two which we have recovered," Virginia stated. "We also think he was hit by two cars, one dump truck and a subway." "Well; yeah; Uncle Carrig was looking a bit rough when I answered the door," I confessed. Lumpy had to have been on a freaking quest to go through all that to get to me. Subway? He was hit by a subway and walked away. Most people barely leave a recognizable corpse. "How are Odette, Timothy, Casper and Sovann?" I recalled. She looked at her phone. "They are mostly fine. Casper Winslow was taken to the hospital in shock and was released to her parents," she said. "The other three were taken to the Emergency Room, treated for minor injuries and released," Virginia informed me. "The other four women were a more delicate manner." "Four women? Could you be more specific?" "Your bodyguards." "Could you be more specific?" "For a person with supposedly limited financial means, a lower income lifestyle and a humble background, you appear to have a small army hovering around you, high society friends, and lawyers who are on a first name basis with Supreme Court Justices," Virginia noted. "Lady, half-way through Day Two on this job, I almost gave it all up and biked my ass down to Terra del Fuego to live the sane life of a paranoid recluse," I sighed. "Why didn't you?" "Cause I'm an idiot. I was hoping a crackerjack investigator like you would have figured this out by now," I grinned. "How do you know I'm any good at my job?" she sent a sultry lip twist my way. Yes; pinned to a bed I could still attract the ladies. Having hundreds of little needles in me made the prospects for a quick sexual romp unlikely. "Javiera chose you for this assignment," I told her. "You have to be a woman because this is Havenstone and you have to be clever because this is a lunatic asylum." "Touché," she acknowledged my above average mental status. Next came a list of names. It took me a few seconds to focus on them. "Oh, what happened to them?" I inquired. "What makes you think anything happened to these people?" she parried. "Oh, I'm betting Javiera gave you a list of names and there is only person left alive out of that group," I felt introspective. "I wonder where Anima is hiding." "What happened to those people?" she persisted. "I don't know. I've been napping for the past week, but I'm betting they all met nasty ends," I told her. "Why were these people murdered?" "Were they murdered, or are they merely deceased? See, if I give you my opinion, you will have to pursue that line of inquiry which will only hurt one person who has already been hurt enough and save somebody who shouldn't be saved," I explained. "Why do you get to determine who gets saved?" Virginia pressed. "As opposed to who? You and Javiera? That's laughable. Why don't you go down the net worth of the families of those unfortunate corpses, then tell me how balanced your justice system would be? Please understand, I don't hold you and your profession in contempt," I met her hardening gaze. "To prove to me that I'm wrong, all you have to do is honestly tell me that high-priced lawyers, legions of specialists that confuse juries and enormous bank accounts to keep the appeals going indefinitely while the guilty roam about on bail equates to the legal process working fairly and impartially," I reposted. "That's not the same thing as;” she got out before the door opened and several people traipsed in, including three SD personnel. Last came Troika and she was coldly furious. "I was promised more time with Mr. Nyilas," Virginia protested. She was ignored. "Ishara, you are coming with us," Troika snapped. To be fair, the medical attendant wasn't overly torturous as she pulled out the muscle stimulatory aids and applied the bandages. It still sucked. That was ameliorated somewhat by the read I was getting of Troika. I waited for the last restraint to be removed before speaking. "I refuse to go with you," I stated firmly even as I sat up. See, I needed something to happen that was beyond my ability to obtain. "Take him," Troika directed two of the SD babes. My captors had gone out of their way to make sure these Amazons weren't ladies I knew. "Stop," I declared with authorities. "You cannot touch me against my will as that violates Hayden's ban on me entering blood feuds and wrangling me anywhere against my will constitutes a blood feud in Ishara's eyes." "It is Hayden's order," Troika snapped. "Has she lifted the ban? If not, these ladies will be breaking Hayden's decree." Troika harrumphed then gave Hayden a call. For the purpose of this meeting, the ban was lifted. That was what I needed so off I went. I waited until we got in the elevator and were heading up before launching my strike. Pamela would have been so proud. If Troika had given me an ounce of dignity, I couldn't have pulled it off. As it was, the first stab took her just under the left eye, the second punched through her cheek and spitted her tongue. The third nearly severed her upper lip and then the SD were on me. "Blood Feud!" I screamed. "You stole from me!" Troika was about to come back at me, knife in hand. One of the SD got in the way. What I had done was illegal; blood feuds needed to be approved; except for one tidbit of law Pamela taught me and it was about to come into play. "You cannot wound him while he is in our custody, Troika of Šauška," the Amazon protested. Troika gargled something through the ruin of the left side of her face. "I will peel off a meter of your flesh for this insult," she managed to oozingly communicate before we reached the top floor. For my part; "Unhand me." They didn't. "Unhand me, or am I no longer Head of House Ishara." "Do not attack her," the SD leader stated. "Would you care to explain to me why you are giving me that order?" I mused. "Please, Ishara," the woman ground out. "Do not attack Troika of House Šauška." "Very well. I pledge that from this point until the end of this meeting, I will only act against Troika in my own defense," I promised. "Now give me your sidearm." "You may not bear a weapon in Hayden's presence," the SD leader reminded me. "I asked for your weapon, not your legal advice," I insisted. Another shot of bigotry. "I will not. You are not acting rationally," she stated. Troika snorted. That was okay, because I saw an excellent substitute close by. My deviation from the group was so casual, they barely noticed. I wasn't making a fast break to nowhere. I walked up to the wall and, Vranus be praised, yanked one of a pair of matching battle axes off the wall. Support studs went flying. Like all weapons in Havenstone, this one was real. The SD closed ranks, boxing me in. "You may not bear a weapon in Hayden's presence," the SD leader was at the end of her patience with me. "You are incorrect," I glowered. "There are two occasions I may bear a weapon in proximity to the High Priestess. One is in defense of her person. I am not here to defend her." Harder than any kick to the head; they paled then the anger set in. "How dare you?" the SD leader seethed. "The proof of the necessity of my action stands before me right now; an Amazon defying a House, a First Ancestor and a Goddess on her own initiative and in defiance of everything her ancestors fought, bled and died for," I glared. "Give me the axe," the leader insisted. "No. You will have to fight me for it," I made my stand. She was about to do just that when one of the others spoke. Tears were slowly eking a way down that one's cheeks. "Step away from Ishara, or I will kill you," she told her leader. "You are wrong and Ishara is right though it sickens me to admit it." To add to the macabre, one SD trooper aimed at my 'savior' and the fourth aimed at the third. Civil war. "You know what he plans to do," the leader stated. "It is not our place," the second Amazon insisted. "I cannot face my ancestors letting this abomination pass." "He is the abomination," the leader persisted. "No. The abomination is any full-blooded not of the Council deciding what the Council will and will not do. We now know there were once male Amazons. By the will of our ancestors it was so. Never before have we, the elite of the Host, acted as if we knew better than they," the second Amazon said with righteous conviction. "Go," the leader mumbled softly. The woman on the verge of killing her was most likely a close and trusted friend. Grappling with that sudden rift between sisters was occupying her mind at that moment, not my escape. I moved around her, keeping out of the line of fire as best I could and went with Troika to Hayden's portal. I didn't thank the woman. That would have been insulting because what she did, she did for her people and the hundred thousand that had come before her. Finally we rolled out the Old Kingdom Hittite/Amazon. "See what you have done," Troika hissed. I didn't bother to reply. I was sure, dressed in light green scrubs, I cut a valiant and imposing figure. "Cáel Ishara, what took you so;” and then Hayden saw it. For a second, Saint Marie almost cut me off. Katrina stood up. She wanted to stop me. In her mind, Hayden was one of our allies, but, as I had told her, she (Katrina) didn't get it either. Madi, Beyoncé, Fatima and Krasimira were also present and now highly disturbed. "Take yourself to the cliffs," I announced clearly as I dropped the axe on Hayden's desk. She had stood at my final approach and bore hate my way. "The Goddess Ishara rejects you and has taken herself from the Temple. House Ishara has lost faith in you. Your insults are lengthy and I do not feel like wasting any more time with you." "How dare you?" Hayden spat. "All the times I have shielded you and this is how you repay me? You were a mistake from the beginning." "A mistake we can rectify right now," Fatima snarled. She rose up and drew her knife. "Excuse me, but didn't we gather here for a different purpose?" Krasimira mused softly. "Kill him and end the curse," Madi growled. "Oh; in that case can you kill me first?" Krasimira sighed. "I see no need to postpone the continuation of my chat with my mother." At Krasimira's age, her mother was most likely dead. "Krasimira, you cannot defend him!" Fatima wailed. "Defend him? I am not standing in your way, Fatima. I do know that the statue of Ishara fractured and fell into two pieces in the Temple," she related; certainly retelling information they already had. "House by house, we see nothing but the back of those who fought before us. Five of my augurs had shorn their hair and thrown themselves into the fire. I can do nothing except report what I have witnessed. I cannot appeal to Ishara to lift her curse. I hope one of you can because if you can't and you kill her CLEARLY designated heir we shall all go down to ignoble ends," the Keeper of Records remained serenely poised as she delivered her doom-laden news. "By the way, Troika, what happened to your face?" "He stabbed me," Troika burbled. "Let me kill the bastard." I half-turned. Saint Marie interposed herself between the two of us. "Cáel, lift the curse," Saint Marie demanded. "Lift your damn curse," Fatima and Madi chimed in. "Cáel, lift the curse and then we can discuss things," Hayden tried and failed to sound humble. "If every woman in this rooms fatally slits their own throats in the next fifteen seconds, I'll plead to Ishara to lift the curse," I said. There wasn't a headlong rush to commit suicide. The only one so inclined was Krasimira. I motioned her to stop. "Well, I think we are done here. I have to go and try and cobble my life back together. You ladies have fun pulling off your 'Thelma and Louise' final act while I figure out some way for House Ishara to survive the upcoming war," I shrugged. Of course they didn't let me leave. Fatima on one side, the Golden Mare in the middle and Troika on the other. She had to be in a shitload of pain. "Lift the curse. If we are going to war, we need to be whole," Saint Marie urged me. "No." "Why should I stop these two from killing you right now?" she glared. "Because he is an Amazon," Krasimira muttered. "You should need no better reason. Ah; this is why we must die; thank you Cáel Ishara," she concluded. "A terrible sadness has gripped our people for as long as I have been Keeper. I found it lurking in the shadowy corners of my office when I was elevated. I now imagine it haunted my predecessors for some time as well. At least I will pass on knowing the name of our assassin." "The assassin is right here," Fatima spewed her hate at me. "You are correct," Krasimira chuckled. "The assassin is indeed in this room. Its name is Amazon. I need a moment, please." She stood and walked to the doors. What she wanted didn't take long at all. "Gun," we heard her request. The magazine fell to the ground. The sole bullet did not follow. Krasimira walked tenderly into the office as if every step tore like fishhooks at her flesh. "Take yourself to the cliffs, Hayden," Krasimira intoned as the one-shot pistol fell on Hayden's desk. "I no longer know you." Krasimira took in the whole room. "We show anger when we should show humility. We are proud of our shame. We are arrogant of our weaknesses. We have heaped insult upon insult on our ancestors yet are now aghast that they turn away from us," she shook her head. Her gaze settled on Saint Marie. "I am not one warrior alone, but one of a thousand warriors who have fought before me'; isn't that part of the oath of every member of the Security Detail swears?" Katrina fell to her knees. "Please Cáel. Please save us," she begged me. Something was very wrong with that. "How dare you?" Fatima howled at Katrina. Instead of being ashamed, Katrina's supplicant's face turned first into a grim grin, then one of gallows laughter. "And that is why we are all going to die," Katrina declared as she stood once more. "We are too proud to ask a man for help. We know what Ishara's curse is doing to us. You clearly don't care. You would rather die than admit that our damn ANCESTORS have placed a male here and now. Open your eyes!" she nearly screamed. "They sent a MAN for a reason; to open our eyes before we kill ourselves." You scream 'what gives him the right?' Ishara gives him the right. Nothing else matters. What I am asking you is 'what gives you the right to reject Ishara?' because that is what we have done. How could she make her will any more plainly obvious to us? Cáel has never stopped trying to save us and you two want to gut him like a lamb, or (to Saint Marie) break his body. Hayden, I will not place my rejection upon your desk. You have been as much a mother to me as my actual birth-mother. I love you. Since we first met, I have only wanted to make you proud of me and serve your will. What has gone wrong? How have we come to this? You were the one who told me we had to find a way to save our race; and now, when it stares us in the face; Why can't we accept it? How have I failed you, Hayden? What did I do wrong to not prepare you for this moment? It was my duty to keep you informed in all things and I can find nothing to excuse my failure," Katrina had gone from disappointed to heart-broken. Katrina prized herself on being able to stay ahead of any crisis. Here, at her greatest challenge, she hadn't been able to help her friend and mentor survive this calamity. I imagine that was the final blow for Hayden. Katrina had risen up through the Havenstone system as Hayden's protégé and had given Hayden her all. "Until this moment, I have never considered myself a coward," Hayden murmured. "You are blameless Katrina. In the final analysis, I sacrificed my courage for my life. And now I have neither. I can regain my courage here at the end and be true to the duties I was given," Hayden's resolve strengthened with each word. She took out a piece of paper and created a list. "Saint Marie, on this list are traitors to the Host. Gather these Amazons and prepare them to challenge my accusation." Saint Marie stepped forward, took the paper and quickly read it. "Hayden, this includes a third of the Council!" she gasped. "I am well aware of who I have accused. Please see to my final command, old friend," Hayden sighed. I could see a terrible weight lifted from her; the cliffs. "Final;” Saint Marie and Katrina groaned. "Yes. I will dine tonight with my family, then take myself to the cliffs with the dawn. I feel that will be a good end for me," Hayden mused. "Will Ishara forgive me, Cáel?" "No Hayden. It is not her way, but I will. There will be a place in Ishara's halls for you. I pledge you that," I suddenly felt a sorrowful pit in my stomach. Into that romantically tragic scene, Krasimira snorted with amusement. Eyes turned to her. Hayden shook her head, held up a hand to forestall the Keeper until she rounded the desk and left her office for the last time. "Who is on the list?" Fatima stormed up to the Golden Mare and looked over the list. "I am on this. So are you Troika," Fatima growled. "This is insane. We'll destroy Hayden over this; this; piece of filth." "I don't care if I'm on it, or not," Madi seethed. "I'm with you." "There is a small manner of little known law you may wish to be aware of," Krasimira chuckled. "The ruling of an honorably deceased High Priestess may not be challenged." "You two are under arrest," Saint Marie whipped out her pistol. Being with the SD, she was allowed to be fully armed in the High Priestess's presence. "What do you mean?" Fatima looked to Krasimira. "Cáel has killed you all and he didn't even mean to," Krasimira gave a dry chuckle. "By his act of kindness to Hayden, which I now think Hayden was counting on, our former High Priestess goes to an honorable death; taken into the Halls of Ishara in death. Unable to challenge Hayden's decree, you are all going to be executed and your names stricken from the rolls. You will wander aimlessly for all eternity while Hayden will live in the company of her sisters thanks to a man and his love for someone who was clearly his enemy," Krasimira kept snorting at the dark comedy. "Your sole avenue of spiritual survival lies with a man you tried to kill mere moments ago." "This is insane," Troika shouted and came at me. The room exploded with the sonic resonance of a pistol firing. I may have imagined it, but it appeared the bullet took Troika at the juncture of the right eyebrow, nose ridge and right eye. Whatever the entry point, the 45 ACP slug painted the wall behind her with her grey matter. Saint Marie turned quickly on Fatima. "Troika wasn't on the Council, so I could kill her for attempting to murder someone who was. I can't kill you immediately, but please believe I will put a bullet where it hurts if you don't do exactly what I say," the Golden Mare menaced. The debate was truncated by the four Security Detail ladies storming the room. Orders were dispensed and the wheels of Amazon society burst into motion. A side effect of my stunt was I had put Saint Marie in charge until the full Council could meet to create some sort of Regency Council to pilot the ship. There was zip gratitude aimed my way on her part and I didn't blame her one bit. I was headed out before things got too organized. I wanted some 'me' time. "Cáel Ishara, we have not resolved the matter that brought us to this disaster," Saint Marie growled. I was at the door. I looked over my shoulder at the Golden Mare, turned back toward freedom and saw Pamela. "Shoot me," I told Pamela. I was grappling with the horror of what I had just said when I returned to the darkness. MOTHER-FUCKER! I hate women! (Mutter; mutter; mutter) I became aware of my hazy, fugue-like dream state. Sadly, it was familiar and undoubtedly going to become even more familiar while I lived. "Upset with me, Cáel?" she asked. "You had me tell my friend to shoot me; yeah, Ishara, I'm a little cranky right now." "The question was rhetorical. I can read your mind," the Goddess snorted. "What happened to me?" "She bounced a bullet off your skull. You'll be okay. I am the Goddess of Medicine after all," she reminded me. "From an era when trepanning was popular. Color me unimpressed. Oh; and I apologize." "You will get me the fortune cookie next time," she lilted. Something crucial occurred to me. "Hey! I haven't had sex in a week. That hasn't happened to me in four years." "I don't think you are ready for that stage of our relationship yet," she tickled my nose. "Wait; did you just put me in the Friend Zone?" More laughter. "Seriously," I sighed. "Hayden?" "I forgive you," she soothed me. "Forgive me? I killed her. That is not okay. Wasn't; " "No, my Cáel. We are a blood-thirsty society and the ultimate mistakes are answered with the ultimate punishments. I cannot fully express my pride in you for what you did, even in opposition to my will." There was a pause in our relationship and conversation. I thought she sensed my turmoil and aided me in finding some level of peace. With her kind of entity, I would never be sure. "What did Carrig do to me?" I asked. "I don't know." That was not what I expect. Evasion; yes. The ugly truth; no. "I find the concept of an omniscient, omnipotent deity to be self-defeating," she mused. "Sort of negates the whole Free Will thing," I bantered. "Besides, what is the point of beseeching a being that already knows what's going to happen to you and would have saved you if that is what they wanted?" "Yeah," I groaned sarcastically, "I much prefer the divine ones who randomly fuck with your life because they can, rarely provide useful information and won't even put out on the second date." "I know this will cause you pain yet I will say it anyway; I love you." Yeah; I was suddenly wishing Pamela had missed and hit me between the eyes. "Very well, what can I do for you that would make you happier?" Inside of second. "Clever boy. Are you sure?" "Yes." "Done. I can no longer read your mind." A few seconds passed. "This is annoying. Is this what it is like dealing with me; this 'not knowing'?" "Yes and you proved it by the way," I murmured. Several more seconds. "This is really annoying me. Pick something else." Pause. "What does it prove?" "You love me," I grinned. "Love without freedom is illusionary. Freedom of thought is the basis of hope and hope drives all endeavors." A long pause. I was a bit curious about what was happening to my body. "Please." "No." "I could give you a divine gift; speak in tongues; regeneration; long life?" "Nope. Not happening." "I still love you." "Now I can say I love you and know I mean it." "That's unfair; clever and insightful, but unfair," she teased me. "What about the curse?" "Re-forge my statue at the Temple and the curse will be lifted. Be your regular creative self when you do so." Pause; divine sigh. "I need to send you back now. Oh, and make love to the first woman you see. It is important." "What? Why is it im;” and I felt the weight of my body and the throbbing of my temple. (Augurs don'ts and don't give a fuck abouts) I didn't want to open my eyes; really, truly, deeply. I had been dared by both guys and girls to pick up a certain female at a variety of events, even when they came with company. I'd done it because I'm that kind of low-life. Being pre-ordained to sleep with some chick felt wrong to me. It was cheating. I sincerely wished she hadn't been touching my face. Yes, someone was running their slender, feminine fingers over my forehead, eyebrows, eyelids, nose; yadda. "Ishara, I must speak with you," the strange woman implored. My eye movement had given my wakefulness away. I pried open my lids and looked up into the face of a living ghost. Her skin was albino pale with obvious veins and blue capillaries beneath the surface. Her ocular orbs were a deep milky white, with a tinge of light blue. I could barely make out the pupils. Her hair was whiter than Pamela's. From the structure and musculature of her hands and face; it was as if a perfectly healthy human woman's body was in a constant frantic battle against death. My senses expanded to embrace more of my resting place. I was in Katrina's office on the sofa. Katrina was not present. Buffy, the 'senior', Pamela, Rachel, Krasimira, the super-pale chick and two House Guard I didn't recognize were nearby. Despite my head throbbing to the beat of fiendish jackhammers, I managed to sit up. This upset the lady touching me as my movement broke our contact. "Ishara?" she pleaded. "That's it. From now on its Yakko Ishara, Wakko Ishara and Dot Ishara. Let's end all of this confusion over this 'which Ishara are we really wanting to talk to?' bullshit. So, what do you want?" I groaned. "I'm claiming the 'Yakko' spot, by the way." "Ishara?" she pleaded again. Was she protesting me taking the oldest Warner brothers' spot? Yeah, I was the youngest one of the pseudo-divine trio, but I absolutely owned the role of smart-alec. "She is an Augur," Krasimira explained. "The poisons she takes to put her in a receptive state to the ancestors, goddesses and the spiritual currents of the universe leave her blind and deaf to the mortal world. She communicates normally, but needs to be touching your lips to know what you are saying. Her name is Tadêfi and she has a message for you," she finished. "Give me a sec," I put my thoughts together despite my pain. Buffy shoved a glass of water and three pills my way. I downed them gratefully. Buffy was clearly distressed. I was getting the crap kicked out of me a lot and, in theory, it was her job to stop such things from happening. "Buffy, we couldn't have foreseen Carrig coming after me the way he did. He slipped through the seams of very good security," I tried to comfort her. "Pamela shot me on the Goddess/Dot Ishara's orders. She can only communicate with me when I'm in a near-death state," I said. "I have a new mission for you." I needed to keep her mind busy with things other than me. Buffy was action-oriented and I was giving her a doozy of a task. "Obtain at least five of the bullet casings from the battle that took my Father's life. Give them to Krasimira. They are to be melted down with the original statue and recast into a new symbol of the Goddess. We will be a melding of the old and the new," I ordered. Yes, I was sacrificing a priceless ancient artifact for a current political agenda. I'm reprehensible. Kimberly would be ashamed. "Now, who were the women whose names I gave you?" "They are all deceased 'Runners', Ishara," the senior told me. Oh; that made sense. "Tomorrow we induct them into House Ishara," I stated. "Ishara, they are dead," senior repeated. "Do you believe the souls of Amazons go to the houses of their ancestors after dying?" I posed. That took a few seconds to soak in. My almost albino was getting truly distressed so I took her hand and put it on my lips as I asked the latest question. "Oh;” the senior and Buffy both muttered. "All those 'Runners'; their spirits wander aimlessly for eternity bereft of companionship and a place to call home," I told them. "That is a crime," I continued. "Even as Ishara moves forward, we must be honest about our past. Those women earned a place in the Host. They were unduly denied their promised afterlife and we will start rectifying that tomorrow." Their looks broadcast their interpretation of my declaration: I was a wonderful child who had won first place for our team at the State Fair. Now that she was back in the communication loop, the augur calmed down. "You have a message for me?" I 'asked' her. Halfway through, I stopped enunciating. "Yes, Ishara. My dead sister stepped back through the flames and told me you;” she began. "No; stop," I told her. "Everyone leave." They honored my wishes and departed except; "What are you still doing here?" I asked the House Guard who remained. Now that I had a chance to study her, I realized she bore the same cuneiform designation as Krasimira. "I am her guardian. I am always at her side," the woman explained rather heatedly. She was certainly not a fan of the man in mankind. "By all means; have it your way. Augur, your message is unimportant. Write it down and have it sent out as a memo for everyone in Havenstone to read. Someone may tell me about it. I'm horrible with my e-mail, so I probably won't read it myself," I growled. This shit stopped now. I stood and made to leave. The augur swatted out and grabbed my arm when she hit it. "Ishara, you must;” and I lightly slapped her face. The guardian drew down on me. "How dare you?" the guardian seethed. "I am thinking the same thing; 'how dare you?'" I rumbled. "How dare you decide what messages she does, or does not, deliver?" "Tadêfi has something important to tell you," the guardian growled. "Augurs died to bring you this message." "Clearly the message isn't important enough for you to leave the room," I countered. "I took bullet to the head so I could talk to the Goddess Dot Ishara." I was going to enjoy calling my matron pain-in-the-cranium that. She was probably less amused. "I'm about out of patience with you smug, delusionary superior sluts demanding things from me as if you weren't my underlings," I glared. "Get with the program, or get out." Though I had told her to get out, I was the one leaving. I needed clothes, a shave and a chance to get my bearings. I didn't need those two. Tadêfi tried to speak again. I put my hand to her lips to stop her again then raised her hands to my lips. "I do not want to hear what you have to say," I related. "If you try to tell me what you have been told, I will purposely ignore it and cut out your tongue for your insolence. Your sisters died in vain because your guardian has decided what you say is not worth her leaving the room for us to talk in private. Sleep well with the dying screams of your sisters' agonies echoing in your mind and know your fellow Amazons have wished this fate upon you. Good-bye." "How; augurs are sacrosanct and their messages are rare and crucial to the Host," the guardian sputtered. "Didn't know, don't care and could care less what you think is crucial for the Host," I sighed as I started walking away. "What is happening?" the augur wailed. "Her visions are lacerations on her soul," the guardian howled. "Does her pain mean nothing to you?" Those two had to be incredibly tight, the guardian watching the augur scarred and worn down by the task she had been chosen for; and not being able to help. "Not enough to keep me here," I answered at the door. "She's your buddy, not mine and I have a plateful of unhappiness already set before me." I opened the door. "Is there a problem?" Krasimira inquired as I stepped out. She had a guardian too. Pamela was also close by and strategically placed to dispose of said guardian. "Her bodyguard told me to ignore Tadêfi, so I am," I muttered. I hurt. The pain-killers had yet to kick in; and I'd just come out of a coma. Fuck'em. If Ishara wanted me to nail that girl, she was going to have to step up on her level of assistance aimed my way. I accepted that she had her limitations, but so did I. "Cáel Ishara, is that precisely what she said?" the Keeper was being diplomatic. "No; what do I call you?" "Krasimira, Cáel," she answered. "I do not believe it was Tadêfi's intent to be ignored. May I mediate?" "No," I replied. "I will talk with Tadêfi alone, or not at all. Quite frankly, half the time you women open your mouths, I want to kick you off the roof of this building. Either I see some damn humility; your words, Krasimira; or I carry on the Amazon tradition with Ishara and her legion of former 'Runners' while the rest of you are throttled by your pride." Do note that the Executive Services floor was very active and several members heard my statement loud and clear. "May we please try this meeting one more time?" she requested. Her bodyguard nearly choked on Krasimira's gentle, conciliatory tone. "I could not consider myself an Amazon and deny the Keeper's suggestion on this matter. Let's give it one more shot," I conceded. All I was asking for was 'nice'. I wasn't deluded into thinking Krasimira was suddenly my fan. She was simply acting on the enlightenment that her ancestors and goddesses had revealed. We headed back into Katrina's office. As with any divine direction, she knew she had two choices; harm, or heal. She had accepted responsibility that to heal her people, the spirits had chosen a male. Liking me had nothing to do with it. Being true to her oaths and nature as an Amazon were the acting forces here. Amazons survived, first and foremost. They feared nothing, not even change. Her fellows had denied the need for change based solely on pride and Krasimira recognized that now. Back in Katrina's office, the guardian was trying to calm her nearly hysterical charge. I would have been much happier if we had been more alone. The room had become crowded with ghosts during my short absence. Krasimira, who was following, bumped into me. "Ishara?" she whispered. As unfortunate as that was, Tadêfi's blind eyes following the fixed stares of all the ghosts in my direction was worse. I squeezed my brain for an appropriate bit of trivia that would put my depression on its ass. There was this movie by M. Night Shakalaka-ding dong (or something like that) about a boy who saw dead people. The hero; the man trying to help the boy; he turned out to be a ghost as well who didn't figure that out until the end of the flick. But, it got better. Using the numerous ghostly gazes like searchlights pinning down an escaping convict, Tadêfi ran right into my arms. That was a pretty remarkable feat; a blind girl in an unfamiliar room covering four meters flawlessly. But, it kept getting better. All the ghosts started to yammer, clambering for attention. Tadêfi began to weep piteously. I had to wonder if this was Ishara's penalty for keeping my mind free of her meddling. No one else seemed to understand what the fuck was going on. Krasimira was the augur wrangler, not in tune with the spirits herself. She was also the Supreme Litigator, which necessitated her being able to interact with the mortal world on a constant basis, so I couldn't hold her lack of spiritual mojo against her. My instincts were telling me that screaming and yelling was pointless. The cacophony was incredibly vexing, but I could deal. Tadêfi couldn't. I was looking at this dilemma from the wrong angle. Instead of taking on the hundreds, I would take on the one. I placed one of the augur's hands on my lips then placed my hands over her ears. My hope was that since I could interact with the restless dead, my flesh could act as a buffer to their insistent beseeching of us for recognition of their numerous appeals. My first song was one of the melodies sung to me by Oneida's kin while I fought off her Death Pledge. Bit by bit, a tiny fraction followed by the greater whole, I pulled Tadêfi back from the brink of insanity. Eventually, she began mumbling a different refrain into my chest. "My ears work better than my lip-reading," I chided her playfully. The ghosts hadn't stopped their pleas for attention. It was the sonic and tactile sensation of my song upon her fingers and the fluctuation of my lungs in pushing forth the music that allowed her to focus on her mortal coil. As we sang together, eventually with her teaching me a few new ballads, we shut the world out. Once our shared reality collapsed down to just the two of us, the babble diminished then finally faded away. "May I relay my message now?" Tadêfi requested. "No, we have to have sex first," I replied. Whoops; shit-storm. What followed was a blur. "I can't have sex," Tadêfi murmured. "The touch of a man would corrupt me." Plus. "She is an augur," her guardian declared firmly. "She must remain a virgin." Plus. "Cáel Ishara, augurs cannot be;” Krasimira's tongue became tied. "You go, Tiger," Pamela tossed out there. "Tadêfi, where are you right now?" I began my rotation of responses. "Why does she have to be a virgin? And, thanks Pamela. That was less helpful than normal." "I aim to disappoint, Cheetah," Pamela smirked. I couldn't see her face, but I knew she was. She; Tarzan. Me; Cheetah, the Immortal baby chimpanzee. Just what I needed. "It is the law," the guardian moved to separate us. "She must not be touched by a man," Krasimira stated. "Not having intercourse is implied. If she has been corrupted, why did the spirits continue to surround her after Cáel's touch?" "Keeper, this cannot be allowed," the guardian changed her focus. "I agree in that this is your choice to make," Krasimira countered. "Without knowing the missive, you must decide what your charge may, and may not, do. Your oath is to her personally, not to me or any other entity. Consider what the task of guardian truly is before deciding." The convoluted decision: what was the chief duty of a guardian; the message, or the messenger? The augur could convey urgency yet was powerless to act without the guardian's permission. She had to trust her guardian with the basics of life. The guardian; she had to trust what could not be sensed, or even fully understood. "Why; why this condition?" the guardian returned her gaze to me. I could have been a dick. "Dot Ishara told me to have intercourse with the first woman I saw when I woke up," I said. "If you hurt her, I will kill you," the Amazon threatened. "First off, Tadêfi, would you like to fool around?" I might want to get my potential sex partners permission before proceeding. You know; not be a rapist. "I don't know what you want, but if this is what we must do," Tadêfi acquiesced. "First time sex is going to be painful, so be prepared," I cautioned both young women. "If you;” the guardian repeated her threat. "Cáel, you should give daily thanks I don't leave a trail of dead bodies everywhere you go," Pamela declared with malicious menace. "So many pretentious bitches; I tell you, my ability to tolerate your forgiving nature is being sorely tested, damn it." Wow, was that totally ass-backwards, or what? As a side note to life: I was going to receive a serious beat-down the second my sexual tryst ended. Two pernicious women: Buffy; I had been damaged by someone who wasn't her. There was no way she'd forgive me for that. And Pamela; I had sent Estere away to escort Libra instead of keeping the assassin close. Without a doubt, I had taken Pamela away from some odious errand conducted on my behalf, yet without my knowledge. Yes, some serious torment was headed my way. Back to the girl at hand. Back to being the 'me' I wanted to be. Oink! With torturous reluctance, the guardian made to leave. "Wait," I called out. "You can stay if you join us." Yes, I was angling for a three-way with a women who wanted to make line drives with a five iron using my nuts for golf balls; and the blind and deaf girl. I couldn
I don't care what political party you are, why is USA starting wars that can't be won? Nuclear war leaves no planet for your grandchildren. Russia has 5580 nukes. USA 5428. 36 times stronger than Nagasaki bomb We Americans need to mind our own business & fix our own country - roads, bridges, farms Never start a land war in Asia!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We Americans may indeed be "rich" in material terms, but we suffer from what Mother Teresa calls a poverty of spirit. As we chased economic growth we closed ourselves off. We abandoned interconnectedness with other people, beings, and things. We also abandoned ourselves. Many of the problems in our world today are visual manifestations of such abandonment. If the world isn't looking the way you want it to look right now, author Jeff Golden argues that solving our (numerous) issues starts by healing our culture-wide poverty of spirit. Here's a preview: [4:00] Money doesn't make us happy, and the extent to which we strive for stuff is a manifestation of how unhappy we actually are inside [8:00] How we feel about ourselves impacts how we show up in the world. How we treat others! Whether we regard other beings with love and respect! [16:00] Exactly why healing our world (and ourselves!) may indeed start by getting out of our heads [32:00] Debunking heady intellectual conversations about the importance of the economy, plus: a laundry list of the ways we use stuff as stand-ins for well-being [38:00] Tangible ways to "drop into yourself" (because you and others deserve it!) Resources mentioned: Episode #478: Charting A Rich Life Reclaiming the Sacred: Healing Our Relationships with Ourselves and the World Thank you to Wild for sponsoring this week's episode! Use code SUSTAINABLE20 for 20% off. https://www.wearewild.com/us/?discount=SUSTAINABLE20 This show is listener-supported. Thank you for supporting it! Join our (free!) Facebook community here. Find your tribe. Sustainable Minimalists are on Facebook, Instagram + Youtube @sustainableminimalists Say hello! MamaMinimalistBoston@gmail.com.
We Americans may indeed be "rich" in material terms, but we suffer from what Mother Teresa calls a poverty of spirit. As we chased economic growth we closed ourselves off. We abandoned interconnectedness with other people, beings, and things. We also abandoned ourselves. Many of the problems in our world today are visual manifestations of such abandonment. If the world isn't looking the way you want it to look right now, author Jeff Golden argues that solving our (numerous) issues starts by healing our culture-wide poverty of spirit. Here's a preview: [4:00] Money doesn't make us happy, and the extent to which we strive for stuff is a manifestation of how unhappy we actually are inside [8:00] How we feel about ourselves impacts how we show up in the world. How we treat others! Whether we regard other beings with love and respect! [16:00] Exactly why healing our world (and ourselves!) may indeed start by getting out of our heads [32:00] Debunking heady intellectual conversations about the importance of the economy, plus: a laundry list of the ways we use stuff as stand-ins for well-being [38:00] Tangible ways to "drop into yourself" (because you and others deserve it!) Resources mentioned: Episode #478: Charting A Rich Life Reclaiming the Sacred: Healing Our Relationships with Ourselves and the World Thank you to Wild for sponsoring this week's episode! Use code SUSTAINABLE20 for 20% off. https://www.wearewild.com/us/?discount=SUSTAINABLE20 This show is listener-supported. Thank you for supporting it! Join our (free!) Facebook community here. Find your tribe. Sustainable Minimalists are on Facebook, Instagram + Youtube @sustainableminimalists Say hello! MamaMinimalistBoston@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cáel's tombstone: For the love of women, women put him here.In 25 parts, edited from the works of FinalStand.Listen and subscribe to the ► Podcast at Connected..
On October 21 in Washington, DC, Wisdom of Crowds hosted a special live taping of the podcast. WoC editor-at-large Samuel Kimbriel joined WoC contributor and New Republic journalist Osita Nwanevu, along with Georgetown political theory professor Joshua Mitchell, to discuss “Happiness and Misery in America” on the eve of the general elections. Joshua spoke from a more communitarian and conservative point of view, citing the drawbacks that come with the growth of the state: “When you have a regime founded on small government and mediating institutions, you have to develop personal and collective competence. … Early on, happiness is linked to competence and to doing. But as the state has grown larger, and more and more the functions of living have been left up to the state, we've become more isolated and we come to think of happiness more as feeling and self-expression.” Osita spoke from a left-liberal perspective. It might be less the case that we are unhappy, he argued, than that we think we ought to be unhappy, given the way life is structured today. “We think that Americans should be less happy than they are. If you think that Americans should be less happy, because they use smart phones a lot, then you should own that. … Liberals always are in the business of saying less than they actually mean. The pursuit of happiness is not just material well-being … happiness for the Founders … also meant moral and spiritual well-being.”This was a robust and rich clash of perspectives that generated much more light than heat. Osita cautioned against romanticizing the old America of traditional communities, arguing that the “freedom to seek what the good life is, without having it given to you by father or pastor, is an important part of what American civilization is.” Joshua agreed that sometimes the state has to intervene in local communities for the sake of justice — for example, to desegregate the schools in Little Rock — but he also cautioned that we will never be fully satisfied without some “concreteness of embodied relations with others. … We [Americans] are all cowboys … the rest of the world can't believe the level of unboundedness we live with.”Free for all subscribers, this is a valuable and — crucially during this moment — civil conversation that will be interesting to anyone who cares about the soul of America. Give it a listen. Required Reading:* Joshua Mitchell (Georgetown faculty webpage). * Osita Nwanevu (personal website). * Surgeon General's Advisory on Loneliness Epidemic (Department of Health and Human Services). * Declaration of Independence (National Archives). * Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Amazon). * Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation by Samuel Kimbriel (Amazon).This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Governance and Markets.Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe
WE AMERICANS have no idea of what it's like to live under constant threat of missile attack, but that's a fact of life for Israelis. Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, senior reporter for Israel365News.com, joins us via video from his home in Katzrin on the Golan Heights to discuss the current situation in Israel, the impact of recent conflicts, and the political dynamics at play. Adam shares his insights on the future of Israel and its allies, emphasizing the prophetic significance of the events unfolding in the region, and describes the impact of being forced to live within 30 seconds of a bomb shelter. We also discuss the ritual of the red heifer described in Numbers chapter 19 and how it's been misunderstood by Christians. Yes, the red heifers are at Shiloh and they are of age, but there are other critical requirements that must be met before the ritual purification of the Temple Mount can be accomplished.
WE AMERICANS have no idea of what it's like to live under constant threat of missile attack, but that's a fact of life for Israelis. Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, senior reporter for Israel365News.com, joins us via video from his home in Katzrin on the Golan Heights to discuss the current situation in Israel, the impact of recent conflicts, and the political dynamics at play. Adam shares his insights on the future of Israel and its allies, emphasizing the prophetic significance of the events unfolding in the region, and describes the impact of being forced to live within 30 seconds of a bomb shelter. We also discuss the ritual of the red heifer described in Numbers chapter 19 and how it's been misunderstood by Christians. Yes, the red heifers are at Shiloh and they are of age, but there are other critical requirements that must be met before the ritual purification of the Temple Mount can be accomplished. Our new book The Gates of Hell is now available in paperback, Kindle, and as an audiobook at Audible! Follow us! • X: @viewfrombunker | @sharonkgilbert | @derekgilbert• Telegram: t.me/gilberthouse• YouTube: @GilbertHouse | @UnravelingRevelation• Facebook.com/viewfromthebunker Sharon's novels Winds of Evil and The Armageddon Strain are available now in paperback, ebook (Kindle), and audiobook (Audible) formats! Get signed copies of the first two books of The Laodicea Chronicles now at GilbertHouse.org/store! Thank you for making our Build Barn Better project a reality! The building has HVAC, a new floor, windows, insulation, ceiling fans, and an upgraded electrical system! We're in the process of moving our studios and book/DVD warehouse and shipping office out of our home and across the yard into the Barn. If you are so led, you can help out at www.GilbertHouse.org/donate. —— Download our free app! This brings all of our content directly to your smartphone or tablet. Best of all, we'll never get canceled from our own app! Links to the app stores for iOS, iPadOS, Android, and Amazon Kindle Fire devices are at www.GilbertHouse.org/app. Please join us each Sunday for the Gilbert House Fellowship, our weekly Bible study podcast. Log on to www.GilbertHouse.org for more details. Check out our weekly video program Unraveling Revelation (unravelingrevelation.tv), and subscribe to the YouTube channel: YouTube.com/UnravelingRevelation. —— Special offers on our books and DVDs: www.gilberthouse.org/store. —— JOIN US IN ISRAEL! Our 2025 tour features special guests Timothy Alberino, Dr. Judd Burton, and Doug Van Dorn! We will tour the Holy Land March 25–April 3, 2025, with an optional three-day extension in Jordan. For more information, log on to GilbertHouse.org/travel. PLEASE NOTE: Due to security concerns in the Middle East, we have decided to cancel our planned Solidarity Mission to Israel in November. Discuss these topics at the VFTB Facebook page (facebook.com/viewfromthebunker) and check out the great podcasters at the Fringe Radio Network (Spreaker.com/show/fringe-radio-network)!
WE AMERICANS have no idea of what it's like to live under constant threat of missile attack, but that's a fact of life for Israelis.Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, senior reporter for Israel365News.com, joins us via video from his home in Katzrin on the Golan Heights to discuss the current situation in Israel, the impact of recent conflicts, and the political dynamics at play. Adam shares his insights on the future of Israel and its allies, emphasizing the prophetic significance of the events unfolding in the region, and describes the impact of being forced to live within 30 seconds of a bomb shelter.We also discuss the ritual of the red heifer described in Numbers chapter 19 and how it's been misunderstood by Christians. Yes, the red heifers are at Shiloh and they are of age, but there are other critical requirements that must be met before the ritual purification of the Temple Mount can be accomplished.Our new book The Gates of Hell is now available in paperback, Kindle, and as an audiobook at Audible!
OWE NO MAN NOTHING!So says the scripture. Good advice, not only spiritual wisdom, but secular as well. Debt, unrepayable, with its pressure and tension, ruins everyone and everything.That makes reference to debt which cannot be repaid in the normal course of business or living. Tens of millions would never own a home, or a car, or be able to afford the extreme cost of education today unless reasonable financing was accomplished. Scripture means don't incur debt you can't repay in the normal course of living and in the present.But, my fellow Americans, we have a debt which we know little about, and which only increases daily, and which cannot be repaid in the normal course of living. That debt is the American Federal Government debt which now exceeds the unfathomable sum of, are you ready for this:$35 TRILLION DOLLARS.Not millions, not even billions, but now TRILLIONS of debt dollars, owed by Uncle Sam, that is by:YOU AND ME.That means, says one economist and accountant, that you and I, American citizens who elect and foster the decision making of this federal government owe the unbelievable sum of, are you ready for this:$100 THOUSAND DOLLARS.$100,000! And if we think that is a problem, that number only increases daily, hourly, for this DEMOCRAT GOVERNMENT, the Biden Administration, just loves to spend your and my money and of course without ever asking.Biden Administration officials now spend and increase this American debt number by:ONE TRILLION DOLLARS EVERY ONE HUNDRED DAYS.That, my fellow Americans, my freedom-loving, freedom-from-debt-loving Americans, is an absolutely staggering financial fact and it is absolutely stunning that such a debt, this unbelievably high number is accepted, if it is even understood, by you and me. WHY?And another absolutely stunning fact. WE THE PEOPLE must now pay one trillion dollars per year, ONE TRILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR just for interest alone on that debt. ONE TRILLION DOLLARS EVERY YEAR JUST FOR INTEREST ALONE AND THAT NUMBER GROWS EVERY DAY! That interest payment alone is more than we spend as a nation on DEFENSE. It is more than we spend on the ever-declining American infrastructure. One Trillion Dollars in interest is more than WE THE PEOPLE spend on Education and more than we spend on poverty programs. It is the worst kind of debt, really unpayable unless there are mammoth and massive new taxes put in place, and the world at large comes calling for the repayment of that debt, demanding that each American citizen pay the one hundred thousand dollars each would owe if the debt were to be repaid. How in the world did we the people ever let our country, our profligate Federal Government ever get to this point, HOW?President Bill Clinton knew that we had to deal with this big long-term debt problem, but he and his administration did nothing about it. President Barack Hussein Obama knew such fiscal policy was “irresponsible” but did nothing about it. President Donald J. Trump said we've got to get rid of this long-term American debt, but he as well did nothing about it. Then comes President Joe Biden, a man given to the lie whenever expedient, and he tells the American people one of the largest lies he has ever told:“WE LITERALLY CUT THE FEDERAL DEBT IN HALF.”And no one, especially his supporters, liberal, woke, radical media cohorts ever challenged one of the greatest and largest lies ever told by any American President. Not only was the American budget not cut in half, but it was and is increased by one trillion dollars every one hundred days, President Biden! We Americans don't need nuclear warfare with Russia or China or any other nation to destroy us, we have become expert at:SELF DESTRUCTION – FINANCIAL SELF DESTRUCTION!Small wonder we have had the inflation problems so recently experienced, in the last four Biden years, where the prices of everything have risen dramatically. We are on the verge as a country, of what is known as hyperinflation, an economy out of control, and a nation virtually bankrupt. It was that very hyperinflation which destroyed Germany, the German economy after World War I and produced perhaps the most evil man in all of human history, Adolf Hitler as dictator, promising to solve the hyperinflation problem and restore Germany to its former greatness. Many think there is some possibility that such a thing could happen in America at some time in the future, the end of course of our great nation and our even greater democracy.No problem says Biden. We will just tax the rich, the wealthy even more. We will get what we need to manage the debt in the present (not reduce it) from the American rich. That of course, as Biden and his cronies well know, is an absolute impossibility. The Federal Government could confiscate all the wealth, all the assets held by the wealthiest Americans, whoever they are and however many of them there are, and this profligate American debt would never, ever be extinguished or repaid. We are, my fellow Americans, a nation painfully out of financial control and you and I, YOU AND I, are responsible for letting that happen.In ten short years, or realistically even sooner, the debt held by the American public will reach the staggering sum of:$50 TRILLION DOLLARS.If so, that staggering number would represent 136%, 136% of the entire American economy. Our nation would be beyond hyperinflation and would be utterly destroyed financially. Why, my fellow Americans, do our elected officials, our politicians with their heads in the sand, never acknowledge or deal with these problems, why?This ever increasing debt produces ever increasing interest payment demands, and the payment of interest alone will be one of the most destructive factors ever in the American economy. This profligate Federal Government (Biden) spending will destroy our country, utterly destroy it. Our elected officials, our politicians do not seem to really view these critical and crucial financial matters as real problems, and it matters not whether the politician is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, or whatever. NO ELECTED WASHINGTON-FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL HAS THE COURAGE TO DEAL WITH THE GREATEST PROBLEM AMERICA HAS EVER FACED!WE THE PEOPLE know that and we do nothing about it, NOTHING! WHY?America, the republic, the democracy, is on a path to self-destruct. It will soon be another post-World War I Germany, where hyperinflation destroys the lives, the lifestyle, and the economy of millions upon millions of people. But it seems as though WE THE PEOPLE remain indifferent. We do nothing. We lack courage or demand. We elect and forget. We vote every four years or sooner, and get back to the good life, all the while our beloved America is economically destroyed. Like Nero of old, he fiddles on a balcony while Rome burns, while Rome is destroyed. We just simply don't seem to care. God help our children and grandchildren, and those young yet to come, for them there will be no America, no nation even close to what we know and in which we have lived.Instead of owing no man or anyone nothing, WE THE PEOPLE will owe everything we have and that debt will be the end of everything.
We Americans have had Love American Style. We've had a Love Boat. We had a Love Story. And 24 years ago we got Love and Basketball. Now the boys see if it still works. Links You can rate and review us in these places (and more, probably) Does This Still Work? - TV Podcast https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/does-this-still-work-1088105 Does This Still Work? on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/does-this-still-work/id1492570867 Los Angeles Lakers https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-signal/148957599/ Weddings https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=103506&page=1 https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-sacramento-bee/148960470/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/1083120.stm UK Wife Carrying Race https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Tekg7RmymQ
Welcome to the Gospel Rant. Hebrews assumes that we Christians are, in spite of what we say, here still on planet earth for a reason only secondarily for our own success and well-being. Face it, heaven would be so much better. No we have a grand celestial eternal purpose, modeled by Jesus and Moses. We are here to be part of the salvation story of others. We don't redeem anyone. But somehow, what we do, and how we do it proclaims salvation to them. That's the good news. The bad news is that like Jesus and Moses, and Israel in the wilderness, that goal may only be achieved through our persecution, suffering and even harm. I don't like it much either. It is the big theme of Hebrews. Humanly speaking, you will shudder in fear and rather stay in your tents in the wilderness. No judgement. But you, sons and daughters of God can ask for power, through the Spirit in your inner being to access heaven-born faith (willingness to be led into temptation, confidence in God, boldness) and heaven-born righteousness (caring for others over self) so that like Jesus and Moses and at least two Jews in the wilderness, you will do it—in order to rescue and save others. We Americans hate this plan. But the template is Jesus, who willingly suffered and died and many children were saved. At one point you said, “Father, wherever you lead I will follow.” OK, he's taking you seriously—because he loves you as much as the father loves the son and the son loves the father. But don't expect life to be a rose garden. And he has something to prepare you for the struggle. You don't naturally have it. Curious? Welcome to Gospel Rant and God's Love for the Unlovable.Support The Show: https://www.gospelrant.com/ Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.
Hebrews assumes that we Christians are, in spite of what we might say, afraid of death. It's a brain thing. To accomplish God's high Kingdom goals—meaning salvation for others, He requires and even ordains the testing, trials, suffering, loss, and sometimes even death of his beloved children—in order to rescue and save others. We Americans might hate this plan. But the template is Jesus, who willingly suffered and died and many children were saved. At one point you said, “Father, wherever you lead I will follow.” OK, he's taking you seriously—because he loves you as much as the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. But don't expect life to be a rose garden. And he has something to prepare you for the struggle. You don't naturally have it. Curious? Welcome to Gospel Rant.Support The Show: https://www.gospelrant.com/ Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.
#1,010 - Lynne Patton Lynne Patton joins The Paul Leslie Hour! We Americans find ourselves living at an extraordinary time. One person who may agree with that assessment is today's guest Lynne Patton. Lynne Pattons is a Senior Advisor to the 45th President — Donald J. Trump. She was also listed among Newsmax's Most Influential Black Republicans. We're honored to have her. And real quick ladies and gentlemen, if you like this interview please consider sharing or posting it wherever you can. Oh and won't you subscribe to Paul Leslie's YouTube channel? And with that ladies and gentlemen, let's start this episode. Yes. Let's listen. Together. The Paul Leslie Hour is a talk show dedicated to “Helping People Tell Their Stories.” Some of the most iconic people of all time drop in to chat. Frequent topics include Arts, Entertainment and Culture.
What does the Bible say about work and rest? Let's face it, We Americans fall into one of two camps. We Overwork and under rest or we over rest and under work. This week we're taking a look at the problem of overwork and business and how God instructs us to take a day for worshipful rest. __________ If you're new let us know in the comments/chat & visit https://www.covenantdoylestown.org to learn more about us and how you can get connected. If you would like to be prayed for, you can submit a prayer request here: https://covenantdoylestown.org/prayer/ __________ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/covenantchurchdoylestown Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/covenantdoylestown 4000 Route 202, Doylestown, PA #churchonline #church #sermon
Aldi Hwy 5 Chardonnay 2021- $4.99-Drink Like The French, No!, I am Serious!I recently talked to a French winemaker that the average French family spent about 5 dollars on their daily bottle of wine. They drink wine with the meal, not at night as an alcoholic beverage.We Americans, as a whole, have a different attitude toward wine.So, is this 5-buck Aldi wine a food wine?For all the info check out https://cheapwinefinder.com/ and listen to the best value-priced wine PODCAST on the planet!Check us out at www.cheapwinefinder.comor email us at podcast@cheapwinefinder.com
We Americans love our rights. We talk about them, we demand them. It's woven into the fabric of who we are. But as Christians, we need to be aware that relinquishing our personal rights is essential to living in obedience to Jesus. As we approach the end of 2023 and start thinking about 2024, ask yourself – what are the things you are holding onto that hinder you. Do you make deals with God? As the saying goes, if Jesus isn't Lord of all, then he's not Lord at all.Learn more about this topic in Chapter 2 of A Discipleship Journey: A Proven and Practical Tool for Making Disciples available at Lionshare.org/store. The National Disciple Making Forum takes place May 1-2 in Indianapolis. You can learn more about it and register at Discipleship.org. When available, episode notes are at Lionshare.org/podcast. Learn more about Lionshare's ministry at Lionshare.org Purchase books on discipleship and subscribe to teaching videos at Lionshare.org/store Download the Lionshare Leadership Group app for free video devotionals.
Frank Roberson PI “Raising Expectations!” Friends, we are excited to have our good friend and Protection Specialist Frank Roberson back with us this Monday night! Since he is part of our family, you may remember Frank is an Executive Protection Agent, Counter-intelligence Threat Specialist and Private Investigator. With all that is happening in the Middle East War, demonstrations in the streets and college campuses…we are now anticipating family Christmas shopping, traditions and all that means in the coming weeks! How important it is to remind and appraise all Americans to think and plan ahead with your families. What if something happens in a mall… what should we be cognizant of and share specifically with those we love! We Americans just seem to be oblivious most of the time to very clear potential danger. Perhaps family meetings and actual discussions would be beneficial and also show how much we love them! You won't want to miss hearing from Frank Roberson and the discussion we will have. *Remember friends to tune in, watch, listen and text comments live. LIVE - Monday 6:00pm Pacific 8:00pm Central 9:00pm Eastern BBSRadio.com/RaisingExpectations Facebook YouTube LinkedIn X Pastor Joe: Joe Schofield Dr. Paul: Paul Hall Stef: Stefanie Shaw Thayer Dr. Craig: Craig Tank Thayer Pastor Ron: Ron Greer
We Americans don't usually think much of titles. In fact, this disdain was written into our Constitution, where Article I, Section 9, Clause 9 states, “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Not only that, but any government official must get the permission of Congress before accepting one from a foreign king. So, we tend to turn a deaf ear to titles like marquis, duke or knight. We have a few titles for current and former office holders. We allow medical doctors and members of the clergy to put Doctor or Reverend in front of their names. Other than that, it is just plain Mister, Missus, or Miss, and even those become less common every day. The founder of the TFP, Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, thought that this tendency was very unfortunate. In his mind, titles separated those who provided exceptional service to their nations and God – together with their descendants – from the rest of the human herd. He believed that such separations – or hierarchies – were essential to the proper order of society.
1973 October War, 50th anniversary October 6. October 6, 2023 is the 50th anniversary of the 1973 October War. This war lasted three long weeks and took the great powers (the US and the USSR) to the brink of nuclear war. It also cleared the sinuses, so to speak. Nixon and Kissinger realized that unless there was progress in working out some kind of resolution of the 1967 war, the US was going to get dragged into a major war. Let me clarify the term “The Year of Decision.” My lecture got a bit distracted on that. In 1972 Sadat spoke to his parliament and said “This is the Year of Decision.” The Egyptians knew what that meant. They cheered hysterically. The Israelis also knew what that meant. They mobilized their reserves and prepared for the attack. That mobilization cost a lot of money. But as the joke goes, what if you gave a war and nobody came? In fact, there was no war in 1972. Then in 1973, Sadat delivered another speech. “This is the Year of Decision.” Again, the Egyptians were hysterical with excitement. But Golda Meir decided she had been snookered once and would not be snookered a second time. Alas, for her, this time the war came. And Israel was not prepared. This decision wrecked Golda Meir's credibility. She was driven from office and replaced by Yitzhak Rabin (who was elected a second time in 1992). The Israelis still argue over who was responsible for that decision not to mobilize. Let me also note that the Israelis thought it was a bit of dirty pool that the attack came on Yom Kippur Eve when many Israeli soldiers had been given home leave. Of course it also came during Ramadan so it was a religious holiday for both sides. We Americans also remember that George Washington attacked the British at Trenton on Christmas Eve when he knew the British army would be drunk. As Harvey unwisely said in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “there are no rules in a knife fight.” Or a war. This was a class lecture and there were a few glitches along the way: paper rattling, the zoom fading. And also the laptop microphone not as good as the quality one I now hae. I hope that is not too distracting.
It's a Book, It's a Podcast Episode, It's KismetA bunch of geeks (native born, immigrants; Americans all) interviewing an Australian and a New Zealander/Australian/American (it's complicated) set Yr. Obt. Svt. to immediately think of the title of this podcast (eh, I need to get more than one hobby), who then looked up the phrase and found that…it's a travelogue of a New Zealander's view of the USA, circa 1888. Seriously, what are the chances that the Mind of Cameron (often non compos mentis, invariably kind of wacky) and reality and a not half bad title smack up against each other? This podcast episode was destiny realized. What then is the value of a Culture Clash episode where people-who-are-practically-Americans (ahem) are interviewed by-people-who-are-practically-Aussies-and-Kiwis? I have noted that those who are closest and yet different are often the best observers, for they are alike enough to understand nuance but separate enough to not be blinded by a common mindset.Richard (the man of a million or so legitimate passports) and Pete (just the one country, but Godzone) have lived/worked in the States. Just what are their perceptions? What are two very different (from the US-of-A) EPM markets like?I should note that Pete got me (I did do some of the work) the 2017 Best Kscope Essbase co-speaker award that I have always, always, always wanted. My oh my, did I want that, did I ever think I deserved it – yes, cruel ego as it was always unfulfilled – and I never did get it till Pete and I did a presentation on Hybrid Essbase. I will note that Pete has won multiple best speaker awards at Kscope, so I have a sneaking suspicion our joint award is 20% Cameron, 80% Pete but no matter, a win is a win. I should also note that Kscope 2017 was my last Oracle conference as a speaker, so it made the reward all the sweeter.Richard graciously was my host at Flinders Uni way back in (I think) 2012 as part of an ODTUG conference tour of the Antipodes and facilitated (orchestrated?) an ODI/Essbase presentation at NZOUG. My primary memory of that trip (I was in a constant state of jet lag) was dinner with Richard and a bunch of attendees and being stared at as a Real Life American geek, not commonly seen in the wild, sitting there eating his plate of spag bol, feeling more self-conscious than usual were that possible. Oh well, I like to provide entertainment to all, no matter the cost. Having the two of them on the show was and is a special treat.Not For The Faint of HeartFor those of delicate disposition, easily offended by adult words, mortally insulted by honest, open, and frank conversation, I fear you must put on your big boy/girl pants and buckle up. We Americans, cultural descendants of the Puritans, beseeched our guests to tone down the language lest you, Gentle Listener, get a case of the vapors. They mostly complied, but You Have Been Warned. That takes care of the North Americans; the rest of the world won't care. Sensitivities aside, as always our guests are witty, insightful, and extremely interesting.Join us, won't you?
We Americans love to win. And when it comes to our social or political opponents–those people who are just plain wrong!, we feel like we *must* win. And yet, our fixation on winning is driving us deeper into division, animosity, and at times even outright hate. So in today's sermon, we'll explore a better way. We'll consider how Jesus treats people who are wrong and what it would mean for us to follow his lead. Join us as we kick off our new series, “Not In It To Win It.”
My guest, Dr. William Levine, DDS is also a board-certified Periodontist specializing in oral diseases and implantology and has over 35 years of experience in the dental field. That may sound like the lead into a boring conversation but my time with Dr. Levine was anything but. He makes the science of teeth and gums simple and interesting.I had to ask about flossing—yes it is as important as why our dentists harp on doing it. He made a good point I hadn't thought of:“You're brushing the outside and the inside, but you're actually not getting between the teeth. The surfaces of these are filled with bacteria and the bacteria forms immediately there and begins to grow there. And you're not able to remove it. There's no place else in your body where you would tolerate that.”All sorts of nasty possibilities if we did…He gave a thumbs up for my fave portable flossing tool—the interdental brush pic, or in my parlance, the round brush thing. It's virtually as good as flossing.I've got a new favorite phrase: immunomodulatory protective system, aka bacteria killing agents. These guys work to keep us from getting infections below the gum line and in the bones. Ask them to work overtime for too long—not effectively cleaning your teeth and gums—and they begin to cause damage and bone destruction.We Americans are not doing too well in the tooth and mouth care scale. “In the United States, which is relatively high level of oral health awareness and the population generally takes care of their teeth.And still over 50% of the American population have advanced or significant gum disease over the age of 35. That's an enormous number. And when you look at gingivitis, which is simply inflamed gums that haven't yet caused bone destruction, we're talking about the 85% of the adult population.”The thing I most wanted to share with you is the relationship between the health of our mouths and our cardiovascular system. Dr. Levine says it goes further than just our hearts.“if we get to the place of periodontal disease, bacteria overload, infection you can't necessarily see, our bloodstream absorbs reams of bacteria causing an enormous elevation in inflammatory chemicals, which will elevate what we would classically call the inflammatory profile. Our body is at high risk at that point, and therefore it impacts actually much more than just cardiac disease.There's very strong associative data to show that it impacts significantly upon, strokes, it increases diabetes risk, it increases rheumatic fever and rheumatoid arthritis and pretty much every other disease, even Alzheimer's and others.”No healthy aging program can be complete without including our teeth and gums.Dr. Levine was and is so concerned with the high rates of inflammation in our population, and knowing that none of the over the counter rinses are reaching into the gums where inflammation can live and hide, that he created his own product, PeriActive.According to their website, PeriActive is the only product that will actually penetrate into the gums to reduce inflammation and strengthen the gums by inducing collagen formation and healing.It's 100% natural plant based formula. If you listen you'll hear him talk about the painstaking process of testing ingredients and formulations. What he thought would take 6 months took 10 years to develop! Unlike most over the counter rinses it has no sugar, no alcohol, and no chemicals.I had hoped it would be available here in the states by now (June 5, 2023) it's slated to arrive in...
Do you know about the chemicals that are in the supplements you take and the food you eat? Frank Davis is back today to talk about our health and what you need to know to make sure that your supplements and food don't have toxic chemicals in them. You'll be surprised by the examples that Frank gives of everyday vitamins, supplements, and foods that you probably eat every day that are contaminated with chemicals! Frank says, “We (Americans) are the most over-fed, under-nourished people in the world!” Watch as Frank conducts an experiment with a few people from our Morningside staff to show how sugar spikes in the body after eating. He tells us more about Optivida's SugR-2-FibR supplement and how it helps to optimize your body's ability to process sugar in the body. You won't want to miss the experiment with our staff members! You need this nutritional information so that you can manage a healthy diet and body function. Mondo says, “It will change the way you eat and live!”
We Americans are notorious for making our unwanted stuff someone else's problem. Part of the reason has to do with our desire to be altruistic: We tell ourselves we're helping the less fortunate when we pass on our perfectly decent items.But the reality is much bleaker: Both our recently-decluttered donations and our down-and-dirty trash create problems for the people and places that get stuck with our stuff. Here's a preview of what we're discussing today:[3:00] The literal mountain of clothes in West Africa[7:00] Swirling, soupy, and more than one: Here's what you likely didn't know about the Pacific trash vortex[14:00] Alabama's recent landfill fire[18:00] What's the reality re: America's plastic recyclables?[22:00] You - yes you! - can help. Here's how --Join our (free!) community here.Find your tribe. Sustainable Minimalists are on Facebook, Instagram + Youtube.Email me and say hello! MamaMinimalistBoston@gmail.com.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/sustainable-minimalists/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
We Americans know that Batman was also popular in the United Kingdom (and many other countries), but there are differences in the level of popularity that was reached and how long it lasted, and also in terms of when “first run” of the show was there. 66 Batman Message Board co-admin Ben Bentley is, in fact, British, so we asked for his assistance in tackling this topic. Our discussion touches on the show's second wind in the ‘70s, Batman references in The Avengers (as in Steed and Peel) and other British TV shows and commercials (on into the '80s!), Adam West's “Kerb Drill” traffic safety PSA, the Carpet King, whether British kids actually jumped from roofs because of Batman, and more. Plus, the Piano AccoMan version of the theme, more of Adam talking with Conan O'Brien, and your reaction to Episode 199's discussion of the Nora Clavicle script! "Batman: The Super-Sell" (The Tatler, July 16, 1966) Batmobile-adjacent car on Rentaghost (1983) Adam's "Batman and Robin" single from 1976 Adam's "Kerb Drill" PSA (1967) Adam on the Danny Baker Show (1994) What the Pope admitted about meeting Adam West Fight scene from The Avengers "The Winged Avenger" Only Fools and Horses Bat-ref Austin Rover ad (1987) Cyril Lord carpets commercial (History of Advertising Trust)Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's "I'm Bored" - reference to Carpet King ad 2 minutes in
We Americans have an uneasy relationship with authority - and have since the very beginning of our nation (right, King George?) But this distrust of authority has only been exacerbated in recent decades to the point that we are quickly becoming a people totally unaccustomed to and even repulsed by the concept of authority. What does this mean for Christians, who have said for millennia to be a people “under the authority” of Jesus? What does that mean? And how can a church (or a person) live out a life under “authority”? Also, Jay shares about the time he got into the most trouble with the “authorities.” Speakers: David Tieche + Steve Clifford + Corinna Girard
We Americans love our material goods. The term “paycheck to paycheck: is pretty applicable to most these days. With the economy being crummy, we are all looking for ways to cut back and save. You've gotta get rid of the crap expenses and keep the good stuff. Like subscription based services! We can't lose those, right? As vital as a role of toilet paper, subscription services are in all of our lives, past or present. But what are the best subscriptions? We are gonna talk about our Top 5 Subscriptions. To enhance discussion, we didn't share our lists and are by no means experts. The Top 5 Podcast is available on Apple, Google, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon, TuneIn, Stitcher, and Podbean. We appreciate your fandom! If you like what you hear, don't forget to rate and subscribe. Your participation helps us immensely! You can also find us on Twitter @podcaststop5. Enjoy!
Podcast & Blast: Episode 149, Conservation in the 118th Congress with the BHA Policy Crew As a wise man once said, You may not be interested in war, but when the times comes, war will certainly be interested in you. The same can be said about Congress. This week's episode with BHA's John Gale and Kaden McArthur takes us to Washington, D.C., with an exploration of the 118th Congress, where the hottest issues pertaining to our hunting and fishing and the conservation that makes it possible will be on the floor, in the offices, buried in reams of obscure paperwork and clouded by political shenanigans….John and Kaden clear the smoke, slash the fat, and let us all know what is going on, what is at stake, and who the players are as we make our way through 2023. We Americans consent to be governed, and this is a must-listen conversation about what we are consenting to, what we support and what we must resist.
In recent days, Kevin D. Williamson and Jay Nordlinger—among others—have been writing about our old friends, our old enemies, the federal budget deficit and the federal debt. (KDW, here; JN, here.) Something's gotta give, right? We Americans have to act at some point, right? Jay and Kevin jaw it out.
In recent days, Kevin D. Williamson and Jay Nordlinger—among others—have been writing about our old friends, our old enemies, the federal budget deficit and the federal debt. (KDW, here; JN, here.) Something’s gotta give, right? We Americans have to act at some point, right? Jay and Kevin jaw it out. Source
In recent days, Kevin D. Williamson and Jay Nordlinger—among others—have been writing about our old friends, our old enemies, the federal budget deficit and the federal debt. (KDW, here; JN, here.) Something's gotta give, right? We Americans have to act at some point, right? Jay and Kevin jaw it out. Source
Majesty!We Americans don't have a king, nor do we think highly of that form of government.And yet Jesus is the King of kings, and His majesty is worthy of our worship.Join us for today's Daily Word & Prayer as we allow this popular song written by Jack Hayford to inspire our worship.Who do you know that needs to hear today's message? Go ahead and forward this to them along with a prayer that God will use it in their life.Scripture Used in Today's MessageJohn 4:23-24To become a TSCM Ministry Partner, click herehttps://www.tomthepreacher.com/supportTo find Tom on Instagram, Facebook, TicTok, and elsewhere, go to linktr.ee/tomthepreacher Have you read my book, "Takin' it to Their Turf"?If not, you may request a copy on my website, www.TomthePreacher.comWe send a copy to anyone who donates to our ministry, but if you can't do so, simply request a copy by sending us an email.************ Do you want to have all your sins forgiven and know God personally? *********Check out my video "The Bridge Diagram" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0Kjwrlind8&t=1sCheck out my website, www.TomthePreacher.com, to learn more about my ministry and sign up for my daily email. And make sure to request a copy of my book, Takin' it to Their Turf, when you visit my website.Check out my videos on this channel to learn how to answer tough questions challenging our faith.
Voluntary markets and civil society unite, while power and politics divide. The more power, the more politics, and the more division throughout society. Political power was designed, and meant to be, decentralized in America. Problems are always best solved locally. They also tend to remain local when a giant apparatus of compulsion can't impose itself on everyone. We Americans have a lot of re-thinking to do, if we really want to rid ourselves of all the unnecessary division.
Tune in to hear about Ayana Morris's recent documentary, "Why is We Americans?" that focuses on the electrifying and sometimes controversial Baraka family. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/skindeepradioshow/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/skindeepradioshow/support
Pastor Andy Davis preached on Mark 7:1-13 exploring the genuine purpose of worship and its three enemies: legalism, traditionalism, and hypocrisy. - SERMON TRANSCRIPT - Turn in your Bibles this morning as we continue our study in the gospel of Mark. We're in chapter 7 now looking at verses 1-13, exposing vain worship and espousing heart worship. One of the greatest issues of the human soul stands in front of us this morning in this text, and that is of genuine worship. Worship from a pure heart, worship that engulfs your soul, worship that is a fragrant offering to your Creator, your God, the lover of your soul—true heartfelt worship. That's what's in front of us here. It's not difficult to make the case that establishing that worship in human hearts is the entire purpose of scripture, of the gospel, of the work of God, and in the original creation and the work of Christ in redemption, the work of the Holy Spirit and regeneration that we human beings created in the image of God, would genuinely worship God from our hearts for all eternity. That's it. And against this precious thing, are three of its greatest enemies, legalism, traditionalism and hypocrisy. Legalism, the belief that God accepts our worship based on how well we keep a set of rules and regulations. In that case, our focus is on ourself and our own performance. Traditionalism, the belief that true worship of God consists in manmade patterns, crafted by human beings generations ago and handed down unchanged from generation to generation. Keeping that tradition, that's the essence of worship. Then there's hypocrisy, putting on a show, a show for God and others when our hearts are actually far from God. The whole thing is false. It's a lie. Hypocrisy. These are the issues in front of us in Mark 7:1-13. "It's not difficult to make the case that establishing that worship in human hearts is the entire purpose of scripture, of the gospel, of the work of God, … And against this precious thing, are three of its greatest enemies, legalism, traditionalism and hypocrisy." Now the setting in Mark's gospel - Jesus has just fed the 5,000 plus women in children. He's walked on water, and then we get a quick summary at the end of chapter 6 of a healing ministry that's comprehensive and mind boggling. But it's just a summary of perhaps as many as thousands of miracles that were done. Miracles mostly of healings, even of people that just touched the hem of his garment who were instantly healed by his power. Jesus, at this moment, it could be argued is at the pinnacle of his temporary popularity. The crowds are swelling with anticipation. In John 6, after the feeding of the 5,000 some of them want to take Him by force and make Him king. They don't really understand who He is or what His kingdom is, but they want to do that. Jesus is a threat to the religious establishment, and a delegation of religious police is sent. Self-appointed investigators, scribes and Pharisees come to observe Jesus and not friendly at all, but to try to find fault with him and shut him down if they can. We see right away in this outline, the legalist charge against Jesus, ceremonial defilement. Look at verses 1-5. The Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were unclean, that is "unwashed!" Mark gives his Gentile audience, probably Romans who didn't understand these things, this explanation. The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders.When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash and they observe many other traditions such as the washing of "cups, pitchers, kettles”. So the Pharisees and Scribes ask Jesus, "Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with unclean hands"? They're making a charge against Jesus by means of his disciples breaking tradition through this ceremonial defilement. Who are these Scribes and Pharisees? These were professional legalists. This is a great escalation of conflict with the Jewish authorities. As I said, a delegation is sent from Jerusalem to check Jesus's rising influence and find fault with him if they can to try and find a way to put a stop to Jesus. The Pharisees were a religious party, a group of religious leaders, who had maneuvered their way in Jewish society to the top pinnacle of esteem in terms of their spirituality in their religion. They made the meticulous study of the Law of Moses their top priority and then dispensing rulings and judgements based on that. The Scribes were priests from the temple area whose day-to-day work was that of copying the Law of Moses letter by letter. There weren't printing presses back then, it was all done by hand, and these Scribes were entrusted with the task. But beyond that, they were teachers of the laws that they read and they taught their interpretation of scripture to the people. So Scribes and Pharisees are the religious leaders of the Jewish nation. Both of them are legalists who think that their right standing with God is based on how well they keep the laws of God. They generally thought they kept them just fine. “All these commands I have kept from my youth.” They would say something like that. Furthermore, they accepted the trappings of honor in Jewish society, whether at banquets or in the marketplace or other places. They love that kind of thing. They love to be honored and to have the most important seats of the banquets. That's who they were. What is the origin of their religious legalism? Where did all that come from? We could start with the exile to Babylon. In the exile, the remnant that was exiled was made aware, very plainly, by the ministry of Ezekiel and Jeremiah that it is because they have violated the laws of God for generations that this exile has come. They have broken God's laws and have gone over into idolatry and wickedness. And for this reason, most of them were killed by sword, famine, and plague. A small remnant was exiled to Babylon. Daniel, a godly man, is very aware of this and prays in Daniel 9:11, this prayer, "All Israel has transgressed your law and turned away refusing to obey you. Therefore, the curses and sworn judgments written in the Law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out on us, because we have sinned against you". Well, they got it. They got the message. At least Daniel did. And godly exiled Jews like him, understood. When in the course of time under the rule of Cyrus the Great of Persia, a small remnant, 42,000 was allowed to come back and repopulate the Promised Land, Jerusalem. They were committed to the law of God. Even if within a short amount of time there were some of them that intermarried. Ezra and Nehemiah pulled out their hair and were zealous that they would not fall into the same patterns of wickedness that their ancestors had fallen into. Ezra 7:10, it says, "Ezra had devoted himself to the study and observance of the Law of the Lord and to teaching its decrees in laws in Israel". That all sounds good, right? Ezra was a godly man studying God's Word. But in the course of time, patterns of legalism and traditionalism emerged that were very corrupt based on this initial zeal. Schools of religious lawyers developed who spent their full time debating this or that law, trying to nail down exactly what they're supposed to do in every case in life. Scribes and Pharisees were in that heritage. They arose and studied the law more carefully than anyone else and appointed themselves ethical police over to the daily life actions of others. That's a simple answer to the origin of their legalism. Let's go broader and deeper. There's a deeper answer to the origin of legalism. It's just in the wicked, sinful heart of man. We, sinners, want to fix our problems ourselves. We want to save ourselves. Most of us aren't denying there's a problem. Vertically with God, horizontally with others, but we want to solve it. We want to make up our own religion that'll solve it. We want to follow our own rules. We want to be the master of our own fate and the captain of our own souls. Spiritually, we want to save ourselves, and this is true all over the world. Every religion except Christianity is codified self -salvation. Self -salvation, that's what we want to do. Look at Mark 7:7, "They worship me in vain. Their teachings are but rules taught by men". It's a manmade religion. That's the origin of legalism. That's where it's coming from. For Scribes and Pharisees, their highest value is conformity to legal tradition. By the time of Jesus there are well developed schools of rabbis who spent their full time discussing and teaching minutia of the law. A key issue here is that the law of God itself was deemed too complicated for average ordinary people to understand. There's clear evidence of this that these elitists considered the common group of people to be an untrained rebel who could not just read and hear God's law, and get it right. So they needed the Scribes and Pharisees to interpret it. They began to give additional insights, rules and regulations that were beyond the scripture. And so it went, rabbi so and so commenting on rabbi such and such who made observations saying this and that and therefore the other. And it was all written down, this heritage of rabbi this and rabbi that and all this kind of thing. These verbal traditions were erected like a safety fence around the law of God, keeping a safe zone around God's law with the idea being if you keep the tradition of the elders, you're certain to be acceptable to God because we're going beyond what God requires and therefore He must accept you if you just follow our traditions. In the second century AD, the second century after Christ, a Rabbi Yehuda organized the rabbinic teachings that have been passed on into a book called the Mishnah. In time there arose more and more traditions and disputations and statements based on the Mishnah itself, course. Those additional disputations and wranglings over the Mishnah were organized into another book called the Gemara. The Mishnah plus the Gemara together is called the Talmud. Twelve centuries of Jewish rabbis wrangling over originally the Word of God, but mostly over their own traditions. That's the Talmud and it's the authority for most Jews in the world that are religious. They are Talmudic scholars. Now, do you not see behind all of this an astonishingly disparaging attitude toward the Word of God? I. Legalists’ Charge Against Jesus: Ceremonial Defilement What we see in Mark 7 in Jesus' accusation against them came true concerning the Talmud. The Talmud came to be put above the Word of God, far above it. The traditions of men totally supplanted the laws of God. Listen to these statements from the Talmud itself. "The sacred scriptures is like water. The Mishnah is like wine, but the Gemara is aromatic wine". That's a clear hierarchy. The lowest level is the Word of God. What you want to get up is to that beautiful level of the Gemara, or again, "My son give heed to the words of the Scribes rather than to the words of the law". And again, this one, "He who transgresses the words of the Scribes sins more gravely than the transgressors of the words of the law". That's from the Talmud. It's astonishing that the opinions of human beings can take the place of the perfect Word of God. The accusation by the Pharisees and Scribes of Christ is ceremonial defilement. They stood around Jesus and watched him and his disciples eating their meal and they accused him. That’s creepy. They're just standing watching them eat. Verse 5, "Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with unclean hands"? Mark, as we said, gives us this detailed backstory about these comprehensive traditions. Let's read again, verse 3-4, “The Pharisees and all the Jews. . .”, see that? Everybody's doing this stuff. The Pharisees have won the day. Everybody's following this. The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash, and they observe many other traditions such as the wash and cups, pitchers, kettles, et cetera. This is an elaborate, carefully developed system of ritual washings that covered almost every area of life mandated by the elders in their traditions. Notice clearly their accusation is not that Jesus and his disciples are violating the law of God. They're not even thinking about that because it's not stated anywhere in the Law of Moses. You're not going to find it. There are not these washings laid out in the Law of Moses. This is all human tradition. Now don't misunderstand. This has nothing to do with germs. It's not like if only they had that hand cleanser stuff that kills 99.99% of all the germs. If they had that, we wouldn't have this problem. It has nothing to do with germ theory, which didn't come until Louis Pasteur and all that. That's not what we're dealing with here. Not at all. This is about religion. If you don't wash like this, you're not acceptable vertically to God. That's their charge. II. Jesus’ Charge Against Legalists: Arrogance over God’s Word What's Jesus' charge against the legalists? Now it goes back. Arrogance over God's Word. Let's reverse the order that Jesus takes. Let's not walk through it in the order in the text. Let's go later and then work back. Let's address their arrogance over God's Word and then get to the deeper issue of worship. First, their arrogance concerning God's Word. Verse 7, "Their teachings are but rules taught by men, manmade rules concocted from the imaginations and morals and thoughts of men without the Holy Spirit”. Verse 9, "And he said to them, you have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions". In other words, you make a regular habit of doing this. You are continually doing this. You're setting aside God's Word to observe your own manmade traditions. This is a habit you have. I believe Jesus is being sarcastic here. The Greek word kalos is, "Well, you're really good at this. You're fine at this. You have developed this skill to a high level. There's a level of sarcasm here you're really good at. You do this well. You're experts at this evil thing of setting aside God's Word to favor your traditions.” Then Jesus gives a case study, a clear example. Look at verses 10-13, "For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother and anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death’. But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is corban,’ that is a gift devoted to God, then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. Thus, you nullify the Word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.” Then He expands it in verse 13, the very end of the phrase of today's reading, "And you do many things like that". In other words, this is just one case. You do this all the time. This is a serious attack on the Word of God. Notice how Jesus clearly contrasts tradition with God's Word. Matthew's account makes it even sharper. Matthew 15:5, "For God said, honor your father and mother and anyone who curses his father and mother must be put to death". But you say . . ..” I mean, that's about as clear as it gets, “ for God said, but you say.”That's the whole system that we're dealing with here. The whole system of legalism and traditionalism was a serious attack in the Word of God. Legalism is fundamentally adding to and subtracting from the Word of God because you think there's something wrong with it. They added requirements that God did not give and thereby they overturned the requirements that God did give. What is this case study about the practice of corban? It has to do with the habit or the practice of corban, a gift devoted to God. Sometime before Jesus, generation before, the rabbis decided that if any Jewish man, let's say had a sum of money or a possession or even all of his money or all of his possessions, and he put somewhat of a fence around it and called it corban, he still owns it, it’s still his, but he designates it a gift devoted to God. Then it's off limits for anything else, including using it to help aging parents in their old age, caring for them financially. This concept became a nasty loophole through which people drove huge ox carts.It is nowhere found in scripture, but just something they made up. The fundamental issue here when it comes to the Word of God is the sufficiency and the clarity of scripture. The legalist is adding new laws because he feels God's laws are insufficient to get the job done for a good life on earth. “We need some additional help here. God missed some things and furthermore , it’s not clear. So you need us, the expert teachers, to explain stuff to you. You'll never get it because you're an unwashed rebel. You need us.” It's impugning the clarity of God's Word. Either way, do you not see the breathtaking arrogance towards scripture, toward the Word of God? This is exactly why God condemned this very practice before it ever came. Many times in Deuteronomy 4:2, "Do not add to what I command to you and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of the Lord your God, that I give you". That couldn't be clearer. Don't do this thing. Don't add to, don't subtract from. By the way, what does that imply God saying about his Word? It's perfect. You can't make it better by adding or subtracting. Again, Proverbs 35 and 36, it says, "Every word of God is flawless. Do not add to his words or he will rebuke you as a liar". That couldn't be clearer. The whole Bible ends with a warning to not add to or take away from anything in the Book of Revelation, and by extension the whole 66 books of the Bible. Don't add to it. Don't take away from it. Christ in this case study perfectly upholds the law of God as it is written. The example Christ cites is the fifth command of the 10 commandments. 10 commandments came down from on high, came down from the mouth of God, written by the finger of God when God descended in fire on Mount Sinai, and he gave the 10 commandments to the Jewish nation. They come in two tables, a vertical table, the first four commandments, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength sums it up vertically. Then you got horizontally. Love your neighbors as yourself. The first of the horizontal table, other people, is honor your father and mother. The concept here is a child born into a family must learn to submit gladly to parental authority. Honoring is something you do in your heart. And out of that heart flow is a pattern of obedience, a pattern of delighted obedience from child to parent that is foundational to all the other horizontal relationships they'll live in the rest of their lives. They've got to learn this from the start. The two commandments specifically to children are honor and obey. Honor your father and mother, treat them with respect in your heart, and then obey [Ephesian 6:4]. That's it. Now honoring, it goes far beyond lip service and all that. It's just a state of heart. It's giving esteem a high place in your mind and heart to your parents. Christ upholds the authority of parents over their children, and He even goes so far as to cite the death penalty concerning parents. He said, "Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death”[ Exodus 21:17]. When new parents bring home a little child, an infant from the hospital, being instruments of God that they will at the right time, understand this commandment and live it out, that's central to parenting. It's not because you're so great, I'm a parent, you're not so great. But it's because they need to understand God is behind this and saying it to them and they must. There's so much disrespect from child to parent and God doesn't coddle it at all. Jesus says it's worthy of death. Thanks be to God that Jesus died on the cross to take away the death penalty for us sinners.This is a serious matter. So Christ is extremely distressed with the Scribes and Pharisees, their arrogant handling of the perfect Word of God. III. Jesus’ Deeper Charge: Hypocrisy in Worship But let's get to the deeper charge. The deeper charge is hypocrisy in worship. You have to go back in the text for that. Look at verse 6-7, "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites, as it is written, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain. Their teachings are but rules taught by men” [ Isaiah 29:13]. These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Isaiah in his day, exposed a problem among his own countrymen that's still with us today, hypocrisy in worship. Seven centuries before Jesus was born, Isaiah begins his prophecy with an expose on the Jewish hypocrisy and formalism in their religious machinery. It was running like a machine, talking about the animal sacrificial system and the temple and the cycle of three festivals and daily animal sacrifice. It was a big machine going on in Isaiah's day and in Isaiah 1:11-14, this is what God says about it, "The multitude of your sacrifices, what are they me, says the Lord. I have more than enough of burn offerings of rams and of the fat of fated animals. I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to appear before me who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts. Stop bringing meaningless offerings. Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations, I cannot bear your evil assemblies. Your New Moon festivals and your appointed feast my soul hates. They become a burden to me. I'm weary of bearing them”. And yet they're all commanded in the Law of Moses to be done. What's the problem? Hypocrisy. They don't feel it in their hearts. It's just a machine that's running week after week, year after year, as in Isaiah's day, so in Christ's day with the Scribes and Pharisees and may I say, as in Christ's day, so in our day. We're a very religious country. We drive by so many churches to get to this church. Many of them are filled with people, very religious. But here's the question, is it possible that the scathing critique Jesus gave, "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain" is true of us today. So what is this issue of hypocrisy? What is hypocrisy? A hypocrite is a person who acts righteous when they're not, let's say, or a person who says one thing and does another. They don't practice what they preach. Claiming to have moral standards to which they don't actually conform. The word “hypocrite” is literally a Greek word brought straight over pretty much letter for letter into the English. It means “an actor”. The Greek word meant an actor. You remember the symbol of dramatic arts? You have the two masks, the smiley mask and the sad mask. That symbol, those masks were things that those Greek actors would hold in front of their faces, happy or sad, that kind of thing. They're actors in a drama. They play this role, but they don't feel any of it. It's just a show which they do for the audience. Now in our culture, we give a very high place to actors and actresses. We ask their opinions on the economy. It's incredible, these people, we can well applaud their talents and skills at acting. It's really quite remarkable. You can watch the same individual in multiple movies and the same person is playing a, I don't know, a homeless street person in one movie and a Nobel Prize winning physicist in another and a president in another, and then a captain of a sailing vessel in another. You may say,”Wow, how do they do it"? Their range as actors is incredible. I've often wondered what it would be like to be married to a really skillful actor. I mean, in real life. You see all their movies and all the same faces that they're giving you when they're expressing love or whatever they've given to other people in a movie. Would you ever be secure in that relationship? I mean, do you really love me or is this just like that scene in that movie back then? I don't know what you're doing. Maybe that's why so many of those marriages don't last very long. Is any of it real? The Scribes and Pharisees played at being righteous. They played at it, but their hearts were far from God. God was never their audience. Jesus said it plainly. Matthew 23, "Everything they do is done for others to see". He said in Matthew 23, "You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but inside they're full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous, but inside you're full of hypocrisy and wickedness”. What is hypocrisy in worship? It's acting reverent when you're not. So what is it? What is true worship? What are we talking about? Is it not a heart aflame with the glory of God? A mind captivated by God's nature, captivated by God's great actions and history? God's nature, his power, his compassion, his tenderness, his mercies, his holiness, his righteousness? And all of his great achievements in creation and in the Exodus and the history of Israel and then especially in Jesus, his life, his death, his resurrection? Is this not true worship? But a hypocrite doesn't feel any of this. It's not genuine. None of that moves the needle really. "What is true worship? … Is it not a heart aflame with the glory of God? A mind captivated by God's nature, captivated by God's great actions and history?" Now along with this issue of hypocrisy comes the problem of traditionalism. Look at verse 3, "The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands the ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders". Again, verse 5, "The Pharisees and teachers of the law ask Jesus, ‘Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with unclean hands?’” And then again, verse 7, "They worship me in vain, their teaching are but rules taught by men". Three different times it's tradition, tradition, tradition. Traditionalism. What is traditionalism? How is it different than traditions? Are they related? Traditionalism I believe, is elevating a past pattern to a level of religious permanence equal to or even superior to the Word of God. That's traditionalism. It's belief in the traditions, and that they can never be changed. I think somewhat, it's like trying to recapture a beautiful spiritual moment for all time by the outward trappings that were around it at the time, like some things happened and that was awesome. And from then on, we'll do those some things like it's a scientific experiment and then you'll get the spiritual moment that way. I remember hearing a story of a one local church that decades and decades ago had an amazing Sunday. The word of God was preached powerfully.The spirit of God is poured out in power and a revival broke out in that church. Many people were weeping, falling down, crying out and genuine work happened in their lives. The closing hymn that day was “Spirit of God Descend upon my Heart.” It’s a great hymn. So for the next 50 years, they played that song at the end of every worship service in that church. One day a courageous worship leader changed it and played a different song. It took incredible courage. That's traditionalism. It's like there's this beautiful butterfly and then you capture it in acrylic like a paperweight and just put it down there heavily and it's not going to move. It's not alive. That's traditionalism, imposing that moment as a rule for future generations to follow. Now, there is an essential place for tradition. Tradition means just that which is handed on. We need a respect for church history. We need a respect for the past. We need to know we are not the first generation of Christians. Lots of stuff was worked out before us and has been passed on and we're not reinventing the wheel every time. We Americans, we love what's hot and cutting edge and trending and all that sort of stuff. Often that's poured over into our worship over the last 25 years. What's hot and trendy is what we’re looking for, and there isn't a respect for a tradition. IV. True Worship versus Traditionalism But there's a difference between tradition and traditionalism. Doctrines have been handed down to us from the apostolic era. Paul says very plainly in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, "What I received, I passed onto you as a first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, according to the scriptures". The word “I passed on” in the Latin is “traditio”. That's where we get the English for “tradition.” It's handed down. There’s nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with a lot of things being handed down, but there are manmade rituals and patterns that get encrusted and then are given equal if not greater authority to the Word of God. Now that's traditionalism and that's what's going on here. What then is true worship? Three key observations. Number one, it's not manmade, but it's initiated by God. It's revelation and response. God reveals, we respond. Remember Peter's confession of Jesus. "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God". And Jesus said, "Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my father in heaven". Do you hear that? Revealed by God, Peter responds. That's all. Worship is that way. It starts with God, He reveals and then we respond. Secondly, it's not based on human rules and regulations, but based on the Word of God. Where is the record of God's revelation? Only one place, here in the Bible. Our job is to study the scriptures and then worship flows from our understanding of God is revealed in the scripture. That's where it comes from. So it's based on the Word of God. Thirdly, it's not hypocritical, but it's a reflection of a heart that's truly drawn after God. Drawn close to God. Verse 6, "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me". True worship is a heart drawn close to God based on the Word of God, and it involves awe, reverence, fear, wonder, amazement, tears, shouts of joy, exaltation, surprise, astonishment. It's a rich array of feelings. But before any of them is truth. Truth first, then the feelings and then the outward actions. That's what true worship is. That's not hypocrisy. IV. Application Now, as we close today, I want to just focus on this one statement, this one key issue. Look at verse 6, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me". I want to ask you, is that true of you today or not? "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me". Let me turn it around and let's say I hope for a large percentage of you it's not true today. If it’s not true as you sat here, as you stood here for worship, then you ought to thank God for your salvation. You ought to thank God for the work done in you by the Holy Spirit of God. He worked in you to take out your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh that is sensitive and responsive to God. No, not perfectly, but you do love him and you do yearn to please him. You can't wait to go to heaven and you're hungry to know more about him. That's who you are. If that's all true of you, praise God. God has saved you through the work of Christ and the cross and by the Holy Spirit. But let's turn it back. What if it is true? What if it's true that you're honoring God with your lips, with your outward behavior, but your heart is actually far from God? One of two things is true. One is that you may not be a Christian, you’re not born again. Could be that you could say to me, "I'm actually not claiming to be a Christian. I came here today because a friend invited me". The point is your heart, is far from God. That's why Jesus came. He came to seek and to save lost people like you and like I was. He came to go get us and bring us to God. To bring us to God. He came to shed his blood on the cross for all of the many transgressions you've committed while your heart was far from God, to pay for it all in his own blood. And God raised him from the dead to show that that payment was accepted. I'm just crying out to you, and I'm saying don't let it be the case even later today or next week, that your heart is far from God. Suppose that this is a true statement of you, but you actually are a Christian. It happens to all of us. What's gone on is you become distracted by earthly circumstances. Could be physical pain on your part or a loved one. It could be a financial difficulty. It could be that the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things is alluring and distracting you and your heart are from God, and maybe even you've been in a habit of playing at your Christianity. The text is standing over you today to plead with you to repent, to acknowledge that you're not loving Jesus with the same love you used to have, that your heart's been drifting from him, and the Lord is standing in front of you now, pleading with you to repent and to come back to God and to live openly and honestly and passionately for him. Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the time we've had to listen to these words. Thank you for Jesus courage and boldness in telling the truth. Lord, as the psalmist said very plainly in Psalm 1:39, "Search me oh God, and know my heart. Try me and show me if there's any offensive way in me, show it to me and lead me in the way of everlasting". God, we don't want to be hypocrites. We want to be genuine followers of Christ. So please work in us by your redeeming grace. We love you. We praise you. We thank you. In Jesus' name. Amen.
We Americans like our stuff. Strike that....we LOVE our stuff. There's nothing wrong with possessing nice things, but it can be a slippery slope and we end up holding these things ever more tightly. In today's episode, host Travis Shelton shares a very counter-cultural perspective on our possessions. Many may aggressively disagree with this approach, but perhaps it will at least give you something to think about. Hope you enjoy! Get your free copy of Travis's new devotional here: https://www.meaningover.money/resources If you have questions or would like to connect with us outside of the podcast, here's where you can find us: Join our podcast community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/370457478238932 Online Courses: https://www.meaningover.money (podcast listeners can get 25% off by using the promo code "podcast25") YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCasnj17-bOl_CZ0Cb9czmyQ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meaning_over_money Travis's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/travis_shelton_ Travis's website: https://www.travisshelton.com E-Mail Us: meaningovermoneypodcast@gmail.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/meaning-over-money/message
Pastor Andy Davis preaches on Mark 5:1-20, and an account about a demon-possessed man freed by Jesus. We see that demons may have power over humans, but no chance against God. - SERMON Transcript - Turn in your Bibles to Mark chapter 5. This morning we have the joy of resuming our study in this awesome gospel of Mark. We're right in the middle of two spectacular miracles back-to-back, the stilling of the storm at the end of Mark chapter 4 and now the driving out of the legion of demons in Mark 5. I said last time, a couple of months ago now, that the stilling of the storm is the most visually spectacular miracle Jesus ever did. How amazing is it then that immediately after that He does his most spectacular exorcism? That's exactly what this account reveals. There is no other account of an exorcism that even comes close to this one, the driving out of demons from a human being. Nothing else even comes close, just for the magnitude of the power that it reveals and the stunning transformation in one man revealed in Mark's gospel and the effect on the pigs, 2,000 of them perishing in one moment. There's no other power encounter with a demonized human being that even comes close. In terms of preaching, oftentimes at the very beginning of a sermon, a preacher has to speak some words of introduction to ensnare or beguile his congregation into being interested in the text. I don't have to do that this time. I would hope you're interested in what you've heard. I would hope you'd realize that all I need to do as a preacher is get out of the way of the text and just point to the Jesus that it reveals. Some time ago, I was meditating on the juxtaposition of Mark 4 and Mark 5, the stealing of the storm and the driving out of the Legion demon in Mark's gospel. The way it's written here, it's really astonishing because you could see Jesus at the end of Mark 4 standing on one side of the Sea of Galilee and perhaps in a visionary sense as a prophet, looking ahead to what's about to happen. He has to go through a hurricane and drive out an army of demons in Mark's Gospel to save one man. That's it. He saves that one man and comes back; He goes over and back for one man. And that's encouraging. Some of you are thinking, in Matthew's Gospel, there's two guys. I'm not talking about the two guys today. In Mark's gospel, there's a focus on that one individual. I think we're supposed to understand, in the Galatians 2:20 sense, that Christ loved me and gave himself for me. He did that for me. He was willing to go through a hurricane and drive out an army of demons to save me. So we need to just step aside and let the text do its work in us. And what is that work? Remember that the theme of the gospel of Mark is stated right from the beginning, Mark 1:1, “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ”, the Son of God, that's the theme, Jesus as the Son of God. In the spirit of the Gospel of John, as I've said many times, actually all four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they all have this same purpose, though only John's Gospel says it so openly and directly. “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name.” That's the purpose of the Gospel of John, and it's also the purpose of the Gospel of Mark: to bring you to the point where you can confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed one, the Promised one. That He is more than just that, the Son of the living God, and that by confessing that from your heart, you might receive full forgiveness of sins and live forever in heaven and not die forever in hell. That's the reason this Gospel of Mark was written, and that's the purpose of all of the accounts in it. Not only that, not just that we would be able to make in a slogan sort of sense, “Who is Jesus? the Son of God.” That phrase, that we would have expounded before us, really means the infinite majesty of the second person of the Trinity, the infinite majesty of Jesus. It means that we'll be spending eternity finding out how glorious and majestic Jesus is. We've only just begun the greatness of Jesus, the Son of God. That's what we have before us. It's not enough to just have the slogan, “Who's Jesus? Son of God.” Remember how, when on the way to the villages around Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asked, “Who do people say I am?” and Peter replied, “You are the Messiah,” and then a few minutes later he's taking Jesus aside and rebuking him. Now that's a bad look, friends. Peter was underestimating Jesus, the Son of God, all of us do. The ministry of the word through the power of the Spirit is to get us not to underestimate Jesus and to see the infinite greatness of Christ. The infinite greatness of Jesus is what we're seeing here. The effortless power that Jesus has, that He displays here, power that only almighty God could have, effortless stilling of a hurricane and the turbulent sea immediately after that, effortless, just a word and it's done. And then effortless power over 6,000 demons, saying in Matthew's gospel, a single word, "Go," and they're gone. No effort at all, they instantly obey. "The ministry of the word through the power of the Spirit is to get us not to underestimate Jesus and to see the infinite greatness of Christ. " Sadly in the account that we're studying today, we also see mixed reaction. We see many who saw the effects, even the miracle with their own eyes, and responded in faithless fear, driving Jesus away because they didn't want the implications of what it would mean to have Jesus in their region. The unreasoning unbelief was so strong they would rather have, it seems in the end, this demon-possessed, stark-raving homicidal maniac in their region, rather than Jesus, peaceful Jesus, loving Jesus staying in their region. The gospels all make it clear that many people will see the evidence for Jesus and reject. It ends up dividing people into two categories. I. A Demon-Possessed Maniac Terrorizes a Region Let's walk through the text now. It begins with a demon-possessed maniac who terrorizes a region. What is the context? Jesus and his disciples had left the huge crowds to get away to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. Perhaps the disciples thought a time of R&R was coming, a little bit of relaxation, getting away from all of that. Little did they know what was awaiting them as they got into the boat, this raging hurricane in which they thought they were going to die. Then once that's done, as they land on the other side, they're confronted by a demon-possessed maniac of terrifying power. Look at verse 1-2, “They went across the sea to the region of the Gerasenes” and verse 2, “when Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an evil spirit came from the tombs to meet him.” The region of the Gerasenes or Gadarenes, a little village near there was called Gerasa from which we get Mark's term, Gerasenes. There's a larger city nearby called Gadara, which also gave its name to the region, Gadarene. That's why you end up with two different names in the gospel. The demon-possessed maniac is described in verse 2 as “a man with an unclean spirit”. This is a demon, an unclean spirit is a demon. Demons are angels, spirit beings that rebelled long ago with Satan and were evicted from heaven as described in Revelation 12. They're called unclean because their thoughts and their works were pure evil. The encounter begins with Jesus and his disciples getting out of the boat. The demon-possessed man sees them from a distance and comes from the tombs down to the shoreline. This man is an absolute monster. His human personality has been swallowed alive by the demons inside him. Look at verse 3 through 5, the description of his plight. This man lived in the tombs and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain, for he had often been chained hand in foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills, he would cry out and cut himself with stones. I believe those words describe the most wretched human being on the surface of the earth in history. I can't imagine a more wretched condition to be in than this, worse than Nebuchadnezzar turned into an animal for seven years eating grass, worse than any tortured individual in a prison, worse than anyone suffering from a malady. This is the most wretched human being ever described in the pages of history, I believe. Look at the text, it says he lived in the tombs. No one in their right mind would live out in the tombs of dead people. These are often caves blocked up with boulders or big stones. At best, they would offer rudimentary protection from the elements, they would be cold, they would be dark, they would be hard, no place in which to live. This man is absolutely severed from all human society. He has a family as we see at the end of the account, but his condition has cut himself off from all interactions with them. It says no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain.The account gives a sense of history with this man. He had originally been bound, or actually many times been bound with chains and even shackles, maybe fetters or manacles, large flat pieces of iron that would be heated up and then pounded by a blacksmith into curved pieces to fit around his wrists or his ankles. The chains would have large strong links in them, sizable links to restrain a powerful man, but this man had broken every chain ever put on him and shattered every shackle, verse 4, “for he had often been chained hand and foot,” but he tore the chains apart, he broke the irons on his feet. Demons gave this man supernatural power. They are vastly more powerful than we people are, physically. They can do amazing physical things. Remember at the resurrection account after Jesus had risen from the dead and the tomb was empty, a single angel came down and rolled back the boulder that was in front of Jesus's tomb and sat on it. So imagine the kind of supernatural power these evil angels give this man. It says no one could bind him anymore, in verse 4, “no one was strong enough to subdue him.” The Greek word here means “to tame” as if he's a wild beast. This implies many efforts to take this man down, perhaps four or five grown men, or more trying to work with this guy. One grabbing an arm, another grabbing another arm, one grabbing a leg, the other maybe coming up behind him and hitting him on the head to knock him unconscious so they could put the chains on him. It's horrible the circumstance here. Then once he's conscious again, if that's indeed what they did, he then in a rage, tears them off and they're all running for the hills. Finally, the people in that region had given up. He's not chained now. There's nothing they can do. They just stayed away from that area. His lifestyle is stunningly sad. It's a human being created in the image of God, but he's rendered to an almost animal-like existence. Luke tells us that he had, for a long time, gone without clothing. He didn't wear any clothing. He was naked with no shame at all like an animal. But furthermore, he rarely slept and he was immersed in self-harm, verse 5, “night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones,” roaming restlessly as demons do, seeking rest but not finding it, yearning for rest, going from tomb to tomb, from hill to hill night and day, crying out as if for deliverance. But who could ever set this man free? The most wretched human being I think in history. He is terrorizing that region. II. The Son of God Terrorizes the Demons Point two, then the Son of God comes to terrorize the demons. That's pretty exciting, isn't it? Now who's afraid of who here? The encounter with Jesus is initiated, this demon-possessed monster sees people landing from a distance and comes down to the shoreline, and what he did is really astonishing. Look at verse 6, “when he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him.” Now here's the fascinating thing. The more you study this, the more amazing this gets. These terrified demons, and they are terrified, we're going to make that case plainly in the scripture, they are afraid of Jesus, but instead of running away from him of whom they are terrified, they run to him to get closer to him, that's counterintuitive. Why are the demons running to Jesus? Do they want an encounter with Jesus? Oh no, not at all. They are pure darkness, he is pure light. They hate him with every fiber of their being. They do not want to be near pure light, they who are pure darkness. Why then are they coming closer? Furthermore, they make the man fall down on his knees in a display of humble submission, even of worship before Jesus. Think about that text that says “every knee shall bow and every tongue confess.” So that's what these demons are doing, falling down in front of Jesus. Why do they draw near? It's very obvious, they know exactly who Jesus is. Verse 7, “he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What do you want with me, Jesus, son of the most high God?’” They are terrified of him, and yet they run toward him. This is my theory on why. What else can they do? They understand Jesus's power in ways we don't. They understand omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence in ways we don't. And the demons understood, Psalm 1:39, “Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I go down to the depths, you are there.” Or again, as God says about his enemies in Amos 9:1-4, these are physical human enemies, but we can apply it here to demons as well, Amos 9, this is God speaking about his enemies, "Not one will get away. None will escape. Though they dig into the depths of the grave, from there my hand will take them. Though they climb up to the heavens, from there I will bring them down. Though they hide themselves at the top of Carmel, there I'll hunt them down and seize them. Though they hide from me at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent to bite them. Though they are driven into exile by their enemies, there I will command the sword to slay them. I will fix my eyes upon them for evil and not for good." Oh, it is a dreadful thing to have God as your enemy. Where can you go? There is nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide for these demons, and they know it in ways we don't. So they come to Jesus and in Mark 7, He drives out the demon of the Syrophoenician, the Canaanite woman from her daughter, and the daughter is not even there, and Jesus says to this Syrophoenician woman, "You may go home. The demon has left your daughter." "When did that happen?" "Oh, a second ago." "You didn't even go, you didn't lay hands on her." "Not needed." "You didn't say anything." "Not needed. I just thought it." And the demon got its eviction notice. That's the power of Jesus and the demons know it. "It is a dreadful thing to have God as your enemy. Where can you go? There is nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide for these demons, and they know it in ways we don't. " They come toward Jesus because they have a request to make of him. The demons come to Jesus, making the man shout at the top of his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, son of the most high God?" The demons are utterly unruly, they frequently make their human hosts scream or shriek or foam at the mouth. This one's shouting at the top of his voice, clearly they are terrified of Jesus. The reason for the terror is they did not understand Jesus, the Son of God, the incarnate Son of God invading their dark realm. They literally say, "What business have we with each other, son of the most high God? What business do we have? What are you here to do?" The reason for their terror is the power of almighty God and of his perfect and holy son, Jesus. Now you have to understand, demons have very accurate theology. They got the theological stuff right, better than us. James 2:19 says, “You believe that there's one God, good, even the demons believe that, and they shudder.” They get all the facts right, but they're just in an absolute wrong relationship with the God behind the facts. They hate him, but they know the truth about him. And furthermore, demons know their future. Matthew 25:41, “Jesus, the judge of all the earth, the judge of heaven and earth will say to the goats, ‘Depart from me you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’” The lake of fire was made for Satan and demons, and that's where they're going, and there's no salvation plan for them. Also, in Revelation 12:12, the devil is filled with fury because he knows that his time is short. We must imagine the demons know this, but now Jesus, in his incarnation and now in his public ministries which have been going on a year or two, this assault of the son of God on their earthly territory is unprecedented. For all redemptive history, demons have been operating in secret, in the darkness, in the shadows of the spiritual realm, doing absolutely whatever they wanted to make life utterly miserable for human beings and to fight against God at every point. That's what demons do and they're still doing it today. But now Jesus has invaded, the Son of God, the Son of Light, pure light, into this realm of darkness and they're terrified. They want to know, what is the purpose? They want to know about timing. In Matthew 8:29, the demon says, "What do you want with us, son of God? Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?" They are well aware that there's a pit of torture ready now, before they even get to the lake of fire, there is a place of demon incarceration, short of the lake of fire. As far as I read scripture, there are no demons now in the lake of fires, a not-yet situation. Most of the demons are roaming and causing trouble in a hidden way on earth, but there are some that are incarcerated. They've been arrested by the power of God. It says in Luke 8:31, in the same account, they begged him repeatedly not to order them to go into the “abyss.” It's a Greek word, meaning “bottomless.” It's a pit. But the demons in Matthew 8:29 speak of torture, of torture in the pit, as does our text. Look at verse 7, “Swear to God that you won't torture me.” Do you see now the fear that demons have of him? They are afraid of incarceration and torture now, right now, and they don't want it. They're afraid of it, so they come to Jesus to make this request of him. This torture implies demonic agony of which they're clearly terrified. Peter speaks in his epistle of a temporary place of restraint and torture for demons, [2 Peter 2:4]. God didn't spare angels who sin but threw them down into “Tartarus” that's the Greek word there for “the pit” and delivered them to be kept in chains of darkness until judgment. Those chains cannot break, they're restrained and held. They're very aware that Jesus can instantly do this to them at any moment. He has overwhelming power over all demons. The demons are also afraid of losing their jurisdiction. Look at verse 10, “He begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area.” Not only do they not want to lose their freedom, but they want to stay right there in their area. They've got a geographical area that they're working. The Greek says that they're begging him earnestly, or again and again, they're pleading with Jesus because they want to stay there. This demon-possessed man is the greatest nightmare of that entire region, a murderous, powerful maniac who threatens them all. But it is also clear that the Son of the most high God is the demon's greatest nightmare, if we could use that language. They are terrified. They are as terrified of Jesus as that region would've been terrified of that man. III. The Son of God Drives Out the Legion Third point, the Son of God drives out the Legion. Jesus commands him to leave and he will soon. He doesn't leave immediately, but in verse 8 it says, “Jesus had said to him, ‘Come out of this man, you evil spirit.’” I think He stated his intention, "I'm going to drive you out," but they're going to have this conversation first, and Jesus wants to have that conversation with him. He demands the demon's name [verse 9]. “Then Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ ‘My name is Legion,’ he replied, ‘For we are many.’” The demons have no desire to reveal anything about themselves, they want to stay hidden. They want to stay in the darkness just like these days. They don't want to reveal anything, but they have no choice. When Jesus says, "What is your name?" They must give it, they must answer his questions, so He demands their name. Angels have names, we know two of them in the Bible, Michael and Gabriel. Demons must have names as well, but here they use a human term, “legion”. And the reason they gave is, "We are many." Legion was a division of the Roman Empire's world-conquering army, a little bit larger than a modern day brigade, which would be about 3,000 soldiers. A legion is about 5,000 to 6,000 Roman soldiers. They had conquered that part of the world. So first of all, it shows theologically multiple demons can inhabit one person. We get that from this, but it also shows something of the demon's personality and mind. Though the demons might ordinarily have been boastful about their cumulative might, they would never have dreamed of boasting in front of Jesus. We are mighty and we are powerful, they're saying, but they're not doing that in front of Jesus, no way. I want you to picture the spectacle in the spiritual realm, the spectacle of Jesus against an army of demons. In 1960, there was a movie called Spartacus, which was about a slave revolt in the Roman era, and the climactic scene is a battle between the slave army and multiple, multiple Roman Legions. It's really quite a spectacular scene over a wide field. You get a sense of the machine-like efficiency of the Roman legions as they come down in formation and then quickly spread out into battle line and come relentlessly toward the slave army. You know as you're looking, you're going to lose. There's no way you can defeat the legions, they're just that powerful. But picture that, all that's unfolding and one man goes out across the field by himself with no weapons in his hand, and that man is Jesus. As he takes a stand and raises his hand and says, "Begone," they turn and drop their weapons and flee and He's left alone on the battlefield. That's the picture I get. If you didn't see that movie," don't worry about it, just know that it’s a massive army, one man goes forward, and who's afraid of whom. Again, just like the storm, do you not see effortless power? Effortless, that's what we've got. The demons come, they throw themselves in front of Jesus and they make this request, a demonic request. [Verses 11-12], “A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside, the demons begged Jesus, ‘Send us among the pigs, allow us to go into them.’” So I would say this clearly shows this is a gentile dominated region. No Jews would be raising pigs, because it was unclean for them to eat. These pig herders are there looking at this and this huge herd of pigs is there, 2,000 in number. The demons continue their begging, their pleading, their groveling to Jesus. In Matthew's Gospel, as I mentioned, it's a single word. Go to Matthew's account, in Matthew 8, you're going to see in the middle of a bunch of black letters, if you have a red letter edition, you're going to see one red 2 letter word. It's all Jesus says in Matthew's account, "Go,” and they go."Go,” and they're gone. One word. It reminds me of Luther's A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. "The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him. His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure. One little word shall fell him. That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth.” That's the power of Jesus's word. When He says go, they've got to go. Awesome. That's the supreme power of Jesus Christ. He draws out the name Legion so that we can be amazed, because we can't see it. You can't see the demons, but you have a sense of what Legion means. What happens next is a display of the power as well—the death of the pigs [verse 13]. He gave them permission and the evil spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about 2,000 in number, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and were drowned. This is to show visibly the scope of the demonic defeat, to make it obvious in the physical realm what Jesus was dealing with here, the death of the pigs, the sheer destructiveness of these demons. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” That's what these demons do. Some of you have sympathy for the animal owners there, the pig farmers who look like they lost all of that, they didn't lose anything. The harvest came early. They went pig fishing. That's kind of an interesting thing when you think about it. I know the text doesn't say they went pig fishing, but if you're the owner of the pigs, the market price is going to be a little low because there's a big influx of pig meat, but they’ll be fine. So don't think that way economically, et cetera. But again, it wasn't Jesus that destroyed the pigs, it was the demons. Now here's the question, a very significant question. Why does he give permission to the demons to do what they want to do? Why doesn't he send them into the pit? Why doesn't he incarcerate them? We bumped into the same question in the Book of Job, if you remember, why does he allow the demons to roam? Why does he allow them to do damage? It's vital for us to understand what Satan reveals in the Book of Job, that hedge of protection. I look on it as a whole matrix, like a maze of walls of protection that they can't go through. God is controlling the demonic activities, and they're running rough shot where they're permitted to run, and then mysteriously, some gate opens and they flood in like a plague of locusts and do the damage, and then suddenly the gate comes down and they're stopped and that's it. That's what's going on every day by the mysterious purpose of God. They are God's lackeys, though they are not trying to serve God, they are doing his will in some very complex way. When we get to heaven, we'll understand why God let the demons do what they do, et cetera, but that's it. Don't think for a moment it's because he couldn't have stopped them. He could have collected all of the demons in an instant, they'd be in the lake of fire now, but He's using them for his own mysterious purposes. When the time is right, He will send out his angels and they will collect all the demons and they will be in the lake of fire, and there'll be no escape. IV. Two Opposite Human Responses Fourth point, two opposite human responses. The report spreads in the Gadarenes, and the people rejected Jesus. Look at verses 14-17, “Those tending the pigs ran off and reported this in the town and countryside and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the Legion of demons sitting there dressed and in his right mind and they were afraid. They were afraid. Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon-possessed man and told about the pigs as well. Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region.” This is tragic. Instead of, as they should have done, falling in front of Jesus in wonder and worship, and say as the Philippian jailer said in Act 16, “What must I do to be saved?”, instead they beg him to leave. I suppose it's the same terror that comes on people who really don't understand Jesus's goodness, they're afraid of what he's going to do in their lives, they're afraid of becoming Christians because they don't know what is going to happen. They're afraid, and they drive him out, they don't want him. They're just afraid because they don't understand his goodness. You see how meek and mild Jesus is, He just accedes to their wishes. "Okay, I'll leave." He walks away and gets back in the boat. We need to understand the infinite power of Jesus, but also the incredible gentleness, as we sang earlier, "Come into me, come into me." That's him. He's so gentle. I don't think you ever get a better text juxtaposing the infinite power of Jesus and his gentleness as in Isaiah 40, which talks about how He has all of the stars in the palm of his hand, this kind of thing, the infinite majesty, the nations are a drop in the bucket and dust on the scales and all that. But right in the middle of that, Isaiah 40:11, “He tends his flock like a shepherd. He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart. He gently leads those that have young.” That's who Jesus is. Why do they want him to leave? Along with that, we get the previously possessed man, and he has the exact opposite response. He doesn't ever want to leave Jesus again. He wants to be by Jesus's side forever, forever. Look at verse 18-20, “But as Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him but said, ‘Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy on you.’” So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and all the people were amazed. This formerly demon-possessed man's a different story altogether, isn't he? I believe more things happened than is recorded here. I think once the demons were out, Jesus preached the gospel to him, explained to him about the kingdom of God, the need for repentance so that his sins could be forgiven, and the man listened and believed. The text says in verse 15 that, “they saw him there dressed in his right mind.” Isn't that beautiful? It's kind of like the prodigal son coming to himself. It's like, "What am I doing here? Slopping pigs when I could be in my father's house." This man comes to his right mind, and again, supports that therapeutic view of salvation. He saves you by healing you, healing your mind so that you can see Jesus properly, you can see his beauty and his power and his love and you want him. He's dressed in his right mind, his sins are covered, that's a metaphor, the “dressing”. I think it's just an account, he's dressed now, he's not naked, but also the covering. His sins are forgiven and he's in his right mind and wants to be with Jesus forever. He sees Jesus properly, he loves him, he cherishes him. All he wants is to know him and be with him. He pleads with Jesus to stay with him. "He saves you by ... healing mind so that you can see Jesus properly, you can see his beauty and his power and his love." Now, three entities plead with Jesus for something. The demons begged to not be driven out of the area and stay in the area and go in the pigs. The unbelieving people asked Jesus to leave their area, and He does it. This man says, "I want to go with you." He says no. Isn't it true that God's ways are not our ways? But instead he has a mission for this man. He sends him out with a mission to do, verse 19, "Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy on you." “Go win your family. You kind of put them through a hard time. Now go home and show them that you've been healed and win them. Tell your family how God has had mercy on you, how much the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy on you.” I wonder what that was like when he walked through the threshold the first time, it's like, "Uh-oh, here comes trouble." "No, no, I'm different now." His job is to tell them the mercy of Jesus in his life and to win them. So it says in verse 20, “The man went away and began to tell the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him and all the people were amazed.” The Decapolis just literally means 10 cities, it's just a region there of 10 cities together. Apparently this man was effective because Jesus is going to return to the Decapolis in Mark 7:31 and there'll be many people waiting there for him to do healings. It's the fruit of this man's ministry. What a testimony this man must have had. I don't know how it began. How would you begin? "I used to be a demon-possessed raving maniac. And now I'm not. Now I'm healed." Imagine the joy of talking about Jesus that he must have had. V. Lessons What are some lessons and applications? First of all, I just want to ask you a question: Do you think demons are less active in our world than they were in Jesus' world? I hope you're saying no, because if you're saying no, you don't understand how much they have deceived you. They're every bit as active now as they ever were then. We Americans are naturalists, materialists, and I don't mean by that shopaholics, I mean we tend to think of things in a scientific material way. We tend to think of stories about demons and angels as a little weird, almost medieval. We definitely believe in the most high God, and then we believe in science, and we don't tend to do much in that middle realm with angels and demons, but they are every bit as active in 21st century America as they were in first century Palestine. They are deceptive and they're powerful, and they are around us at every moment. We need to be aware of them and understand the destructive power of demons. They are there to steal and kill and destroy. I wonder how many of the convicted serial killers or individuals that are incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals or asylums or prisons, I wonder if anyone is diagnosing them based on this. Or are they trying to get the chemical balances right and talk about their childhood or do other things? I’m not minimizing those sciences, but I'm just saying, is there a whole realm of possibility that's unthinkable in 21st-century treatment of individuals like this? For us Christians, let it not be so. We need to be aware that they're around and they're trying to make our lives miserable. We need to say then that demons are every bit as active. They're still here. They're still powerful. They still hate us, et cetera, but they're still terrified of Jesus. They are terrified of him. His power is infinite. He is far above all rule and authority, power and dominion. They are controlled by him, channeled by him. Hedges of protection and walls of protection everywhere, or else they'd run amok on the surface of the earth. We need to be thankful. We need to be aware of how demons could be assaulting you, annoying you, irritating you, making you susceptible to sin, alluring you, feeding you with depression, feeding you with hopelessness, feeding you with ideas of ways of acting out on the flesh. Put on your spiritual armor. Put it on every day, every moment. Be mindful, be not unaware of his schemes. Beyond that, see that the real issue here is worship Christ. Worship of Jesus. The name that is above every name, worship him, have a sense of his infinite power. Just fall down before him, not like this demon-possessed man did an abject terror, but fall down before him because you love him and want to tell him how much you love him for dying for you and rising again. Finally, what reaction do you have to the Jesus in this account? Like this healed man, do you want to spend the rest of your life with him? Do you want to spend eternity learning him? I do. Friends, it is the greatest honor of my life to stand up in front of you week after week and exalt Jesus. There's nothing in my life with more honor than that. I hope that your esteem of Jesus has gone up because we studied Mark 5:1-20 today. So I'm asking you, is that you? Do you love him? Do you know you're a sinner? His bloodshed for you is sufficient for your sins, are you trusting in that? Or like these townspeople, do you want him to go away? Just leave you alone? That's the question you have to ask. Use your testimony with your family. I want to tell my family how much Jesus has done for me and how He has been kind to me. Can I tell you what the Lord has done for me and how He has had mercy? I mean what a great phrase, “what He has done for me and how He has had mercy. I mean He could have mercy on you too.” Close with me in prayer. Lord, thank you for the time we've had to study in Mark 5:1-20. Thank you for what the text shows us about your infinite power and thank you for your kindness to us, weak sinners. I thank you for your gentleness and meekness and humbly acceding to the wishes of unbelieving townspeople who want you to leave. But I thank you for your wisdom in sending this single man out in Mark's gospel, this single man to go win his family. Lord, give us opportunities to share the gospel this week, help us to be bold, perhaps even tell this story and see what people think. But Lord give us opportunities to win the lost in Jesus name. Amen.
No worries this week as we once again say G'Day to our number 1 guest from Down Under; CRAIG ELVIN! We Americans may know AC/DC and a few select other Aussie bands, but the CEO of Pub Rock is back to take us further on our continuing sonic journey across the continent to hear where that meat and two veg rock originated. Grab a pint and get ready to rock - - - Aussie-style!What is it we do here at InObscuria? On most shows, Kevin opens the crypt to exhume and dissect from his personal collection; an artist, album, or collection of tunes from the broad spectrum of rock, punk, and metal. This go-round we turn the microphone over to Craig Elvin to give us all a schooling on more lost, forgotten and should have beens selections of Aussie Pub Rock. Our hope is always that we turn you on to something new.Songs this week include:Buffalo - “Sunrise (Come My Way)” from Volcanic Rock (1973)Australian Crawl - “Things Don't Seem” from Sirocco (1981)The Radiators - “Comin' Home” from Feel The Heat (1980)Baby Animals - “Working For The Enemy” from Baby Animals (1991)Sunnyboys - “Happy Man” from Sunnyboys (1981)Skyhooks - “Women In Uniform” from Guilty Until Proven Insane (1978)Johnny Diesel & The Injectors - “Parisienne Hotel” from Johnny Diesel & The Injectors (1989)Please subscribe everywhere that you listen to podcasts!Visit us: https://inobscuria.com/https://www.facebook.com/InObscuriahttps://twitter.com/inobscuriahttps://www.instagram.com/inobscuria/Buy cool stuff with our logo on it!: https://www.redbubble.com/people/InObscuria?asc=uCheck out Robert's amazing fire sculptures and metal workings here: http://flamewerx.com/If you'd like to check out Kevin's band THE SWEAR, take a listen on all streaming services or pick up a digital copy of their latest release here: https://theswear.bandcamp.com/If you want to hear Robert and Kevin's band from the late 90s – early 00s BIG JACK PNEUMATIC, check it out here: https://bigjackpnuematic.bandcamp.com/
Our guest this week is Larry Siegel. He is the Gary P. Brinson director of research at the CFA Institute Research Foundation. Prior to that, he was director of research for the Ford Foundation's investment division for 15 years. Siegel began his career at Ibbotson Associates in 1979. He specializes in asset management and investment consulting and has served on various boards as both an advisor and a director. He has also served on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal and currently serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Portfolio Management and TheJournal of Investing. Siegel is a prolific writer and has authored several critically acclaimed books in recent years, including Unknown Knowns: On Economics, Investing, Progress, and Folly as well as Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago and his MBA in finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.BackgroundBioUnknown Knowns: On Economics, Investing, Progress, and Folly, by Laurence SiegelFewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance, by Laurence SiegelResearch"Lifetime Financial Advice: Human Capital, Asset Allocation, and Insurance," by Roger Ibbotson, Moshe Arye Milevsky, and Kevin Zhu, ResearchGate, January 2007.Popularity: A Bridge Between Classical and Behavioral Finance, by Roger Ibbotson, Thomas Idzorek, Paul Kaplan, and James Xiong, Jan. 15, 2019."Bursting the Bubble—Rationality in a Seemingly Irrational Market," by David F. DeRosa, SSRN, April 29, 2021."Equity Risk Premium Forum: Don't Bet Against a Bubble?," by Paul McCaffrey, CFA Institute, April 8, 2022.The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do, by Erik Larson, April 6, 2021."Value Investing: Robots Versus People," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, June 30, 2017.Endowments and Investing Lessons"Don't Give Up the Ship: The Future of the Endowment Model," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, April 7, 2021."Where's Tobin? Protecting Intergenerational Equity for Endowments: A New Benchmarking Approach," by M. Barton Waring and Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, April 21, 2022."Debunking Nine and a Half Myths of Investing," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, March 12, 2020.Inflation"Protecting Portfolios Against Inflation," by Eugene Podkaminer, Wylie Tollette, and Laurence Siegel, The Journal of Investing, April 2022."The Novelty of the Coronavirus: What It Means for Markets," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.com, April 1, 2020."Will Demographic Trends Drive Higher Inflation and Interest Rates?" by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.com, Feb. 10, 2021.Other"Cliff Asness: Value Stocks Still Look Like a Bargain," The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, May 31, 2022."Tom Idzorek: Exploring the Role of Human and Financial Capital in Retirement Planning," The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, June 7, 2022.TranscriptJeff Ptak: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I'm Jeff Ptak, chief ratings officer for Morningstar Research Services.Christine Benz: And I'm Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.Ptak: Our guest this week is Larry Siegel. Larry is the Gary P. Brinson director of research at the CFA Institute Research Foundation. Prior to that, he was director of research at the Ford Foundation's investment division for 15 years. Larry began his career at Ibbotson Associates in 1979. He specializes in asset management and investment consulting and has served on various boards as both an advisor and a director. He has also served on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal and currently serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Portfolio Management and The Journal of Investing. Larry is a prolific writer and has authored several critically acclaimed books in recent years, including Unknown Knowns: On Economics, Investing, Progress, and Folly as well as Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance. Larry earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago and his MBA in finance at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business.Larry, welcome to The Long View.Laurence Siegel: Thank you.Ptak: Thank you so much for joining us. We're really excited to chat with you. I wanted to start with your early career. You worked for Roger Ibbotson early in your career. In fact, you were Ibbotson's first employee if I'm not mistaken. Talk about Roger's influence on you and more broadly, the impact he has had on our understanding of markets and investing.Siegel: Roger was not only my first boss, he was my first finance professor at the University of Chicago. So, I got fed the Ibbotson—and to give credit where it's due, to Sinquefield—view of the markets early. I was 21 years old. And I would describe that view as that asset classes are what's important; that security, individual securities, are best viewed as components of asset classes, although when you get involved in the business, you realize that you have to understand the market at the security level, too; and that long-term performance is very strongly in favor of equities. So, at the time, pension funds, who were the main customers for Ibbotson Associates' work, had relatively little in equities, and one of our missions was to improve the returns of those funds and thus for the sponsors and the employees by holding more equities. This was in the early ‘80s. I was hired in 1979. So, you can see that was a good strategy.Benz: So, sticking with your background in your early career, you think young professionals should have a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts. Why is that?Siegel: Well, not every single one needs to, but the ones who are going to rise to the top in the business need a grounding in the common cultural heritage of the human race, and that's given by humanities and social sciences that the liberal arts broadly construed. Investors invest in businesses or governments, but mostly businesses, and businesses exist to serve the needs and wants of people, an ever-changing group of people around the world. So, without a deep understanding of human affairs—in other words, of the why of business—young investment professionals are likely to fall into some intellectual traps: short-termism, geographically narrow thinking, where you only think about your own country, and a bunch of other well-documented behavioral biases—you shouldn't do that.Ptak: Maybe a dumb question to follow up on that: Why doesn't the market do a better job of creating incentives to ensure that younger professionals—let's talk about those who are heading into finance and in investing in particular—that they have a liberal arts background and they're able to better avoid some of those traps? Why haven't those incentives really taken shape and why is it still so typical to see this procession of MBAs and people with the traditional finance background dominating finance and investing?Siegel: Well, if you're as old as me, I'm 68, you have observed that it used to. The market, when I was getting out of school, was in a very different position. There weren't many MBAs. It was an unpopular decision to go to business school. And most of the people who were accepted in business school had an Ivy Plus background where a liberal arts education is required in order to graduate. By Ivy Plus I mean the University of Chicago, Stanford, Northwestern, places like that, plus the Ivy League. So, this staffed the investment business with a fairly broadly educated group of people. What happened in the next 40 years is that business got too big. And the MBA programs mushroomed from a little specialty of a dozen or two dozen schools to something that everybody felt they had to get in order to get a job. So, it just became more of a trade school degree rather than an academic degree. And I'm sorry if I'm offending anybody here, but that's the way I see it. And the investment business became more of a trade. So, the market became less efficient, I think, because it just got so big that it had to pull in a lot of different people, including people who had specialized early because they wanted to be in finance because they were seeing people in finance made a lot of money.Benz: Speaking of specialization, do you think that the only way to truly specialize is to have had a generalist humanistic education first? In other words, are the most successful specialists people who trained as generalists first and is there any evidence for this?Siegel: I think there is among CEOs and maybe CIOs, chief investment officers. The greatest businesspeople in the world have generally had a pretty broad background and a lot of them started, the legend is in the mail room, but they may have started in engineering, accounting. They may have started in sales. Whatever they did, they found their way to the investment business through a kind of evolution over time. An organization needs foxes and hedgehogs. Isaiah Berlin, drawing on an ancient Greek story, said that there are two kinds of people of foxes who know a little about everything and hedgehogs who no one big thing. Einstein, for example, was a hedgehog. He really only cared about physics, and he was very productive. We would have a very different world without him. I am suggesting that you're better off looking for foxes, but you also want to have a few Einsteins in there, and an organization that consists entirely of foxes would be very unfocused and would be more like a college dorm than a business.Ptak: Wanted to shift and talk about something that seems like it's been an awfully short supply lately, which is optimism. You wrote a book called Fewer, Richer, Greener, evincing optimism about the global economy and humanity in general. Have you always been an optimistic person? Or has it gone back and forth or been situation dependent?Siegel: I've always been an optimistic person in terms of my intrinsic biases. I do know enough economic history and regular history to know that living conditions have improved so much in the last 250 years, and actually in the last 50, that you'd be kind of crazy to deny that things have improved. This is a bad year and a bad decade. And it's very easy to become pessimistic when you read the news or check the stock market or look at the world situation with wars and so forth. But underneath the surface of all this chaos and negativity, technology is continuing to advance at an amazing rate of speed. And what we really rely on for economic growth is improvements in technology, where I use the word technology to mean it very broadly. Technology is not just the gadgets or computing power. It's biology. It's social technology—my ability to gather together a bunch of people in a Zoom meeting from all over the world and have a board meeting. And as this technology has grown in the broad sense, we have made our lives much easier; work has gotten easier. We do less of it. The 80-hour work week has now become a specialty of doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. Coal miners—my father-in-law was a coal miner and he worked 80 hours a week in a coal mine when they let him. He would have preferred to work 40, but he needed the money. So, we have an economy in which we produce an awful lot without doing all that much, frankly. We have probably the easiest lives of any population that's ever existed.Benz: Optimism seems like one of those secret weapons in investing, in finance in that if you're optimistic, you're more likely to stick with it, stick with your plan, and markets have tended to reward people who have stuck with it over the longer term. But it's hard to be optimistic about the long term given how unknowable things are. So, is the equity-risk premium compensation for subjecting ourselves to that unknowability?Siegel: Yes. There are two kinds of risks. One is fluctuations in asset prices. We all know what that is. The market just went down 20% or 25%, and we're feeling it. And we might forget this, but it went down 34% in a month in the spring of 2020, which is a profound dislocation in the markets. And a few months later, we forgot it. The other kind of risk is actually more profound, and it's the possibility that our general expectations for assets are wrong. And if you look back, equities have returned about real 7%, 7% plus inflation. Going forward, it's pretty unlikely that they're going to do that over the next 20 or 30 years just because of the high prices. Even if economic growth were as rapid in the future as it was in the past, you want to pay less rather than more for the stocks. So, right now, they're selling at a premium to their historical average. That conventional asset-allocation input of equities generate 6.7% or 7% real is almost certainly too optimistic, and we've got to do what Jack Bogle said, which is budget for it. We can't all earn alpha and earn a higher return, because the net alpha in the market is 0, so we would all be trying to take it away from somebody else. We have to budget for lower returns.When you look at the bond market, it's even worse. Bonds seem to be priced to yield about real 0% to real 1%. That's much lower than the historical average, about half the historical average.Ptak: You got that right. It looks like real yields across the yield curve 49 to 99 basis points as of yesterday, which would be July 11, so a pretty paltry real yield. I did want to, if I may, stick with the general topic of optimism and its nexus with investing, talk about that in the context of value investing. I sometimes wonder if value investing pays off because it's so repulsive over long stretches that it's almost impossible to be optimistic. That does, though, raise questions about the implications for its practical usability. For instance, if investors are likely to give up on it because they do find it so repulsive when it underperforms growth as it had done until relatively recently, they might miss out on some of that payoff, which can come in bunches. Or do you think that's off base? Do you think that value investing really is usable, you just have to stick with it long enough?Siegel: I think that value investing is usable. But you shouldn't concentrate your whole portfolio in it. What we've seen is that the pendulum has swung between value and growth in very long cycles and large cycles where value does much better or much worse for the entire time that data are available. Fama and French did this back to 1927 and you get these five- to 15-year swings, which is so long that people give up on either value or growth at exactly the wrong time. So, in 2007, value had outperformed massively, and it was a great time to buy growth stocks because we were just about to enter not a tech bubble but a period of tech innovation that produced huge returns for a decade and a half. Anybody who went against the grain, anybody who went against the tide and overweighted growth stocks did much better than the market from 2007 until a year or two ago. Now people are saying, only growth works, so value is disgusting. And the more disgusted you are, the more likely it is to work. I would overweight value right now, but not all the time.Benz: I wanted to ask about intuition. It's something that tends to be greatly valued in everyday life, but it can lead us astray when it comes to investing. For example, in March 2020, which you referenced earlier, few of us expected the great snap back in the markets because intuitively we knew the pandemic would be bad for humanity. Do you think intuition was a better model for investing before markets became so efficient or has it never really worked?Siegel: Well, informed intuition, if you've spent a lifetime in, let's say, engineering and you know something about the way that computers are put together or the internet is put together or something, you might have had the intuition that this was going to be a profound change in the way everybody did everything and you bought those stocks. But the problem is that most people who bought the stocks in the first tech wave, in the 1990s, bought them without knowing anything about the individual companies. They were right about the technology; they were wrong about the companies. So, you would now have a portfolio of AltaVista and Netscape and AOL and a bunch of other companies that had promised but they were just outcompeted by somebody else. So, I would rather hang my hat on analysis than intuition unless you just happen to be one of those people with special inside knowledge but that is obtained legally. But most people who think they have inside knowledge don't. So, I would try to avoid relying on intuition too much.Ptak: Wanted to shift and talk about your role at the CFA Institute. You have a lot of experience assessing research proposals in that role. What are the best pieces of research have in common based on your experience?Siegel: Well, they draw heavily on theory to make practical recommendations that can be implemented in the short to medium term. And going back to Roger Ibbotson, we published a piece in 2007 on lifetime financial advice that came from Roger with several colleagues. We are about to publish, but have not yet received the manuscript, the second installment of that from Paul Kaplan, Tom Idzorek, and a third author whose name I forget, and that will come out later this year or early next year. So, even though they're 15 years apart, the Ibbotson people have an integrated theory of investing insurance, annuities—all these different tools in order to provide people with a lifetime income that's secure and yet has the room for adding value through either asset allocation or security selection alpha. So, that's the kind of research I like most. We sometimes have also done pieces that step outside of the box of the Financial Analysts Journal or the Journal of Portfolio Management -type of research and look at a broader set of issues—for example, geopolitics, demography. There was a beautiful piece by David DeRosa on bubbles. He's against them. I don't know how he can be for or against bubbles. Either bubbles are or bubbles are not. But he takes the position that what we think are bubbles are mostly rational responses to circumstances and then when the circumstances change, the bubble bursts. But it wasn't a bubble; it was rational at the time. I don't know that I buy that 100%, but it sure was interesting reading his logic because he expresses it so well. So, these are the kinds of research I enjoy the most.I've also done some of my own research here. I am compiling for the CFA Institute Research Foundation a book on the equity risk premium, which was a symposium of 11 fairly famous people—Marty Leibowitz, Rob Arnott, Cliff Asness and so forth—which I led. I'm not one of the famous people, but I know them all socially, so I was able to get them to come. And I edited it with a co-editor, Paul McCaffrey, who is producing a book on that as we speak. It could come out in the next month.Ptak: I did want to ask you about what's become the new rage in investing research and portfolio management, which is combining quantitative and human-driven decisions. If you had to draw up a CFA curricula for a bot, how would it differ for the current human-based curricula? And on the flip side, how do you think the current human curricula ought to be reshaped to account for the rise of things like machine learning? Is that something you've given any consideration?Siegel: A little bit. I'm writing a book review right now for Advisor Perspectives, which is an industry newsletter, a very good one. And the review is of a book by Erik Larson that's called The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. I'm giving it a good review, so you can see where I'm going to come out. I believe that machine learning is a real thing. Machines can be programmed to learn, and that's a valuable tool in investment management. But when you step beyond that to the idea of artificial general intelligence, I think it's an illusion caused by very fast computers, very big data and very clever programmers who want to create that illusion. So, we have had 300 million years of evolution—not as human beings obviously but as animals—to develop a set of connections in our brains that actually are intelligent. Yet intelligence in the sense that we are talking about now didn't really emerge until the last 200,000 years. So, it is rare. It is fragile. And we don't know what it is. It's like Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography: We don't know what it is, but we know it when we see it. And to imagine that we're, as human beings, of one level of intelligence, whatever we are, can build a machine in a few decades of those 200,000 years that's more intelligent than we are with all that evolutionary heritage is frankly ridiculous. These machines are going to do what we tell them to do. But if we tell them using instructions that are crafted well enough, it will give the illusion of being intelligent. When I don't know how something works, like everybody else, I tend to think it's magic. I'm driving and there are two or three cars lined up at a red light, it immediately turns green and makes the other traffic stop because it's a smart red light, and all it's doing is counting the number of cars that are waiting for it to turn and changes the cycle, changes the frequency, according to the traffic instead of operating on a fixed time cycle. But it looks like a pretty smart red light when you haven't encountered it before and you say “Gee, that's really amazing.” Well, I think that AI as we're experiencing it now is kind of the same as that. It's just a technology that other people understand because they developed it, but we don't because we don't have the knowledge and so we feel like it's magic or intelligence, whichever you want to call it.Benz: There's been a lot written about the glut of skilled, highly trained professionals in the investing field. Can you talk about the level of competition you see now versus what you saw earlier in your career?Siegel: The industry has become way too big. Every stockbroker has become a financial advisor. Ninety-six percent of them ought to tell people buy, hold, diversify, and rebalance and minimize taxes, and then they have to fill in that outline through implementation. In other words, somebody has to do it; their clients aren't qualified to do it. But they should mostly be telling people to buy index funds and to use premixed asset-allocation decisions that conform to what somebody at the headquarters has decided is optimal. To add value for an individual, what you really need to do is be more like a psychologist and a life counselor who says, “You have too much debt, you're not saving enough; you have too many houses; at some point your assets become a liability.” Or you don't have a house at all, you are a renter—you might want to consider a house as a hedge against inflation. But telling them which securities to buy or micromanaging the list of mutual funds, to me, is a fool's errand for most people.Inside the business, that's the public-facing side. Inside the business there are too many security analysts, too many asset allocators, too many broker/dealers. And I think that competition has become more and more people fighting over fewer and fewer real alpha opportunities, and that's why the competition feels so fierce. It used to be an easy business. And it's not easy anymore because the market is more efficient, I guess.Ptak: Wanted to shift gears and talk about asset allocation, specifically the 60/40 portfolio. And my question for you, which is a question I think many are asking, is the 60/40 debt. It's having one of its worst years ever. But the paradox is that yields are now, albeit they're still paltry, they're now a little bit higher and valuations are a tad lower, which you'd think would boost the 60/40's future prospects. What's your take on the 60/40, Larry?Siegel: I think that it's a pretty good consensus outcome of people buying what's available in the market. If you look at the supply of securities, it has to be somewhere around 60/40 because everybody holds it, and the supply and demand have to equilibrate in the long run. But why do issuers produce that ratio? I think that the underlying reason is that for a very long period of history, bonds were a very good investment. If you didn't have 40% in bonds, you wanted to, because they were producing high real returns. And that period is roughly 1981 to 2007. It's a long time. From 1940 to 1981, bonds did terribly because interest rates were going up and up and up, and we didn't have a lot of 60/40 portfolios, but what we had was mostly 0 or 100. Institutions bought fixed income to fund their pension plans. They bought fixed income to fund if there were insurance companies. The big money was in fixed income and equities were this gravy—you sold some stocks to some rich people. And over time as the stock market went up and the bond market didn't go up, you had greater interest in equities, and the consultants who emerged from this world of pension funds settled on 60/40 as a consensus. And so, you've got what I call the standard model. The allocators picked from a list of active managers in each asset class, usually buy way too many of them, didn't have access to index funds or didn't want to buy them. And so, they compared the performance of their active managers to benchmarks, fired the underperforming ones, gave more money to the outperforming ones, and since these things tend to run in cycles, generally underperform the market. They also had to have an overall asset-allocation policy where 50/50 was the tradition that they'd been coming from, but they moved it up to 60/40 because the stock market was beating the bond market and it just stayed there. Stocks are risky. So, 70/30 or 80/20 seemed like it was too volumed. We're all human, and we do what we see the person next to us doing. I think it's really just consensus-building, although there is a supply aspect to it. You have to buy what's out there. And if we all decided to increase our allocation to equities, we couldn't. But we would just be buying them from each other. This is a point Cliff Asness made. He can usually be counted on for very good thinking.Benz: Our research has found that fund investors tend to do a really poor job of utilizing so-called liquid alternative funds. If you take the illiquidity and gates away from alternatives, do you think they can still work for individual investors in the form of liquid alternatives?Siegel: Well, the term liquid alternatives has changed over time. When I started hearing about liquid alternatives in the early to mid-90s, it meant hedge funds and to some extent managed-futures funds because the stuff they were buying was liquid, and then the illiquid alternatives were venture capital and private equity. Over time, liquid alternatives have come to mean liquid to the investor. And when you securitize an alternative investment, you've removed—so that you can trade it like a stock—you've removed the one thing that has tended to give alternative investments better returns, which is the lockup. If you can lock up somebody's money for a long time, you can take risks that don't necessarily pay off in the short run, but that may pay off in the long run. If you take that away, I would rather just invest in liquid nonalternatives, stocks, bonds, and some real estate. Although some people call real estate an alternative. It's the oldest asset class, so I'm reluctant to put it in the alternatives bucket.Ptak: Wanted to shift and talk about endowments. You spent a good chunk of your career in the endowment world. And as you know, a lot of ink has been spilled concerning debates over the endowment model. Some decried it as costly and complex, others defend it as path-breaking. What are the lessons an advisor or an individual investor should take away from the success of the endowment approach? And conversely, what are the lessons they need to unlearn, so to speak?Siegel: I'll start with the last one because it's so easy. The lesson they need to unlearn is that if David Swensen can do it, so can I. He and the people at other big endowments and foundations have access to the best funds because they come to you, you don't have to go ferret them out. The best people they can afford to hire, outstanding analysts and other chief investment officers who can make millions. And if they do lose money, they have this capability of withstanding some pain. A foundation, in particular, which doesn't have professors to pay, or buildings to maintain, or students to give scholarships to, has to pay out 5% of whatever it has at the time, so if it loses some of the assets, their liabilities go down too in a one-to-one correspondence and so, at some level, they don't care. Of course, they do care because it's always better to have more money to give away than less. But the foundation isn't going to be destroyed by a 20% decline in the market.Endowments are a little trickier because the liabilities are not so flexible. If you start paying your professors less, they will just go to another place that doesn't pay less. Students will do the same thing. But these institutions also have a lot of reserve in their fundraising ability. An ordinary individual investor doesn't have any of this backstop. If I want to raise funds, I have to work harder. I'm already working as hard as I can. And I don't have the option to reduce my liabilities by saying I'm just not going to pay them. So, individuals have to be inherently more conservative. You get older, life becomes a race against diminishing capabilities and your risk level has to go down as you get older. So, there's a lifecycle effect that institutions don't experience. So, I would say that's the main lesson is, endowments and foundations have generally done well, but they have some structural advantages over individuals. Unless you have a rich uncle—a university has a rich uncle—which is the alumni and yet that's not an unlimited resource any more than your rich uncle is. But it is a backstop for bad performance.Benz: One investing paradox is that success demands humility, but humility is a tough sell. What's the humblest thing an investor can do to boost their odds of success while also attracting clients? Is it to have a long time horizon?Siegel: Well, the humblest thing an investor can do is buy index funds. It says to the client, I don't know what stocks are going to do best, but other people collectively as a market make pretty good decisions, so I'm just going to trust them to say the prices are roughly right. And when you buy an index fund, you're making a bet that the prices are roughly right. They're obviously not exactly right. In terms of having a long time horizon, it can be humility, or it could be hubris. I can claim to have a long time horizon, but I don't know what liabilities I'm going to face tomorrow, so I better have a short time horizon with some of my investments and I could also live 30 more years, so I need to have a long time horizon with other parts of my portfolio. But the time horizon issue I don't see so much as humility versus hubris, but it's a planning tool that a lot of people don't use effectively.Ptak: One of your more popular pieces of writing in recent years was an article you wrote on investing myths. If I'm not mistaken, I think you've updated it a few times to this point, the most recent being in 2020. Why'd you write it, and how would you change it if you were to update the piece yet again today?Siegel: I wrote it because somebody in Brazil paid me to come down there and give a talk on Siegel's Nine Myths of Investing. So, when that gave me an outline I had to fill in. Most of the myths have changed over time. I've updated it every two to five years. And what would I change now? Well, first of all, you'd have to go back and look at what the myths are. I don't really think I have time to go over all of them. But the one that I would change today is that stocks and bonds are always negatively correlated, so each is a good hedge against the other. It's not true. It runs in cycles. There was a period where they were positively correlated in the ‘90s and then before that at some other time, and all of a sudden, it's back. So, with stock market down, the bond market is also down, and people say, "Diversification doesn't work." Well, first of all, nobody told you to go out and buy the longest bond. Diversification within the bond market works in the sense of holding some less-volatile, shorter-term securities. They sacrifice some yield in order to get that safety. Secondly, stocks and bonds will again be uncorrelated or negatively correlated someday. But this is not that day. And there are other assets. The one that comes to mind is the original alternative investment: cash. Right now, you're losing money in cash in real terms, because inflation is so high. But, on average, over time cash has paid a percent or so over the inflation rate. And then the other one is real estate. I keep coming back to real estate because it has become the unloved stepchild in the investment world. And other than their house, nobody has any. The last time I heard somebody talking about real estate as an investment was probably in the decade of the 2000s, and probably it was going up a lot. Then there was a crash. And the crash stuck in people's minds while real estate itself turned around and went up again. And there may yet be another crash, but it's just another asset class that should probably be in your toolkit.Other myths—I kind of went out on a limb in the last version of that article and started talking more about social and political issues. One is that we can transition to entirely green energy without disrupting the entire world economy. We can't. We either have to transition slowly, which may not be good enough, but I actually happen to think it is, because energy transitions have taken a half century or so—wood, coal, coal to oil, oil to natural gas, and so forth—and the next transition is not going to be all solar and wind. Nuclear power is going to be a vital and probably the most important part of it. So, if the myth that you're subscribing to is the, let's call it the European version, although that's not quite fair because they have plenty of nuclear power in Europe. It's not going to happen, but we're going to need all the energy we've got, because the world is getting richer fast. Growth rates in China are down to 5%. That's still huge. Indonesia is higher than that, and it's a country of 300 million people that most Americans couldn't find on a map. The energy demands are going to be huge from all these different parts of the world that are growing and becoming middle class. And so that myth is something I spent a little time on in the article and I would write more about it next time.Benz: You more or less predicted the spate of inflation we would have before it happened. In fact, one of the myths you wrote about in 2020 was that the government could borrow all it wanted without sparking inflation. What did you see then and what do you think people should be monitoring to assess how long high inflation will persist into the future?Siegel: My forecast at the time was based on basic economic history from the 1700 and 1800s, which is that when the government borrows more money than it can pay back, it's going to pay it back anyway but in cheaper dollars. And the way that you get cheaper dollars is to have inflation. Inflation is a transfer of resources, of real resources, from savers who are bondholders and cash holders, to borrowers, which in this case is the government itself. So, it's tax. So, when you have a budget—that's how government budgets, it's out of balance by a lot for a long time— you're going to have a lot of inflation, because it's the only way the government is going to be able to make those payments on the bonds. I didn't see anything in the economy other than the budget deficits. And it was so early that you could say, I was wrong. There's not much difference between being a decade and a half early and being outright wrong. So, I'll say I was wrong.What I didn't see was the supply catastrophe that came with COVID and our response to COVID. So, when you get a supply shock like the one we've just been through, prices are going to rise, and you don't even need an unbalanced government budget, you don't need budget deficits for prices to rise when there are shortages of things because by ships not being able to dock and workers not coming to work, we just have never seen anything like this. And so, I think the inflation rate will come down from these astronomical rates to something more normal, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, but we're not going to go back to zero to 2, because governments have over-leveraged, and deleveraging is always inflationary.Ptak: What role do you think top-down macro should play in an allocation and investing process? Obviously, it's hard to correctly make a macro bet, though we've just talked about one you did correctly make, but it's even harder to translate that into a successful investment. So, should most people just avoid macro and diversify and call it a day?Siegel: If you mean macro bets to guide your general asset-allocation philosophy, I think you should. In other words, if you believe, as I do, that global economic growth, while slowing, is going to be very large in absolute terms for a very long time. In other words, the absolute terms meaning the number of overall dollars, or whatever your currency is, generated by the world economy that you want to hold equities because bonds don't give you a claim to that growth. And they give you a very indistinct claim I wouldn't bank on it. But international investors say that when a country is growing rapidly, the currency goes up, so you get a little bit of diversification that way. But equities are much more powerful, and international equities are frankly cheap relative to the United States. So, that's a macro bet, and I'm recommending it. But again, I recommended it for a long time. I thought the U.S. was expensive. It hasn't been cheap since the 2007-08-09 period. So, you should make an evaluation of those conditions and implement it through your portfolio.In general, most Americans suffer from home country bias because the U.S. is so big that you can get a pretty diversified portfolio with just the S&P 500 actually, because that's a lot of stocks, and those are all the big caps. If you lived in Belgium, you would not be under the illusion that Belgium was the whole world. It's just you can reach the border in an hour from anywhere in the country. So, you've known since you were a little kid that there's a big world out there. We Americans just don't have that intuition. So, that's why I'm saying that international is a macro bet that is reasonable to make. Now, if by macro bets you think that you act like a hedge fund and you think that the pound is going to crash, and that oil is going to go to $70 and then back to $110. No, individual investors should not do that.Benz: People aren't very good at respectfully disagreeing these days. You're someone who seems unafraid of having a fulsome debate. Besides stepping away from social media and the internet, what are some things we can do to exchange differing views without becoming polarized?Siegel: Well, if I knew I would run for President. People have become dug in—I don't like it at all. Spend a quarter of your reading time reading points of view that you know in advance you're going to disagree with, see how that person expresses themselves and what arguments they make and trying to take their side mentally while you're reading it. Consider maybe I'm wrong, maybe they're right. If I name some names, that would be too obvious where my biases are. But I would read the moderates on the other side, because the extremists are extremists, and they overstate everything. That's about all I can think of other than be nice. If the people you care about and generally respect have different views from you, ask yourself why. It's not because they're crazy or stupid or evil. It's because they've looked at the same data in the broad sense. They've looked at the same world and come up with different conclusions. Try to think about why that might happen, and then picture them doing that to you. That's about all I have to say about that.Ptak: Well, that's great advice and I think a great way to close this conversation, which we very much enjoyed, Larry. Thanks so much for your time and insights. We very much enjoyed having you on The Long View.Siegel: Well, thank you very much.Benz: Thanks so much, Larry.Ptak: Thanks for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a minute to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can follow us on Twitter @Syouth1, which is, S-Y-O-U-T-H and the number 1.Benz: And @Christine_Benz.Ptak: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast and Kari Greczek produces the show notes each week.Finally, we'd love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at TheLongView@Morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.(Disclaimer: This recording is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. Opinions expressed are as of the date of recording. Such opinions are subject to change. The views and opinions of guests on this program are not necessarily those of Morningstar, Inc. and its affiliates. Morningstar and its affiliates are not affiliated with this guest or his or her business affiliates unless otherwise stated. Morningstar does not guarantee the accuracy, or the completeness of the data presented herein. Jeff Ptak is an employee of Morningstar Research Services LLC. Morningstar Research Services is a subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc. and is registered with and governed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 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From outside the United States of America I can see that there is a marketing campaign to discredit the AMERICAN PEOPLE. Like "look at those crazy Americans." Today I want to share with you that what you are seeing on tv and the representation that has stolen their way into power, is NOT OUR REPRESENTATION. For the most part WE AMERICANS are GOD LOVING, CREATION LOVING, AND if you can remember the most charitable nation on the planet. However satan had his plan and it was to make us look like the global problem so that other nations would come against US the people, rather than the GLOBAL TRAITORS and satan himself. Americans and America is not the problem, the problem is satan doesn't want our LIBERTY to be known around the world so he put his people in to try and get us destroyed. Nations listen to me. The TRAITORS ARE THE PROBLEM, THE TRAITORS OF HUMANITY. Warring against nations is not the solution. Warring against evil in the high places will usher in the righteousness of Gods Kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven. Pray for America and Americans, because us Christians took up our responsibility after obtaining a degree of liberty to go forth and teach the Word of God to the nations. Helping to build communities, bringing health and nutrition to the nations. We took mission trips to the darkest places. Don't fall for the propaganda that America is bad, pray for us because we were working to get the whole earth free. ~ Cory Gray 11 years preaching and teaching the Word of God to the nations! Born in the USA! Lived in great liberty thanks to God and our Fathers and Grandfathers. We will crush satan off this earth, but we need to recognize who the true enemies are and they need to be brought to court. Connect more and get on my list @ https://kingdombusinesslifestyle.com
Join us for a dynamic conversation with Eric Mann, Channing Martinez, and Ayana Morris on the film Why is We Americans? Ayana Morris is the Co-Director of Why is We Americans? along with Udi Aloni. The film is an exploration of the history of Newark through the eyes of the Baraka Family. From the 1967 Newark rebellion in which Black people were placed under martial law and lived under beyond oppressive conditions to the Black Radical Organizing Tradition of Amiri and Amina Baraka to the election of Ras Baraka as the current Mayor of Newark. Why is We Americans? explores various Black movement traditions from Black nationalism, Black communism, the Black power Movement all through Organizing, activism, art, spoken word and electoral politics. Eric, Channing, and Ayana speak about all of the aforementioned themes as well as the production and editing of the film, great stories on the cutting room floor, and the beautiful process of working with the Baraka family to create a masterpiece. On April 22nd the Strategy Center sponsored the showing of Why is We Americans at the 30th Annual Pan African Film and Art Festival. The Strategy Center is looking forward to working closely with Ayana to host a screening of Why is We Americans at the Strategy & Soul Film Theater. Stay tuned for an invite, but today, tune into a great exchange intellectual, cultural, and emotional chemistry.
Prophecy in scripture indicates that these may indeed be the last days, the end times of this world. Could be, don't you think?No man knows the hour, the time, the era when end times will occur, only the FATHER. But it is our duty, says the scripture, to study the signs of the times and to be on the watch, looking for that grand appearance the second time, the return of the savior of the world, the beginning of His reign and the end of all things earthly. A prophecy expert is one David Jeremiah who studies and teaches prophecy, a real expert. Dr. Jeremiah believes that the rapture, the taking away of the real church of Jesus Christ could happen any day, ANY DAY! The signs of the times are right for that to happen. The church of believers will be redeemed, taken out and the great restrainer, the moral restrainer, the Holy Spirit will be removed from this world and as Jeremiah well says, all hell will break loose. Some of that seems to be happening right now, don't you think? Then will rise up the Anti–Christ who will become the leader of the world, a one world dictator and all with the mark of the beast (666) will pay homage and swear allegiance to him and any who don't will be cut off and killed. The rise of the Anti–Christ, say prophecy experts, will usher in the great tribulation, a period of seven years says the Prophet Daniel. There will be relative peace for the first three and one half years, and a treaty with Israel which will guarantee peace and its safety. But at the end of the first three and one half years, the peace treaty will be broken and the war to end all wars, the Armageddon of all conflicts will break out and the Anti–Christ will cause nations to rise up against Israel and in fact against all people of faith. Scary stuff, is it not? But, that's what scripture says, war, violence and killing will occur like has never been seen before in the history of mankind. Prophecy experts believe that real Christians will be gone, delivered, up there with Him even as this incredible slaughter, destruction and barbarism occurs on this earth. The signs of the times seem to indicate that these are the last days. One of the key signs of those barbaric days is lawlessness. The rule of law is replaced by the rule of dictators. And violence. Violence is everywhere. But the main sign is:WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS.Scripture predicts and Jeremiah affirms that Russia will be reborn, reenergized, and play a key role in the military affairs of the last days. We now witness the start of that prophecy with the brutal, barbaric and bestial invasion, slaughter and killing of Ukraine and the Ukrainians. Vladimir Putin is a brutal, barbaric man. He is determined to rebuild the old Russian empire, take back every state and piece of territory which he believes was taken from him and Russia, and as long as he is in power, he will drive the new Russia to retake and rebuild the old USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). The Ukraine war will not end until Ukraine is absolutely subservient to the new Russia. Then, more wars will occur, more invasions, more slaughter and killing of innocent civilians, and eventually, the involvement in these wars of other nations. Russian induced conflicts will spread until the entire world is at war. That then occasions the Third World War, and the last world war, the rapid development of those signs and conditions which lead to the rise of the Anti–Christ and the happening of the tribulation. Prophecy experts say these will be the last wars for they will be NUCLEAR in nature. It only takes one nuclear bomb to trigger the entire world, every country to military action. The nations of Russia, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan and some European countries, along with we Americans, and soon to be if not already Iran have the nuclear bomb and nuclear capabilities. Any one of those nations can unleash one bomb and the world explodes. America is by no means immune as it always has been. In the Second World War, one of the most popular songs was OVER THERE. Americans were energized and motivated to enlist in the military to fight the war over there, the fight with Germany, Japan and Italy. Then came Pearl Harbor in 1941 and we realized that the war over there could very well some day soon be the war over here, right here. It was ironic how that song and others romanticized the war until such time as American body bags began to arrive back in America. War is brutal, vicious, barbaric, evil and the ultimate satanic tool. Russia indicates that America is the ultimate enemy, not Ukraine, not the Baltic States, but THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Russia has the capability of sending ballistic missiles which can reach our shore armed with nuclear warheads and in an instant, some of our great cities and all of its citizens could be totally destroyed never again to return. The modern–day Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin may one day do just that. We Americans are unprepared for this war. We believe naively it won't happen here because death and destruction are always over there. But violence, killing, barbarism, murders, terrorism and war itself will happen in America. IT WILL. It is only a question of when. Our military is strong but many military experts think that the Russian and Chinese militaries are stronger. China and Russia are ready for war. We are not. Americans who understand and fear these possibilities arm themselves. The purchase of all kinds of weapons is at an all time high. Americans have distrust for our governments, our National Guard and the readiness of our Country in a time of war. These Americans are determined to defend themselves, and their families and loved ones and they are ready when, not if, this happens. Putin comes from a KGB background, skilled in the art of torture and killing and really has little regard for human life much like his predecessors Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and especially Stalin and Marx. Tens of millions of human beings were slaughtered at the direction of these men, and Putin, if he retains the power he now has, will do the very same thing. Tens of thousands of innocent human beings, including women and children have already been slaughtered in the Ukraine. And there are many more brutal deaths to come.One bomb, one nuclear bomb, and the world explodes. The end times will in fact happen then and there. Nations will demand vengeance. If Israel is attacked, especially in a nuclear way, the payback destruction that tiny nation can dish out will be nothing like the world has ever seen. Then, say the prophesiers, people will lift up their eyes and pray, plead for the return of the only one who can bring peace to the world, Jesus Christ. They will pray for the rapture, the deliverance from this world, and for justice and vengeance. But that won't come from human hands. VENGEANCE is mine says the Lord. I and only I will repay. These indeed are frightening times, but they are times of incredible opportunity. The witness for the gospel, true revival will have opportunity like never before. The work we do will never be better for we work knowing the night, the black dark night of death and destruction is coming. In the midst of this incredible barbarism and killing, there comes the opportunity for love to reign supreme. These are trying days indeed but days of incredible spiritual opportunity. Take advantage of them my brothers and sisters in the Lord. Count it a blessing that you have been called upon to be an active spiritual participant in:THE END TIMES.
You've heard of The Holy Trinity…of American Dolls, right? Chucky, Annabelle, and Robert, perhaps. But what about globally? We Americans can't be the only ones who possess haunted dolls?Yes, the U.S may take the cake in oddities when it comes to our paranormal claims to fame, however we are just a wee baby when it comes to our existence as a nation.Time is a factor when it comes to many great things, good and bad... So, it's not farfetched to believe age may come into play with the creation of paranormal experiences, like hauntings, possessions, and other various metaphysical phenomena. So, when we decided to cover the chilling topic of “Haunted Dolls”, we didn't want to invite any of America's Holy Trinity to come out and play…So picking the world's 6th oldest nation's most haunted doll instead seemed like a good idea!If you are a lover of antique dolls or the paranormal, come and meet Okiku of Japan! The only doll who's existence pressures all monks who apply at her temple to have a background in beauty school. We promise she won't bite, but she does love to show you her pearly whites… If you get close enough to stare.Special guest appearances include: Ruby the Doll and Lily the Doll!FOR MORE WATCH THE VIDEO ON THIS TOPIC: OR READ THE BLOG: https://www.metapsyckicks.com/journalOR JOIN OUR PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/metapsyckicks——-BOOK A PSYCHIC MEDIUM READING:Olivia the Medium: https://www.metapsyckicks.com/our-servicesBOOK A TAROT READING:Emily the Intuitive: https://www.metapsyckicks.com/our-services-----RECOMMENDED PRODUCTS:Our YouTube Setup ►► https://kit.co/metapsyckicks/meta-psyckicks-youtube-setupOur Podcast Setup ►► https://kit.co/metapsyckicks/meta-psyckicks-podcasting-setupEm's Tarot Collection ►► https://kit.co/metapsyckicks/em-s-tarot-card-collectionOther Divination Tools: ►► https://kit.co/metapsyckicks/other-divination-toolsDISCLAIMER: This description might contain affiliate links that allow you to find the items mentioned in this video and support the channel at no cost to you. While this channel may earn minimal sums when the viewer uses the links, the viewer is in NO WAY obligated to use these links. Thank you for your support!-----ARE YOU A PSYCHIC QUIZ: https://www.metapsyckicks.com/extrasTELL US YOUR PARANORMAL STORIES HERE: https://www.metapsyckicks.com/extrasCHECK OUT OUR WEBSITE AND BLOG:www.metapsyckicks.comEMAIL US: metapsyckicks@gmail.com——-SAY HI ON SOCIAL:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-Np1K0QH8e-EDHhIxX-FaAInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/metapsyckicksTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@metapsyckicks?lang=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/Meta-PsycKicks-107812201171308Em's Pet Channel - Chin Villain: https://www.youtube.com/chinvillainOlivia The Medium:Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/oliviathemedium/Twitter - https://twitter.com/OliviaTheMediumSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/meta-psyckicks/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Celebrities, big elites, government, billionaires, they are all a bunch of hypocrites.I am so fired up this week about so many incredibly hypocritical things that are happening right now. From the super bowl, to mandates, to protests and even pro-choice, there is so much hypocrisy. One thing in specific that I want to make a special shout-out to is is the #FreedomConvoy2022 protest in Canada and what is going on there. I stand with you Truckers!Also HUGE shoutout to an upcoming rally in New Jersey March 5th and 6th. For more information on that, see below. In solidarity with our brothers and sisters nationwide in the global Freedom Convoy phenomenon, a peaceful, nonpartisan convoy & rally has been planned statewide in New Jersey from March 5th – March 6th, 2022. We Americans love our freedoms and love the Constitution of The United States of America. This convoy aims to restore our civil liberties and freedoms. We demand an end to all unconstitutional mandates. We aim to protect the freedom of choice for future generations. It's not about political parties, but more so about a government that has forgotten its place and has no regard for our Founding Fathers' instructions, The Constitution of the United States of America.Volunteer with us, donate to support the truckers with non-perishable items and other necessities, show support and attend the family and kid friendly events on 3/5 New Egypt Speedway 630pm 3/6 Salem County Fairgrounds 2pm https://ustruckerstodc.com/?fbclid=IwAR3_ePi8NQErQhU8Sp_xh_Tq76EZKWKIzIN2j522SFZrY-StNLFe2KGLEO8https://www.facebook.com/events/525849938847892/Subscribe and hang out with me every Wednesday to stay up to date on this show. If you enjoy, please share this on your social media and tag me (@brookebrewer20) and give me a rating/review. Thank you!Show notes and references: Candace Owens Book - https://www.amazon.com/Blackout-America-Second-Democrat-Plantation/dp/1982133279/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1645587314&sr=1-1Patriot Band - https://www.facebook.com/imaginationrocknroll