What happens when you get a fresh shepherd’s anointing?
Often I feel led to do what Jesus did so often, and head out to an isolated place to pray. I really like doing this just before dawn, but it’s not always possible. Over the past few years, the vast majority of my quiet prayer times have been out on bike rides. Recently, since getting a car, I’ve used that as a way to visit places where it’s easier to stay longer. I take a camp chair with me.
But when this fresh anointing came over me, I didn’t want that so much. Instead, sometime during the early morning, I’ve gone out to a spot on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. The ground slopes away toward the curb, and because a tree was removed some years ago, there’s a low spot next to the sidewalk. I can sit down and get back up with ease.
I sit here most mornings now and pray. Anyone bothering to look at me can probably surmise that’s what I’m doing. The focus of this prayer time is that the Presence of the Lord will be manifested in this area.
You should know that’s a two-edged sword. When you ask the Lord to visit, it usually means wrath on sin. So, as a matter of principle, I always ask Him to start with me: Cleanse me first, O Lord. Then bring Your Spirit to bear upon this place, and the people here.
It’s not as if He’s been absent. The request is for Him to start working strongly in you. But with that often comes a significant spill-over effect. He uses you as the vector for touching people around you. Some few will be blessed in some way. In my case, a number of them will be struck with conviction on various levels. It tends to destabilize people with a significant demon presence.
The best way to envision this is that the angels and demons are poked into a more active profile. When they start getting busy, people can’t ignore them. Angels are a little harder to understand, but Scripture gives us lots of warnings about demons. If your own demons get provoked into activity, it should serve to make you aware of the gaps in your covering. It helps you to clarify things enough to reinforce your covenant obedience. For people without covering, it gets really rough. You have to be ready to do the extra work to handle the inevitable changes in people around you. But it’s all in your best interest.
That’s when you begin to see the power of your spiritual dominion. If these people in your vicinity are ill-disposed to seek your covering, their lives can be turned upside down. If they have tried to be at peace with you, then it works rather like a revival. Somehow, they are going to know they need to talk to you, even if they have no idea why they feel driven to seek your fellowship.
Where His Spirit is active, so are the demons. The latter have no choice; the Lord cracks the whip. They know that being extra active is going to polarize things where the Children of the Covenant reside. The net effect is to work toward strengthening your shalom. Your Covenant peace is so important to Him that He’ll turn a lot of things upside to make it strong around you. It means you’ll have to be ready to handle the extra spiritual activity, to build up His dominion in your life.
This is more of that Spiritual Warfare. We’ve already seen some interesting results in just three days of this prayer effort. Care to come out and join me?
Joining the dots is a simple enough exercise. If we do so, we might see a well-defined narrative outline emerge, whose succinct summary reads as follows: lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions were intended to 1) Allow the Fed to flood the ailing financial markets with freshly printed money while deferring hyperinflation; and 2) Introduce mass vaccination programmes and health passports as pillars of a neo-feudal regime of capitalist accumulation. As we shall see, the two aims merge into one….
The mainstream narrative should therefore be reversed: the stock market did not collapse (in March 2020) because lockdowns had to be imposed; rather, lockdowns had to be imposed because financial markets were collapsing. With lockdowns came the suspension of business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion. In other words, restructuring the financial architecture through extraordinary monetary policy was contingent on the economy’s engine being turned off. Had the enormous mass of liquidity pumped into the financial sector reached transactions on the ground, a monetary tsunami with catastrophic consequences would have been unleashed.
The plague is one or more man-made pathogens. How it works is not quite what they expected, because too many people are resistant. Furthermore, it’s nowhere near as fatal as was planned. Finally, there are too many effective remedies (Ivermectin, HCQ, etc.). But the honest truth is that they planned to push through the lock-downs regardless.
Meanwhile, most of what we hear about the plague is total lies. There is currently no definitive way to detect this particular virus, so most claims of “positive” tests are bogus. A handful of people who should be somewhat expert in such things have been enlisted to lie about it. Here in OKC, our KFOR TV station has reported a large number of people hitting the ER over Ivermectin overdoses, but the only source is one dubious physician who offers zero statistical data. So far as anyone can tell, he’s flat out lying, but the news station has carefully avoided any effort to verify anything. People are starting to ask questions.
The facts will be censored. They have been for a very long time. We can discuss it privately, but as soon as anyone starts to notice, the censorship will come at us.
There are no super-geniuses involved in this oppression. There are some who are convinced they are smarter than everyone else, but it’s manifestly not true. They will not notice. The current financial mess is the result of a long list of decisions made that appeared to make the elites richer at the time. There is an underlying trend to it, but it is not a coherent plan. Now that it’s falling apart, they are scrambling to squeeze the last few drops of profit from before they have to make it collapse on their command. If they let it fall, they’ll lose way too much.
Meanwhile, the controls they’ve ginned up will not work as planned. Things are not working like these self-anointed masters of humanity planned. They are scrambling, panicking at how it’s coming apart. The Lord is in control. It will be rough, but we have nothing to fear, if our devotion is to the gospel message first.
This is what runs through my head when I think about the Bible. The honest truth is I don’t invest as much time in simply reading it as I once did. That’s not to say I don’t sit and read it at all, but that I don’t subscribe to the typical evangelical disciplines. More to the point, I don’t subscribe to the context behind the admonitions they offer.
As noted in the past, I find that churchians have no covenant awareness. When you boil down what they teach, virtually all holiness turns out to be a fleshly discipline. It has to come through the intellect for them, and it ends up being a herding of the cattle, not a leading of the sheep. They drive their fleshly nature from a fleshly level. We seek the otherworldly leading of the heart. You don’t tame the fleshly nature; you kill it. It often looks the same on the outside, but the internal dynamics are quite different.
As noted in a previous post, there were times when I would sit for hours reading the Bible, sometimes days on end. Back in my college days there was a thing going around about reading 10 chapters daily. I was so hungry for Scripture that it simply wasn’t a burden.
But that’s the whole point: If you aren’t craving it, you aren’t likely to benefit much from digging into it. Your heart knows what you need and when you need it. Yes, there is a place for academic study, and it’s work, but it’s joyful work. If it’s not important for you, then you won’t do it well. Human talent alone is not going to redeem you in the process of sharing the Word.
These days I spend far more time studying about the Bible. I can never get enough background.
Let’s put that in perspective. You already know that I’m working hours each week to review all the Bible commentary I’ve published in ebooks and such. I read through it, and frankly enjoy it greatly while I’m correcting grammar and clarifying stuff that strikes me as unclear. But I spend a good bit of time on the side making sure I’ve got the details correct. Something nudges me that I don’t know enough about one issue or another.
For example, I’m currently revising my Old Testament History text. I had to fix a lot of dates involving the story of Joseph in Egypt. Recent archaeological discoveries have changed some of the dates we use for various Pharaohs. So it’s not a waste of time to double check stuff like that; when the urge strikes, I look it up. (That’s something I’m going to miss if the Net ever goes down.)
And quite naturally I read the passages I use for our weekly study series, before I try to sense what God wants me to address. I’m not just regurgitating what I’ve already written in the Ancient Truth series.
By now, regular readers know that I strive very hard to get the bigger picture. Very early this took me away and down an entirely different path from all the preacher boys I went to college with back in the 1970s. They had a very strong devotional interest, but I had a strong contextual interest. When I heard the professors mention the unique viewpoint of the Hebrew people, I was fascinated by it. It took decades for me to get any kind of grip on that, but it deeply affected me, putting me on that different path.
So, the current weekly lesson series is all about the Covenant of Christ and its roots. I’m trying to make Jesus a living person in your minds. I certainly hope that you read those passages in the Bible, because I do several times when writing the lesson. I sincerely hope there’s a time in your life, sooner or later, where you feel drawn to read Scripture obsessively. I hope it burns like a roaring fire in your soul. It’s not a merely intellectual question of what the Bible says. It’s more a matter of how the Bible influences who you are.
I don’t worship the Bible. I do hold myself accountable to what it says, but it’s all about the God of the Bible. There is an academic standard to how I approach it, but that academic standard is what taught me that the Bible is the glass through which we see our Lord. The academics pointed me beyond academics. An honest examination of the very real data tells you that the data itself is insufficient, that the ancient people who knew it best would never settle for mere academics. I got that message. If that revelation does not burn in my heart, then reading the Bible was a waste of time.
I do have a copy of one of those “read the Bible through in a year” Bibles on my shelf. In the next year or two, I’ll go through it again as I have several times. But I don’t just read it; I always study and contemplate what it says. It’s not prodigious intelligence, but by God’s grace I can remember the vast majority of what the Bible says on various things. Yes, I memorized some passages, but no large chunks. Indeed, my brain doesn’t work like that. It takes me roughly 5 or 6 times the effort other folks need to invest to memorize anything. But I still remember what it teaches in more detail than those same average folks who memorized more of it than I did.
Right now I need to finish working on revising my commentaries. This is what the Spirit is urging me to do. And when He changes that urge to something else, I’ll do my best to obey. But the Bible is the Counsel of the Holy One; you can’t know Him very well without starting there.
Practical points: The discipline of the flesh will fail you. Don’t go in for all these difficult reading plans for the sake of discipline. If you don’t enjoy reading the Bible, nobody can fix that for you except God. Pray about it. If you’ve read it a great deal already, then stop worrying about it. It’s not a book of magic. The power is in the Holy Spirit as you read, not in the ink on paper. Memorization is up to you. If you need something, memorize it.
Under the Radix Fidem covenant, we eschew the notion of propositional truth. It’s not a matter of precise wording, but in the contextual meaning. Try to discern the historical and cultural meaning in which the words rest. There’s no obligation to learn the original languages, but it doesn’t hurt to at least pick up a few of the words. What matters most is that you try to absorb the Hebrew culture, because it still runs under the New Testament.
Nothing in your life will ever replace reading the Bible out loud with folks who share your faith commitment. Read it together and talk about it. And if husband and wife can’t sit down and do this at least once per week, that’s a very broken marriage. Husbands should be able to at least guide their family in moral matters. Can you manfully stop and pray with your household? Can you discuss what’s in your convictions? It’s all part of the same package.
The Sabbath Law was surprisingly simple: Don’t do any work. Treat it as a day dedicated to Jehovah for His use. The only question about executing this would be: How would God want to use this day? Eventually, distinctions were made. Obviously it’s okay to sustain life; feed your family and domestic animals. Assist people and domestic animals who suffer misfortune. If anything, the biggest issue is that you cannot require anyone else to perform labor for your profit. It was a day of rest; that was the whole point. Thus, there are no business transactions on the Sabbath. The whole point is promoting shalom in your community. Give people a break so they can stop and contemplate their Lord. You would think it was a matter of common sense.
But as we have already seen, with the Pharisees it was all about turning the Law into a false god. Their elaborations on Sabbath Law were downright cult-like. They insisted this was what God required, though it was clear He had not. Rather, it was a bunch of nonsense they required of others in order to maintain their dominance. Their whole existence was consumed in discussing the existing legalistic conclusions of previous experts, and adding more to them. They openly claimed that they were building a hedge around the Law to protect it. They never understood that the Law protected God’s people.
Jesus was on a mission from His Father to restore the Covenant to the people. Fields of grain were not fenced in; there was a general custom of free passage. And according to Moses, anyone walking through your field of ripe grain could pluck a few heads and eat as much as they were able without carrying any away. In other words, they could eat whatever they could pluck, strip from the stalk, and rub the chaff off between their hands. They weren’t supposed to stop and just pig out.
So the disciples of Jesus were having a small snack while passing through a field of ripe grain — on the Sabbath. In the wild imagination of the Pharisees, the disciples were harvesting, threshing and winnowing grain, all prohibited labor. And obviously Jesus permitted it, as the rabbi in charge, and that was the key issue here.
But even the traditions of the elders admitted that David didn’t sin when he stopped off at the Tabernacle in Nob and took the expired showbread, and on a Sabbath, no less. That’s when the bread is swapped out, and the priests eat it that day as part of their perks of office. These were large flat cakes of unleavened bread, so it doesn’t spoil quickly. The flour was donated, and they used about a pound for each cake. After a week, the Levites could come in early Saturday morning, bake a new batch of a dozen cakes, and swap it out for the coming week. David wasn’t even king at that point, just one of King Saul’s most famous servants. Yet he claimed to have a mission that took priority over the ceremonial rules.
Did David have the authority to do that? The rabbinical traditions say he did. He compelled the priests to serve him food on the Sabbath. David was always a favorite of the Pharisees in their ruminations. Note that Jesus points out how David did this as much for his small entourage as for himself. He was showing mercy and preserving life and health for his troops on a special mission. And Jesus was allowing His disciples to feed themselves while on a special mission, too. If the Pharisees condemn Jesus, they have to condemn David, too.
And what about the priests and Levites? Don’t they labor on the Sabbath? They baked that bread and moved it around, “serving” it to the Lord as a Sabbath breakfast. And then they all puttered around the Tabernacle or Temple all day long, doing all kinds of labor: starting fires, butchering animals, carrying stuff around, etc. That was their job. Did they have the authority to do break the Sabbath command like that? And then there are the worshipers who bring all those offerings into the Temple on the Sabbath — herding and carrying loads. Just what is it about the Sabbath in the first place? All of those silly traditional rules about things you can carry, how far you can walk, and whether you can feed yourself, miss the point.
Jesus had a mission that day that took priority over rules about the Temple services, same as David that day when he took the showbread. To be precise, anything Jesus did took priority over everything that didn’t actually adhere to the Covenant. The Pharisees’ rules were a violation in themselves, since they were adding to God’s Word, when they weren’t coming up with cutesy tricks to take away from it so they didn’t have to follow the same rules they put on everyone else. They had no concept of mercy; they were all about making the people sacrifice for their benefit.
Then Jesus said, “This human is Lord over the Sabbath.” He was the expert. It was for Him to decide what was consistent with Sabbath Law.
To prove the point, the next time He visited one of their synagogues on the Sabbath, some more Pharisees questioned Him about one of the folks in attendance. One of this fellow’s hands was withered. Of course, they were testing Him, given His reputation for healing just about every malady in His presence. Was it lawful, Rabbi, to heal on the Sabbath?
Jesus pointed out that everyone one of them would have been quite willing to rescue a domestic animal on the Sabbath. Was not a Covenant brother worthy of rescue on the Sabbath? Indeed, it is just and righteous to do good things for people on the Sabbath. That’s not work. So Jesus told the man to stretch out his hand, and it was healed just like the other.
That very day, the Pharisees began holding council on how they could get Him killed. They couldn’t definitively argue with His teaching, and certainly couldn’t restrain His miraculous power. It never occurred to them to wonder how He could exert God’s power if they were right and He was wrong. They had God figured out, and God Himself couldn’t argue with them.
Something has shifted in my heart, and I need to share it.
Over the past week I’ve been praying about this shift to emphasizing ministry in the real world versus the virtual world. Most of it was the kind of thing you cannot put into words, so my conscious stream of thought was simply a reflection of something far bigger (Romans 8:26). As you would expect, such prayer often results in things we didn’t have the presence of mind to request.
So this morning I arose to a different sense of awareness about things. It’s one thing to be trained in pastoral ministry professionally, as I was, but quite another thing to have a shepherd’s anointing. And it’s not as if I never had that before, but this morning it was prominent and dominant. Even if we account for character and instincts, this is something new for me. I noticed it when I attempted to comment on Jack’s blog.
He posted something about Bible reading. This brings up an issue I haven’t thought about in years. I realized the whole question had been stood up in a context that I rejected long ago. Of course I want people to read the Bible, and it is a matter of self-discipline, but it’s not at all what most evangelicals make it out to be. So to begin talking about it requires we first strip out all of the cultural background.
Of course, this is true on every question we might discuss. Nothing is a stand-alone issue for us. The Radix Fidem way is not just another culture, but a wholly different world. When people ask me about my political opinions, I just tell them my orientation is from another planet. Sometimes I say things like, “You cannot imagine my fundamental political theory.”
There was a time in my life when I read the Bible obsessively, sometimes for hours at a stretch. It was the need of a season in my spiritual development. I no longer read the Bible every day. But I also don’t pray at every meal. There are whole host of habits that others inserted into my life that I’ve had to trash because it couldn’t follow me into the mission and calling. Reading the Bible has taught me that there is a radical difference between what the world around me is doing versus what He wants me to do.
A whole host of “Christian” stuff reflects the culture to which I don’t belong any more. And a major element in my shepherd’s anointing demands I be ready to help the flock move far out into the wilderness to find forgotten pastures. I’m still struggling with defining the boundary lines for being in the world but not of it. I’m forced by conviction to emphasizing the latter — not of this world — compared to what I’ve seen in my church-boy upbringing.
The same goes with the wider question of defining manhood, which is the ostensible purpose of Jack’s blog. In previous posts, the discussions have been about how to help men be worthy, to find and attract worthy brides, or how to restore worthiness to an existing marriage. The majority of the comments belonged to a different world than the one to which the Lord is calling me. There was a fundamental orientation in those comments that I have long rejected. For me, the question is not what attracts women, or should attract them, but how does all of this contribute to a definitively biblical lifestyle.
It’s not as if the people commenting there don’t have a valid definition of “biblical” in their lives, but that what God has called me to is radically different from theirs. It’s not often I can comment in any useful way, due to the lack of overlap between their paths and mine. Even the more liturgical Christians (Catholic, Orthodox, etc.) are still closer to the evangelicals than any of them are to me.
So, being aware of the radical difference means I’ll expend a lot of energy on the process of filtering. As I focus on ministering to people face to face in the real world, I will need a strong sense of when I can help and when it appears I’ll have to back off and wait for a better moment. That’s what struck me this morning was I prepared to comment on the issue of Bible reading. The whole question stands in a radically different context for me. I’m not going to minister with any assumption of embracing everyone who crosses my path.
This is a major element in the Radix Fidem way: It’s not for everyone. What we do is private, and it would be a major violation of our covenant to aim at establishing public accommodations. The world in which we live is increasingly hostile to genuine faith, and we have no expectation that our influence will affect the wider society. The broad American Churchian assumptions about what a church is supposed to do are not even on the same planet with our assumptions. Sadly, that ends up with us facing hostility from most church folks.
If we take the long view, that what we do is just a passing moment in a very long stream of spiritual revelation in human space, then we rightly regard the current churchian culture as a passing fad. Yes, we are aware that, for the churchians, what they have is the very definition of following Christ. Let them have their ways; their time will pass. Whether we can help any of them is not something that can be programmed into a course of teaching. It’s always a miracle. But then, it’s the same with the rest of the world, and sometimes we can’t tell the difference between churchians and the rest of the world.
And this is all the background against which I awoke this morning to a very fresh shepherd’s anointing. Everything we have to offer is preposterous to everyone but those few called to join us. I’m here to help them, and sometimes that means manifesting faith in a way that might jolt their awareness. That’s the calling for all of us under the Radix Fidem covenant.
Okay, here it is, folks. I said it was a prayer request, not a fundraiser, but some of you contributed anyway. This is the cheaper of the two versions of the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook2 with the Celeron processor. It has a touchscreen that I’m not likely to use much. It has Linux already folded into the system, but I’m not likely to do too much with that, either. This is not for play, but for ministry. Right now, I’m not certain what that means, but I suspect it will be my “parish office” on the go.
I keep having visions of dealing with a small audience of people who share my faith. It’s not here at my home, but at some other kind of facility. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I still need to spend time with this thing and get used to how it works. In case you are wondering, there’s not an awful lot of Chromebook apps out there, but it runs Android apps just fine, and everyone says it does Linux just fine, as well.
I’m shutting down my Microsoft accounts; they will expire at the first of December this year. Those of you who have been contacting me via my Outlook address, it’s time to change. From here on out, it’s ehurst@radixfidem.blog
I’m just rattling my own cage here, thinking out loud.
The odd thing about living by your convictions is that you can draw conclusions regrading what it signals in broader terms. If you sense the Lord telling you to go this way or that, you know the other paths offer something He doesn’t want for you. And if it turns out others in your community have the same conviction, it may well be the other paths will be bad for just about everyone else in the world.
I know I’m not alone in thinking the Net is no longer the place for outreach. To be more precise, the people God intends us to reach won’t be reached via an online witness. Right after I began getting a strong sense about that, other believers outside our community were writing the same thing about it. This reemphasis on face-to-face faith witness is a thing, though not very widely publicized, so far. That’s about what I would expect, all things considered.
Some of my convictions seem to have little to do with my witness, and more to do with how I’m supposed to get things done. But I pray about that a great deal, so apparently God is humoring me and giving me direction in my convictions that becomes more clear by the day. This puts me in territory that tends not to be shared with too many other folks. Still, sometimes I sense that it may have wider effects.
In a few months, I will cancel my MS Office 365 subscription. I’m not sure why, but I’m being driven to get away from using that. Maybe I’ll have most or all of my books revised by then — I sure hope so. But if the Lord wants me to pray for a Chromebook, it should be obvious that He’s going to sponsor a shift to Google Docs. Much as I hate Google in general, I’ve long sensed that this move would come. I’m glad I waited, because I would have gone about it with mistaken ideas about the purpose. Somehow, the Lord intends to use such an account for His glory, and it’s important to get as close to the target as possible before pulling the trigger. What looks like a bullseye from way back turns out to be a distraction, and the bullseye was hiding behind something else.
By the way, a Chromebook has been ordered and it’s on the way. We’ll see what it can do when it gets here. Yeah, I’ll post a picture of it here.
To be honest, I wasn’t really sure why I needed one. As I was seeking His face about it, the answer seemed to be that I would be working with a real-world faith community, and the Chromebook was for that purpose. I still need the paper and pencil stuff, but there are certain things that won’t work that way. Something about the nature of the group will require such a device, something that the other stuff I already have cannot do. That’s all I know for now.
I’m not sure if any of this represents another one of those changes that I sense now and then, as if God saw where certain people were going, and then let me know that it called for a revision in methods and means. Keep in mind: This kind of stuff clearly isn’t that important, in the sense that it doesn’t make much difference from God’s perspective. “Oh, you really want that? Fine, here you go.” And then because it’s a major figure on the human level, it cascades back down on all the little people, including us. Except we get to sense in our spirits when it happens, even if nobody is reporting it. It doesn’t change our mission, only some of the methods.
Yeah, I really believe that. He’s waiting for certain people to decide how they want to be a fool, and then He tells us what to expect as we are going about the really important business that is far more dear to Him. It’s the business that most of the world never notices. They think their big plans really matter. We have to live with their plans, but only as the background noise that accompanies our witness of the gospel.
I’m quite certain sometime in the next few months I’ll have to forget Microsoft, but it has been a convoluted path. I’m not the only person who senses that something from that direction is headed our way. But it’s not the kind of thing that will affect everyone, just some of us. Indeed, I tend to believe my wife will be just fine with her Windows machines. She’s not doing what I have to do, and vice versa, though we are very much a team.
At any rate, it’s not time just yet for me to shift, so I’ll wait until I get that signal. The way I see it, I’ll be dodging a bullet meant for others. Meanwhile, I have to keep using it until I get certain things done. Maybe I can stop looking back; maybe I don’t have to move back and forth as I’ve done over the past year or so. I’m willing to go through all the hassles and jump through all the hoops, but I keep praying I get some relief at some point on stuff like this. It feels like a distraction.
I think I’m almost numb to most of it now. I don’t love Linux and I don’t hate Windows. I really don’t like computers all that much, but the Lord isn’t ready to let me put that tool down just yet. I simply would like to pick one or the other and set the matter aside.
So, do you reckon you get that strong sense of conviction that the Lord is going to do something big with face-to-face outreach soon? If the economy collapses anywhere near as much as I expect, it’s going to bring changes no human can predict. The Lord will take care of us, I’m quite certain, but it will be tribulation, for sure.
Things to keep in mind: The fiber optic cables are probably safe. However, the signal boosters strung at regular intervals along the cable are vulnerable. Sea water is no protection; it actually makes things worse. But for the most part, nobody knows what would happen, simply because during the entire life of the Internet, there have been no CMEs of significance. The current speculation is that the cables will be okay, but little else. Maybe local networking can survive in some places, but the global links would disappear. The big issue will remain the power grid itself.
2. I’m not surprised that the MSM is trying to suggest that the Taliban have been promoting the heroin poppy crops in Afghanistan. That’s an outright lie. The CIA have been promoting the heroin production to fund their rather extensive operations there. The heroin is shipped to Russia, China, Iran and so forth.
As one commenter said, let’s keep in mind that the CIA is no different from any other government agency. They’ve got a few talented people, a whole bunch of mindless bureaucrats, and plenty of outright political hires. They are no better at their work than any other federal bureaucracy. They simply have official permission to be evil and not have to report it. Pepe Escobar is a mixed bag of good and so-so reporting, but this article on Unz Review strikes me as pretty good reporting.
And the Taliban are not supermen either, but they are true believers in their mission. You can bet they’ll quickly shut down as much poppy agriculture as possible, which is what they did the last time they were in control of major portions of Afghanistan. They will also end the “dancing boys” culture again, and a lot of other socially corrupting things the CIA has promoted.
But the CIA will try to stick around and keep things stirred up.
3. Here’s one story that was actively buried by the right-wingers, all the way down to the grass roots: The CIA has killed numerous American troops intentionally. Throughout the Middle East and all the way back into Vietnam, there were incidents in which the CIA set traps and killed US troops. Part of the time it was for the obvious reason of blaming someone else, trying to get a story in the news about how this or that “evil enemy” did it. So when videotape evidence surfaced, people got killed again for trying to get the story out.
The estimates are all over the map, but a great many combat engagements in places like Iraq and Afghanistan were actually our troops being suckered by the CIA. I’m not going to tell you how I know about this, but it’s not news amongst folks who paid attention over the past two decades.
Think about this: The bombing outside the Kabul airport was blamed on ISIS-K (a nickname for ISIS in Afghanistan). The US government claims to have used drone missiles to take out the ISIS planners of that bomb. But people on the ground went and checked, and the drone missile killed an ordinary family with kids. From what I understand, it was the CIA that fed the drone pilots the data. At this point, I’d be willing to bet the CIA also set off that bomb near the Kabul airport.
There is simply way too much evidence of how the CIA not only sponsored, but actually took control of, the drug trade in Southeast Asia during the previous century, starting right after WW2. Any time there’s drugs involved, it’s almost guaranteed the CIA has their dirty hands on it. I keep saying this: The CIA has always been one of the greatest threats to the American people.
During my time as a Military Policeman, one of the biggest issues was male MPs being accused of rape and related offenses when they happened to be alone with any female in their patrol vehicle, particularly someone they arrested.
When there was no way to avoid transporting a female without an onboard witness of some kind, the practice was to call in via radio and have the Desk Sergeant record the starting time and mileage on the odometer. Then, when the female was dropped off wherever she needed to be, the MP would call in again to record ending time and mileage. If radio communications don’t work, noting them on a patrol notebook would often serve the same purpose. The idea is that you can’t easily just make stuff up that would calculate out that precisely. How could you know the exact distance and driving time for some random trip?
In these days of silliness about gender ID, I’ve heard it became common policy for all of the alleged genders in any combination. Any accusations later would be compared with the time and distance, and if there was no room in that for whatever the MP was accused of, the claim was dismissed. This is also a general practice in other law enforcement agencies. I’m told most judges honor that evidence. It’s too easy to have someone else go back and repeat the trip under the same conditions to verify.
The reason I mention this is that things are going quite bonkers in our world. We have very few friends out there. It’s a very good idea to think about how this could save your hide some day. When you find yourself in a situation that could come back to haunt you, it’s a very good idea to call or text someone who knows you and let them know what’s going on.
For example, if I were to be asked these days to give a ride to any female or child not in my family, I would naturally contact my wife. I would make note of traffic conditions and forced detours, etc. on the way, and add that to my notations. I would make sure my dashcam was recording, and say certain things out loud. I don’t trust most women any more than I would someone I had in police custody.
False accusations will become a major source of trouble in the future, and you can bet our Enemy will use it against us. Over the years, I’ve helped video tape a few encounters of other types, on behalf of friends, for the sake of evidence. Now that the equipment is so ubiquitous, it’s silly not to think about that sort of thing when dealing with people who haven’t secured your trust.
Feel free to share your own ways of handling social risks.
