George Will, writing for the Washington Post this weekend, says Planned Parenthood's leadership "lack the courage of their convictions."
He says, "They should drop the pretense..." in the selling of baby body parts.
Will describes the pro-abortion culture as "The Church of Choice" whose entire belief system is based on babies not being babies---"and what an abortion kills never possesses a scintilla of moral significance."
While the sensitivities of most Christians and conservatives has been rocked by what we have heard and seen out of Planned Parenthood, how can the progressive left be so callous about it---so nonchalant, vigorously defending the organization and their barbaric practices?
How have so many become so desensitized to this barbarism being practiced by public funded Planned Parenthood?
How have we lost our conscience? If, so can a seared, or dead conscience be resurrected?
George Will says, "Cecile Richards ...apologizes for the tone of her operatives' chatter...But the tone flows from Planned Parenthood's premise: Why be solemn about meat?"
Will writes, "We are wallowing in this moral swamp because the Supreme Court accelerated the desensitization of the nation" in the way abortion was advanced by their ruling in Roe v. Wade, "So today there is a limitless right to kill and distribute fragments of, babies that intrauterine medicine can increasingly treat as patients."
"Yet," Will notes during congressional debates on partial birth abortion, "three Democrats were asked: Suppose the baby's head slips out of the birth canal---the baby is born---before the abortionist can kill it. Does the baby have a right to live?"
He says two of the Democrats refused to answer the question. "The other one said the baby acquires a right to life when it leaves the hospital."
Conscience is indeed the most sacred of all property. With the loss of conscience a culture cannot sustain itself, nor can an individual find meaning in life---much less experience life and liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
Our Founders went to great lengths to protect the individual's conscience.
What is our conscience?
The conscience is much like a built in "firewall" installed to protect you from making destructive decisions.
Without this firewall, man is prone to make destructive decisions, destroying his own and the lives of others.
The firewall, or the conscience is a gift from God our Creator. He gave it to us to provide an inner guide. In its uncompromised or unseared condition, it serves as an inner moral guide causing us to feel guilt or remorse over sin, and an inclination toward doing the right thing.
Our conscience is not "our guide," it is a rudder---an early warning system.
Our conscience must be informed.
Proverbs 20:27 says, "The spirit of a man is the lamp of the Lord, Searching all the inner depths of his heart."
The conscience is not infallible, nor is it the source of revelation about right and wrong. Its role is not to teach us moral and ethical ideals, but to hold us accountable to the highest standards of right and wrong we know.
J. Oswald Sanders said, "Every conscience needs instruction. Its delicate mechanism has been thrown off balance by the fall [of man]. Just as a bullet will reach the bulls-eye only if the two sights are in correct alignment, so correct moral judgments are delivered only when the conscience is correctly aligned with Scriptures."
Therein lies the problem.
When properly aligned the conscience serves as a kind of prosecuting attorney, convicting us when we do wrong, and assuring us when we do right.
By consistently ignoring or going against his conscience a person is in danger of "searing it."
Paul writes about those "speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron" (I Tim. 4:2).
A seared conscience is a very dangerous condition. In fact the Bible explains how a person's conscience can actually go from being your prosecuting attorney, to your defense attorney.
A "seared conscience" is dulled in its ability to help make good decisions. A seared conscience provides its owner with a false sense of comfort over wrong behavior, rather than a conviction.
This process is described in Romans 2:15: "The requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them."
This is how one's conscience becomes seared:
When man becomes his own god, he is rejecting the very purpose for which he was Created---to have a relationship with the one true God.
We are witnessing the predicted results of Marxism's cultural march through our institutions---particularly our public school system, our entertainment industry, our government and even some Christian churches.
We are experiencing the results of removing God from the culture.
As suspected, that temporary restraining order isn’t restraining Center for Medical Progress from continuing to release videos about Planned Parenthood, even if it might delay material from the National Abortion Federation.
CMP just dropped a new video from its undercover investigation of the nation’s leading abortion chain, with another executive admitting that its clinicians change procedures to harvest organs and intact fetuses, from which they receive compensation. Intact fetuses are “just a matter of line items,” says Director of Research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast Melissa Farrell. And in a rather interesting turn of events, Farrell’s testimony here appears to contradict what Planned Parenthood claimed about its Texas clinics.
As in the other videos, be warned: there is very disturbing imagery included.
The fifth undercover video in the controversy over Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted baby parts shows the Director of Research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, Melissa Farrell, advertising the Texas Planned Parenthood branch’s track record of fetal tissue sales, including its ability to deliver fully intact fetuses.
Asked specifically if this means Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast can change abortion procedures to supply intact fetal specimens, Farrell affirms, “Some of our doctors in the past have projects and they’re collecting the specimens, so they do it in a way that they get the best specimens, so I know it can happen.”
The investigators ask Farrell how she will frame a contract in which they pay a higher price for higher quality fetal body parts, and she replies, “We can work it out in the context of–obviously, the procedure itself is more complicated,” suggesting that “without having you cover the procedural cost” and paying for the abortion, the higher specimen price could be framed as “additional time, cost, administrative burden.”
Farrell does a bit of bragging about the “revenue stream” from organ harvesting. “My department contributes so much to the bottom line of our organization,” Farrell tells the undercover investigators. Her department is research, of course, which Planned Parenthood does not do on its own. Farrell presumably refers in this part of the conversation to the revenue stream from the transfer of human organs — and intact humans — to brokers for medical research.
In a separate conversation, Farrell talks about how she can make more money by dissecting “human cadavers,” and that it’s all “just a matter of line items.” But when the buyers want an intact cadaver, Farrell’s more than willing to make sure they get it.
The dissection video is incredibly disturbing. “The organs come out really, really well,” one technician says. They go into detail about the manipulation of dilation to improve organ harvesting. Late-term abortions use a two-stage dilation, for instance. The technicians and the investigators spend quite a bit of time identifying the human organs and bones in the dissection, once again underscoring that these are not “clumps of cells” but human beings being destroyed.
So now we know why Planned Parenthood refused to attend the Texas legislative hearing last week. They would have had to perjure themselves. And Farrell makes it plain that the organ harvesting provides a “revenue stream” to Planned Parenthood which “contributes so much to our bottom line.” As in the other videos, we also confirm that Planned Parenthood manipulates abortion procedures to amplify this revenue stream. All of this violates federal law, and the entire organization should be investigated for its operations.
Abortion kills children, and Planned Parenthood has turned it into an industry on both ends of the abortion. It’s horrendous — and we haven’t yet seen it all.
Our leaders have failed the American people. We had an opportunity as a country in 2009 to purge our system of our unpayable debt. We could have allowed the orderly liquidation of the Too Big To Fail Wall Street banks, GM, Chrysler, and thousands of other over indebted bloated corporate pigs. We would have had a short deep depression. The excesses would have been wrung out of our economic system and we would have experienced a real recovery based upon savings and investment. Instead we allowed politicians and central bankers to do the complete opposite. We believed their lies. The system was not going to collapse if the Wall Street banks went down. Rich people and bankers would have been wiped out.
When a country allows its central bank to encourage yield-seeking speculative malinvestment; suppresses interest rates in a way that punishes those on fixed incomes and destroys the incentive to save; allows too-big-to-fail institutions to use deposit insurance as a public subsidy to expand trading activity instead of traditional banking; focuses fiscal policy on boosting transfer payments to make up for lost income without at the same time encouraging investment – both private and public – that could create new sources of income; that country is going to keep failing its people.
Jim Grant, Bill Gross and a number of other truth telling financial analysts have described how QE and ZIRP have done nothing but allow zombie corporations which should have gone bankrupt to survive and contribute to the low level economy we are experiencing. The creative destruction essential to produce a dynamic economy has been outlawed by the Federal Reserve. The encouragement of consumption through low interest rates has failed. Economies grow through investment, not consumption.
It seems the Fed’s motto is: “The Lunacy Will Continue Until Moral Improves”. The Fed has accomplished only one thing over the last six years – creating multiple bubbles with no exit plan that will not pop those bubbles. The Fed has trapped themselves and there is no way out. They must either raise rates now and trigger the next market collapse or wait and trigger an even larger collapse. Hussman thinks legislation may be necessary to restrain the Fed, but he fails to realize the politicians are captured by the very banks who control the Fed.
They Live, We Sleep: A Dictatorship Disguised As A Democracy
We’re living in two worlds, you and I.
There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.
Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.
All is not as it seems.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live (1988), in which two migrant workers discover that the world’s population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them. Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture. A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats. Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.
In fact, a 2014 study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime? The answer is the same in every age: fear.
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
We have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.
In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live. Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.
Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
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