A Christian’s Heart 6 26 12

Episodes

Things I See and Hear

The perfidy of the national media demonstrated:

You must surely recall the incident where a neighborhood watch volunteer named George Zimmerman killed a young black man named Trayvon Martin. NBC news was caught editing a tape of the Zimmerman 911 call  to make it sound like Zimmerman had picked out Martin because he was black, when in fact that was not the case. NBC fired the editor over this and claimed that they did not intentionally edit this tape this way. What a lie! Any idiot could see through this.

More recently MSNBC edited a video of Mitt Romney’s visit to a store where he commented on certain touchtone keypad equipment the store used. They edited the video  to make it look like Romney was amazed that there might be such technology: message being this guy’s a rube and should not be president. Romney’s message was, in reality, about how competition in the private sector produces efficiencies that are not mirrored when the government runs something. (Like the Obama Nation Health Care law, just approved by the Supreme Court.)

There was also the Duke Lacrosse rape case where the three boys falsely accused of rape were tried and convicted in the press. The New York Times was a leader in this journalistic atrocity.

Then there was the Dan Rather CBS News incident during the Bush years where Rather was caught pushing a forged document indicating, as I recall, that Bush had lied about his National Guard service. Mr. Rather was fired as a result of that.

Of course there are thousands more of examples. Any honest media watchdog agency could provide them.

Such media lies follow a long tradition of the media being little less than a left-wing propaganda machine.

I’ve been reading an interesting book by Thomas Sowell called Intellectuals and Society (Basic Books, NY, NY, 2011). Dr. Thomas Sowell, a well-known economist, makes many comments that touch on this topic in his book (numbers in parentheses represent page numbers in his book).

Re: The Soviet Union

If you were a reader of the news media in the 1930’s, particularly the New York Times, you would have been convinced that the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was the “moral top of the world.” (from Edmund Wilson, literary critic, quoted on p. 213. This idiocy was not constrained to gushing praise of Joe Stalin’s Soviet Union. You older readers probably remember Jane Fonda’s gushing praise of North Vietnam and communism in the 1970s. This was before the government of the North killed over 1 million people after we slunk out of South Vietnam in the early 1970s. This was also before Communist murderer Pol Pot killed between 2 – 3 million people in Cambodia during that same time period.

But Did you know that in the 1930’s Joseph Stalin’s government created a famine in Ukraine that eventually starved to death about 6.0 million human beings (193-194). This was later confirmed when, under Mikhial Gorbechev, the Soviet archives were opened.(194). (According to the Black Book of Communism, estimates of the number of Soviet citizens murdered under Uncle Joe’s rule range from 35 to 50 million. I’ve seen estimates as high as 60 million elsewhere.)

Now during the time of the Ukraine atrocity, a reporter from the New York Times named Walter Duranty wrote, “There is no famine or actual starvation, nor is their likely to be.” (quoted on p. 194) Later a British diplomat reported to London that “Mr. Duranty thinks it quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly.” For lying through his teeth Mr. Duranty got a Pulitzer prize. (also quoted on p. 194).

On the other hand, a British writer named Malcom Muggeridge reported that peasants in Ukraine were indeed starving and that “the man-made famine in Ukraine was one of the most monstrous crimes in history …” What was this honest man’s reward: he was drummed out of the media for his “hysterical tirade”, and could not get a job anywhere as a writer. (194) (If you want to get more information on the atrocities committed by communist governments, Google “The Black Book of Communism.” It’s available on Amazon. The statistics and incidents recorded in that book are based on the scholarly work of several French historians (not right-wingers by any stretch!) who combed through the Soviet archives mentioned above.)

Re: Herbert Hoover

Based on our history lessons “everyone knows” that Herbert Hoover caused the Great Depression, that he did nothing for the poor people of America starving in the streets, that he was in the pockets of the robber barons of Industry; in short, that he was an all round really bad man. This has been the common view of Hoover in the popular media for over eighty years. I never saw anything to balance that view until a few years ago.

But did you know that Herbert Hoover was one of the great philanthropists of the 20^th century, and maybe would have been known “as one of the greatest humanitarians of the century” had he not had the misfortune of being president during the start of the Great Depression? (203) Right after World War I there were millions of people in Europe suffering from hunger. According to Dr. Sowell, “Hoover formed a philanthropic organization to get food to them on a massive scale. However, realizing that if he operated in the usual way, by first raising money from donations and then buying the food, people would be dying…” So Hoover, taking what I consider to be an enormous personal risk, bought the food first with his own personal fortune and shipped it to and distributed it through Europe and then eventually covered the cost by raising donations.(203)

Did you also know that during the beginning of the Great Depression Hoover raised taxes rates on the rich from 30 percent to over 60 percent? And that “the real Hoover was praised by the head of the American Federation of Labor for his efforts to keep industry from cutting workers’ wages during the depression.” (205)

As I point out above, this lying to the public by the popular media certainly hasn’t stopped in our day. Why, then, do you suppose they have so much power over us? Why do we buy into their lies? And what does this suggest about our future as a free country where all points of view are respected?

 

Episodes

Things I see and hear

I saw a movie called THE MIST recently. It is based on a novel by Stephen King. It’s a gruesome story (of course) about some deadly creatures that get released onto earth from another dimension. These creatures exist only in the mist that has poured out of this other world. The movie is shot almost entirely in a grocery store where several dozen people have been trapped. If anyone goes out into the mist, he is brutally killed. (Not the most uplifting movie to watch, I admit.) But there was one character who claimed to know God. Her soul, however, was full of darkness and evil. And like the Evil One, she quoted Scripture incessantly. It’s hard to describe this character within the length constraints of this blog, except to say, she is everything evil anyone has ever thought about God, God’s people or His church: She was accusatory, judgmental, without compassion or love, full of hatred, and just plain awful; she even started demanding human sacrifices to appease the “forces of hell” that had been released into the world. By extension, of course, her God must be this same way. This indicates to me how Mr. King views God and his church.

Needless to say, this movie saddened me greatly. Think of all the people who were turned away from God when they saw this. Think of the darkness of the soul that wrote this book. Yet I’m wondering if the behavior of the church over the past millennium has not merited some of this criticism. Think of the inquisition, for example.  What a shame that the church could be slandered in this way. What have we done?

I was having a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop, reading. A lesbian couple came into the shop and started “making out”. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable this made me. There’s a time and a place for everything, except, of course, for homosexual behavior. Seeing anyone “making out” would leave an uncomfortable feeling. Seeing homosexual’s make out left me nauseous. And my heart went out to them: the judgment they face in the next life is so awful, it cannot be described in human terms. I’m wondering how they might have reacted if I had mentioned my feelings to them. Given the viciousness of the society we live in, they probably would have thrown a cup of hot coffee at me. I am praying for them.

Finally:

I was reading the prophet Haggai and the Lord says:

“Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but have harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.” (Hag 1:5-6) And then the Lord says, “Therefore, because [you have refused to rebuild my temple] the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops. I called for a drought on the fields and the mountains, on the grain, the new wine, the oil and whatever the ground produces, on men and cattle, and on the labor of your hands.” (Hag 1:10-11)

Well, I personally have written six books, with two more on the way. I have spent thousands of dollars on them, and have gotten little in return. One thing I’m sure of: it was and is the Lord’s will for me to write. The one thing I’m not sure of is, am I doing something, or not doing something that has caused the Lord to call a draught on “the labor of my hands”? One tidbit of information: He has continued to bless me in many other ways. I have yet to receive the blessing of book sales, however. It’s about more than the money. I believe the books have merit both artistically and spiritually.  The few readers I do have have said that my work has impacted their lives in a significant way. So, I’m continuing to “give careful thought” to my ways.

That’s the blog this time. Updates should be coming every other day or so.

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