THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
Congressman Louie Gohmert has called for changes to the Jade Helm military exercise, arguing that the labeling of Texas and Utah as “hostile” states in Army documents related to the drill is “suspicious,” while suggesting that the federal government is trying to “provoke a fight” with citizens.
In a piece published by the Highland County Press, Gohmert, who is Vice Chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, suggests that the Utah and Texas may have been labeled negatively because they are red states.
“Once I observed the map depicting “hostile,” “permissive” and “uncertain” states and locations, I was rather appalled that the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority and believe in the sanctity of the United States Constitution,” writes Gohmert.
“When the federal government begins, even in practice, games or exercises, to consider any U.S. city or state in “hostile” control and trying to retake it, the message becomes extremely calloused and suspicious.”
Gohmert says that when he was in the U.S. Army, areas of America were never dubbed “hostile” and that fictitious names were used in such instances. Such descriptions represent “an affront to the residents of that particular state considered as hostile, as if the government is trying to provoke a fight with them,” he writes.
The Congressman also makes it clear that he “understands” concerns that the exercises may be preparation for martial law-style scenarios, noting that the Obama administration has repeatedly expressed animosity towards constitutionalists, veterans and Christians.
“We have seen people working in this administration use their government positions to persecute people with conservative beliefs in God, country, and notions such as honor and self-reliance,” writes Gohmert.
The Congressman concludes his article by calling for major changes to Jade Helm before it commences on July 15.
“The map of the exercise needs to change, the names on the map need to change, and the tone of the exercise needs to be completely revamped so the federal government is not intentionally practicing war against its own states.”
In criticizing Jade Helm and indicating that he understands the concerns of residents, Gohmert is opening himself up to the same kind of media attacks that were launched against Texas Governor Greg Abbott after he announced that the Texas State Guard would monitor the drill.
A school in Texas has defended its use of a frigid “focus room” where one child claims to have been isolated for more than two days.
Parents Lillian Borjas and Trevor Snowden were disturbed to discover the punishment being meted out to their child at the Carl Schurz Elementary School in New Braunfels.
A blog post entitled The “Focus Room” Horror first published details last week regarding 9-year-old Alex’s claims, accompanied by photos taken by the boy’s mother of Alex sitting in the corner of the room with his hands tucked inside his shirt.
Alex’s mother says she was denied access to the room four or five times before the school’s vice principal escorted her to see her son.
“Immediately Alex’s mom pulled out her phone and started taking pictures as the vice principal tried to block her,” the blog states, adding the mother was also unable to re-enter the room in order to photograph the thermostat.
Photos show the young boy huddled in the corner of a small room, in addition to a “hastily drawn” circle in the middle of the floor where Alex was reportedly ordered to sit for an hour and a half in order to earn classroom minutes.
Alex told his parents the room is “where bad children go and serve their in-school suspension (ISS).”
Asked how often he’d been subjected to the room, Alex responded, “Almost every day, once for two straight days.”
“I asked if I could get my jacket and was told no,” Alex said.
Meanwhile, “the teach [sic] put her own jacket on and said ‘It’s sure nice to be warm,’” Alex claims.
The boy went on to assert he’s not allowed snacks, bathroom breaks or exercise when in isolation.
“If you have a son or daughter attending Carl Schurz Elementary I strongly encourage asking your child about the ‘Focus Room’,”the blog’s author cautioned, adding “go to the school and ask to see it for yourself, insist on it.”
“Isolated, cold, confined to a circle drawn on a floor of a featureless room. Think about that for minute. Who else deploys such tactics? And under what circumstances?”
Admittedly, Alex’s parents confirm he sometimes acts out, and that he was recently diagnosed by a pediatrician as having ADHD, which would make it difficult for him to sit still inside of the circle.
The district defended its use of the space, highlighting the difference between a “focus room” and “safe rooms,” which are used during emergencies.
“A ‘FOCUS Room’ is a classroom environment that allows for behavior intervention such as social skills and counseling,” the district expressed in a letter.
“What it is, is a space that the child can focus their energy,” a spokesperson for the New Braunfels Independent School District explained, professing, “You’ll find it in any school district, in any school in the state.”
On Friday, the Texas Education Agency lodged a complaint against the district alleging faculty may have violated the Texas Education Code, namely a provision prohibiting educators from confining special needs children to secluded areas “contain[ing] less than 50 square feet of space.”
As for the temperature of the room, school officials noted, “It’s set district-wide at a certain temperature. There was no intentional way to keep that child cold in that room.”
The boy’s parents declared this is the last year Alex will be attending public school.
"With the Obama administration-backed “net neutrality” takeover of Internet infrastructure paving the way, federal bureaucrats may seek to regulate the content of websites such as the Drudge Report. That is the warning of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Ajit Pai, who cautioned in various interviews and talks this month that another Washington, D.C., bureaucracy — the Federal Election Commission — needs to be watched closely lest the government “impulse” to regulate online speech be acted upon. The United Nations and various UN member regimes hope to censor and tax the Internet, too.
FCC Commissioner Pai, one of two Republicans on the five-member commission, was also an outspoken opponent of his bureaucracy’s Internet takeover earlier this year under the guise of “net neutrality.” The Obama-backed plan seeks to regulate the architecture of the World Wide Web as a “public utility,” supposedly to keep it “neutral” and prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from using different business models that might speed up the delivery of certain content over that of other sites. But that may be just the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent vis-à-vis government regulation of the Internet, Pai warned.
“I could easily see this migrating over to the direction of content,” he explained in during a panel discussion at the “Right Online” conference earlier this month. “What you’re seeing now is an impulse not just to regulate the roads over which traffic goes, but the traffic itself…. It is conceivable to me to see the government saying, ‘We think the Drudge Report is having a disproportionate effect on our political discourse. He doesn’t have to file anything with the FEC. The FCC doesn’t have the ability to regulate anything he says, and we want to start tamping down on websites like that.’”
Pai also said he did not think it was “unthinkable” that some government bureaucracy would consider the marketplace of ideas to be “too fraught with dissonance” — that media outlets ranging from Drudge to Fox News and everything in between would be seen as “playing unfairly” in the online “political speech sandbox.” The First Amendment is more than just words in the Constittion, it is “an ongoing cultural commitment,” he added. “And I sense that among a substantial number of Americans and a disturbing number of regulators here in Washington that online speech is [considered] a dangerous brave new world that needs to be regulated.”
The FCC commissioner reiterated his warnings last week on Fox News Radio’s The Alan Colmes Show. Among other concerns, Pai warned that the federal government’s “net neutrality” takeover of the Internet’s infrastructure could be a mere sneak preview of D.C. efforts to regulate content on media powerhouses such as the Drudge Report. “It’s not so much the FCC that I’m worried about in terms of online content regulation,” he said. “But what we do see is that at places like the Federal Elections Commission there is a regulatory impulse to regulate what heretofore has been a pretty open marketplace of ideas.”
“Net neutrality would insert government jurisdiction over the infrastructure of the internet and in time, other agencies might try to regulate the content,” added Pai, a leading critic of the Obama-backed “net neutrality” scheme, who said he had suffered from harassment and threats after speaking out. “If you look at what some of these agencies are thinking about doing right now — last year, for example, at the Federal Elections Commission, three regulators suggested that they did want to consider online content, like the Drudge Report, potentially as an in-kind contribution given that it had an impact on political campaigns.”
The notion that the FEC, under the guise of regulating elections, might seek to regulate the political speech found online is hardly far-fetched. In fact, last year, a top Democrat on the commission, FEC Vice-Chair Ann Ravel, openly advocated a new regulatory regime to control online campaigning. “A reexamination of the commission’s approach to the Internet and other emerging technologies is long overdue,” she claimed following a battle over whether two anti-Obama YouTube videos in Ohio were a violation of existing FEC decrees.
Seeing through the call, the Republican FEC chairman, Lee Goodman, warned that Democrats on the commission were targeting online political sites and even media outlets such as the Drudge Report for regulation. “I told you this was coming,” he told the Washington Examiner, adding that if regulations could be extended in accordance with Democrat wishes, anyone writing a political blog, running a news site, or even a chat room could face stifling FEC regulation on speech. Goodman had already warned that Democrat commissioners were targeting conservative Internet sites before that.
If it materializes, FEC regulation of online political speech could smother First Amendment protections for some of the unalienable rights outlined therein: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and more. Among other attacks, FEC bureaucrats could force even small-time bloggers and other activists who might be involved in writing about elections or candidates to obey a never-ending deluge of federal regulations. For a major operation, that might not be the end — they could afford armies of attorneys to sort through it. But for a smaller outfit, filling out mountains of paperwork and being forced to obey incomprehensible mountains of decrees could prove fatal. And maybe that is the point.
“We [at the ITU] don’t have a common interpretation of what censorship means,” the recently installed secretary general of the UN agency, Houlin Zhao, was quoted as saying by the Korean Yonhap news agency last year. “A country can ask people not to watch pornography, and some consider this as also kind of censorship. We have not got a common definition.” When asked about the Communist Chinese dictatorship’s massive censorship regime targeting dissent, dissidents, and ideas it disagrees with, Zhao was evasive. “Some kind of censorship may not be strange to other countries,” he responded.
From Washington D.C. and UN headquarters in New York to Moscow, Beijing, and everywhere in between, totalitarian-minded forces are up in arms about the free and open Internet — essentially the final bastion of real free speech and a truly free press, and potentially a crucial tool in freeing humanity from government tyranny. Among other concerns, the World Wide Web has facilitated a massive increase in public understanding surrounding the goals of those same totalitarian-minded forces — hence their efforts to control, regulate, censor, and tax it.
For the sake of humanity and especially liberty, Americans must resist any and all efforts to infringe on Internet freedom. Without it, free speech and much more may become a thing of the past."
