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.
In this exclusive interview with Alex Newman of The New American, former organic inspector turned whistleblower Mischa Popoff exposes the dubious testing and certification processes of the "organic industry." Almost half of "organic" food tests positive for prohibited pesticides, he says. Even more alarming, Popoff, author of the book "Is It Organic?", explains that all sorts of Communist Chinese garbage from state farms with "serfs" working on them is being peddled to Americans as "organic," despite the laxest of "inspections." Popoff said the best solution is to simply buy from farmers that consumers know personally.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
This essay was first written 19 years ago, in 2000. I have expanded, edited, and updated it.
Gun Registration is Gun Confiscation – Updated 2019 Edition
U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- The holy grail of those who wish us disarmed is gun registration. Once your guns are required to be registered, they are, in effect, already confiscated. A little thought will reveal to you why this is so.
The Government will know who has legal possession of each firearm. They will know where the firearm is stored. When physical possession of the gun is desired, they can order you to turn it in. This has happened repeatedly.
The historical examples include NAZI Germany, Soviet Russia, Red China, and Cambodia. Recent examples include Kosovo, Great Britain, Australia, New York, and California. Not having possession of the firearm registered to you can be grounds for prosecution. If you have reported the gun stolen, and it is found in your possession, you can be charged with obstruction of justice, filing a false report, or perhaps a newly created crime for “gun criminals.”
Once all guns are required to be registered, the only people who will legally possess guns will be those who have registered them, a truism, but necessary to state the case clearly.
If you choose to follow the course of civil disobedience, and not register your firearms, mere possession of an unregistered gun will put you at grave legal risk. Civil disobedience has been the most common course of action in California and Canada, in Maryland and Connecticut, where it has proven impossible to enforce the laws requiring registration.
If you choose this course of action, you would be at the mercy of any informant who discovers you possess a gun illegally. Children are being trained in public schools to inform authorities if there is a gun in the house. Doctors are urged to ask children if there are guns in their home. A warrant was issued in California for a SWAT raid based on the mere picture of people holding unidentified guns which were legal.
Social media is being used to find gun owners. If you are not on the list of those who have registered, you have become a criminal. If you are forced to use the gun for self-defense, you will have committed a serious crime. It will become difficult to train your children in firearms safety or to bring friends or relatives into the gun culture. Any use of the now illegal gun will risk exposure, confiscation, arrest, and other penalties. With digital recording devices in nearly every pocket, in most businesses and homes, this becomes a serious threat. This essay explains how it could work.
New Zealand passed a ban on whole classes of guns recently. There has been massive non-compliance. The proponents of the ban admit gun registration is necessary to effectively confiscate the banned guns. Those pushing disarmament are now pushing for mandatory gun registration.
The theory to produce gradual disarmament is to slowly destroy the gun culture by administratively reducing the number of people who legally own guns. The people who urge gradual or immediate gun registration are attempting cultural genocide of the gun culture.
The practice, once guns are required to be registered, is to incrementally tighten the requirements of registration to reduce the number of gun owners. When the number is low enough to limit effective political action, the remaining legal guns can be confiscated with little political cost. The purpose is not to reduce the number of guns, precisely. It is to reduce the number of legal gun owners, to make sure all those who have guns are politically reliable. All societies have some gun owners. The political elite can always obtain guns. The political elite in San Francisco considers the National Rifle Association to be a terrorist organization. 32% of Democrats agree with them.
Gun registration has proven ineffective in reducing crime. Those who wish us disarmed often cite European countries' crime rates. But crime rates in European countries were low before gun registration was implemented. The did not change much, up or down with gun registration. Under registration systems, crime may increase because of the transfer of police resources from crime-fighting to administer and police the political requirements of the gun registration scheme, and because of the number of people willing or able to use their firearms for self-defense will be reduced. There is no relationship between legal gun ownership, illegal gun ownership, and violent crime.
Self-defense is never acknowledged by those who wish us disarmed because it trumps their arguments for disarming the people. In those groups, it is a crime speak to admit the utility of guns for self-defense. The primary purpose of gun registration has always been to reduce the political power of the people rather than reduce the crime rate.
There have been three significant attempts to require gun registration in the United States. The first attempt was during the regime of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). In the original bill, all handguns were to have been registered, with a $200 ($3,800 in today's dollars) federal tax. The provision was defeated by the NRA. FDR got the booby prize of requiring registration of a few seldom used or owned firearms and accessories. The people were saddled with the ineffective National Firearms Act of 1934, which registered machine guns, short-barreled shotguns and rifles, and silencers.
The second attempt at requiring gun registration started in 1968. Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) tried to pass a bill requiring all handguns to be registered. It was opposed by the NRA, and the registration requirement taken from the bill. As a compromise, Congress required gun dealers to obtain a federal license. Purchasers of guns from federally licensed dealers were required to fill out a form 4473 to take possession. Congress forbid the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms from constructing any national gun registration list from this data.
The third, ongoing, scheme was initiated in 1994. Congress passed the Brady Bill, which required handgun purchasers to undergo an instant check or a five-day wait to purchase a handgun. While parts of this act were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, a little known part of the bill went into effect in 1998, requiring all purchasers of firearms from licensed dealers to undergo an “instant check” before taking possession.
Two safeguards were built into the bill to ensure it would not be used to develop a national registration of firearms. First, the FBI is forbidden to keep any records of instant checks that allow the purchase. Second, the instant checks only applied to dealers, not to private sales. Since gun owners could sell their firearm without government permission, no registration list could effectively be developed. Effective gun confiscation was prevented.
Both of these safeguards have been under attack. The FBI refused to immediately destroy the instant check information, although required to do so by law. Their refusal was struck down in court. There is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the other safeguard, private sales. The campaign has been pushed as a requirement for “universal” background checks. Once private parties are forbidden from selling guns without government permission, universal registration comes from making those records permanent. The final step is to make possession of a gun that is *not* registered illegally.
Particularly troubling is the emphasis on guns seldom used in a crime, but which are very useful in militias. Groups who promised they only wished to limit handguns, now call for limiting the ownership of semi-automatic rifles and standard capacity magazines.
Many models of guns which are rarely used in a crime, are now required to be registered, or illegal for people to own, in some states. Those laws are being challenged in court.
This desire to remove power from the people is reflected in the push to place severe restrictions on the sale of .50 BMG caliber rifles. The authors of the legislation don't claim these guns are significant in crime.
Only one homicide in the United States appears to have been committed with a .50 caliber rifle, in the case of Adam Wickizer, in Moosic, Pennsylvania. The case likely involved a muzzle-loading rifle, not a .50 BMG caliber. The murderer was a convicted felon. Articles about the case do not identify the rifle.
The people who want to ban .50BMG caliber rifles wish to ban them because they have military purposes. One argument frequently heard by those pushing for gun registration, is to ban “weapons of war.”
The most explicit reason for the Second Amendment is to ensure the people retain a large measure of military power, to balance the power of the government. It is stated in the present participle of the Second Amendment, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” The people are to have the right to keep and bear arms, in part so that they can form militias. The Republic is in grave danger when congressmen openly state they fear military power in the hands of the people. Gun registration is advocated by people who want the power of government to be unlimited.
The only practical effect of gun registration is gun confiscation, whether it is done individually and piecemeal, as legal requirements to own a gun become more and more difficult, or en mass, when politicians feel the necessity to disarm citizens to further the politicians' control, consolidate their, power, or prevent insurrection.
Governments that push for gun registration distrust their people and have earned the people's distrust.
About Dean Weingarten:
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of constitutional carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and recently retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
The New York Times was forced to delete a tweet that praised Communist dictator Mao Zedong – who was responsible for the deaths of around 45 million people – as a “great revolutionary leader.”
Under Mao’s Great Leap Forward policy, over the course of just 4 years between 1958-1962 some 45 million people starved to death, making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.
Countless other victims also lost their lives as a result of Mao’s ruthless oppression, incarceration and execution of political adversaries who stood in his way.
That historical context was noticeably absent when the NY Times effusively tweeted about how Mao, “died one of history’s great revolutionary figures.”
The newspaper was forced to walk it back after a huge online backlash.
“We’ve deleted a previous tweet about Mao Zedong that lacked critical historical context,” the Times tweeted.
We’ve deleted a previous tweet about Mao Zedong that lacked critical historical context.
This is by no means the first time the New York Times has run defense for the most genocidal leader of the entire 20th century.
In a 1973 op-ed, globalist David Rockefeller praised Chairman Mao for leading “one of the most important and successful” social experiments in “human history.”
Inside China's 'thought transformation' camps - BBC News
The BBC has been given rare access to the vast system of highly secure facilities thought to be holding more than a million Muslims in China’s western region of Xinjiang.
Authorities there insist they are just training schools. But the BBC’s visit uncovers important evidence about the nature of the system and the conditions for the people inside it.
The BBC's China Correspondent John Sudworth sent this report.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
Even as the United Nations brazenly attacks the United States over alleged “human rights” issues, the UN is facing global criticism for censoring a formal complaint against the Communist Chinese dictatorship's mass incarceration of ethnic Uighur Muslims in “re-education” camps. The UN is also under fire after it tried to cover up the fact it gave the Chinese regime the names of dissidents who exposed communist crimes.
The latest complaint, filed by over 120 non-governmental organizations from around the world, sought to have UN leaders and agencies condemn Beijing's “escalating abuse” of the UN's rules to silence discussion about China's monstrous human-rights violations. Instead, UN leaders chose to help the regime in China sweep the scandals under the rug.
The current saga began in March when UN Watch chief Hillel Neuer spoke out about the communist regime's abuses against the Uighur (also spelled Uyghur) population in China's far-Western Xinjiang province known as East Turkestan. Beijing's delegates continually interrupted him, pounding and hollering, in an effort to shut down the embarrassing and horrifying testimony.
UN Human Rights Council President Coly Seck of Senegal reportedly told Neuer to “stick to the agenda item,” implying that discussion of barbaric Chinese persecution of an ethnic and religious minority by Beijing did not belong in a forum on “racial discrimination.” Seck later told the Chinese delegation not to disturb the proceedings.
As The New American magazine and other publications have documented extensively, the Chinese dictatorship has interned at least a million Muslims in what authorities refer to as “counter-extremism centers.” Some estimates suggest millions of victims are in the “re-education” camps and programs. And the entire region now resembles a “massive internment camp,” observers say.
Beijing's behavior — at home and at the UN — goes beyond that of a rogue state. But now, the UN is complicit, too, critics say. When a complaint against the Chinese regime's recent antics at the UN Human Rights Council was filed by Switzerland-based UN Watch and 125 other UN-accredited NGOs, the dictator-dominated UN literally refused to publish it.
“In our 15 years of submitting written statements to the UN for publication, this is the first time I've experienced such blatant, heavy-handed and unapologetic censorship,” Neuer said in a September 6 statement, adding that anti-Semitic drivel submitted by others is published routinely. “In 2005 and 2010, the UN asked us to make certain modest edits to written statements, such as replacing the word 'regime' with 'government', but we've never seen anything like this before.”
“That the UN is now barring the entire publication of major NGO statements while refusing to tell us which word, sentence or even statement is allegedly in breach of a UN rule is simply Kafkaesque,” the UN Watch director continued. “By exercising arbitrary censorship, the UN is also in breach of our right to freedom of expression, as guaranteed under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”
Other critics went further. Some accused the UN of aiding and abetting the crimes taking place against Uighurs. Consider that the UN deployed its top “counter-terrorism envoy” to Xinjiang (also known as East Turkestan) in mid-June on an official trip at the request of Beijing, tacitly endorsing the re-education camps as a supposed measure to deal with “extremism” and even “terrorism.”
“It is truly shameful for the UN that its Under Secretary for Counterterrorism Vladimir Voronkov visited East Turkestan and China at a time [when] anywhere from one to three million Uyghurs have been locked up in Chinese concentration camps for more than two years,” World Uyghur Congress President Dolkun Isa explained, calling it an “irrevocable mistake.”
“This official visit, approved by the UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres, allows China to link its crimes against humanity in East Turkestan as a necessary counter-terrorism measure,” said Isa. “Instead of raising and investigating China’s horrific treatment of the Uyghur people, the visit by Voronkov should be seen as the UN not only endorsing China’s repression of the Uyghur people but rather legitimizing and collaborating with the authoritarian government in Beijing to further suppress the Uyghur people.”
The UN refused to specify exactly why it would not follow its own procedures in regards to the complaints filed by NGOs. Instead, it merely claimed that “personal attacks” are not allowed and that the filings must be “relevant” to the work of the UN Human Rights Council. An appeal questioning the censorship was also denied. Instead, a coalition of 50 UN member states just signed a letter praising the Chinese regime for its human-rights record. Seriously.
“It's bad enough that dictatorships like Iran and Venezuela endorse China's abuses,” said Neuer from UN Watch after the ordeal. “But when the UN's own human rights office joins in by censoring speeches and statements about China, and when they put Chinese dissidents and their families at risk by handing over their names to the repressive regime, then we are in a very dangerous place.” He added that Beijing's “growing and pernicious influence” within the UN was “alarming” and that civil society must be allowed to speak out on behalf of the regime's victims.
Meanwhile, the UN's “human rights” machine has been working overtime to attack and demonize the United States. As The New Americanreported last month, the UN recently blasted Americans states seeking to restrict the murder of unborn babies, claiming abortion is a “human right.” The UN also slammed U.S. border security and immigration policy. And in recent years, top UN officials have attacked the right to keep and bear arms, free speech, due process, and numerous other God-given rights protected under the U.S. Constitution.
In Article 29 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, the document makes clear that the “rights” can be limited by “law” under virtually any pretext. It also says that the alleged “rights” may “in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” In short, individuals have no inalienable rights under the UN's view, only privileges that can be revoked at will.
It is time for serious measures. Clearly, reform is not possible — the UN is doing exactly what it was set up to do. The U.S. government should quit legitimizing and financing the UN's absurdities through its membership and dues. Anything less is an endorsement of the UN's escalating extremism, making Americans complicit in it all.
Uighur Woman Recalls Journey from Chinese Camp to US
The greatest concentration of Muslims in China is in Xinjiang province, where 10 million Uighurs live. Repressed by the Chinese government, more than 1 million Uighurs are estimated to be held in detention camps, a U.N. report says. Beijing denies any human rights are being violated, but accounts of violations persist, including from a Uighur woman who journeyed from a detention camp to the United States. VOA's Saba Shah Khan has her story.
Originally published at - https://www.voanews.com/a/uighur-woma...
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
The National Rifle Association (NRA) fired back on Monday against the San Francisco Board of Supervisors by filing a lawsuit claiming that the board’s resolution declaring the NRA a “domestic terrorist organization” violated its First Amendment rights to free speech.
A simple declaration by the board would likely have not generated the pushback from the NRA, which supports the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech. But the board overreached, according to the NRA, when it resolved to “take every reasonable step to limit those entities who do business with the City and County of San Francisco from doing business with” the NRA.
The NRA’s lead attorney, William Brewer, declared that the board’s “action is an assault on all advocacy organizations across the country. There can be no place in our society for this manner of behavior by government officials. Fortunately, the NRA, like all U.S. citizens, is protected by the First Amendment.”
In its opening statement the lawsuit refers to a landmark Supreme Court case ruling from 1943 that has already settled the matter: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. The court concluded:
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
The lawsuit states that the non-binding resolution “is a frivolous insult — but San Francisco’s actions [in seeking to limit entities from doing business with the NRA] pose a nonfrivolous constitutional threat.” The lawsuit went further:
The Resolution intentionally violates the First Amendment speech and association rights of the NRA and its members. Defendants’ conduct would chill a person of ordinary firmness from continuing to speak against gun control, or from associating expressively or commercially with the NRA; these ongoing constitutional violations constitute irreparable injuries.
There’s another Supreme Court ruling that also blocks San Francisco from limiting its entities from doing business with the NRA: Board of County Commissioners, Wabaunsee County, Kansas v. Umbehr, decided in 1996. Keen Umbehr owned a trash hauling business and a sharp tongue. After suffering much criticism from him, the commissioners voted to terminate his contract with the county. As the Supreme Court ruled in that case:
The First Amendment protects independent contractors from the termination or prevention of automatic renewal of at-will government contracts in retaliation for their exercise of the freedom of speech….
We recognize the right of independent government contractors not to be terminated for exercising their First Amendment rights.
As Jacob Sullum, writing for Reason, pointed out, the board’s resolution, if upheld, would have a chilling effect on the freedom of speech not only of the NRA but of any person in any way supportive of the organization who has even the most tenuous of ties to the city of San Francisco. He wrote:
Imagine a printer who does work for the NRA at a discounted rate because he agrees with the organization’s goals. If the city stopped hiring the printer because of his “financial and contractual relationships” [language included in the resolution] with the NRA, it would likewise be discriminating against him based on his political views.
The safest bet for the Northern District Court, San Francisco division, would be to uphold the NRA and rule against the city’s board of supervisors as an appeal of an opposite ruling would surely be filed with the Supreme Court. As that court has at least two precedents in similar cases on which to rely, the board’s resolution would more than likely be tossed in favor of the First Amendment.
