Pope Warns Church Must Find Balance or Fall 'Like House of Cards'

Pope Warns Church Must Find Balance or Fall 'Like House of Cards'
September 19, 2013

Source

BIG changes are in the air...can you smell it yet? From my vantage point it doesn't matter whether the Pope and the Vatican are sincere. Their public actions in and amongst themselves since the Pope changeover are unprecedented and represent a major shift happening now and forthcoming exponentially. ~BK

Pope Francis said the Catholic Church should not allow its bans on gay marriage, abortion and contraception to dominate its teachings, but must be a more welcoming Church where priests are understanding pastors and not cold, dogmatic bureaucrats.

In a dramatically blunt interview with Civilta Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit monthly, Francis said the Church had locked itself up in "small things, in small-minded rules". It must find a new balance between upholding rules and demonstrating mercy, "otherwise even the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall like a house of cards..."

The interview was published simultaneously Thursday in other Jesuit journals, including America magazine in the U.S.
Related: Pope Francis On ... Priorities, Influences, Nuns, Artists

Francis, the first non-European pope in 1,300 years and the first from Latin America, did not hold out the prospect of any changes soon to such moral teachings.

In the long interview with the magazine's director, Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, he also said he envisioned a greater role for women in the 1.2 billion member Church but suggested it would not include a change in the current ban on a female priesthood.

In an remarkable change from his predecessor Benedict, who said homosexuality was an intrinsic disorder, Francis said that when homosexuals told him they were always condemned by the Church and felt "socially wounded", he told them "the Church does not want to do this".

He re-stated his comments first made on the plane returning from Brazil in July that he was not in a position to judge gays who are of good will and in search of God.

In the interview released on Thursday, he added: "By saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person."


CHURCH SHOULD BE "A FIELD HOSPITAL"

The Church, he said, should see itself as "a field hospital after a battle" and try to heal the larger wounds of society and not be "obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently."

John Gehring, Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a liberal advocacy group in the United States, said:

"This pope is rescuing the church from those who think that condemning gay people and opposing contraception define what it means to be a real Catholic.

"Francis is putting a message of mercy, justice and humility back at the center of the church's mission. It's a remarkable and refreshing change."

The interview of some 12,000 words took place over three sessions in August in his simple quarters in the Vatican and was released on Thursday simultaneously in translations by Jesuit journals around the world.

"We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that," he said.

"But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the Church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the Church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time," he said.

Speaking specifically of homosexuals, he said:

"We must always consider the person. Here we enter into the mystery of the human being. In life, God accompanies persons, and we must accompany them, starting from their situation. It is necessary to accompany them with mercy. When that happens, the Holy Spirit inspires the priest to say the right thing," he said.

The Catholic Church teaches that homosexual tendencies are not sinful but homosexual acts are.

 But in several parts of the interview, which took place in his simple quarters in a Vatican guest house where he has lived since his election instead of the spacious papal apartments, he stressed the need for mercy and understanding by priests.

"The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better," he said.

The pope also spoke about the role of women in the Church, saying their "deep questions must be addressed".

"We must therefore investigate further the role of women in the Church. We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman. Only by making this step will it be possible to better reflect on their function within the Church," he said.

He hinted that he was open to giving women greater decision-making roles in the Church.

"The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions. The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the Church is exercised for various areas of the Church," he said.

 

AK: The True Size of the Shadow Banking System Revealed (Spoiler: Humongous)

http://americankabuki.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-true-size-of-shadow-banking-system.html

in The Physics arXiv Blog
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/5e1dd9d1642

The True Size of the Shadow Banking System Revealed (Spoiler: Humongous)

The shadow banking system is vastly bigger than regulators had thought, say econophysicists who have developed a powerful new way to measure its hidden impact

In most parts of the world, the banking system is closely regulated and monitored by central banks and other government agencies. That’s just as it should be, you might think.

But banks have a way round this kind of regulation. For the last decade or so, it has become common practice for banks to do business in ways that don’t show up on conventional balance sheets. Before the 2008 financial crisis, for example, many investment banks financed mortgages in this way. To all intents and purposes, these transactions are invisible to regulators.

This so-called shadow banking system is huge and important. Indeed, many economists blame activities that took place in the shadow banking system for the 2008 crash.

But the size of the system is hard to measure because of its hidden and impenetrable nature. But today, Davide Fiaschi , an economist at the University of Pisa in Italy, and a couple of pals reveal a powerful and simple way of determining the size of the shadow banking system.

Their conclusions are revealing. They say that the shadow banking system is vastly bigger than anyone had imagined before. And although its size dropped dramatically after the financial crisis in 2008, it has since grown dramatically and is today significantly bigger than it was even then.



Perhaps the biggest problem with measuring the shadow banking system is that nobody quite knows how to define it. Economists say it includes activities such as hedge funds, private equity funds credit insurance providers and so on. But there is significant debate over where to draw the line.

The de facto arbiter of this question is the Financial Stability Board set up in 1999 by the Group of Seven developed nations. It estimates the size of the shadow banking system each year by adding up all the transactions that fall outside mainstream regulation, or at least as much of this as it can see.

The Board estimated the size of the shadow banking system to be just over $60 trillion in 2007, the year before the great financial crash. This figure dropped a little in 2008 but rose again to $67 trillion in 2011. That’s more than the total GDP of the 25 countries from which the figures are obtained.

Now Fiaschi and co say the Financial Stability Board has severely underestimated the total. These guys have developed an entirely different way of calculating its size using the emerging discipline of econophysics.

These guys begin with empirical observation that when economists plot the distribution of companies by size, the result is a power law. In other words, there are vastly many more small companies then there are large ones and the difference is measured in powers of 10. So not 2 or 3 or 4 times as many but 100 (10^2), 1000 (10^3) or 10,000 (10^4) times as many.

These kinds of power laws are ubiquitous in the real world. They describe everything from the size distribution of cities, websites and even casualties in war.

That’s not really surprising. A power law is always the result when things grow according to a process known as preferential attachment, or in common parlance, the rich-get-richer effect.

In economic terms, big businesses grow faster than smaller ones, perhaps because people are more likely to work with big established companies. Whatever the reason, it is a well observed effect.

Except in the financial sector. Fiaschi and co say that this power law accurately governs the distribution of small and medium-sized companies in the financial world. But when it comes to the largest financial companies, the law breaks down.

For example, the UK’s Royal Bank Of Scotland is the 12th largest firm on the planet with assets of $2.13 trillion.

If the size of these firms followed a power law, the largest would be ten times bigger than the 10th on the list. But that isn’t the case. But world’s largest, Fannie Mae, has assets worth $3.2 trillion, just 50% larger than the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Why the discrepancy? Fiaschi and co hypothesise that the difference is equal to the size of the shadow banking system, which is not captured in the balance sheets of the largest financial firms.

And if that’s the case, it’s straightforward to calculate its size. The value of the shadow banking system is simply the difference between the value of the largest financial firms and their projected size according to the power law.

By this measure, the shadow banking system is significantly bigger than previously thought. Fiaschi and co estimate that in 2007, the year before the financial crisis, it was worth around $90 trillion. This fell to about $70 trillion in 2008 but has since risen sharply to be worth around $100 trillion in 2012.

This new Shadow Banking Index has significant advantages over conventional ways of calculating its size. “This index is based on simple and robust statistical features, that are expected to characterize the collective behavior of an economy,” says Fiaschi and co.

That’s useful because the growing complexity of the financial markets makes them hard to measure directly. Fiaschi and co point out that any detailed description and classification of financial activity is unlikely to keep pace with the rate of innovation in the financial industry.

So the new Shadow Banking Index looks to be an important step towards the proper and meaningful oversight of an industry that is hugely valuable and important and yet increasingly complex and renegade.

Of course, there is an 800lb gorilla in the room. That’s how these financial companies come to be so huge in the first place. The global economy is dominated by financial firms. On the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world’s largest companies, the first non-financial firm is General Electric, which ranks 44th.

How can that be? If it isn’t evidence that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, then it’s hard to imagine what would constitute such proof.

The size and impenetrability of the shadow banking system is clearly part of the problem so an index that can measure it quickly and easily is a useful step in the right direction.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1309.2130: The Interrupted Power Law And The Size Of Shadow Banking

Rumor Mill: White House Gets Ready for a Shutdown

Rumor Mill: White House Gets Ready for a Shutdown
September 18, 2013
http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/322927-agencies-should-prepare-for-shutdown-white-house-says#ixzz2fGdIF2bm
Not sure what to make of this just yet. ~BK

Another supporting piece:

http://alt-market.com/articles/1721-is-the-fed-ready-to-cut-americas-fiat-life-support

The White House told federal agencies on Tuesday to prepare for a government shutdown.

President Obama's budget director Sylvia Matthews Burwell in a memo to agencies said they should set their plans in case Congress fails to pass a funding measure by the end of the month. The government would shut down Oct. 1 without action by Congress.

While there is time for Congress to act, Burwell wrote that "prudent management" requires agencies to prepare for a shutdown. 


Only activities that are required by law would be allowed to continue to function during a shutdown, the memo states. A similar memo was released twice in 2011 amid potential shutdowns.

Conservative Republicans in the House and Senate are demanding that any government funding bill include language defunding ObamaCare and have said they will oppose a funding measure that doesn't include the ObamaCare defunding language.

Since Senate Democrats and President Obama are not expected to accept such language, the bill would likely lead to a government shutdown Oct. 1.

GOP leaders are expected to discuss various options for moving forward at a conference meeting Wednesday. Leaders appear to be leaning toward bringing a bill to the floor that would include language defunding ObamaCare.

The last government shutdown came in 1996. Washington came close to shutting down several times in 2011 amid budget fights.

 

Russia to provide UNSC with data for chem weapons' use by Syrian rebels

 

 

Russia to provide UNSC with data for chem weapons' use by Syrian rebels

September 18, 2013

http://rt.com/news/russia-syria-evidence-chemical-023/

 

Russia will provide the UN Security Council with data proving that the chemical weapons near Damascus were used by the opposition, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said. The materials were handed to Russia by the Syrian government of Bashar Assad.

“We have plenty of reports on chemical weapons use, which indicate that the opposition regularly resorts to provocations in order to trigger strikes and intervention against Syria,” Lavrov said. “There’s a lot of data. It’s widely available on the Internet. This data is presented in the report, which our experts put together in association with the use of chemical weapons in Aleppo in March this year. There’s also plenty of data on the incidents that occurred in August in Ghouta, near Damascus.”

“All of this will be considered in the Security Council, together with a report, which was submitted by UN experts, confirming that chemical weapons were used,” he added.

The minister stressed that “it’s yet to be established,” which side in the Syrian conflict – opposition or government – is responsible for the use of chemical weapons.


The Russian FM said that the Syrian authorities handed the data to Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergey Ryabkov, who is currently on a visit in Damascus.


“I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m sure that the experts are going to work with it and, of course, we’ll provide it to the security council,” he added.

‘No Russian chemical weapons in Syria’ – Kremlin

Neither Russia, nor the USSR has ever supplied chemical weapons to any other foreign state, Sergey Ivanov, the head of the Kremlin’s administration, stressed.

"Nobody disputes the fact that the Soviet Union has never shipped warheads armed with sarin to Syria or any other country,” the official is cited as saying by Interfax-Ukraina news agency.

The statement comes after the report by the UN experts in Syria claimed that a rocket found on the site of the August 21 chemical attack near Damascus had writings in Cyrillic on it.

According to Ivanov, the ammunition used in the chemical attack in Ghouta, near the Syrian capital was most likely “backyard produced.”

Previously, US Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, said that there’s plenty of chemical arms in the Syria, which was supplied to the country by the Russians.

The US and its allies blame Assad forces for using sarin gas against civilians in a chemical attack near the Syrian capital, Damascus, on August 21.

Despite the Syrian government denying the accusations and no proof of its guilt being presented by Washington, Obama announced that there would be “limited military” action against Assad because the use of chemical weapons can’t be tolerated.

But the US strikes were put on hold after a Russian proposal to hand the Syrian chemical weapons arsenal to international inspectors for destruction, a plan that received the full backing of Assad’s government.

The civil war, in which the Syrian government is fighting what it calls Western-backed Islamist militants, has been raging in the Arab country since March 2011, and has claimed over 100,000 lives, according to UN estimates.

BREAKING: Government Whistleblower Exposes Hip Hop Conspiracy

 

 

BREAKING: Government Whistleblower Exposes Hip Hop Conspiracy

September 17, 2013

 

This video was sent to me by Bob earlier and has since been shared on Facebook by a friend of mine. So, I'm inclined to help get this out there, despite not being able to prove the legitimacy of this guy's claim. I've heard many stories in the past of Michael Jackson being murdered due to his gung ho approach to exposing corruption, but this is the first time I've heard it from a whistle blower. Discernment suggested. ~BK

 



Scott Bartle: CONfinance & the Corporations Act of 2001

Scott Bartle: CONfinance & the Corporations Act of 2001
September 17, 2013

This video is perfect for anyone who wants a better understanding of all the various ways banks "provide funds." This proves that it doesn't have to be through "lending money." This video was produced in Australia, but I'm fairly certain all the same fundamentals apply for the Corporations Act of 2001 for the U.S. Scott lays down a great opportunity for going your bank to have a discussion with the manager, to test their knowledge of their own banking practices. Nice work Scott! ~BK

David Wilcock: We are Building up to Something Very Significant

 

 

David Wilcock: We are Building up to Something Very Significant
September 17, 2013
http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/1151-dw-radio

Good data in this piece by David as usual. However, he still seems to be sold on the whole "mass arrest" scenario, which I'm not so convinced on these days. ~BK


A radio show from Friday the 13th (interestingly enough) features David Wilcock discussing the cycles of history, and why the collapse and defeat of the negative agenda is utterly inevitable. It is a law of nature -- like any other.
 

SO MUCH IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW

Internet access is very restricted at the place I'm staying in Canada. They advertise it as "not high-speed," but more to the point, it's often "not at all!"

I figured a short update was better than none. I have been doing a lot of healing here, and feel very inspired to write -- as long as I don't lose it along the way.

I wouldn't dare try to write anything large at this point, because with web-based editing, it's bound to get deleted while in development -- in the midst of such bad reception.

I've taken lots of pictures of the local scenery, and will upload more of it as time goes on. In the meantime, that's probably not what you came here for!


WE ARE BUILDING UP TO SOMETHING VERY SIGNIFICANT
Major geopolitical events are happening at an incredible speed. It is becoming increasingly obvious that we are building up to something very significant.

When you consider the possibility that classified technology exists that can boldly manipulate the weather, causing freak problems, the current chaos takes on an even deeper level of potential significance.

Yosemite wildfires. Boulder flash floods. Everything is too hot or too cold. There's either too much water or nowhere near enough.

Some of this is definitely a natural effect. However, there is a real possibility that technologies exist that could be enhancing these problems as well. For now.

The whole negative-elite objective right now seems to be: "DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO DISTRACT THEM FROM THE NSA DISCLOSURES."

Syria clearly appeared to be another desperate attempt to sway the headlines away from the ever-increasing NSA disclosures.

It did not work.


WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH

The public has finally had enough of sudden, knee-jerk responses to questionable atrocities -- which, in turn, get us embroiled in long-term, unwinnable wars.

Wars generate very significant profits. The same "usual suspects" need these wars. It's their number-one way to raise the money they desperately need to maintain control.

Military strikes kill innocent people. Lives are being lost as these geopolitical chess games play themselves out.

A gas attack is a horrible thing. So is having your body blown apart from an attack with explosives.

To respond to violence by instantly creating more violence, rather than pursuing peaceful means first, is the peak of insanity.

Thankfully, the public saw this as Iraq 2.0, which it was -- and nobody bought into it.

Even the manipulated polls couldn't get better than a 10-percent approval rating.


CHECKMATE

Kerry's epic mis-step gave Putin an opportunity to propose a full elimination of the CW arsenal in Syria -- and it worked.

 

 

If I had actually thought Syria was going to turn into a war, I would have written about it much sooner.

All along, I never felt that this one was going to happen.


"LIKE ANOTHER MASS SHOOTING..."

Last night, I drove to a place where I could use my phone, and talked to one of my top insiders for over an hour.

This is the same insider who recently said "Every time the Ponzi scheme known as the Federal Reserve Note is about to collapse, they need another mass catastrophe to prop it back up again."

Last night I said, "Now that Syria fell through, they're going to have to cook up something else to try to distract the headlines and create fear and trauma -- like another mass shooting."

Little did I realize that it would happen the very next day.

 

 Here is the rest of the post on David's blog, Divine Cosmos:

http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/1151-dw-radio