America’s Uncertain Future. Prophesied War in the Middle East. HOW NOT TO DIE.

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America’s Uncertain Future

“Our world is changing before our eyes, and in ways that are highly dangerous for the current world order and the United States in particular. You need to understand why.

Mohammad Ismail/Reuters/Newscom

Afghan soldiers inspect some of the thousands of U.S. vehicles abandoned in the American pullout from Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, in July 2021.

As this issue of Beyond Today was going to press, the last U.S. combat troops were being withdrawn from Afghanistan. Only a token force of several hundred will be left to guard the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Perhaps nothing encapsulated the moment more poignantly than the U.S. withdrawal from the sprawling 30-square-mile Bagram Air Base, epicenter of America’s war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda for the last 20 years. The base was in reality a sizable city, built from the ground up on a large plain about an hour’s drive from Kabul.

It boasted American pizza and fast-food chain restaurants, air-conditioned fitness centers, a library, post office, a 50-bed hospital and a two-mile-long runway capable of handling dozens of U.S. fighter jets, reconnaissance aircraft and huge transport planes ferrying troops, weapons and supplies. At one time it was home for some 100,000 U.S. personnel.

In ironic timing, just before the July 4 Independence Day holiday, the last American occupants of the base shut off the electricity and slipped away into the night. Nearby looters arrived before Afghan soldiers and helped themselves to anything that wasn’t nailed down. Among items left behind were thousands of civilian trucks and vans and hundreds of armored vehicles, plus weapons and ammunition the Afghan soldiers would need to fight off the Taliban in battles sure to come.

Strategically, Bagram Air Base was a crucial military asset, located 500 miles from Iran and 400 miles from China, with runways that could handle any U.S. military aircraft of any size. But as is the case with so many critical American strategic assets in recent decades, it is no longer in U.S. hands—and will likely soon be in the hands of America’s enemies.

It’s the sad end of a 20-year saga that began with a highly coordinated terrorist assault on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. In righteous indignation America, with a coalition of allies, went to war against terror-supporting governments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But after 20 years, more than 60,000 U.S. casualties, and a fortune of almost $6.5 trillion in borrowed money squandered, American forces quietly withdrew, the nation no longer having the will to fight.

If you pay close attention to the news, you may have heard that America is said to now be facing more threatening and dangerous enemies. On June 9 U.S. President Joe Biden declared that global warming is “the greatest threat facing America.” Ironically, he said this as he arrived in Europe seeking support from allies against Russian hacking attacks that have devastated U.S. businesses and to combat Chinese secrecy over the origins of Covid-19, which has plagued the entire world.

Meanwhile, America’s true geopolitical opponents such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea grow ever more dangerous. They’re not focused on teaching their military a rewritten “woke” version of their nations’ histories; they’re training their soldiers, sailors and pilots how to destroy and kill their enemies—with the United States at the top of the list.

The uncomfortable truth is, America has lost another war, and appears to not be any wiser. The last significant war America truly won was World War II, more than 75 years ago. In Korea the United States fought to a draw and agreed to a truce, leaving tens of thousands of troops there for two-thirds of a century now. Vietnam was an ugly defeat at the cost of nearly 60,000 American lives, and after the U.S. withdrawal communists in Vietnam and Cambodia murdered some 1.5 million of their own people. America and its allies did defeat Iraq in the first Gulf War after Iraq invaded Kuwait, but Saddam Hussein was left in power, leading to the second Iraq war and another slow, painful retreat for U.S. forces, to be completed by the end of this year. Folly reigns in the halls of power.

These wars collectively cost trillions of dollars and more than 100,000 American lives, and what do we have to show for it?

Our world is changing before our eyes, and in ways that are highly dangerous for the current world order and the United States in particular. You need to understand why."

From: https://www.ucg.org/beyond-today/beyond-today-magazine/americas-uncertain-future

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Prophesied War in the Middle East

Daniel 11:40

““At the time of the end the king of the South shall attack him; and the king of the North shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter the countries, overwhelm them, and pass through.”

Bible prophecy describes a key end-time conflict between a “king of the South” and a “king of the North” that is part of a chain of events leading to the second coming of Jesus Christ. Here is some of the background to this verse from our post “End-Time Prophecy Jigsaw: The Pieces Are Falling Into Place!”

The book of Daniel tells us that in the last days there will be an influential person ruling in the south, that is, in the Mediterranean area and generally south of Jerusalem (Daniel 11).

Historically, this king of the South was the dynastic leader of the Ptolemies, or the Egyptian branch of the Greek Empire. The king of the South battled it out for over a century, as the Egypt-based Ptolemies struggled for supremacy against the Syria-based Seleucids, another branch of the Greek Empire. This took place in the third and second centuries B.C., after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. (Daniel 11:3-4).

Yet this same prophecy suddenly takes a huge leap to ‘the time of the end,’ when we find a latter-day king of the South provoking and fighting against the king of the North (Daniel 11:40). …

Daniel’s prophecy tells us that once this end-time king of the South has provoked the king of the North, the latter will swoop down on him with massive military force, and invade and conquer much of the Middle East (Daniel 11:40-43).

Elsewhere in Bible prophecy, the king of the North is referred to as ‘the beast,’ the name assigned him by the apostle John in the book of Revelation (Revelation 13:1-10; 17:3-17). We know from history that the heart of this massive end-time power will be in central Europe. In fact, much of the history of the Middle Ages reflects the struggle for dominance between Catholic Europe and the Muslim world, a struggle destined to reappear just before the second coming of Christ.”

For more details about this prophecy, see the articles “The King of the South” and “The King of the North.””      From: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/bible/blog/prophesied-war-in-the-middle-east/?

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HOW NOT TO DIE – The Role of Diet in Preventing, Arresting, & Reversing Our Top 15 Killers

“In this “best-of” compilation of his last prior four year-in-review presentations, Dr. Greger explains what we can do about the #1 cause of death and disability: our diet.

Excerpts from transcript of YouTube: https://youtu.be/P_fBTiqCnNI

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

“Allow me to begin on a personal note. This is a picture of me, right around the time that my grandma was diagnosed with end-stage heart disease and sent home to die. She had already had so many bypass operations, basically ran out of plumbing at some point, confined to a wheelchair, and there was nothing more they could do.  Her life was over at age 65. But then, she heard about this guy, Nathan Pritikin, one of our early lifestyle medicine pioneers.

And what happened next is chronicled in Pritikin’s biography. My grandma was one of the “death’s door” people. Frances Greger arrived in a wheelchair. “Mrs. Greger had heart disease, angina, and claudication; her condition was so bad she could no longer walk without great pain in her chest and legs.  Within three weeks, though she was not only out of her wheelchair but was walking ten miles a day.”

This is my grandma at her grandson’s wedding 15 years after she was given her medical death sentence, and thanks to a healthy diet, she was able to live another 31 years on this earth—until 96—to enjoy her six grandkids, including me.

That is why I went into medicine.

When Dr. Ornish published his Lifestyle Heart Trial years later, proving with quantitative angiography that coronary artery disease could indeed be reversed in the majority of patients without drugs or surgery—just a plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle changes, I assumed that it was going to be a game-changer. My family had seen it with their own eyes, but finally here it was in black and white, published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals on the planet.

But, nothing happened— leaving me to wonder if, effectively, the cure to our #1 killer could get lost down some rabbit hole and ignored, then, what else might be in the medical literature that can help my patients? I made it my life’s mission to find out.” 

“(Last year, Dr. Kim Williams became President of the American College of Cardiology. He was asked why he follows his own advice that he gives to patients, to eat a plant-based diet. “I don’t mind dying,” Dr. Williams replied. “I just don’t want it to be my own fault.””)

Lots more to see in the video or read the transcript at: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/flashback-friday-how-not-to-die-the-role-of-diet-in-preventing-arresting-reversing-our-top-15-killers/?

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