Sky Links, 2-1-20


Impeachment, John Bolton's Book, And His Cash Grab Gone Wrong
-Lance Walnau

John Bolton was a confidential advisor who has turned into a bitter enemy with a bruised ego, exploiting a nation's agony so that he can profiteer from a tell-all book. As Trump's enemies seek to exploit this division and turn Bolton against Trump, the President takes his case to the people. The battle lines get more intense as Bolton's document leaks. What happens next?




White House Summit on Human Trafficking


President Trump delivered remarks at the White House Summit on Human Trafficking, The 20th Anniversary of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The president then signed an Executive Order on child exploitation in the U.S.






The Origins of the Enneagram
-Marcia Montenegro








Explosion of the Enneagram among Evangelicals
-Krista Bontrager

The Enneagram isn't new. It's been circulating in Roman Catholic circles for a few decades. But its influence among evangelical Protestants has skyrocketed in the last few years. Here are just a handful of examples to illustrate how pervasive it has become.




Enneagram Christian Perspective: Is the Enneagram for Christians?
-Kap and Joy Chatfield












Christian Leaders are Saying Lies About You
-Mario Murillo








Mark Galli is telling lies about you. He doesn’t understand that the evil one has riled him up and given him a wispy need for recognition from the intellectual community. For ten years I have watched a number of smart Christians seduced in Berkeley by the need to water down their faith in order to be accepted among the “intelligentsia.”

Remember when Peter played the hypocrite and ate with Gentiles until the Jewish believers from Jerusalem arrived? Then he withdrew from the Gentile believers. Paul rebuked Peter publically, and wrote about it in the book of Galatians chapter 2! It’s the same thing. Guys like Mark Galli seem to need the approval of the media. Small wonder he appeared on CNN right after this.

Lest you think it is wrong to name names, take a look at the long list of heretics mentioned by name in the New Testament. From Paul calling out Alexander and Hymenaeus, to John naming Diotrophes. It is biblical to warn the sheep about wolves.

Mark Galli’s now infamous editorial where he called for Trump to be removed from office is his second lie. There is no evidence that Trump committed any impeachable offense. Nancy Pelosi found nothing. That’s why she hasn’t gone forward with the process and presented the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, holding up the trial she knows is going nowhere.

Mark Galli took their false accusation, and stated it as fact.

But he is not the only Christian Leader lying about you. Beth Moore tweeted Galli saying “My hat’s off to you, @markgalli. Respect.” She is commending someone for making a false accusation. She also lies by signaling that no true Christian man can support Trump.

It is also possible to lie by omission. Neither of these leaders ever criticized Obama or the Christians who violated their conscience by voting for Obama.





Is The Message as bad as they all say?
-Mike Frost


There are many criticisms of The Message, some of them justified. It’s not a reliable translation if that’s what you need. It’s a rendering of the text, an attempt to make the Bible accessible in the common vernacular. But as a doorway into serious Bible reading, it has been a gift to the church. At least that’s how my friend has found it.

In his book on Bible reading, Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson writes about his motivations in writing The Message. He goes so far as to say it’s a form of sacrilege to speak of God in language that is “inflated into balloons of abstraction or diffused into the insubstantiality of lacey gossamer.”

And that is the reason he agreed to provide people with a paraphrase of the Bible that makes sense in contemporary language. He sees it as part of the mission of God’s people. He explains:

“For those of us who take the Scriptures seriously as the word of God and the authoritative text by which we choose to live, translation is one of the primary defenses that we have against . . . letting language inflate into pomposities or artifices that are no longer current with the way we express our ordinary lives.”



Crowdstrike

The Transcript of the 7-25-19 Phone Call


Page 3:

CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims
-Aaron Maté

Before he nixed U.S. government contacts with Assange, Comey was implicated in another key investigative lapse – the FBI’s failure to conduct its own investigation of the DNC's servers, which housed the record of alleged intrusions and malware used to steal information. As Comey told Congress in March 2017, the FBI "never got direct access to the machines themselves." Instead, he explained, the bureau relied on CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, which "shared with us their forensics from their review of the system."

While acknowledging that the FBI would "always prefer to have access hands-on ourselves, if that's possible," Comey emphasized his confidence in the information provided by CrowdStrike, which he called "a highly respected private company" and "a high-class entity."

CrowdStrike's accuracy is far from a given. Days after Comey’s testimony, CrowdStrike was forced to retract its claim that Russian software was used to hack Ukrainian military hardware. CrowdStrike's error is especially relevant because it had accused the GRU of using that same software in hacking the DNC.

There is also reason to question CrowdStrike's impartiality. Its co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the preeminent Washington think tank that aggressively promotes a hawkish posture towards Russia. CrowdStrike executive Shawn Henry, who led the forensics team that ultimately blamed Russia for the DNC breach, previously served as assistant director at the FBI under Mueller.

And CrowdStrike was hired to perform the analysis of the DNC servers by Perkins Coie – the law firm that also was responsible for contracting Fusion GPS, the Washington, D.C.-based opposition research firm that produced the now discredited Steele dossier alleging salacious misconduct by Trump in Russia and his susceptibility to blackmail...


...While the extent of the FBI's reliance on CrowdStrike remains unclear, critical details are beginning to emerge via an unlikely source: the legal case of Roger Stone – the Trump adviser Mueller indicted for, among other things, allegedly lying to Congress about his failed efforts to learn about WikiLeaks' plans regarding Clinton’s emails.

Lawyers for Stone discovered that CrowdStrike submitted three forensic reports to the FBI that were redacted and in draft form. When Stone asked to see CrowdStrike's un-redacted versions, prosecutors made the explosive admission that the U.S. government does not have them. "The government … does not possess the information the defendant seeks," prosecutor Jessie Liu wrote. This is because, Liu explained, CrowdStrike itself redacted the reports that it provided to the government:

At the direction of the DNC and DCCC’s legal counsel, CrowdStrike prepared three draft reports. Copies of these reports were subsequently produced voluntarily to the government by counsel for the DNC and DCCC. At the time of the voluntary production, counsel for the DNC told the government that the redacted material concerned steps taken to remediate the attack and to harden the DNC and DCCC systems against future attack. According to counsel, no redacted information concerned the attribution of the attack to Russian actors.

In other words, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party’s legal counsel to decide what it could and could not see in reports on Russian hacking, thereby surrendering the ability to independently vet their claims. The government also took CrowdStrike's word that "no redacted information concerned the attribution of the attack to Russian actors."







Do You Care What People Think? How do you handle criticism?
-Shawn Bolz



How do I deal with criticism? I get asked from time to time...did you research that on Facebook? Wow! I don't have time for that! LOL! That would be so incredibly hard to do. The amount of work it would take to maintain a lifestyle of manufacturing would be all consuming. But when you are a lover of the Holy Spirit and a lover of truth, you can't let yourself get distracted by people who don't believe you. My job is never to convince people if they don't believe in it, it's not important for people to believe in me, but I want to help people understand these gifts: words of knowledge, wisdom and prophecy and I hope to help people believe in the gifts.

When you are processing your prophetic journey, you will have people who will not believe you. But the moment you compromise is the moment you ruin the whole thing for yourself. The moment you have to manufacture, it the moment you need to step out of the prophetic for a while.

Anytime you go after something new that's supernatural, you will get a lot of mixed reviews, and that is part of what you will deal with when you go after these gifts. I want to encourage you, you are not alone. A lot of people who are used in this way have gone through a season of rejection, and that's part of the journey and graduating. The moment you put people in the enemy category is the moment you will not have authority to love them. Focus on the right people that God has put in front of you!





Steven Strang, "God, Trump, and the 2020 Election".
-Eric Metaxas


Steven Strang returns to the studio with an interview that's sure to stir the pot in both the political and religious worlds when he shares thoughts from his new book, "God, Trump, and the 2020 Election".




Disputed NY Times '1619 Project' Already Shaping Schoolkids' Minds on Race
-John Murawski

Since its publication in August, the 1619 Project has been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states, according to the 2019 annual report of the Pulitzer Center, which has partnered with the Times on the project. Five school systems, including Chicago and Washington, D.C., have adopted it district-wide. It is mostly being used as supplemental, optional classroom teaching material. By and large, school systems are adopting the project by administrative fiat, not through a public textbook review process.

Even as it is being embraced by schools, the project is facing strong pushback from some leading scholars who say it presents a false version of American history. They dispute The New York Times’ claim that America’s true founding date is not 1776, the year the colonies declared independence from Great Britain, but 1619, when 20 to 30 enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, Va., leading to the creation of a “slavocracy” whose legacy of racism and oppression has been encoded in the nation’s DNA and hidden in plain sight.

Gordon Wood, a leading historian of the American Revolution and emeritus professor at Brown University, told RealClearInvestigations the Times material “is full of falsehoods and distortions.” In its current form, without corrections, which the Times has declined to run, the only way to use it in the classroom, he said, would be “as a way of showing how history can be distorted and perverted."

The 1619 Project reflects disputes about both the facts and meaning of American history at a time when the nation is divided by identity politics, including a movement to transform education in colleges and high schools through “ethnic studies,” an approach that emphasizes teaching about white oppression of minorities and their resistance to “whiteness.” Proponents of ethnic studies use the term “whiteness” to refer to the political, economic and cultural power structure imposed by a dominant culture of white Europeans.




What Not to Say to Someone Who is Grieving
-Kay Warren










Two Project Veritas Whistleblowers On Why They Blew The Whistle on Pinterest, CNN—With James O’Keefe, Cary Poarch, and Eric Cochran
-Jan Jekielek





At Turning Point USA’s 2019 Student Action Summit, we sat down with James O’Keefe, founder and president of Project Veritas, and two whistleblowers who came to his organization—Cary Poarch, a former CNN employee who shed light on what he saw as political bias at CNN, and Eric Cochran, a former software engineer at Pinterest who exposed evidence of how Pinterest appeared to censor Christian and pro-life content.

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