Ozzone 10-3 > The power of the saint lies in the coming down from the mountain and in the living down in humility

 

Ozzone 9-11 > Has God humbled you by bringing people like yourself around you?

 

Ozzone 8-22 > Have you ever felt completely unworthy of the Love of God? I hope so.

 

Inexpressible unworthiness is associated with both repentance and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. It is another nail in the coffin of self-love, an error taught by those who preach pop psychology rather than the Bible. 

Ozzone 8-4 > Are you courageous enough, and humble enough, to be a friend of God?

 

Ozzone 6-10 > Have you ever lamented (been afflicted before God), expressing your sorrow for the condition of your inner life? There is no thread of self-pity left, only the heart-rending difficulty and amazement which comes from seeing what kind of person you really are.

 

Ozzone - 5-1 > Can you do your work for God in complete obscurity?

..

Humility means working in obscurity without taking credit. Such work will stand you in good stead when you are before Jesus Christ on the day.

Ozzone 4-18 > Are you ready for whatever the Lord expects of you? Are you sure?

 

When God calls us to a particular duty, remember, He will not leave it to us and go away. He will always be there with us and help us to accomplish His will. So, when the Lord gives you a menial task that you might think is beneath your dignity – He is there with you, ready to get to work. He washed the disciples’ feet!

Dirty Underbelly: Shkreli Fires Off Drug Industry List of Failures

Martin Shkreli, aka Pharma Bro, showed the industry he’s not the guys to mess with after a pharma trade company launched an ad campaign which takes a pot shot at him. Shkreli has fired back with a website listing drug companies’ scandals.

"I’m pretty p***** off,” opens Shkreli on his YouTube post introducing this tell-all website, pharmaskeletons.com. “This lobby group, PhRMA, thinks it’s a good idea to come after me for the industry’s problems. So I made a website called Pharmaskeletons.com, and you can see the industry has quite a history of problems.”

The link above did not work for me, Shkreli may have taken the site down. Below is a 10:33 rant which probably contains most of what was on the site. It is laced with course language so caution advised.

Shkreli said he went through each member of the PhRMA lobbying group and made a website about some of the scandals that have plagued the companies in the past. He mentioned 26 specific drug companies and has harsh words for 25 of them.

“Because to call these companies model corporate citizens would be an error,” said Shkreli.

Shkreli’s website has an alphabetical list of drug companies, with notes and links to stories of some of the drugs that caused scandals for the company, whether for drug prices hikes, or burying side-effects of drugs, or extreme measures over drug recalls.

“Merck. I have a special place in heart to take a s*** on Merck. This is a company that has as their CEO a lawyer who prior to Merck worked at McDonald’s,” stated Shkreli.

“Merck had a drug called Vioxx. They allegedly hid the data that showed drug caused cardiovascular problems. Vioxx is a pain drug. It was pulled from the market. It almost took Merck down. The CEO, I mentioned, saved the company by settling these lawsuits. The fact of the matter is there is a dirty underbelly at Merck that was about selling Vioxx not about caring patients.”

I was on Vioxx for a few months and it worked wonderfully for pain and inflammation, but my heart went ridiculously a-rythmic and I had to stop taking it.

Shkreli gained notoriety when he hiked the price of a drug essential to many HIV patients by 5,000 percent.

What rankled with Shkreli was PhRMA’s new multi-million dollar ad campaign, launched on Monday, which aims to distance itself from Shrekli.

“Much of the public discussion has been myopically focused on drug prices and not on the value the products bring to patient care, the health care system, the economy as a whole. Much of the public discussion has been focused on some guy in a hoodie,” PhRMA CEO Stephen Ubl told CNBC, a reference to Shkreli’s trademark attire.

Ubl said the new campaign would show the world the drug industry is about hard work and scientific discovery, not price gouging.

“We want to close that gap. Less hoodie, more lab coats,” Ubl added.

Shkreli fired back at the end of his post on the website.

“Look in the mirror. This website took me half an hour to make, just 'membering a few moments from the past. Pharma is a wonderful industry that does great things, but trying to throw me under the bus is foolish. Let me remind you 90% of your members' CEOs could not hold a candle to me in scientific knowledge, achievements or wealth and entrepreneurial achievements,” he wrote.

Big Pharma needs to work on a pill for humility!

Berlin Head of Polish Culture Institute Fired for Promoting ‘Too Much Jewish Content’

    Polnisches Institut Berlin © wikipedia.org

The director of the Polish cultural institute in Berlin, Katarzyna Wielga-Skolimowska, has been fired by Poland’s Foreign Ministry because she allegedly promoted too much “unwanted content”, particularly concerning Polish-Jewish relations.

Wielga-Skolimowska was “dismissed immediately” last week, the institute’s spokesman, Marcin Zastrożny, confirmed to Germany's TAZ daily on December 2. According to Der Tagesspiegel, she was fired without any explanation or prior notice.

She was also ordered to leave the office immediately and depart her flat in Berlin at the end of December. She was not allowed to say goodbye to her subordinates in the institute, Der Tagesspiegel reported.

According to German media, it was the institute’s cultural program that led to her dismissal as it contradicted the cultural policy of the Polish government ruled by the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party that came to power in 2015.

The Polish ambassador to Germany, Andrzej Przylebski, sharply criticized Wielga-Skolimowska in an internal report in October, which was seen by dpa news agency. The dpa report stated that he particularly rebuked the former head of the Polish cultural institute in Berlin for “excessively covering ... topic[s] related to Polish-Jewish relations” and inviting what was called “unwanted” guests to events staged by the institute.

So, it appears Poland's new government wants to rewrite history and remove all shame from Nazi collusion during WWII. But that is not how you deal with shame - you accept your responsibility, repent, ask forgiveness, and then move on. You don't pretend it never happened or try to diminish the significance of the whole thing - you learn nothing that way; you just develop a shallow and false pride and leave yourself open to recommitting the same atrocities.

One has to wonder if growing antisemitism in Poland and the rest of Europe is contributing to this revisionism. Is another Holocaust possible in the not too distant future? As hard as it is to believe, I think it is not only possible but almost inevitable.

The issue of Polish-Jewish relations should not be promoted “especially in Germany, which should not take the role of mediator” in this field, the report, written by Przylebski said, adding that the institute should instead emphasize the importance of dialog between Poland and Ukraine or Poland and Lithuania, as reported by dpa.

“A blind imitation of nihilist and hedonist trends leads to nothing good in civilizational sense,” the report added, referring to Wielga-Skolimowska’s work.

    Katarzyna Wielga-Skolimowska

The ministry already expressed its discontent with Wielga-Skolimowska’s work for similar reasons. In early 2016, the Foreign Ministry negatively assessed the institute’s performance and appointed conservative Malgorzata Bochwic-Ivanovska to deputy head.

In April 2016, Poland’s Culture Minister, Piotr Glinski, called for "an end to the culture of shame” in relation to the Polish role in Holocaust and WWII. At the time, the Polish cultural institute in Berlin showed the Academy-Award winning film ‘Ida’ (2015) that tells the story of a young woman living in 1960s Poland, who found out that she was Jewish and her parents had been murdered by their Polish neighbors during WWII.

At the same time, the Polish Foreign Ministry insisted on showing another Polish film – a propaganda movie ‘Smolensk’, which suggested that the Polish presidential plane crash in Russia in 2010, which claimed the lives of all passengers aboard, was an act of terrorism orchestrated by Russia.

No German cinema agreed to show the movie, even though it was actively promoted by the institute’s deputy head, Bochwic-Ivanovska.

‘One cannot find better person to promote Polish culture’

– German artists

The decision of the Polish Foreign Ministry has caused a wave of criticism and indignation among German artists and cultural figures and even prompted them to write an open letter to Polish authorities.

The artists expressed their “embarrassment and irritation” over what they called “an unjustified and inexplicable decision” in a letter to the Polish ambassador in Berlin and Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski.

The initiative was put forward by Cilly Kugelmann, the program director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and supported by the head of the Berliner Festspiele arts center, Thomas Oberender, the director of the Maxim-Gorki-Theater, Shermin Langhoff and the head of a museum of modern art, photography and architecture in Berlin, Thomas Koehler, who signed the letter.

“One could not possibly find a better person to promote Polish culture,” the letter said, as cited by Der Tagesspiegel. “She [Wielga-Skolimowska] has an exceptional talent for communication,” Kugelmann told Der Tagesspiegel, adding that the former Polish cultural institute’s director promoted “an image of a young intelligent country that is ready to face its history.”

“So far, Poland’s culture was presented in the best possible way at different levels [in Germany],” Marcin Piekoszewski, who works for the German-Polish book store ‘Buchbund’, told TAZ, commenting on Wielga-Skolimowska’s work.

Wielga-Skolimowska worked as the head of Berlin’s Polish cultural institute for three years from 2013. Her contract was due to expire only in summer 2017.

She established a cultural exchange program between Poland and Germany, particularly in cooperation with the German Goethe-Institute promoting German culture in foreign countries.

She also created a forum for German and Polish artists, where they could discuss the modern art, architecture, music and journalism, TAZ reported.

The former director of Berlin’s Polish cultural institute also promoted the ‘Film Polska’ film festival in Berlin.

However, she was not the only one reportedly fired due to the inconsistency of her ideas with the Polish government’s policy.

One of many

According to Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza daily, 13 out of 24 directors of Polish cultural institutes across Europe were fired this summer.

This means that it is government policy to revise history. It's probably an attempt to build Polish pride, but humility wears much better.

Many of them were also criticized for inviting “unwanted” guests to their events, such as Austrian author and journalist Martin Pollack, who criticized the PiS party, or Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish writer and recipient of the German-Polish International Bridge Prize, who was accused of “tarnishing the good name of the Polish nation.”

Japan Doesn't Like Its WWII History, So It's Changing It

By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes
BBC News
 From the section Asia

Former comfort woman Lee Ok Seon says she was "kidnapped"

Seventy years after the end of World War Two, the voices of revisionism in Japan are growing stronger and moving into the mainstream, particularly on the issue of comfort women, who were women forced to be sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war.

One of the most eloquent voices of revisionism is Toshio Tamogami.

Mr Tamogami is well-educated, knowledgeable and, when I meet him, exquisitely polite. The former chief of staff of Japan's air force believes in a version of Japanese history that is deeply at odds with much of the rest of the world.

But it is increasingly popular among young Japanese, tired of being told they must keep apologising to China and Korea.

Last year Mr Tamogami ran for governor of Tokyo. He came fourth, with 600,000 votes. Most strikingly, among young voters aged 20 to 30 he got nearly a quarter of the votes cast.

"As a defeated nation we only teach the history forced on us by the victors," he says. "To be an independent nation again we must move away from the history imposed on us. We should take back our true history that we can be proud of."

In this "true" history of the 20th Century that Mr Tamogami talks of, Japan was not the aggressor, but the liberator. Japanese soldiers fought valiantly to expel the hated white imperialists who had subjugated Asian peoples for 200 years.

It is a proud history, where Japan, alone in Asia, was capable of taking on and defeating the European oppressors. It is also a version of history that has no room for the Japanese committing atrocities against fellow Asians.

Mr Tamogami believes that Japan did not invade the Korean Peninsula, but rather "invested in Korea and also in Taiwan and Manchuria".

I ask him about the invasion of China in 1937 and the massacre of civilians in the capital Nanjing. Surely that was naked aggression?

"I can declare that there was no Nanjing Massacre," he says, claiming there were "no eyewitnesses" of Japanese soldiers slaughtering Chinese civilians. Maybe because they were all dead.

Former chief of Japan's air forces, Toshio Tamogami, says that stories of
atrocities such as the Nanjing massacre in the 1930s are "lies and fabrication"

It is when I ask him about the issue of Korean comfort women that Mr Tamogami's denials are most indignant.

He declares it "another fabrication", saying: "If this is true, how many soldiers had to be mobilised to forcibly drag those women away? And those Korean men were just watching their women taken away by force? Were Korean men all cowards?"

Although they may not say it as loudly and as bluntly as Mr Tamogami, this is a version of history that is widely believed by many of Japan's nationalists.

Earlier this year at a joint session of the US Congress in Washington DC, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed deep sorrow for the suffering caused by Japan during WW2.

Mr Abe does not deny there were Korean women serving as comfort women near the frontlines in China and South East Asia.

But he has repeatedly said there is no evidence these women were coerced or that the Japanese military was involved in their recruitment and confinement. The implication is the women were prostitutes.

This is a very murky area. Girls from poor families have been sold in to prostitution in Japan, Korea and China for centuries, and the practice was certainly still going on in the 1930s and 1940s. No kidding! It's still going on today!

But that does not absolve the Japanese military from responsibility.

'We were kidnapped'

In a quiet valley an hour's drive from Seoul there is a small care home called the House of Sharing. This is where some of the last surviving comfort women are cared for in their old age. There are only ten left here now.

Lee Ok Seon is a tiny 88-year-old with thick white curly hair and badly-fitting false teeth. She chuckles as I try to cajole her to speak to me in Chinese.

Ms Lee spent 65 years in China, and only returned to South Korea 15 years ago.

She was born in the port city of Busan on the southern tip of modern day South Korea. Her family was poor and she was sent out to work at the age of 14.

"I had to start work as a housekeeper for another family at a young age. It was at that time I was out on the street one day… that's how I got kidnapped," she says.

She said two men grabbed her and put her on a train. "By the time we arrived I realised we had crossed the border into China. I was sent to a place where there were already several comfort women.

"I wonder why they called us comfort women. We didn't go by our own accord, we were kidnapped. I was forced to have sex with many men each day."

South Korean elderly women (yellow vests), who served as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II, hug the statue of a South Korean teenage girl in traditional costume called the 'peace monument' during the 1,000th weekly protest in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul on 14 December 2011.

Ms Lee spent three years in the brothel close to a Japanese military camp in Manchuria. I ask her why she didn't try to escape.

"Of course I tried to escape several times!" she says. "Each time I was taken back and I was beaten over and over.

The military police would ask me 'Why are you trying to escape?' I would tell them because I am cold and have no food. They would hit me again saying I talked too much."

She says that she lost part of her hearing and some of her teeth from those assaults.

Revisionists like Mr Tamogami say women like Lee Ok Seon have been coached to embellish their stories; that they are tools of a South Korean government that is intent on humiliating Japan and squeezing it for more money

It is certainly true that the comfort women issue is used by the South Korean government for its own political ends. But there is plenty of other evidence that the Japanese military organised the comfort women system, not least from the men who served in the Japanese imperial army in China.

'Ridiculous to deny'

Masayoshi Matsumoto is now 93 and lives with his daughter on the edge of Tokyo. He has a warm open face and the piercing eyes of a much younger man.

Former Japanese soldier Masayoshi
Matsumoto: "I call myself a war criminal"

As a 20-year-old he served as a medical orderly in northwest China. "There were six comfort women for our unit," he tells me. "Once a month I would check them for sexually transmitted diseases.

"The Korean women were mainly for the officers," he says. "So the ordinary soldiers attacked local villages screaming, 'Are there any good girls here?' Those soldiers robbed, raped, or killed those who did not listen to them."

Those who were captured were taken to Mr Matsumoto's unit to serve as comfort women.

After the war Mr Matsumoto became a priest to try and atone for his sins. For decades he said nothing of what he'd seen.

But then as the voices of denial grew stronger he was filled with righteous anger, and decided to speak out.

"It's ridiculous... Mr Abe speaks as if this is something he witnessed, but he didn't. I did," says Mr Matsumoto.

"Someone told me this, 'One who fails to look back and perceive the past will repeat their wrongdoing'. But Mr Abe thinks we should erase anything bad Japan had done in the past and pretend nothing happened. That is why I cannot forgive him," he adds.

Mr Matsumoto sits back in his chair and chuckles.

Hirohito

"One day the right-wingers will come and get me for saying such things," he says, drawing a finger across his throat.

That seems unlikely, but Mr Matsumoto and all the other survivors are now in their late 80s or 90s. Soon they will all be gone - while the voices of denial grow louder and stronger.

If you look at this from a spiritual viewpoint, Japan was humiliated during WWII and after because of its many atrocities, but perhaps mainly for its deification of the Emporer Hirohito, and its legendary pride. Hirohito was only recognized as less than a god when he surrendered Japan.

By revising Japan's history, their pride can return, and they think that is a good thing. It isn't! God, the real God, hates pride. He also hates lies. 

The Japanese don't recognize the inherent, sinful nature of man; if they did they would not seek after pride. God revealed that to them through their defeat in WWII. That they could easily forget that lesson within a hundred years, means God has to humiliate them again in order to get their attention.