Why we fear broad surveillance WHEN the brouhaha over the Department of Justice reading the e-mails of James Rosen, a Fox News reporter, broke last month, I wrote that it seemed quaint to be outraged about the department getting a warrant from a judge for a specific target (and eventually disclosing the warrant) when other agencies can obtain secret authority for much wider surveillance. What I wanted to write was that the National Security Agency (NSA) was doing the same sort of thing all the time. But I couldn't do that because I didn't know whether it was true, such surveillance being, you know, secret. I assumed that the NSA had probably been routinely accessing vast amounts of electronic communications from millions of Americans ever since we first learned this was happening under the Bush Administration. With the agency building a $2 billion facility in Utah to process multi-yottabyte quantities of data from its Global Information Grid, complete with the world's fastest decryption supercomputer, one assumes it's doing so for a reason. But we didn't officially know anything about exactly what information the NSA was harvesting. So now we know a tiny little bit. As my colleague outlines and the Guardian reports, on April 25th the NSA got a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordering Verizon to pass on records of all calls made on its network until July 19th. Verizon must give the NSA the numbers of the caller and the person called, the caller's location, and the time and duration of the call. There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that Verizon is the only network the NSA is monitoring, or that April-July is the only period they're monitoring. (Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, hints that this has been going on for seven years.) It seems entirely plausible that the NSA is simply recording everyone's calling data and locations, all the time, and that the court is approving warrants for them to do so. This casts a bit of a new light on the controversy years back over the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping programmes. If the FISA court is willing to approve surveillance this broad, it's hard to see why the administration ever wanted to circumvent it. On the other hand, if the court is willing to approve surveillance this broad, and the NSA doesn't have to disclose the fact of that surveillance, it's hard to see what the point of subjecting such surveillance to a court is. Hopefully the court would be much more leery of approving a warrant allowing the NSA to actually pore through the contents of everyone's phone calls, and perhaps enforcing that barrier is the court's raison d'etre. But one thing I haven't seen enough of in the coverage of the latest surveillance scandal is a reminder of what it is we're afraid of when the government collects such immense amounts of data in sweeps of our personal information. It's not the totalitarian fear that an agency that knows exactly where we are and who we're talking to at all times would find it easier to round us up; we're not a totalitarian state, and in any case, in modern America, if the police want to arrest you, they'll be able to find you. The legitimate fear boils down to two things. The first is the possibility of illegitimate pressure based on information we didn't intend to be made public. Everyone has secrets; everyone has things they'd prefer not be publicly known. If a detective who suspects you of committing a crime knows that when your wife called you at 11.30pm on Wednesday you were at the apartment of your attractive co-worker, that detective is likely to threaten to release that information to convince you to sign a confession. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that when we say "the government", we are actually referring to huge numbers of different agencies and individuals, each of which have their own interests and will use whatever information resources they get their hands on to pursue those interests. The second is the fear that a pattern of circumstantial activity will lead us to be falsely incriminated, or to suffer administrative penalties that don't even require any actual indictment. In the era of the no-fly list, it's not clear what set of activities are enough to get you to pop up on somebody's computer screen at DHS and turn your life into a Kafkaesque hassle-dome. Did you visit Qatar, then Pakistan, then Qatar again? Did you spray-paint artistic graffiti on a sidewalk that turned out to be too close to Dick Cheney's daughter's house? We don't know; our security agencies will never tell us. Giving the NSA a vast database of phone calls, and inviting them to search for correlations that might be predictive of terrorist activity, is likely to generate a massive number of false positives. It's not just the government that we need to watch here; the phone companies themselves routinely store call and location data from your phone, aggregate it, and sell it to third parties. Hopefully the FCC will ban that practice except with user consent, when it votes on it later this month. It would also be a good thing if the NSA were blocked from routinely mining patterns from every phone call made in America in the hopes of finding something that matches up with terrorism. Another approach would be to see whether we can erect clearly enforced firewalls that prohibit the NSA from sharing its knowledge that you were in bed with your mistress with prosecutors. Then again, the fact that different intelligence agencies weren't allowed to pool their knowledge was precisely what outraged Americans in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. And as for reining in the data-gathering activities, I'm a bit sceptical that blocking the NSA's routine court-monitored requests will go very far towards curtailing their other mind-boggling data-harvesting efforts. A while back I had a conversation about this with a longtime digital-freedom hacktivist who had initially been a senior advisor in the WikiLeaks project. I asked him what he thought were the most important political projects to protect online privacy and organisational openness. He said that ship had sailed; it was too late to carve out a zone of electronic freedom. The architecture had already been defined; the telecoms corporations and the government can learn whatever they want about you, and there was no way to undo what had been built. So, I asked, how did he plan on protecting himself against America's crusade against WikiLeaks? He didn't, he said. He had a family to consider. He'd dropped out.

The windows of Heaven will be opened to you.!!!

Benefits of Paying your Tithes

God promised to pour His blessing to you, by opening the windows of Heaven. When your heaven remains open you will struggle less. Little effort will yield bountiful harvest. Opportunities will be staring at you even you are not there the opportunity will still be waiting for you


Today we are going to see the Benefits of Paying your Tithes. Let us start this topic this way.

1. What is Tithe?
Tithe is a biblical word for the giving to the church or charity organizations the one out of the Ten or your salary, profits, or property that God blessed you with. We can see it in the book of Malachi 3:8-11.

2. The second question is, why should you pay Tithe?
The reasons why you should pay your Tithe are:
A. It is commandment by God to the Children of Israel in the book of Levi 27:30-32;
It reads:
''And all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree, is the LORD'S: it is holy unto the LORD.'' (KJV)

Paying of Tithe is never an option but a commandment from God to all. Your tithe belongs to God according to the scripture we just read in Leviticus 27:30. It is true that you worked for the money but bear in mind today that God is demanding that you should give His portion of the blessing which is the Tithe.
If you look at the whole story God is not even demanding too much from you He just said that you should give one of the Tenth and live on with the rest of the money or proceeds. So if you have not been paying your tithes start today to do so.

B. The second reason why you must pay Tithe is because it was practiced by the people of old. Let see one example from the Bible. Let us see Father Abraham. The book of Genesis 14:18-20 says:
v18: ''And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God.'' (KJV)
v 20: ''And blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And he gave him tithes of all.'' (KJV)


The scripture we just read tells us about Abraham paying Tithe to a high priest Melchizedek the priest of Salem. Abraham paid him Tithes of his substances. So Tithes is a commandment. Therefore the saints of old practiced it. So you too should be ready to practice paying of your tithes from today.
During the time that Abraham paid Tithe, the law had not been given. So those who said Tithes are for the old Testament should note that Abraham paid Tithe before the giving of the law to Moses in Leviticus.

Now having seen Why we must pay our Tithes, let us see:
3. How Tithes should be paid.
A. When paying of Tithes ensure that you pay the complete Tithe. Don't be like those who pay their Tithes after they must have removed their expenses for the month, then the remaining money they remove one tenth and pay their Tithe. That is not Tithe. Doing so is not paying of Tithe but you have just given an offering. Offering has no conditions attached to it like Tithe. In offering you pay any amount you choose to pay. But in Tithe it is the one tenth of your profit or salary. And you must remove your Tithe first before spending the money for your needs.

4. Where To Pay Your Tithe. I hope your are following the lesson? We have seen How to Pay our Tithes Now let us see where the Tithes should be paid. The Tithe should be paid to the house of God. The house of the lord is the right place to pay your Tithe. Look at Abraham, He paid his tithe to Melchizedek the priest of Salem. In other words Melchizedek is a type of Christ the High priest of our salvation. If Abraham recognized the office of Melchizedek to pay his Tithe to him you and I should recognize the house of God to pay our Tithe too.
All Tithes should be paid for the use God’s work.

5. The consequences of Not Paying Tithes. At this point we shall be looking at the consequences of not paying Tithes. What we mean is the punishment that comes for not paying Tithes.
A. The first consequence is that you are a Thief in the sight of God. In the book of Malachi 3:8-9
v8: ''Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings.'' (KJV)

v 9: ''Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation.'' (KJV)

Have you seen it in the two verses just quoted in the book of Malachi. It says that those who are not paying their Tithes are spiritual Robbers. It means that you are not different from physical thieves that our Government is looking for a way to eliminate out our country. In that case God is also not happy with you. That takes us to the second consequence:
B. You are cursed by God.

v 9: ''Ye are cursed with a curse, '' When a man is under a curse he cannot know any blessing in his life. He will be struggling when others are succeeding. Poverty will be written all over his life. To such a person his problem is not capital or lack of job opportunity. Even if you find him the best job or give him millions to start a business because he is under a curse he cannot prosper.
So the alternative is to start paying your tithe so that you will be ushered to the next and final point in the lesson which is:

6. The Blessings of Paying of Tithe. In conclusion to our Topic: The Benefits of Paying Of Tithes.

A. The windows of Heaven will be opened to you.
v10: ''Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.'' (KJV)


God promised to pour His blessing to you, by opening the windows of Heaven. When your heaven remains open you will struggle less. little effort will yield bountiful harvest. Opportunities will be staring at you even you are not there the opportunity will still be waiting for you.

My humble advice is that for you to still enjoy God's blessing at the remaining months of this year try God and pay your Tithes; you will discover that God does not tell lies; your life and business will have a drastic turn around.


To pay you tithe now click here now


This message is from Christ Ministry Online Org.
Assisting the needy worldwide!!!

When saying sorry is wrong!!!

We often run into situations where we get apologies from someone who has wronged us in one way or the other, we naturally want to forgive the offender but once in a while or more often like it is these days we have a situation where we are deliberately or to be more accurate we are carelessly wronged or we are wronged with total disregard, wronged by someone repeatedly; these situations are so rampant these days and one begins to wonder if the offenders do not have regard for you or for themselves as the case may be, one really wonders the values we have for our actions these days, not to mention the quality of humans that parade around today, how else do you explain the action of someone stepping on you repeatedly and each time tells you sorry casually with the attitude written all over his/her face, “what else do you want” these actions makes you wonder what we ought to do to people who do not realize that the word sorry should be used with care and humility, retaliate or allow this to continue?
This situation reminds me of the saying in a novel by Maria Correli –Vendetta, in which a character makes this statement “Christ never loved a woman, had he, he would have left us with a special code of justice”. Before the “Born again” crucify me, I would like to point out that the character in question was not talking about platonic love, having said that, I will like to move straight to my point which is that if these offenders where examined in the pre-bible times we might have a holy and biblical or even Koran acceptable ways of handling such people, it really gets on my nerve when people have no disregard for others well-being and yet they expect you to show much love to this same people. I would really like to cut of a leg that has stepped on me more than twice, but I know I will be reminded of the famous 70 X 7 times “statement by Jesus, but frankly speaking I do feel the urged to get back at the individual that assumes he/she can inflict any form of discomfort on me and get away with it.
Our action goes a long way to determine who we are, and how we get along in life, let’s examine what happens to the simple action we take when we indulge in such careless and disregarding acts repeatedly. Firstly if while driving you see a friend and stop at the middle of the road in other to exchange greetings with your friend, while other road users are blaring their horn behind you and you pay no attention to them simply because you are a police commissioner or a local government chairman, or one of those local champions

Dealing with emotional vampires by: Patrick Wanis

Almost every one of us has someone in our life whom we wish we could change or whom we wish would change; desiring them to do things differently or to be different. It might be a boss, coworker, colleague, team member, friend, family member or worse, a romantic partner. Understanding that we cannot change anyone (except ourselves) is step one to inner peace. Step two is to understand yourself and others. Step three is change yourself. Step four is clear out of your life those people that are parasites or bring you down. A client of mine was relating to me that all the women in his life expect him to support them (on many levels) but they never support him. I explained to him that there are only two types of relationships: parasitic (one person living and feeding off the other person) and symbiotic (the two people mutually supporting and benefitting each other.) A parasite can feed off you mentally, emotionally or energetically. I refer to these people collectively as emotional vampires. And when you are around them, you may feel physically tired, drained, sleepy, weak, agitated, low, small, inadequate, low spirits, hopeless, trapped or afraid. Identifying the emotional vampires There are many types of emotional vampires:

* Narcissist
* Controller
* Victim
* Criticizer
* Drama queen

Please note that I always avoid labeling people, and so, the above terms refer to a person�s behavior and approach to life. Labeling people robs them of their power and in turn, can give them a reason or justification for their behavior i.e. �I can�t help it; I am ADD.� My intention here is to help you to:

1. Identify the way people in your life can drain you, (hold you back, rob you of your power, confidence and potential)
2. Understand the emotional vampires and their behavior
3. Become empowered by offering you some basic strategies to best handle, deal with and respond to those behaviors and people.

Narcissism This person needs and demands constant praise and attention. He ignores your feelings and interests; believes that the world revolves around him or her, and almost always tends to turn the conversation around to discuss him or her.

You often feel invisible and pressured to compliment and praise him.

Victimhood

This person is extremely needy; often has a story of how the world has wronged him; has many �accidents� and �bad luck�; wallows in self-pity and misery. You often feel like the parent and therapist to him. Control

This person dictates and dominates you; he or she is rigid, rarely fun or spontaneous, often telling you what is best for you and how you should be living your life. You often feel weak and trapped around him. Criticizer

This person is highly critical, condemnatory and judgmental. He puts others down often and easily points out your flaws. You often feel inadequate around him. Drama Queen

This person needs to be center of attention 24 hours a day; he or she is great at getting attention and when he doesn�t get it or his way, he creates drama and outbursts believing that the intense emotion is a healthy connection. This person can also be passive- aggressive: seeking your approval and charming while he has it, but aggressive and abusive when he doesn�t get it. When you are around this person, you feel like you are walking on egg shells, hiding your true feelings and riding an emotional roller coaster. Understanding the emotional vampires

All of the above behaviors stem from negative experiences and programming. In other words, the emotional vampires feel empty and are missing something and thus they turn to you to fill them up with: validation, recognition, attention, approval, love, acceptance, reassurance, personal power, etc. No matter how confident and assertive they may appear, underneath, they often suffer from self-hatred, low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, guilt, shame and so forth. Handling the emotional vampires 1. Mentally and emotionally separate yourself from their behavior: �I understand that the way others respond to me is about them� 2. Determine if it is possible to end this relationship - cut them off from your life 3. Become aware of how you feel around this person (creepy, tense, scared, weak, tired, trapped, shut-down, tight chest, etc) and if bad feelings arise, do your best to remove yourself from the setting as soon as possible (before the person can begin to drain or impact you) 4. Always respond with �matter-of-fact� tone and approach; maintain your calm and composure by listening but not allowing their words or behavior to enter you; imagine an impenetrable golden light around you 5. Breathe deeply before speaking back 6. Remind yourself that it is their intention to get a reaction from you 7. Limit your interactions with them as much as possible - avoid socializing 8. Firmly, clearly and openly state your limits and boundaries 9. When experiencing their tantrums and outbursts, imagine you are dealing with a five-year old child 10. Express compassion and empathy but place your limits Tips to strengthen and empower yourself The better you feel about yourself, the less you will attract or be affected by the emotional vampires, and the easier it will be to protect yourself and say �no� to them. In other words, build your self-esteem, clear out your stuff (doubts, insecurities, negative emotions, etc.) Avoid socially isolating yourself because you can easily become hypnotized, controlled or dominated by the emotional vampire. Use the emotional vampires as a mirror to understand how they reflect you and why they push your buttons. For example, I once had a close friend who would often freak out over the smallest things, turning them into major dramas and disasters. When I took the time to determine why I would respond with anger, I realized that I would often do the same thing - turn small things into major disasters. I resented in her what I resented in myself. As I changed my behavior and perception of life, her responses had little effect on me and I was able to master the way to handle her, calming her down while not getting emotional myself.

I am a Celebrity Life Coach, Human Behavior & Relationship Expert. I provide Stop Smoking hypnosis programs and many other Hypnosis programs.

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Natural resources a blessing or a curse!

One could easily say that most natural resources constitutes a nuisance to the individual countries in which they reside, take for example the Nigerian situation; imagine what the situation would have been if the country has no crude oil, I believe now that the country will be exporting experts in the diverse field in crude oil, like in drilling, refining, re-refining etc. I also believe that the best and most innovative oil workers will be from Nigeria now' but for the fact that there is oil in the country, thieves are governors sick people are presidents, lay bouts are politicians and it has become an insult to be addressed as "honorable".

Travellers

This is just the beginning, more pix coming