The Industrial Age ended in the 1960’s with the beginning of a new era which would be called the Information Age; an era which promised the liberation of humanity from a world of labor and economic hardship, and which heralded the dawn of a new age of knowledge, understanding and prosperity.

The changes brought about by the Information Age are ultimately transforming the balance of power between the individual and our social institutions as more information is now available to everyone, yet control of this information is accumulating in the hands of an increasingly small group of global corporations.

The impact of this concentration of media power is altering the very soul of our society while also changing the relationship between these corporations and the state.

One the most profound changes have been the impact upon the profession of Journalism and its primary domain, the media.

Modern journalism evolved during the enlightenment, based upon the core principles that mankind is by nature basically good, rational and intelligent, and that men can differentiate between what is important from what is irrelevant, what is good from what is bad, and ultimately between truth and lies or what may be more appropriately called propaganda.

These core principles were codified in the standards of professional journalism which include truth, accuracy, reliability, balance and objectivity termed the Journalist Model. In essence, “the nature of journalism is to seek the truth.”[1]

The Information Age has brought about fundamental changes to the Journalist Model and to the world of media; with the most profound being the complete transfer of dominant media power from the written journalistic forms (newspapers, periodicals and books) to the elevation of television as the uncontested monopoly over what is today called mainstream media.

It is through the medium of television that the most profound changes in the Journalist Model have occurred.

The Total Dominance of Television

The total dominance of television as a media monopoly cannot be overstated. To this point, Chris Hedges in his book, The Empire of Illusion writes: “Television, a medium built around the skillful manipulation of images, ones that can overpower reality, is our primary form of mass communication…

Television speaks in a language of familiar, comforting clichés and exciting images. Its format, from reality shows to sit-coms, is predictable. It provides a mass, virtual experience that colors the way many people speak and interact with one another.

It creates a false sense of intimacy with our elite – celebrity actors, news people, politicians, business tycoons, and sports stars. And everything and everyone that television transmits is validated and enhanced by the medium.

If a person is not seen on television, on some level he or she is not important. Television confers authority and power. It is the final arbitrator for what matters in life.”[2]

Television and the advancing technologies of the Information Age have murdered objective journalism; It died a martyr’s death, going silently into the night, somewhere between the first Gulf War and the disaster marathon coverage of the attack on 911, while only a few seemed to observe its passing.

Experts in media studies noted the death of the editorial function, the loss of objectivity and editorial inquiry as the media format of television news has evolved into a type of Reality TV show, exemplified by the “Disaster Marathon” news reporting and the now all too common “Breaking News” genre.

The public no longer watches the news to understand the day’s events, but rather is glued to television’s live footage to experience the news; objective analysis, editorial review, or even understanding the context of the new is no longer relevant.

The public only desires to experience the profound video footage, sharing the emotional impact of events, or the pain of the victims, while gazing at the high definition images of the latest disaster event, whether natural or man-made.

As the technology of television has advanced, viewers are now treated to a “real life experience” of the news.

Up close and personal, the events are viewed as if “live” in the viewer’s own living room, and as the volume of news sources has grown exponentially; from CNN and the other devoted news networks, to the video footage captured by the latest citizen reporting on the smart phone or video camera, the public is exposed to an avalanche of news images which has left them adrift in a flood of high tech news content, enabling the viewer to see and hear, and even “feel” the events, just like being there.

Lost within this sensory overload of images which are largely understood only for their emotional content is any objective analysis of what is actually happening.

And rarely do any of the national media sources ever deviate from the official narrative explaining the color images flashing in front of the viewer’s eyes. The world where “less is more” has been replaced with a world where “more” is now the goal of news content; more spectacular video footage, more breaking news, more live action and more emotion framing yet, in reality, “more” has become a disaster. Kampf writes:

Viewers and internet users around the globe follow events, literally and metaphorically, on ‘wide’ and ‘flat’ screens, in ‘high definition’. Paradoxically, as we will show, the better the quality of viewing, the less the understanding of what we see.”[3]

“To cite Martin Bell, the admired British journalist, in contemporary television coverage of armed conflict, “the screens become screens also in the traditional sense of blocking the view and filtering out the light.[4]

Say Good Night to the Editors

Also lost to viewers’ attention is the profound absence of editorial content in the steady flow of the daily news. The editor, whose role was central to maintaining the balance of objectivity in the Journalistic model, has been lost.

And once the center failed to hold, the whole model was easily destroyed. “The success of CNN is the symbol of failure… it represents the beginning of the end of journalism as we have known it… it also uses the satellite to distribute the news as quickly as possible. At first glance, this sounds like the ideal deployment of the new media technology. The only trouble is that it eliminates the editor.

Rather than collecting information and trying to make sense of it in time for the evening news broadcast, the CNN ideal is to do simultaneous, almost-live editing, or better yet, no editing at all. CNN journalism almost wants to be wrong.”[5] Kampf states,

The move to television had a massive impact on the profession …. It did not take long for journalists to understand that the order of the day has become authenticity, live action and drama, all of which have contributed to creating a new model, that we entitle ‘performance journalism’. In the new environment, ‘liveness’, the moving image, and the penetrating voice, replace the printed word. It is an environment of images, not of letters; of stories, not of issues; of people, emotions and actions, and not of cognitive analysis.”[6]

The Corporate-Media State – a Global News Monopoly

Beyond the move to television and the transition from objective journalism to emotional reporting, live action and drama; another more powerful change was occurring outside of the view of most observers. Globalist corporations have been consolidating ownership of the world’s major news organizations.

Even more alarming than the consolidation of global media power into the hands of a few organizations is the fact that 18 out of the top 20 global media giants are also corporate members of the Council on Foreign Relations, a private globalist think tank, whose openly stated agenda is the promotion of a global government, which by definition necessitates the subversion of state sovereignty, along with the advocacy of a global socialist agenda.

The executives who control the global media giants also share membership within several of the world’s secret societies such as the Skull and Bones Fraternity and the various globalists groups such as The Bilderberg Group.

The Bilderberg membership is made up of Kings, Queens, Princes, Chancellors, Prime Ministers, Presidents, Ambassadors, Secretaries of State, Wall Street investors, international bankers, news media executives, and wealthy industrialist. Their meetings are by ‘invitation only’, and no ‘outsiders’ are allowed, except by special invitation… the news media are always present at these meetings. Even though the media moguls attend these secret meetings, they do not file reports about the Elite Bilderberg activities during their meetings.[7]

For over 14 years, Daniel Estulin investigated and researched the Bilderberg Group’s far-reaching influence … in his book, ‘The True Story of the Bilderberg Group’ he reveals the Group is ‘a shadow world government….

Bilderbergers want to supplant individual nation-state sovereignty with an all-powerful global government, corporate controlled, and check-mated by militarized enforcement…. The global media giants control everything we see, hear and read – through television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, films, and large portions of the Internet. Their top officials and some journalists attend Bilderberg meetings – on condition they report nothing.[8]

The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.[9]

Scholars in the media field argue the end of objective journalism is the result of many factors: commercialism of the news, competition for ratings, and the new technologies which support an action oriented “live reporting” of the news.

Each of these factors have clearly influenced the change in format, but it is the global media corporations who, having consolidated ownership of the global media, now control virtually all content; they now have direct control over the news content and media format, which has by design, killed objective journalism.

Hedges states this quite clearly:

Corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip… Television journalism is largely a farce. Celebrity reporters, masquerading as journalists make millions a year and give a platform to the powerful and the famous so they can spin, equivocate, and lie. Sitting in a studio, putting on makeup, and chatting with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Lawrence Summers has little to do with journalism.[10]

Russert, like Cramer, when exposed as complicit in the dissemination of misinformation [propaganda], attempted to portray himself as an innocent victim, as did New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who, along with her colleague Michael Gordon, worked largely as stenographers for the Bush White House during the propaganda campaign to invade Iraq.

Once the administration claims justifying the war had been exposed as falsehoods, Miller quipped that she was ‘only as good as my sources.’ This logic upends the traditional role of reporting, which should always begin with the assumption that those in power have an agenda and are rarely bound to the truth. All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, and it is the job of the journalist to do the hard, tedious reporting to expose these lies. It is the job of courtiers to feed off the scraps tossed to them by the powerful and serve the interests of the power elite.”[11]

The corporate elite, who now control the major media organizations and the news disseminated within the global media, destroyed objective journalism for a reason: they wanted to replace it with a new media format based upon, and designed around, the science of propaganda, with the express purpose, of altering not only public opinion, but the understanding and belief systems of the public as well.

As we shall from the evidence below, the content changes have gone far beyond mere propaganda, all the way to the introduction of new media methods more appropriately described as systems of hypnosis or mind control.

Footnotes:

1. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Striking the Balance, Audience Interests, Business Pressures and Journalists’ Values, March 30, 1999, p1.
2. Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, July 2009), p 45.
3. Zohar Kampf and Tamar Liebes, Transforming Media Coverage of Violent Conflicts: The New Face of War Draft version 13 January 2013, p8.
4. M. (1998) ‘The Journalism of Attachment’ In M. Kieran (ed.) Media Ethics, London: Routledge, 15-22.
5. Elihu Katz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem , The End of Journalism? Notes on Watching the War, Journa1 of Communication, Summer 1992 p 9.
6. Zohar Kampf and Tamar Liebes, Transforming Media Coverage of Violent Conflicts: The New Face of War Draft version 13 January 2013, p29.
7. Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr, The brief descriptions of the major Elite organizations, the Bilderbergs (BB), Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Trilateral Commission (TC).
8. Stephen Lendman, The True story of the Bilderberg Group, Global Research, May 15, 2013.
9. Corporate Medias Threat to Democracy, Quote by Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media critic.
10. Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, New York: Nation Books, July 2009, p 169.
11. Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, New York: Nation Books, July 2009, p 174.

Copyright © 2015, Benjamin Baruch – All Rights Reserved

Website: BenjaminBaruch.net

Source of Graphic: Frugal Dad

And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. — Revelation 6:5–6 KJV

John tells us that the price of grain is one denarius — about ten times its normal price when these words were penned in the first century. At those prices, each worker would barely be able to feed one person — or require that the entire family try to survive on the amount of food that just one person needed to survive.

For those of us who live in the developed world, it’s hard for us to imagine being truly hungry; let alone standing by helplessly as our children or grandchildren go to bed with empty stomachs. Yet, we have witnessed soaring food prices and starvation often in modern times — both in the third world and also in developed nations. We saw it happen repeatedly early in the 20th Century:

• In 1921 Poland, food prices doubled every 19 days.
• In 1923 Germany, they doubled every four days.
• In 1944 Greece, they doubled every four days.
• In 1946 Hungary, food prices doubled every 15 hours.

We’ve also seen government-engineered famines more recently:

• In 1982 Mexico, the inflation rate hit 10,000%, driving the price of food up 100 times in 12 months.
• In 1989 Argentina, the Peso was devalued three times, driving food prices up 3,079% in a single year.
• In 1994 Brazil, inflation raged at 2,075.8% per year, making food more than 20 times more expensive.
• In 1994 Yugoslavia, food prices doubled every 34 hours.
• And in 2008 Zimbabwe, they doubled every single day.

Hyperinflation

The best-documented hyperinflationary episode in history is the one that nearly destroyed Germany between 1922 and 1923. The German government began printing unbacked paper marks – first, to finance World War I and later, to pay war reparations. By late 1923, 300 paper mills and 2,000 printing presses worked around the clock cranking out German banknotes.

The human toll was devastating: On average, prices doubled every three days. In a single month, prices exploded more than 32,000% higher — enough to drive prices up by a factor of 320 in a single, 30-day period.

My German grandparents sold their restaurant in order to retire. However, by the time formalities were completed, all they received was enough to buy a loaf of bread!

These crises were entirely man-made. Their nation’s leaders made them by creating unbacked paper marks out of thin air. So what does this have to do with you and me in today’s world? Quite simply, everything!

You see, Germany sank into the most severe hyperinflationary period in recorded history after printing 1.3 trillion marks. That translates to about 4 trillion in today’s dollars. Ironically, that is almost exactly the same amount of money the United States government has printed since 2008.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg because:

• The European Union has printed 503 billion euros — equal to about 627 billion dollars.
• Japan has printed 180 trillion yen, equal to about $1.5 trillion.
• The UK has printed 314 billion pounds, equal to about $493 billion. Altogether, that’s well over $6 trillion.

And despite the fact that most of that money is still being held on bank balance sheets and has yet to trickle into the economy, food prices are already beginning to rise rapidly.

Flour prices are up 19% … ice cream is up 21% … rice and cheddar cheese are both up 27% … chicken is up 34% … oranges are up 70% … and hamburger meat is up a whopping 74%.

And this is only the beginning. Because that trickle of newly printed money flowing into the economy will fast become a flood. As the rest of it hits food prices, they can only explode higher with no end in sight. Inflation Isn’t the Only Problem.

“Civilization and Anarchy are just seven meals apart” — Spanish Proverb

The food problem is affected by many different factors even after you take into account inflation, war, unrest, disease and weather. Here are at least five major concerns not covered above that food producers and suppliers must also deal with:

1. Limited arable land – land that has the needed nutrients and water to sustain crops.
2. Crop yield ratios – crop yields seem to be plateauing or are increasing considerably slower than the population.
3. Growing population – many experts expect the planet to add another 2 billion people in the next 35 years.
4. Changing diets in emerging markets – developing countries are demanding more and better foods.
5. Bio-fuel demand – crops to supply cheaper and cleaner fuels continue to take precedent over food crops

Bayes’ Theorem

It can be useful to exploit a technique that goes by several names including “causal inference” or “inverse probability” — based on a mathematical equation called Bayes’ Theorem. Basically, you form a hypothesis based on experience, common sense and whatever data are available. Then you test the hypothesis not by what has happened before, but by what comes after.

Instead of reasoning from cause to effect, you reverse the process. You watch the effects to determine the cause. This will validate or invalidate the ‘cause’ which you have hypothesized. Sometimes, the effects contradict the hypothesis, in which case you can modify it or adopt another. Often, the effects confirm the hypothesis, in which case you know you’re on the right track and keep going.

The theorem has proved its worth, such as in 2012 when it was used to successfully predict the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in all 50 states before the final vote counts were available. Despite its success it has always been regarded with some suspicion by statisticians particularly because it has been used when genuine prior data is unavailable or uncertain.

Bad Debts

Prof. Laurence Kotlikoff,[1] (a widely accepted expert) using CBO figures estimates that the U.S. national indebtedness is $222 trillion at last count, and growing. That’s $17 trillion current, national debt, plus over $200 trillion unfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicaid and other entitlement programs.

To put that in perspective, McKinsey Global Institute calculates that the total wealth of the world is estimated at $200 trillion. So, at $222 trillion, the US fiscal gap is 11% larger than all the accumulated wealth existing in the world today!

That’s almost $500,000 for every man, woman, and child. The U.S. government borrows four out of every ten dollars it spends.

One popular hypothesis is that the world is facing a tsunami of more than $2 trillion of bad debt just coming from oil drilling, emerging markets and corporate junk bonds. Even money-losing operations can keep up debt service for a while by using working capital and cash flow — at least until the cash runs out. Banks that hold some of the debt can also cover up the losses for a while with accounting games such as fiddling with their loan loss reserves. If so, bank stocks may take a major hit by early 2016 as these losses come home to roost.

Using the language of Bayes’ Theorem, bad debts will be the “cause” of a drop in financial stocks. What are the other “effects” to test the validity of these hypotheses?

For energy junk debt, we can look at rig counts in the oil patch and layoffs among energy exploration companies. For emerging-market debt, we can look at the strong dollar and dwindling hard currency reserves in countries like Russia, Turkey, Mexico and Brazil. In short, we can work backward from these visible causes to test the validity of the original hypothesis.

Right now, the idea that financial stocks will suffer major write-offs by this time next year looks like a good one.

If it were only so simple. Stocks may rise much higher before a crisis hits. If no fed rate increase this year comes true, it could be extremely bullish for U.S. equity markets. Right now, equity markets are priced for a rate hike in mid–2015.

When markets realize that easy-money policies could continue into 2016, another upward thrust of the bull market would commence, and a level of 2,200 or higher on the S&P 500 index would not be surprising.

The Age of Deceit at Work

Not wanting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it seems almost no one has connected the dots between Yellen[2] and Draghi,[3] and most seem to assume that they each operate independently.

However, some suggest that the rapid rise of the dollar is being allowed because it is part of the “plan” to save the Eurozone and hold back the inevitable U.S. rate increases. The under-the-counter payoffs allow corporations to continue to buy back shares and increase dividends by borrowing at near-zero rates forever — clearly visible in the bank’s celebratory “stress test” announcements.

Whether this game ends in a massive economic collapse or the establishment of Special Drawing Rights is not important, as either will result in the same outcome for the world’s 95% — economic disaster and enslavement.

This was also underlined with CNBC’s celebration of 500,000 newly minted American millionaires — establishing 5% of American households with assets greater than $1 million, (while CNBC failed to report that American families living in poverty have increased to 35%.)

Just in from the Agriculture Department: The number of Americans on food stamps has now topped 46 million every month since September 2011. This does seem to speak of a real destruction of America’s moral political leadership.

One way to approach the “Age of Deceit” is to establish your own prior probabilities to trigger your own “tests.”

For a more detailed exploration of these ideas, see our briefing pack on the ostensible advent of the “Black Horseman.”

1. Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a William Fairfield Warren Professor at Boston University, a Professor of Economics at Boston University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, President of Economic Security Planning, Inc., and the Director of the Tax Analysis Center. Professor Kotlikoff received his B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1977. Kotlikoff attempted to run for President of the United States in the 2012 election, and sought the nominations of the advocacy group Americans Elect and the Reform Party of the United States before ending his campaign in May 2012.
2. Janet Yellen is the 15th Chair of the Federal Reserve.
3. Mario Draghi is an Italian economist, manager and banker who succeeded Jean-Claude Trichet as the President of the European Central Bank on 1 November 2011. He was previously the governor of the Bank of Italy from December 2005 until October 2011. In 2014 Forbes nominated Draghi as the 8th most powerful person in the world.

This article was originally published in the May 2015 Personal Update NewsJournal.

Copyright © 2015, Dr. Chuck Missler –All rights reserved

The Duggar family media coverage teaches us many outstanding lessons, one of which is that while God opens many doors of opportunity to serve Him, we need to guard ourselves from the hidden dangers of media celebrity, pride and accolades.

Now critics are crucifying the family again after viewing “The Kelly File” that reportedly drew 3.1 million viewers.  (See videos below) The Duggars didn’t know that this was a bait and betrayal from the media- even the so called “Conservative” Fox network.. The opportunity to defend themselves and the bait of celebrity status ultimately backfired on them.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fevkx229XBs]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCpGMoocWcw]

Opposition to Birth Control

Jim Bob’s and Michelle’s opposition to birth control and large number of children had already drawn the attention and scorn of population control advocates who are obsessed with controlling the population. Few people value life these days.

We’ve become a very selfish society and the Duggars forgot that it is a taboo to have more than two children in most Western nations including some in the church that view children as a burden to society, an interruption to our lives, a drain on our economic progress, and many other negative reasons.

In fact we are blaming babies and children for all kinds of social and political problems that don’t even exist, yet the pornography and sex slave business is making billions of dollars a year promoting sex that ultimately increases the population. It’s the same media that broadcasts lust and violence, which in turn feeds lust until people can no longer contain themselves within the bounds of human decency.

The Media-Opportunity and Control

Remember the amount of information someone has about you is a certainly a factor in determining how much control the person exerts over you. Privacy is the door through which power must pass to access information about our lives. Once that door is opened, we become vulnerable to manipulation and control.

The media that was originally birthed to glorify what was good, righteous and pure in the human heart, has now become overtaken by lust for money, power, and greed. So the media elites and empires of this world have become tools to manipulate, control, and exercise dominion over the public at large.

The Duggars forgot or didn’t know that the vast majority of all news media including in the United States is controlled by five or six corporations. These corporations control almost all America’s newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations, books, records, movies, and now the Internet. These avenues of media occupy a major role in the private lives of the entire societies with controlled sights and sounds.

Apart from a few independent newspapers, most of the media has been a champion of the elite’s agenda, which is to promote other people’s rights and to bow to the pressure of only one group of people wherever possible. They only care about their ratings, survival, and to avoid offending those groups who have the power to damage or even destroy them. This includes the powerful LGBT Lobby.

The media that used to play a positive role in being a watchdog in society, government corruption, and the plight of the weak and marginalized, cannot maintain their integrity and independence any longer. It will use personal attacks against those who dare challenge sex before marriage, homosexuality, birth control or anything related to pro-family causes.

Hitler was right when he reportedly said, “one must demonize the opposition if one wishes to create agreement on political or social philosophy….make the price of opposition as steep as possible.” The most enduring lesson of Nazi Germany in propaganda, according to Dr. Lutzer, is:

Ordinary people, simply concerned about living their own lives, can be motivated to become a part of an evil movement through the power of compelling propaganda, intimidation, and mass euphoria… In such a climate, anyone who swims against the stream is demonized by misrepresentations, false evidence and ridicule. With such pressure, even rational and decent people who refuse to be co-opted begin to question their own sanity. Can they alone be right when everyone else is wrong?

Most of the journalists love freedom and liberty, but they love their lives and comfort a little bit more. Who can blame them? After all, most human beings prefer to turn to the path of lukewarmness, compromise, apathy, and self-preservation when faced with opposition. There are very few journalists today who possess the persistently determined character to report the truth objectively.

I am not suggesting that every media personality twists the truth for personal gain. There are so many good people who work in the media and do their best to operate with a sense of ethics, justice, and commonsense. What we are referring to represents just a few who decide to openly violate the laws they are sworn to protect in order to gain money, power, and control by calling the gospel “hate speech” and the family tradition “intolerance.”

The end justifies the means. The ability to gather vast amount of information about us is increasing everyday; which leads to questions very few are asking: what information should become open to the public and what should remain closed or private. How much should other people, the media, institutions, or governments be allowed to know about its citizens and their activities? What are the boundaries and safeguards, and who will decide—in other words who is watching the watchers that are unrepentant?

The Danger of Pride and Lure of Celebrity Status

The problem is, the Duggar family accepted the celebrity status which provided the media an occasion for disreputable persons to make fun what they cannot understand. Yes, most of us have made terrible choices in our past lives and one cannot go back in time and change the past, but we can certainly repent and do something about it today in order to build a better tomorrow. This is what Duggar was trying to do, but he wasn’t allowed and therefore had to resign.

This is why the Lord warns us not to cast pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6) The pearls of a Christian are, perhaps, his/her experiences of the Lord’s grace, power and love in regards to his soul and these should not casually be made public, unless prompted by the Holy Spirit.

David Wilkerson, for reasons of his own, turned down every invitation from a U.S. president to visit the White House, but he would drive hundreds of miles out of the way during an evangelism tour so he could meet an obscure nun who had written something about Christ that had moved him. Always, he saw the world and those around him through the lens of eternity. He probably knew the dangers of his ego and pride which the media could manipulate, control and use it against him. It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote that:

If a deep-sea fish used to a constant pressure of many atmospheres rises to the surface, it perishes because it cannot adjust to excessively low pressures, and in much the same way I for fifteen years had lurked discreetly in the depths—the camps, exile, underground- never showing myself, never making a single noticeable mistake about a person or a situation, now that I had risen to the surface and to sudden fame, inordinately resounding fame (for in our country abuse and praise are carried to extremes), began making blunder after blunder, completely failing to understand my new position and my new possibilities….

Remember the danger of pride is always with us. A good example is that of Hezekiah found in 2 Kings Chapter 20. The Bible tells us that out of desperation, God answered Hezekiah’s self-willed prayer and confirmed it with a sign of a sun’s shadow going back ten steps backward. But shortly after the Lord had answered his prayer, Merodach-Baladan, the son of Baladan king of Babylon, having heard that the king was sick, sent a get-well card and a gift to Hezekiah.

Then, Hezekiah made a mistake of showing the messengers of the son of Baladan king of Babylon all his treasure house-silver, gold, spices, aromatic oils, his stockpile of weapons—a guided tour of all his prized possessions. There wasn’t a thing in his palace or kingdom that Hezekiah didn’t show them.

When Isaiah asked him what he had shown the messengers from Babylon, he replied, “I showed them everything I own—all my royal treasuries.

There are many lessons to learn from Hezekiah account which would be beyond the scope of this post and which culminated in a series of many terrible things that should have been avoided:

Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, Hear the word of the Lord! Behold, the time is coming when all that is in your house, and that which your forefathers have stored up till this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the Lord. And some of your sons who shall be born to you shall be taken away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of Babylon’s king.

From the book of 2 Chronicles 32: 24-31, it appears that Hezekiah’s prosperity, success and deliverance from sickness had made him proud. Instead of giving credit to God for all his blessings, he tried to impress the Babylonian visitors with his wealth and power.

The Bible tells us “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. (Psalm 127:3) But even these children can make us proud. We can all be tempted to do exactly what Hezekiah did in different areas of our lives. Without knowing something we esteem becomes an idol—family, power, prestige, education, ministry, ego—can all become idols.

Helmut Thielicke, a German theologian and pastor, said, “success in any area of life is the greatest narcotic of all…. and it’s this worship of success that is generally the form of idol worship the devil cultivates most assiduously…” A testimony of success in any area of life can be exploited by the enemy and can quickly degenerate into vanity and self destruction.

Someone who understands this issue of celebrity seeking a lot better than I do is Chelsea Vicari who serves as the Evangelical Program Director for the Institute on Religion and Democracy. She concludes by saying:

The pursuit of celebrity is an idol that urges us on promising fulfillment, affirmation, and a claim in society. It doesn’t always deliver.

For Duggar, the promise was an elevated spotlight in a conservative pro-family movement. A position most 20-somethings from Arkansas would need to work ’round the clock, on a shoe-string budget before finally attaining….

As we see in the case of reality television, celebrity can ultimately be turned on us and can tear us down pretty far. Indeed, there are consequences of the pursuit of celebrity.

First, celebrity seeking has the potential to hurt people that never wanted to be involved in the first place. Few commentators have stopped to consider how the Duggar daughters or Jenner kids feel about the worldwide unraveling surrounding their families’ personal confusion, frustration, abuse, trauma and healing……

Another problem with celebrity seeking is it encourages us to exchange our well-intentioned motivations with self-serving ambitions. As Christians we have to stop and consider how living out our private lives on millions of TV and computer screens might cause us to elevate our goals, our pride, and our selves before the Almighty….

I’ve heard it said that reality TV is the Roman Colosseum of our day. This comparison seems reasonable. Still, some people assume their celebrity status is cheered on by their audience. Remember, that is not always the case. In the world’s eyes, the higher the celebrity status, the more entertaining the fall.”