No sugar-coating here, just the brutal reality of conspiracies against political leaders: “His officials conspired against him and assassinated him at Beth Millo, on the road down to Silla.” (2 Kings 12:20). One definition of “conspire” is to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act. That definition most certainly applied in that situation! And take a look at the perspective of one to whom conspiracies were targeted. King David wrote this: “For my enemies speak against me; those who wait to kill me conspire together.” (Ps 71:10). Imagine living as a political leader knowing that you could be surrounded by conspirators just looking for the right opportunity to get rid of you! Conspiracies have been occurring for millennia and continue today. But perhaps overshadowing and outnumbering actual conspiracies are conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are defined as a belief that some influential or controlling o...
The words were scary and intriguing at the same time: “A pattern of deliberate obfuscation.” In order to make my way through what that phrase could mean, I decided I needed to start with defining each individual word: Pattern : any regularly repeated or reoccurring arrangement, design or sequence. Deliberate : done consciously and intentionally; characterized by or resulting from careful and thorough consideration. Obfuscation : the act of making something less clear and less easy to understand, especially intentionally; the action of making something obscure, unclear or unintelligible; t o throw into shadow. Putting those definitions together, perhaps this is what the phrase likely means: a repeated intentional effort to make things unclear so that people are not aware of what is actually going on. By the way, I originally saw the phrase in an investigative journalism piece. The journalists concluded, after they had investigated an enterpr...