Servant of Messiah Ministries

Preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.

Your Money and Prophecy…

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We wrote about cycles in the stock market and the 7-year corrections. It is time to revisit that.

We are a nation of consumers – obese locusts devouring the resources of the earth enabled only by record debt.  Debt levels have now reached their 2008 peaks…right before the Great Recession.

  • Total consumer debt reached a record $12.8 trillion. The prior peak was $12.7 trillion in 2008.
  • Since the financial crisis, auto loans and student loans have soared. Auto loans are now at $1.2 trillion, up 70% from the depths of the recession in 2010.
  • Student loans have reached an incredible $1.3 trillion.
  • Total credit card debt has reached $784 billion, the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2009.

Wall Street is the Temple of Capitalism, Finance is its religion,  and fear and greed are its sacraments. Fear and greed are not based on wisdom, logic or faith. The warning signs are being ignored in a greedy race for every new stock market high.

This is not meant to be a prediction of any kind.  I cannot even predict my own behaviour for the next 12 hours since phone calls and family needs arrange my day. These are warning signs that we are setting up for that cyclical correction of the type we had in 1973,1980, 1987, 2000, 2007.

Valuations are at levels only seen in 1929 and 1987.

The CAPE ratio (cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio), a valuation measure applied to the S&P 500 devised by Yale economist Robert Shiller, is higher today than it was on Black Monday. In fact, it’s only been higher at two other moments in history: heading into the stock market crash of 1929 and the dot-com bubble of 2000. Today the Shiller CAPE, ratio, is above 30 when its average is 16.8

The trading 12-month GAAP price/earnings ratio was about 20 times earnings in 1987 compared with 23 times today.

Since PE valuations of broad indexes ignore stocks losing money adding them takes the PE of the Russell from 26 to a more realistic P/E of 78.(combined market cap /all component companies trailing earnings)

Since its 2009 lows, the S&P 500 SPX,  is up more than 250%, the second-longest bull market ever, which should put you on guard.

Trading Behavior is a warning

The small-cap stocks and broader indexes are flat and have turned down to below their 200-day averages.

Dow Transports –  A traditional leading indicator has broken down and since they move the goods and products they should participate in the boom?

NYSE exchange – more stocks are making 52-week lows than are making 52-week highs triggering the Hindenburg Omen. Five such signals recently are only tied with 2007 and 2000 leading up to both corrections.

Political and other considerations

The Federal Reserve is now unloading the $4.5  trillion-dollar portfolio of mortgages it bought which has propped up Real Estate prices. Selling 4.5 trillion dollars of mortgages will reprice all fixed income securities. Never fight the Fed is a ‘truism” in trading circles.

The “business leader” president has shut down his Business Councils amid massive defections and so far his agenda is a mystery.

Korea and Iran remain nuclear thorns in our side while civil unrest and racial tensions fill the news. This President is likely to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran.

We have not paid back the trillion-dollar bailout passed by Congress in 2007  for all those “shovel-ready projects’  and we are certainly not prepared for another correction so soon.

“Make American Great Again’  is not a new idea.  The American foreign policy of Isolationism in the 20’s and 30’s  was a diplomatic and economic doctrine that aimed at self-advancement to make the United States economically self-reliant.  The policy of Isolationism in the 20’s and 30’s attempted to isolate the United States from the diplomatic affairs of other countries and limiting foreign competition by imposing high import tariffs (Taxes).

Tearing up N.A.F.T.A.  and recent trade skirmishes with England and Canada over jets…are but the beginning.

My conclusions are that a cyclically inevitable correction and a bear market must follow.

This selfie generation is best described here:  2 Timothy 3 v2 – For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred.

We need this Global Correction for two reasons: 

  1. A loving God must take away our idols to save us….and tear down what separates us from Him.
  2. On a larger scale –  the crash of 1929 set the stage for the Messiah’s of the 1930’s. That decade gave us the leaders that promised their nations a solution to the economic meltdown of 1929.  Stalin, Franco, Tojo, Tito, Mussolini, Hitler. They also brought us a World War.

There are new Messiah’s waiting to capitalize on the coming economic meltdown.  My bible says 10 in fact ….and so we watch events unfold..…

Foot Washing or Hand Washing

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We live in a democracy and many Christians are pleased that we elected Donald Trump. He pledged to make us “Great”.  The danger of democracy is, that we all share the blame and the consequences of our Governments rule in our name.  Literally ‘democracy’ comes from the Greek ‘demokratia,’ and may be translated as the rule of the common people (‘demos’ means ‘common people’ and ‘Kratos’ means rule or strength).

As the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, we have a responsibility to mankind. This United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all….is on track to collide with the values and the concerns of the Creator of all men.

In ancient Jewish literature, there are many references to Sodom. The phrase “middat Sdom” was used. It may be translated as “the way the people of Sodom thought”. It meant a lack of charity and hospitality towards others; ignoring the needs of the poor, etc. In the Middle East, a person’s survival could depend upon the charity of strangers. To help strangers was a solemn religious duty of paramount importance.

Isaiah 1; The entire first chapter is an utter condemnation of Judah. They are repeatedly compared with Sodom and Gomorrah in their evildoing and depravity. Throughout the chapter, the Prophet lists many sins of the people: … being unjust and oppressive to others, being insensitive to the needs of widows and orphans, committing murder, accepting bribes, etc.

Ezekiel 16:49-50:”Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.” God states clearly that he destroyed Sodom’s sins because of their pride, their excess of food while the poor and needy suffered; sexual activity is not even mentioned.

Our new budget calls for a 10% increase in defense spending ($54 Billion) at the expense of UN food aid. The largest humanitarian crisis since World War 2 is looming in Africa. The lack of humanitarian access in Somalia and conflict in Sudan, South Sudan, and Eritrea has resulted in an influx of refugees into Ethiopia. The refugee camp at Dadaab, located close to the Kenyan border with Somalia, was originally designed in the early 1990s to accommodate 90,000 people but the UN estimates over 4 times as many reside there. The ongoing civil war in Somalia and the worst drought to affect the Horn of Africa in six decades has resulted in an estimated 12 million people whose lives are threatened. The total number of refugees and asylum seekers has made Ethiopia the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa…and they can barely feed themselves. The millions that face starvation is larger than the Ukrainian famine, the Cambodian famine, and the Irish famine combined.

This punitive gutting of food aid makes up only a microscopic part of the US budget. It costs less than a new jet – and only buys sacks of corn meal….the kind that obese and intoxicated Americans feed their animals and would never stoop to eat.

In 2011  40% of the U.S. corn crop was diverted to make fuel for cars. Ethanol uses 4.9 billion bushels of corn in the U.S. That was enough grain to feed 350 million people. Seems biofuel and ethanol paid more as Govt incentives redirected corn/wheat into ethanol production. So we filled the tanks of our cars with subsidized ethanol at the expense of the very hungry poor.

American farmers cashed their checks and Egyptians, Libyans, Algerians, and Mexicans rioted over the price of their bread/tacos/tortillas. Raising their basic food prices along with our efforts to destabilize the Middle East was our “gift” with political motives. The Arab Spring was the chance for the “rule of the common people”  and left six countries in ruin and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Islamic State of Libya in charge…before chaos. Food is a weapon more powerful than oil.

It is Passover next week and another crowd once chanted “Crucify Him”  His blood be on us and our children. They understood the responsibility of democracy.

This Passover we will gather for our Seders and our Easter festivities…collectively having sentenced millions of people to death. They are black and brown and we will never get close enough to smell that smell or hear the rasp of a starving baby.

  • We too will ask for a bowl and a towel.  
  • It won’t be to wash their feet…..
  • It will be our hands we wash as we proclaim ourselves innocent of their blood.

 

American Drunken Delusions

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Since I was not born in America I was afforded the benefit of a British schooling in Africa. Our history lessons included European history and the rise and fall of great empires. Now living and working as a citizen of the United States, we talk about OLD houses that are only 50 years old. In Britain, the city of Bath was established in the 1st Century by the Romans, in Europe an old house is 700 years old, and in Jerusalem, they date back to the Crusades…. 700 years before America was even settled.

The great business leaders that made America great are Astor, Rockefeller, DuPont, J.P. Morgan with roots that are less than 200 years old. In 1308 some 700 years ago, the Frescobaldi’s were wool traders and bankers and they financed King Edwards wars both in Wales and in France. The family, which also built Florence’s first bridge Santa Trinita also became one of the main composers of keyboard music during the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods.

The Bank of Italy compared the tax records of Florentine taxpayers of 1427 to track the mobility of social economic status across the centuries. All that long before Columbus ever sailed.

We look with pride on Harvard (1693) and Yale (1701) and Princeton (1747) Ivy League schools that trace their roots back to the first Great Awakening that swept the East Coast. The word university comes from the Latin: Universitas – which was coined at the foundation of the University of Bologna in Italy in 1088. In 1158, the Emperor Frederick Barber also settled the rules, rights, and privileges of universities. Back then Italy was part of the Holy Roman Empire. The University of Oxford in the Kingdom of England was founded between 1096 and 1167, but it was not until 1254 that Pope Innocent the fourth granted Oxford University, a charter by papal bull. I guess our schools missed some 700 years of early education.

Our largest Protestant denomination is the Baptists with a long history extending all the way back to 1845 and the Southern Baptist Convention. The Catholic Church held sway over all of Europe and crowned its Kings and its Emperors a thousand years before….The old line confessions of the Reformation that are the roots of Lutheran and the Westminster confession are 200 years older than America. The 500 year anniversary of the Reformation is this October 2017 and the Catholics and the Lutherans and the Anglicans are planning a wonderful reunion as the mother church embraces her errant daughters.

So what is my point?
We are the illegitimate offspring of no lineage that stumbled onto a continent and found the winning lottery ticket. In the last 80 years, we became the most ignorant, most obese, entitled people squandering the world’s resources at an unprecedented rate.

We are thrilled and hypnotized with our latest technological gizmo. Like most lottery winners, we have bought depreciating cars and lead the world in drug addiction, divorce, illegitimate births, abortion, porn production and consumption, depression, and the highest number of incarcerated citizens on the planet.

We have remained too drunk to realize we can’t read or write, have no sense of history, and our biggest political concern is who is allowed in which bathroom.

Like most lottery winners we have racked up the world’s largest national debt and bankrupted ourselves with pouring trillions of dollars in failed “Nouveau riche” (French: ‘new rich’) schemes to export our democracy.

Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar already recognized Afghanistan would not be changed. If our schools included history we would have recognized neither Greece, Rome, Genghis Kahn, the British nor the Russians ever defeated and subdued Afghanistan. She has been called the graveyard of empires…but we won the lottery…..so our money can change what 1000 years could not?

Europe is not ignorant of her history and her monuments and her old buildings are reminders of her ancient roots. Nationalism is awakening all over Europe and the E.U. is done. Europe is beginning to realize that the United States (which has no history and no character) is only about consumerism and self-protection. Like most “friends” on a drunken bar hopping spree, they tend to leave when the U.S.A. can no longer pick up the tab for the next round of cool-aid……

There is a new world order coming, and the United States is no longer the center of the world. Like a cherry tree in the coming hurricane, she will be blown over by the wind of History. America will be replaced by a tree planted in Europe long ago, with deep roots, reaching all the way back to Rome, Greece, and Babylon.

God also has a view of history and it also stretches back to 2000BC when He called a man out of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. Babylon, that area between the Tigris and the Euphrates River in modern-day Iraq.

God has also appointed a King to return and take up His throne. Those two world orders, who both trace their roots back to Babylon, (the cradle of civilization) will clash at the center of the world. Jerusalem.

The people of God need a worldview and a global perspective to look beyond bathroom politics, immigration, and taxation. There are bigger matters at hand according to the God who writes history.

The end time powers will once again be prophets and kings. Our happy feel good “scampering before the Lord” in playful worship in church, is not going to sustain us in the time ahead. As the people of God, we need to sober up, put down our small screen device, and realize there is a war coming.

A Nation Prays

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Born and raised in South Africa compels me to follow the events there. Mandela and Bishop Tutu led the way with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that avoided a race war and defused years of hate.

However, Crime and Vigilantism now rule the street, while corruption and partisan infighting paralyze the government and the economy struggles as South African debt just got downgraded to junk. Xenophobia and tribal hatred have brought violence to the many undocumented workers due to double-digit unemployment.

As a minority in a land, there is a realization amongst Christians that God is the only one that can change the moral and socio-political climate of that country.

Popular South African farmer/evangelist and subject of the book and film, “Faith Like Potatoes”, Angus Buchan called for a nation-wide prayer meeting called, “It’s Time” scheduled for Saturday, April 22, 2017. (Side Note …I really enjoyed the movie Faith like Potatoes…and could fully relate to Angus pre-conversion attitudes and flaws.)

Buchan said, “We are tired of people taking the law into their own hands. We are going to call upon the Lord to bring justice, peace and hope to our beloved South Africa. The day of prayer is intended for all South Africans of all genders, races, and denominations who are concerned about the malice, hatred, violence, murder, and corruption in the country,” said Buchan. He says ‘If My people who are called by My name’—that is you and I, so I want to ask you to pray for us.”

Two thousand hectares of land were already been prepared for the influx of people. Tractors had cut grass on 450 hectares of land to prepare 2 000 bales for people to sit on, although people were asked to bring their own chairs. At one stage a group of farmers donated 800 liters of diesel for the 20 tractors used to cut the grass.

Farmers in the area also allowed thousands to camp free of charge on their land and traffic was snarled for 25 miles (40 km) around the event for hours.
• One group took several days to cycle there from Cape Town.
• Others are going on motorbikes, cars, and buses.
• Some walked and the rich and the famous filled the local airports with their planes and helicopters.
This resonated with all denominations ….even those that do not agree with Angus Buchan’s old school Pentecostal theology. Churches set aside differences for a day to act in unison facing a common crisis opening their buildings for prayer meetings that day.

The prayer time was duplicated in hundreds of town and suburbs around the nation. No television broadcasts were allowed, but Christians around the country followed the event from the social media posts of their friends.

Police estimate that 700,000 braved the heat and the traffic to drive through the night to attend to pray. Over 1.7 responded online with pledges of prayer meetings around the world from Thailand to Canada, from Britain to Australia among the Expats of South Africa.

The meeting started 2 hours late due to the traffic and then Angus addressed the crowd. We all want to see our nations healed, restored, revived – yet in order for this to happen, God’s people first have to rise up and take their place. Angus Buchan focused on two key scriptures that will work in any situation, whether personal, family or national.
James 5:16 – “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”
2 Chronicles 7:14 – ” If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from Heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
After his short message, Buchan allowed people to pray on their own.
• The crowds prayed—some in whispers, and others loudly.
• Some were on their knees and others held their hands in the air as they cried to their God.

This reminds of the open air preaching of Whitefield and Wesley – when shiny tracks of on the faces of the coal miners betrayed their tears. Why is it we only turn to God in times of trouble? I know that is usually what it takes to get serious about prayer.
• Would that God could bring this to the American Church. She has been blessed by God with the resources and the people to touch the world.
• While the moral and spiritual decline in the USA has taken decades and so far it has not affected the safety of the church ….so the frog has not jumped out of the pot.
• South Africa has been baptized in radical political and economic change in one generation. It affects their safety and their family daily. They have a reason to pray. May God have mercy on us and open our eyes to our need.

Merkel, the last man standing.

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Germany prepares to split with America. European politicians doubt Donald Trump will become a mature statesman.

Merkel is preparing for the worst. The New York Times called her “the last powerful defender of Europe and the trans-Atlantic alliance.” She is the last man defending a dying vision.  She stands for election a fourth time after 11 years in power.  She faces a difficult election and with 1.5 million new refugees in 2015, her popularity has been damaged by terrorism.

Each terror incident does pose electoral challenges for some of Europe’s leading pillars of unity like Merkel. Terror attacks in France and Germany do provide ammunition for right-wing leaders who want to go beyond simple bans on immigration from the Middle East. The National Front and their supporters want nothing less than a dissolution of the European Union and a return to pull-up-the-drawbridge nationalism for their individual nations.

A new rival to Merkel is Edmund Stoiber. He flatly rejects that Islam is a part of Germany. What makes him an interesting candidate is he appears to walk in the footsteps of his mentor, Franz Josef Strauss.  Stoiber called Strauss ‘the father of the people’s party’ and ‘the greatest political son of Bavaria.’” In the article, Stoiber wrote, “He was a Bavarian in the heart of Germany and European in vision. The modern people’s party was embodied in Franz Josef Strauss. … For me, he remains a teacher and fatherly friend” It was Strauss that wrote The Grand Design: a European solution to German unification. He led during Germany’s rise to power in Europe.

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel called for Salafist mosques to be banned and their communities broken up.   “On this question, I am for zero tolerance,” the German official told Der Spiegel in an interview, commenting on the links between the Christmas market truck attacker and a Salafist preacher.

Gabriel was referring to Salafist preacher Abu Walaa, who was arrested in November along with others for recruiting people in Germany on behalf of the terrorist group Islamic State. Truck attack suspect Anis Amri, who killed 12 people at a Berlin Christmas market, is believed to have communicated with the cleric.   Salafism is growing fast in Germany, flourishing on grants and other forms of support from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations. Gabriel says Germany should fight radical forms of Islam on its own soil.  Gabriel leads to the Social Democrats (SPD), a coalition ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU). He is expected to run for chancellor this year against his current boss.

The cost of assimilating all those refugees and the strain on public services and welfare programs are beginning to mount up. Germans are also troubled at the cultural and religious influence of so many Muslims. Vladimir Putin is deeply troubling to Eastern Europeans.

The refugees are a burden on the country. They will move into apartments that are already in short supply in some cities. They will present a challenge to teachers because children who speak no German will enter the school system. A study by the Nuremberg-based Institute for Employment Research found that 13 percent of new arrivals in 2013 had a university degree, with almost one in four having at least a high school diploma.  Still, the largest group of newcomers, some 58 percent, has no occupational training whatsoever. If the country wants to avoid the mistakes made in the past, these people must quickly be given training. That will be one of the largest tasks in the coming years.

Europe has responded to the crisis with organised irresponsibility. Italy and Greece allow asylum-seekers to continue their journeys, despite the Dublin Regulation, which requires that refugees apply for asylum where they first enter the EU. It is a system that has allowed countries like Germany and France to ignore the true dimensions of the problem for years. As long as the refugees are headed to the Scandinavian countries in the North, they are not Germany’s present problem. The whole eurozone faces economic and financial collapse driven by ageing demographics and slow economic growth. Merkel has faced angry mobs calling her a traitor.  Right-wing parties in Denmark are seeking to clamp down on the number of people coming in, while Hungary is pushing ahead with plans to build a 13-foot-high barbed-wire fence along its border with Serbia, despite criticism from its European Union partners.

The Czech government has defended the right of the police to detain illegal migrants. Last week, its president, Milos Zeman, responded to a revolt among migrants held in a guarded facility by saying, “No one invited you here,” and, “If you don’t like it, leave.”

The Interior Ministry in Germany recorded 202 attacks on housing for asylum-seekers, including attempts to render shelters uninhabitable through arson, attacks with stones or other vandalism. A group called Courage Against the Right cites 48 attacks on individuals, based on local police records.

I wrote in an earlier article, we are entering the age of the strongmen. We will elect the same type of men, in conditions that are very similar to the 1930’s. Brexit, Trump, the swing to the right in European politics are all a logical outcome of the failed policies of globalism and failed attempts to export democracy to the Middle East.

The move to the Right will have huge consequences. The last time the world looked to the Right to solve their problems – the choices were Franco, Tito, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. We have learned nothing from history, so we will repeat it.

Our Leader cursed our nation.

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President Obama’s refusal to veto an anti-Israel U.N. resolution was ranked as the most anti-Semitic incident of 2016 by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Gen 12 v 3 – ” I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse, and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

In the annual anti-Semitism report, the centre placed the Obama administration’s decision Friday to abstain on the UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements at the head of its list, the “Top 10 Worst Global Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Incidents.”

“The most stunning 2016 U.N. attack on Israel was led by President Obama when the U.S. abstained on a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel for settlement construction,” the centre said. “It reversed decades-long US policy of vetoing such diplomatic moves against the Jewish State.”

Also making the list was activity by the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement as well as U.S. white nationalist leader Richard Spencer’s questioning whether Jews are “people or soulless golem” at a November gathering in Washington, D.C.

As a South African, I watched B.D.S. destroy our economy as the world isolated our government. Despite half the world’s gold reserves and the strongest military on the continent, our economy was crippled, our travel limited, and culturally we were isolated. I left South Africa in protest and was unable to return to my country for more than 15 years.

Now the two countries that fought so hard for the right of minorities and who share a similar constitution (U.S.A. and S.A.) lead the charge in anti-Semitic behavior. The 2001 World Conference against Racism (WCAR), also known as Durban I, was held at the Durban International Convention Centre in Durban, South Africa, under UN auspices, in September 2001. Durban 2 followed in Switzerland. On the first day of the conference, Ahmadinejad, the only head of state to attend, made a speech condemning Israel as “totally racist”

He overlooked the fact that over 1 million Arabs (20% of the population) own land, live and vote in Israel, serve on their Supreme Court and in their Knesset and Cabinet, and play for their national and international sports teams.

In the past few years, scores of universities, pension funds, churches, and unions in the US, Europe, and elsewhere have supported BDS by boycotting Israeli goods and investments. The United Methodist Church’s $20 billion pension board, the biggest pension fund asset manager in the US, blacklisted the five largest Israeli banks. Norway’s $810 billion Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, blacklisted two Israeli companies over their involvement in settlement building in East Jerusalem.

The student councils of most of the University of California campuses have voted in favour of requests that the university system administrator divest from American companies making money from the settlements. The National Women’s Studies Association and other academic groups in the US have voted to boycott Israeli universities.

Two top Israeli officials have accused the Obama administration of orchestrating the resolution behind the scenes. Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer said Wednesday that Israel would work to repeal the resolution even though such efforts can take years.

The true nature of the UN resolution is also hinted at by numerology. Resolution 2334 has a value. In gematria 2334 – is XXXX. In the rules of gematria, a repeated letter is for emphasis, turning XXXX into an emphatic XXX, which means ‘to betray’. By abstaining, US President Barack Obama betrayed his alliance with Israel, paving the way for the conference in Paris.

“Our goal would be to repeal it,” Mr. Dermer said “You know, the ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution was sitting on the UN books for 15 or 16 years before we were able to repeal it.”

In its report, the Los Angeles-based centre said the resolution “identifies Jerusalem’s holiest sites, including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, as ‘occupied Palestinian territory.’”

“It also urges U.N. members ‘to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967,’ effectively endorsing BDS,” said the report.“The reason why Jews are called Jews is because we are the people of Judea,” Mr. Dermer said. “So now the Jewish people are foreign occupiers of Judea? Judea all of a sudden has become occupied Palestinian territory? So this is absurd, and it has to be fought.”

The vote came as the latest of 20 anti-Israel U.N. resolutions approved in 2016. The U.N. General Assembly approved one resolution each against the countries of Syria, Iran, North Korea and Crimea in the same year.

Netanyahu will not meet with the foreign ministers of those countries and their ambassadors will not be received at Israel’s Foreign Ministry.  The officials said that business with the embassies of those countries that supported resolution 2334 — Britain, France, New Zealand, Russia, China, Japan, Ukraine, Angola, Egypt, Uruguay, Spain, Senegal — will be suspended.

When we elect a leadership that actively:

  • Promotes the widespread killing of our unborn,
  • Considers the bible a version of hate speech,
  • Undermines the marriage covenant,
  • Exalts the Muslim faith and favors it over Christianity,
  • Now undermines and curses the Jewish people.

For those that don’t believe in the God that faithfully keeps score…..Sleep well.  

For those that do believe in the God that faithfully keeps score, who is the Righteous Judge, the Defender of the unborn and His people Israel…..we know there is trouble ahead.

D.N.A. proves the bible!

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The advancements in DNA have been able to trace family relationships and prove parenthood beyond any doubt. Could this DNA research tell us if:

  • Jews were related to the Arabs and whether they shared a common family heritage?
  • Was there a Levite (Kohen) genetic marker that traced the descendants of Levi – the Priesthood.

“Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham,” says Harry Ostrer, M.D., Director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine. “And all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots over 4,000 years,” he says.

The researchers analysed the Y chromosome, which is usually passed unchanged from father to son, of more than 1,000 men worldwide. Throughout human history, alterations have occurred in the sequence of chemical bases that make up the DNA, leaving variations that can be pinpointed with modern genetic techniques. Related populations carry the same specific variations. In this way, scientists can track descendants of large populations and determine their common ancestors.

Specific regions of the Y chromosome were analysed in 1,371 men from 29 worldwide populations, including Jews and non-Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Jewish men shared a common set of genetic signatures with non-Jews from the Middle East, including Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. These signatures diverged significantly from non-Jewish men outside of this region. Consequently, Jews and Arabs share a common ancestor and are more closely related to one another than to non-Jews from other areas of the world. The study also revealed that despite the complex history of Jewish migration in the Diaspora (the time since 556 B.C. when Jews migrated out of Palestine), Jewish communities have generally not intermixed with non-Jewish populations. If they had, then Jewish men from different regions of the world would not share the same genetic signatures in their Y chromosome. It is possible to calculate from the divergence of the Y-chromosomes how much intermarriage there was over the last 2,000 years. The answer is a striking 0.5 percent per generation.

A similar study published in British science journal, Nature (January 2, 1997), asked that participants in Israel, England, and North America to contribute DNA material and identify whether they were Kohen or could identify their family background.

The results of the analysis of the Y chromosome markers of the Kohanim and non-Kohanim were indeed significant. According to Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman in his article “The DNA Chain of Tradition: The Discovery of the ‘Cohen Gene,’” one scientific study found that 98.5% of Cohens tested share the same genetic marker, which signifies descent from a common male ancestor. Astonishingly, Cohen progeny from both the Sephardic (Arab-Muslim world) and Ashkenazic Jewish (European) groups share the same sequence. Judging by the number of mutations that has occurred in the Cohen haplotype, scientists conclude that the Cohens descend from one man who lived approximately 3,300 years ago.(A haplotype is a group of genes within an organism that was inherited together from a single parent.)

In a second study, Dr. Skorecki and associates gathered more DNA samples and expanded their selection of Y chromosome markers. Solidifying their hypothesis of the Kohens’ common ancestor, they found that a particular array of six chromosomal markers were found in 97 of the 106 Kohens tested. This collection of markers has come to be known as the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH)–the standard genetic signature of the Jewish priestly family. The chances of these findings happening at random is greater than one in 10,000.

The finding of a common set of genetic markers in both Ashkenazi and Sefardi Kohanim worldwide clearly indicates an origin pre-dating the separate development of the two communities around 1000 C.E.

Professor Hammer was recently in Israel for the Jewish Genome Conference. He confirmed that his findings are consistent that over 80 percent of self-identified Kohanim have a common set of markers.

The findings exposed two common myths

  • The biblical assertion that the Samaritans were not proper Jews was unjustifiable and politically motivated. The Samaritan DNA shows that the lineage of this group is even more homogeneous and over a longer time than that of the Jews who returned from the Babylonian captivity. The fact that from Ezra’s time onwards Jewish teaching prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews – reinforced later by Christian rulers also forbidding it – contributes mightily to Jewish genetic identity.
  • The Christian Identity and  British Israelism (also called Anglo-Israelism) is a doctrine based on the hypothesis that people of Western European and Northern European descent are the direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of the ancient Israelites. DNA proves this is a fairy tale.

Two books make for interesting reading:

Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People by Jon Ernstein.

DNA and Tradition: The Genetic Link to the Ancient Hebrews by Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman.

Rise of the European Right

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The Trump victory after the Brexit decision in Britain has shown the way for the right-wing populist parties across Europe. They believe their time has come and they share Trump’s themes – a hard line on immigration, a distrust of trade deals, a defense of traditional values and a suspicion of international organizations and international elites. Voter dissatisfaction with mainstream established political parties is at a record high.

More than half a century after the Second World War, the West is sliding toward a resurgence of far-right political movements that could make the 1930s pale in comparison.

A new report funded by the German Federal Foreign Office reveals that public support for far-right political parties in Europe has risen exponentially since 1999, resulting in record wins in the European Parliament. An analysis of the report’s data suggests that far-right parties are poised to take a third of all seats in the next round of European elections in 2019.

Currently in the opposition in the Dutch Parliament, Mr. Wilders’ anti-immigrant Party for Freedom is set to make big gains in next year’s election that could earn it a seat in the Dutch government.

Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party roared back into the government by winning 39 percent of the national vote in the 2015 parliamentary elections. The party was founded in 2001 by Lech Kaczynski and his identical twin, Jaroslaw. Law and Justice first won power in 2005. Lech became president and Jaroslaw, eventually, his prime minister. In 2010, Lech Kaczynski and much of Poland’s top leadership died in a plane crash while landing at an airport near Smolensk, Russia. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who was not on the plane, is now leading Poland’s shift rightward as the party leader

In Hungary,  Viktor Orban and his right-wing Fidesz party, running on a joint list with the K.D.N.P., a Christian Democratic party, have won the last two parliamentary elections, worrying many Western leaders about his increasingly authoritarian rule. The party also decisively won in voting for the European Parliament in May 2014. Jobbik, a far-right, anti-immigration, populist and economic protectionist party won 20 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections in 2014, making it Hungary’s third-largest party.

The far-right Sweden Democrats party, which has disavowed its roots in the white-supremacist movement, won about 13 percent of the vote in elections in September 2014, which gave it 49 of the 349 seats in Parliament.  Because none of the mainstream parties would form a coalition with the Sweden Democrats, which is led by Jimmie Akesson, the country is governed by a shaky minority coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party. The Sweden Democrats’ platform calls for heavily restricting immigration, opposes allowing Turkey to join the European Union and seeks a referendum on European Union membership.

Founded in 1980, the neofascist party Golden Dawn in Greece came to international attention in 2012 when it entered the Greek Parliament for the first time, winning 18 seats. The election results came amid the country’s debilitating debt crisis and resulting austerity measures. The party, which the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner described in 2013 as “neo-Nazi and violent,” holds extreme anti-immigrant views, favors a defense agreement with Russia and said the euro “turned out to be our destruction.”

In France, the National Front is a nationalist party that uses populist rhetoric to promote its anti-immigration and anti-European Union positions. The party favors protectionist economic policies and would clamp down on government benefits for immigrants, including health care, and drastically reduce the number of immigrants allowed into France. The party was established in 1972; its founders and sympathizers included former Nazi collaborators and members of the wartime collaborationist Vichy regime. The National Front is now led by Marine Le Pen, who took over from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011.

The far-right Alternative for Germany party started three years ago as a protest movement against the euro currency, won up to 25 percent of the vote in German state elections in March, challenging Germany’s consensus-driven politics. The party failed to win seats in the German Parliament in 2013 by narrowly missing the 5 percent threshold, but is now polling at 10 percent to 12 percent and is expected to be the first right-wing party to enter the Parliament since the end of World War II. Support for the party shot up after the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne. The party “attracted voters who were anti-establishment, anti-liberalization, anti-European, anti-everything that has come to be regarded as the norm.

The stage is being set for the new leaders of the future. When resources are strained and the people demand answers, they elect leaders that promise results. Political correctness and globalization will give way to extremism. Individual rights will be sacrificed for the greater good.

The last time the world looked to the Right to solve their problems – the choices were Franco, Tito, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. We have learned nothing from history, so we will repeat it.

 

 

 

Why did Trump Win?

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Four years ago, Donald Trump declared that the U.S. Electoral College system of picking presidents “is a disaster for a democracy;” now he is headed to the White House because of it. How did Donald Trump beat 16 Republican candidates in 56 primaries despite their every effort to stop him?

The facts are – 77% of the electorate are women , people of color and young adults under the age of 35 and still the Trump Juggernaut rolled on to victory. He won ….despite being outspent 2-1 in campaign fundraising….despite a smaller staff…..despite being reviled by his own party and the media…despite his own flaws and offending every minority group and scaring our international partners……….

These factors put Trump over the top…
When Lorianne S. 27, walked into her Michigan polling location last Tuesday, election experts and pundits may have thought Loriann S. — a white woman with a college degree in a light blue state — would be pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton.  But people like Loriann S. across the Rust Belt were poised to deliver one of the most shocking upsets in American political history.

“[Donald] Trump’s policies on tax reform and his promise to bring jobs back made a lot of sense to me,” she said. She acknowledged that she was “disturbed” with Trump’s language about women, but it wasn’t enough to tip the scales toward Clinton. “I wanted her to be real,” Lorianne said. “All of her words about women’s rights and standing up for women sounded hollow to me.” Trump won Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin on Election Day, in addition to North Carolina and Florida on his way to the White House.

The Midwest Brexit..….The traditional democratic states Michigan-Ohio Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have seen their manufacturing plants move to Mexico. Trump correctly blamed Bill Clinton and NAFTA for destroying the Middle Class there. He threatened to slap tariffs on Ford if they moved another plant to Mexico….and tried to ship their vehicles back to the USA. It was music to the ears of the nobodies that had taken the brunt of 20 years of globalization and free trade.

The demographics of the Brexit voters were the same….white voters over the age of 45 who remembered once being part of a vanishing middle class in England,  as in the U.S.A…

• before the banks took their houses with crooked loans
• before the company closed their plant to move it to Mexico
• before the Obama Health Care Plan mailed out 50% premium hikes weeks before the election.

Those were the determined voters who would not be denied and came to the voting booth to vote for the one man who the banks, the companies, the politicians, and the media hated most. Donald J. Trump. He was their only legal human Molotov cocktail to throw at the forces of the “collective Elite” that had robbed them of a way of life…

Trump spoke to these voters — whether it was on policy with how he blew up the Republican message on trade and Clinton’s ties to the establishment and pro-globalist agenda; or his fueling white resentments and racial bias; and there was likely some degree of sexism that played a role.

Trump was the last stand of the angry white male. They turned out to vote….40 million of them. And like Minnesota where the voters put a professional Wrestler (Jerry Ventura) in the governor’s office convinced that he could upend the status quo. These voters knew that their man (Trump) was not bought and paid for and was universally hated by the very elite who had destroyed their middle class.

Hillary had problems.…. She was hugely unpopular — nearly 70% of all voters thought she was untrustworthy and dishonest. She represented the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected. That’s why she fought against gays getting married one moment, and the next she was officiating a gay marriage. The email scandals and the sabotage of Bernie Sanders did not help her cause. The late-in-the-campaign letter from FBI Director James Comey about Clinton’s emails likely also played a role, reinforcing a narrative about her as untrustworthy especially with voters who were prone to believe the worst about her.

And so the new divide between Red and Blue states is not social policy but the new divide is economic policy. It was and will always be the “It’s the economy stupid”… And as long as workers suffer and feel marginalized by the elite….they will vote their pain. Given the problems we face are insurmountable – the solutions we reach for are going to be more and more extreme.

Old paths and Old books by C.S. Lewis

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Many so-called “Christian” books today are not worth reading, and some are spiritually dangerous. Given the vast number of such books in the marketplace, we need wisdom and discernment in what we read, lest we be unwittingly led astray. C.S. Lewis gives us wise guidance on this important issue………

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but Keller, Piper, R.C. Sproul, MacArthur,  N.T. Wright or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (“mere Christianity” as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.  Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. Wells and Karl Barth.

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, I read because they are themselves great English writers; others, such as Boethius, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, because they were “influences.” George Macdonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity. They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think—as one might be tempted who read only con- temporaries—that “Christianity” is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so.

Measured against the ages “mere Christianity” turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost.

Reading classic works is a good way to gain the perspective we need to guard our hearts and minds in this age of abundant nonsense and heresy.