Bible Prophecy Spells Doom for Crypto-Currencies

Financial bubbles generally occur once in a generation. When large numbers of people make bad investments, those experiences are enough of a warning to make caution a virtue.

Today we don’t seem to have an ever-dwindling supply of caution. Some form of bubbles now come along every few years. In 2000 we had the Dotcom Bubble; in 2008 we had the Housing Bubble; and in 2017 we are in the middle of the Crypto-Currencies Bubble.

Interest in digital crypto-currency started with Bitcoin. In 2010, you could buy a pizza for 10,000 bitcoins, which someone famously did with the price in dollars less than a penny. I hope the pizza parlor kept their bitcoins, because now they are worth $18.45 million. As I’m writing, the price of one bitcoin is $1820.

The total value of all bitcoins in circulation now totals $29.600 billion. Their increase in value for just this year has been 90 percent. When you add all the other currencies that brings the grand total to $52.5 billion. This is a huge amount of money for a type currency that only has a five year history.

I cannot find a record of any other asset increasing more 200,000 times in value. Apple Computer, from its 1982 near-bankruptcy low is only up 765 times. People are talking as if Bitcoin’s best gains are yet to come.

I read one report of a man taking out an equity loan of $325,239 on his house to buy 191 bitcoins. If Bitcoin reaches the $10,000 mark, he plans on moving to the West Coast and living in quiet luxury. If it drops below $100, that man may find himself living on the street.

Before people convert their life savings into Bitcoins, Ripples, Ethereum, or my favorite—Stellar Lumens, they may want to take an assessment of the risks.

The biggest threat to crypto-currency is someone breaking into the system and stealing your account code information. In the past few years, several exchanges have gone bankrupt after their systems were hacked. The biggest bust was at MT Gox; $450 million in bitcoins were stolen from customer accounts.

Once a hacker has your passwords, your pile of bitcoins can vanish without a trace. You can even be your own thief by losing your password. For example, in 2013 one user lost 7,500 bitcoins, worth $7.5 million at the time when he accidentally discarded a hard drive containing the digital key to his account.

Another problem with crypto-currencies is their unlimited number. About a year ago, there were about 400 types of these coins. When I last checked, there was 727 crypto-currencies. If this mania continues, there will soon be over a thousand digital currencies. As their numbers increase, people will have to start to question the value of wealth that is created from nothing.

The quantity of each individual coin is also a problem. The exchanges that manage them, create new ones to pay for operating costs. The quantity of some coins increases at a rate that is greater than 50 percent each year. This high level of inflation can only cause the value of each coin to go down.

Crime is becoming yet another problem for crypto-currencies. The untraceable nature of Bitcoin makes it popular with criminal agents. And it’s becoming more common practice to demand ransom in bitcoin, too. This from the New York Times: “Those threats have increased with the advent of ransomware, malicious software that encrypts victims’ data and prevents them from accessing it until they pay a ransom, often hundreds or thousands of dollars’ worth of bitcoin, a crypto-currency.”

I think the biggest threat to crypto-currency is the government seeing it as a competition to national currency. Lawmakers don’t like any other monetary system stepping into their domain. As soon as Congress realizes it is losing tax dollars from people exchanging goods and services with crypto-currencies, they will move to ban the practice. The big banks are not going to stand for a system that cuts them out of transaction fees.

The state of Florida is working on legislation that will make it a money laundering offense to use virtual currencies to hide funds that are related to a crime.

Bible prophecy would seem to indicate that crypto-currencies are going to have a short life. Under the mark of the beast system, all transactions will be supervised by the Antichrist’s government. The devil may be allowing this latest mania to flourish in order to fulfill his end-time plans. Once the crash comes, it will be easy to argue that all digital money needs strong central control.

“And the second beast required all people small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead,  o that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark—the name of the beast or the number of its name” (Revelation 13:16-17).

–Todd

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Israel’s Identity Crisis

It seems strange that the one nation on planet earth that God Himself calls His “chosen” suffers such low self esteem. I use the term self esteem in the sense that there is an internal, national uncertainty concerning where the nation fits within the international scheme of things. There projects from Israel an aura of not belonging.

I suppose this shouldn’t surprise, considering that most countries making up the United Nations join in voting against Israel in almost every case that is brought against the nation. The history of such anti-Israel voting is stunning.

Israel completely outperforms all of its neighbors in productivity. Its ingenuity benefits not only the region but all the world. That tiny sliver of land encompasses only a fraction of the land grant the lord says is theirs. Yet it is an island of technological, agricultural, and societal creativity that is second only to that generated by the United States. And, fact is, much of America’s such creativity and activity is directly due to the brilliance of U.S. Jewish citizenry.

Its tentativeness in national confidence has long been the concern of Israeli thinkers and innovators. Just this past week, initiatives to deal with Israel’s identity crisis came to the surface as breaking news.

A proposal to anchor Israel’s status as a Jewish state in a Basic Law was approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation Sunday.

MK Avi Dichter (Likud), who proposed the bill, called the vote “a big step towards establishing our identity, not only universally, but mainly towards ourselves, the Israelis, to be a free nation in our land,” a line from Hatikva…

“I’ve been working on the Jewish State bill for six years,” Dichter recounted. “Six years to establish the simple and most basic truth: Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People.”…

The legislation states that “the State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it realizes its aspirations for self-determination according to its cultural and historic traditions. The realization of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”…

… It also mentions the Law of Return, and calls for the government to work to strengthen Israel-Diaspora ties.

It states that Hebrew is Israel’s official language and Arabic has a special status, requiring all government services to be available in Arabic. (ISRAEL NEWS, Jerusalem Post, May 7, 2017)

The bill, if approved, was set for a preliminary vote on Wednesday. It will thus take place in the first week of the Knesset’s summer session. The Justice Ministry will be charged with drafting its own version of the bill within sixty days. The two bills will then be combined.

The bill is receiving push-back by those who see it as a racist action that puts too much emphasis on Israel being Jewish and not enough on democracy.

Such an accusation has some validity. But, with things going on as of late, it is action that is warranted, in my view.

One example of the world doing all possible to strip Israel of its sovereignty and even its right to exist is that perpetrated by the U.N.

The UNESCO Executive Board passed a resolution in Paris that disavowed Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. The organization insists, thereby, that Israel should no longer have authority in the city. The vote was meant to delegitimize Israel’s right to the city governance that was won during the 1967 Six Day War.

Because of continuing such actions by the U.N. against Israel, the Israeli government is considering ousting that organization from its facilities within the city of Jerusalem.

The government on Sunday is set to debate the question whether or not to oust the United Nations from its Jerusalem headquarters, but is not expected to take any action on the matter at this time…

In a statement to Channel 2, [Miri] Regev [Culture and Sports Minister ] said that clearly there was no longer any logic to the UN remaining at that location.

“We’ve been sovereign in the city for 50 years, so there is no need for UN monitors. They were given use of the compound to oversee the cease-fire agreement from the Six-Day war, it’s an agreement that is no longer relevant. This saga has to end,” she said. (ISRAEL NEWS, Jerusalem Post, May 5, 2017)

Israel’s identity crisis is destined to become much more acute. Zechariah the prophet and other prophets foretell a time when all nations will seek to kill all Jews. Haven’t we heard that before?

Anti-Semitism on the rise is only one symptom of the great hatred that Antichrist will foment, especially during the second three and one-half years of the Tribulation.

“Alas! for that day is great, so that there is none like it   : it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble; but he shall be saved out of it.” (Jeremiah 30: 7)

Israel’s identity will one day be firmly established, however. God has promised to make it the head of the nations when Christ rules and reigns from atop Zion in Jerusalem as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

–Terry

Fox Is Getting Drawn into the Media Cabal

The Fox News network is the most talked about media organization in America. The New York Times and Washington Post have reporters that spend the majority of their  time writing articles about Fox. Every time there is a major shift in management at the network, it’s covered by all the other news outlets.

There is very little interest in the goings on at CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and dozens of other news organizations. The attention given to Fox is driven by the fact that it is the only major news outlet that has not had a liberal bias. CNN doesn’t know how to manage its own network—evidenced by years of declining ratings. Despite their inability to connect with the public, CNN reporters feel fully qualified to instruct Fox on how to manage its undertakings.

A great deal of news about sexual harassment at Fox has been reported. The network’s former president, Roger Ailes, was fired because he became too personal with the female reporters. Bill O’Reilly was forced out for much of the same reason. When co-president Bill Shine was fired last week and false claims were made about Sean Hannity, it became clear that there is an effort to remove conservative stars from the network.

The effort to reprogram Fox started years ago with the campaign against Glenn Beck. The leftist groups controlled by George Soros went after Fox’s advertisers. They convinced enough of them to boycott the Glenn Beck Show, making it unprofitable to keep him.

The same boycott tactics were used to oust Bill O’Reilly. But before they settled on sexual harassment allegations, they tried getting him fired for plagiarism, messy accusations that stemmed from his 2015 divorce, and claims of false reporting going all the way back to the 1982 Falklands War.

There are no scandals at the other news networks because they have a different set of standards for journalism. If people on the left are caught giving money to their liberal candidates, the punishment is a slap on the wrist. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has made many disparaging comments about women in politics throughout his career, which include Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Melania Trump. Yet he remains a media darling in the eyes of the liberals. In 2011, MSNBC made it clear that it has no standards when it hired the race-baiting “shakedown (con) artist,” the Reverend Al Sharpton.

To find the true reason why 21st Century Fox is changing you have to look at the owners of the company. Rupert Murdoch has run Fox for several decades. Now that Murdoch is 87, he has decided to let his two sons, James and Lachlan, take control of the family business. The sons have a proven liberal background, so they are changing the leadership at Fox to reflect their views.

The Murdoch boys are in for a big surprise if they think they can transfer Fox into a clone of all the other networks and maintain their audience. The changes already made have turned Fox into a bland network. Instead of making news, it just follows the news. Fox only appears conservative now because all the other networks have become so radical in their hatred of the Trump Administration.

About a 100 million people in the U.S. regularly follow the news. Fox News only gets about 5 million of this number. When President Trump does an interview with a Fox News reporter, his message gets out because all other news organizations are obligated to report on what he says.

Once Fox becomes a mirror reflection of all the other liberal news outlets, any interview to which Trump agrees will be a boxing match, crammed with “gotcha” questions. CBS News’ John Dickerson was given the opportunity to interview the president in the Oval Office. It quickly became evident that the nature of his questions were designed to try embarrass President Trump.

Dickerson asked Trump about his relationship with Obama, making mention of a March tweet in which he called Obama a “bad guy.” This was in connection with claims that his campaign headquarters at Trump Tower were wiretapped upon Obama’s orders last fall. After Dickerson badgered him like a chief prosecutor, Trump finally had enough and ended the interview.

To be without the Fox News channel as it was in its best days, leaving us only with liberal bias of the major media—would make President Trump’s life miserable. If a Democratic president is elected in the future, life for all freedom loving citizens will be equally painful. Unless there is an agenda of free press, autocratic rule is the natural inevitable result.

Bible prophecy warns that there will be a global dictatorship in the last days. Fox’s descent and deliberate decision to pivot into the cabal of scripted fake news outlets, shows that the end must be very near.

“And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?” (Revelation 13:4)

–Todd

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Zechariah’s Voice Echoing

Zechariah the prophet’s voice is echoing down through the canyons of millennia long past. Actions by nations of today’s world make plain that God’s prophetic timeline is on the cusp of fulfillment.

The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem.

And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it. (Zechariah 12: 1-3)

The prophecy becomes more manifest by the hour. The nations of the world’s diplomatic community are arraying against Israel. Jerusalem is their primary target. The “occupier” must be dealt with is the mantra.

A most recent indicator that Zechariah’s prophecy is nearing fulfillment is in our headlines. Globalist forces are ramping up efforts to wrest God’s touchstone city –“the apple of His Eye”–from His chosen nation.

Israel is angry at Germany for the anticipated European support for the resolution attacking Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, which UNESCO’s Executive Board in Paris is scheduled to approve this Tuesday, diplomatic sources told The Jerusalem Post.

The behind-the-scenes conflict preceded the public argument between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel over his meeting with the left-wing group Breaking the Silence during his visit to Israel last week…

A March draft asked the UNESCO Executive Board to deny Israel sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, including the western party of the city.

The resolution’s text stated: “Any action taken by Israel, the occupying power, to impose its laws, jurisdiction, and administration on the city of Jerusalem, are illegal and therefore null and void and have no validity whatsoever.” (“Israel Blames Germany for EU Support of UNESCO Anti-Israel Resolution,” Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, April 30, 2017)

The European Union has over the past years voted against the proposal, which has always been  supported by all of Israel’s Arab antagonists. The Arabs have refused to recognize Israel as a state, but rather, like in all instances involving Israel, declares it an illegal occupier of Palestine and of Jerusalem. This refusal to acknowledge Israel as a nation, rather call it an occupier, has apparently been the sticking point on Germany’s voting against the resolution each time it comes up.

Behind the scenes, German operatives managed to have the “occupier” language removed to soften the opposition so it could convince the EU to vote in favor of lessening Israel’s authority over the city–especially over East Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is livid over this treachery by Germany. The resolution, if adopted fully, would in effect–in the eyes of the international community of nations–take away the right of the Jewish state to govern Jerusalem. The action would negate rights won by Israel as a result of victory in the 1967 Six-Day War.

The controversy comes at an interesting time. American President Donald Trump will visit Israel soon. There is conjecture about whether he will announce movement of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The United States is certain, under this administration, to vote against the UNESCO resolution.

The tensions in the middle East continue to build. But, now the focus of the angers, frustrations, and intrigues are narrowing. Jerusalem is the obvious center of the satanic rage. The Temple Mount is sure to eventually be the hottest of the hot spots of the three-thousand-year family feud.

The entire world will, according to Zechariah, Joel, and other prophets, intentionally become entangled in that feud. The EU, most of us who believe in the Pre-Trib, pre-Millennial view of Bible prophecy hold, will be at the heart of that Zechariah 12:1-3 assembly of nations.

While the globalists are foaming at the mouth, wanting to rid the world of America’s new president, the Gog-Magog forces continue to gather directly north of Israel. Jerusalem is at the center of world controversy and the ancient prophet’s words can be heard loudly by spiritually-attuned ears.

And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. ¹And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn. (Zechariah 12:9-10)

–Terry