The Silent Crime Wave

The city of Chicago has had a huge spike in violent crime. Already since January, more than 100 people have been murdered in the city—which is more than double the number of homicides that occurred in the same time period in 2014 and 2015.

The upsurge in the murder rate is a direct result of a meltdown of law and order in our society. Police in Chicago made 30 percent fewer arrests in the early part of this year, compared to last year. Street stops are also down more than 80 percent so far this year.

Since the release of a video showing the shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer, there has been a media war against law enforcement. If a person of the “wrong” color is shot on video by a white officer, the press automatically slant their reports to blame the police. Since no cop wants to be on that next video, they now avoid high-crime areas.

“Well, morale is poor, to describe it in one word,” says Dean Angelo Sr., president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police. “It’s probably the lowest I’ve seen in my career.”

The low moral for police is a nationwide problem. The polling of more than 6,000 of the New York City Police Department’s roughly 24,000 rank-and-file revealed a resounding lack of passion for the job, with cops on average rating morale at just 2.49 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Ninety-six percent of cops also said that relations between them and the communities they patrol have gotten worse. Nearly 90 percent of cops polled said they would quit the NYPD if they were offered a higher-paying job in law enforcement elsewhere; 86 percent said they would not recommend the job to family members.

While the nation is rotting from the inside out, energy is wasted on grievances that are of increasingly trivial importance. For example, Harvard Law School has had the same seal for 234 years. Suddenly, the school has decided to replace the seal because it was once used by a slave owner. Harvard has also made the truly bizarre move of banning the usage of the word “master” from its job titles.

The liberal media is a key source of the problem. It is incredibly diabolical for them to suppress the news of massive bloodshed. When the murder rate doubles, and the press is able to create an illusion of normalcy, we are clearly in the grip of something truly evil.

Black youths are killing themselves in such high numbers that they are actually reducing the black population of America. You would think this is the plan of white supremacist groups. In fact, it is the work of liberals like, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who have driven the police out—while they turn a blind eye to the carnage-inflicted on the people they claim to represent.

A crisis in L.A. of dead bodies piling up is so out-of-control it has caused the Los Angeles County coroner to quit his job. With a backlog of 180 bodies, Mark Fajardo, abruptly announced his resignation after two years as the city’s top medical examiner.

We are headed for much bigger problems if something is not done to restore sanity. When crime gets so bad that even the lies can’t cover it up, people will turn to an authoritarian power for a solution. I have long thought that lawlessness will be used by the enemy to take over America. As the nation falls into chaos, a strong-willed leader will come along to restore order.

As long as we leave God out of any solution, we are doomed to continue this slide into anarchy.

“And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them” (Romans 1:28).

–Todd

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Antichrist Near

Once upon a time I wrote in an early draft of a book manuscript about the spirit of Antichrist as given in the Bible. It was more or less a question positing whether this passage might have something to do with anti-Semitism to some extent. Here is the Scripture.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.” (1 John 4:1-3)

My cogitation revolved around whether the words:”in the flesh” might somehow include/involve the fact that Jesus came into the world through Jewish ” flesh.” After all, Christ came into the world through the Jewish race. Satan has always wanted to have the world deny that the Jew has any special place in God’s plan for humanity.

The Jew has been hunted and hated throughout history. Adolf Hitler said the Jew is sub-human, and much of the communist world would agree with the Nazi thought in that regard, history shows. They were mistreated–brutally–by Stalin and subsequent dictators and held as the scapegoat for all problems the dictators themselves created and perpetuated. This is still going on in our time in Russia and other places. Anti-Semitism is on the grow in virulence and scope in Europe in a way that has not been seen since pre-Nazi Germany.

Islamist hatred is not only on the grow as violently as at any time in history, it is accepted with hardly an objection by the rest of the world. Our own president, in my view, is culpable in looking the other way as burgeoning anti-Semitism explodes around the world. As I was saying, I wrote in the manuscript about this question–and it was in an inquiring, speculative tone, intended as mere examination, not as adamant postulation. I wondered if denying that Christ came in Jewish flesh somehow figured into the matter of anti-Semitism, because Antichrist, himself, will certainly champion great hatred for God’s chosen people.

Bible prophecy is replete with foretellings of how Antichrist will persecute and murder those of the Jewish race during the Tribulation–i.e., might denial that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” mean, in part at least, that the Antichrist spirit has at its core hatred for the Jew because that is the “flesh” through which God chose to usher His only begotten Son into this fallen world?

This went over not at all well at the publisher with whom I was under contract to do the book. I was told this was false teaching–or as I recall, that was the tone and threat I inferred the response to mean. The words were rather strongly put that I must cut that portion or they couldn’t be a part of such heresy. Well, again, that was how I interpreted the charge and subsequent threat.

Someone at the publishing house had a quite sensitive spot which I had obviously touched, not able to understand that I wasn’t challenging the standard take on what constitutes ”the spirit of antichrist.” I know that the meaning is, primarily, that there is a visceral denial among those of this lost world that God came to earth in the flesh to die for the sin of mankind and to redeem mankind. Still, He did enter this world through the Jewish flesh.

I find the fact that Christians who truly have a pre-Trib, pre-Millennial view of Bible prophecy seem the only core entity that doesn’t display animus for Israel. Most of the world sees Israel as the cause of the problems with regard to the so-called Palestinian question. That the Jewish state is illegitimate, and the illegal occupier of land belonging to the Palestinian people, is the never-ceasing mantra. Those who aren’t openly hostile to Israel either give nods of approval to those who say Israel is the problem or say nothing at all as that nation is verbally pounded and hounded from every quarter.

So-called Christian organizations–even those churches claiming to be evangelicals–join in the satanic stream-of-consciousness insistence that Israel no longer is inheritor of God’s promises made to that people. These enthusiastically join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction” (BDS) movement in their denial that the Jews are God’s chosen people.

Okay, I might be way off the mark in my ruminations about the Jewish race–about Israel–being a part of John’s warning in this antichrist spirit passage. But, the Jews are indeed being hated today like throughout all of history. That anti-Semitism is on the rise can’t be denied by anyone other than those who are cerebrally incapable of realizing it, or who are liars.

Every indicator points to the likelihood that the one called Antichrist is about to step out of the shadows of this rising hatred and into the spotlight for doing his dastardly deeds against God’s chosen people, the Jews.

Thankfully, born-again believers will have to exit the world stage first. The antichrist spirit so prevalent today is proof-positive that the time of that exiting–the Rapture– must be near indeed.

–Terry

Negative Interest Rates Are Connected to Bible Prophecy

As long as money has been in existence, there have been people willing to loan it out to others for a fee. Our records for interest rates go back 5000 years. The highest recorded interest rates occurred during the Persian Empire 539 B.C., when a brutal taxation system forced people to borrow money at 40 percent. The historic average for interest rates is 4 percent.

We currently live at a time when interest rates have never been so low. When historians reflect back on 2016, a remarkable statistic likely to be noticed with amazement is how people were willing to accept a negative return on their money.

Not until 2014, were negative interest rates implemented by a major central bank. The European Central Bank forced rates below the negative milestone by lowering the deposit rate to 0.2 percent in September, 2014. With that being the top rate for money, a number of other European nations turned to negative interest rates. Today, we have over $7 trillion in government-issued debt with negative yields.

The standard argument for negative rates is the need to fight deflation. Central bankers claim that lower prices cause people to hoard cash. By placing a tax on money, people are be motivated to go shopping. So far, negative rates have failed to increase spending.

The real reason for negative interest rates is to underwrite support for the massive debt loads of the world’s debtor nations. If rates were to rise to their historic average, the U.S., Japan and most European nations would be unable to fund their federal budgets.

Japan is in the worst shape. Last year it spent just under 100 trillion yen, but took in hardly 50 trillion yen of revenue. The reality of a nation with a mountain of public debt having reached 300 percent of GDP—means that it cannot afford to pay even a half a percent on money. With Japan hopelessly addicted to deficit spending, soon, negative rates will not be enough to keep them afloat.

Negative interest rates create a ticking time bomb by increasing the value of existing bonds. As rates go down, the value of the bonds go up. Bonds issued a few years back with a 30-year maturity and a 2 percent coupon rate responded this way: When interest rates dropped to zero, the bond rose in value by 34.7 percent. A bond selling at a face value of $1,000 before the interest rate drop, would have risen to $1,347, for a gain of $347.

If interest rates where to suddenly normalize, there would be a catastrophic loss for existing government bonds. Japan just had its 30 year bond—hit .47 percent. If rates where to soar to 4 percent, a freshly minted bond with a face value of $1,000, would decline to $300. If rates rose 8 percent, the same bond would only be worth $92.

Japan is in demographic nightmare; with its working age population set to plummet from 78 million to about 52 million over the next 30 years. It already has 31 million retirees, and that number is projected to hit 36 million by 2060. Bondholders in Japan should be demanding Persian Empire type rates to cover their risks.

The United States is not far behind Japan. We face the same problem with an aging population, which will cause our debt levels to soar in the coming years. However, unlike Japan, our debt is not self-funded. Our strategy involves the rest of the world buying our Treasury notes. When we get to the point of needed negative interest rates, the world will probably balk at such a deal.

It is truly amazing to watch the world’s financial system hold together. A meltdown has not occurred because Jesus said the time of His return to rapture His Church would take place at a time of peace and safety. For interest rates to have drifted into negative territory in order to maintain this period of stability—demonstrates how much we are on borrowed time.

“But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:1-3).

–Todd

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Presidential Political Purulence

An infection is spreading among the American populace. It isn’t of the bacteriological or viral sort in the biological sense. But, it is an epidemic in some ways more virulent, more septic. It seems to have contaminated society at every level–even Christian pastors I would have thought would have been biblically vaccinated against the anti-God strain.

Unrestrained by apparently any prophylactic inhibitor, such as media censorship or even Moral Majority-type protective shielding, the salacious show goes on. And, it is made manifest before the nation and the world in an observably, unabashedly shameless display.

It shouldn’t surprise, one must suppose. We’ve had hints of such lasciviousness within the White House, particularly since JFK’s passing–that is, since enough time has passed that historical spelunkers have exposed the sexual trysts in the White House of Camelot’s leader way back there fifty-plus years ago. A president was later deemed a “crook” by the Watergate inquisitionist. But, other than often-expletive, deleted language discovered on the infamous recordings of the Nixon White House, there was nothing even remotely approaching the sexual goings-on like during the Kennedy White House years.

Many accounts of LBJ and his rather raw and rowdy approach to the presidency have since produced accounts of sexual debauchery in the White House. But, until Bill Clinton, all was kept in the Oval Office closet. That closet was opened for all to know when that president’s activities with the young intern within the small study just off the oval room was uncovered.

That down-and-dirty activity–a paraphrase of how Obama’s preacher, Jeremiah Wright, put it–opened the once-high office of the presidency to the cesspool humor and conversation once reserved for the porn magazines and shops where only the most derelict would openly venture.

Now, on the presidential election debate stages where once the all-important issues and events of our time were heard, we are subjected regularly to debased topics once only discussed in those forbidden books such as in Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker.

Talk of male and female genitalia are in today’s political discourse thrown about in vulgar, slang invectives as readily as Richard Nixon might have once thrown accusations that John F. Kennedy was too young and inexperienced for the presidency.

It is an astonishing thing to consider–the Nixon-Kennedy debates (or any other) as against what we are seeing now.

I remember the kind of gutter talk we are hearing by presidential candidates today thrown about by teenage boys during junior high and high school when I was in the ninth grade or so. Back then, those lunkheads–of which I was much too often one–would never deign to bring that sort of conversation out into the light of adult society.

Now, we have presidential wannabees talking about such things–right out in front of the bright lights and cameras, proudly airing their braggadocios salaciousness for the world to hear.

There is, obviously, according to the polls, a vast, reality show-type audience that is entertained by all of this new “populist” political trash-mouth talk. Those who aren’t necessarily amused or entertained by it sit in silence for the most part, overlooking the degree to which the once most- respected office in the land is being debased and degraded.

Some of this silent sort, as I say, are recognized names within evangelical Christianity. It is most distressing to have to acknowledge that this is the case.

This is not to put down any one presidential candidate, or to build up another. My only exhortation to the reader is that you use much discretion and pray for godly discernment during this crucial election season. We are in prophetic times, of this I have no doubt. America is subjected to this presidential political purulence at a time when powers and principalities in high places intend to assert their wickedness upon a generation ripe for the coming Antichrist rise to power.

The Scripture that comes to mind should serve as a mirror into which we, the voters, should look, while doing our best to move in a direction other than moved the once-condemned people the Scripture depicts.

Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore shall they fall among them that fall: in the time of their visitation they shall be cast down, saith the LORD.

I will surely consume them, saith the LORD: there shall be no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree, and the leaf shall fade; and the things that I have given them shall pass away from them. (Jeremiah 8:12-13)

–Terry